Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present

• Main Author: Kate Fisher, Sarah Toulalan
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: London Palgrave Macmillan 2011; Palgrave Macmillan UK
• Edition: 1
• Series: Genders and Sexualities in History
• Subjects: Cultural History; Gender and Women's History; HISTORY; History of Early Modern Europe; History of Medicine; History of Science; Human body; Modern History; Palgrave History Collection; Sex; Sex (Psychology); Sex customs; Sexual Behavior; Social and Cultural History; Social History
• ISBN: 9780230354128; 0230354122; 9780230283688; 0230283683; 1349329002; 9781349329007
• DOI: 10.1057/9780230354128

01 02 How different really were early twentieth-century attitudes towards marital sex from those in the sixteenth and seventeenths centuries, where intercourse was seen as an essential part of a healthy, happy union in which partners should aim to please each other to sustain the marital partnership and to avoid adultery? To what extent did nineteenth- and early twentieth –century concepts of degeneration evolve out of earlier ideas about loss of vital spirits? The authors in this book examine how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted over time, from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. Rather than reproduce narratives of change and progress – or liberation from repression – this collection aims to draw the reader's attention to the continuities in thinking about bodies and sex over the centuries – while concepts may change, they nevertheless draw on older ideas and language. 04 02 List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction; S.Toulalan PART I: BODIES AND DIFFERENCE 'That ere with Age, his Strength is Utterly Decay'd': Understanding the Male Body in Early Modern Manhood; J.Jordan Confusion Embodied: Epistemologies of Sex and Race in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-9) and the Histoire Naturelle (1749-1804); A.Wells The Hermaphrodite, Fecundity and Military Efficiency: Dangerous Subjects in the Emerging Liberal order of Nineteenth-Century Spain; R.Cleminson  & F.Vazquez Garcia Touching Bodies: Tact/ility in Nineteenth-century Medical Photographs and Models; E.Stephens 'Farewell to Frocks', 'Sex Change' in Interwar Britain: Newspaper Stories, Medical Technology and Modernity; A.Oram 'Perversity to Match the Curtains': Queering the Life Story with Grayson Perry; M.Jolly PART II: BODIES, SEX AND DESIRE 'Unripe' Bodies: Children and Sex in Early Modern England; S.Toulalan Urge without Desire? Confession Manuals, Moral Casuistry, and the Features of Concupiscentia between the Fifteenth and Eighteenth Centuries; F.Alfieri On the Unsteadiness of Sexual Truth in Eighteenth-Century France; P.Cryle 'Lay back, Enjoy it and Shout Happy England': Marital Duty and Sexual Pleasure; K.Fisher Eros and Thanatos in European and American Sexology; L.Downing Sadism as Social Violence: From fin-de-siècle Degeneration to the Critiques of Nazi Sexuality in Frankfurt School Thought; A.Moore 19 02 Introduces new areas of historical enquiry in the history of sexuality Considers issues of continuity and change across a wide time-period Tackles complex theoretical issues clearly and in accessible ways 02 02 An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. It draws attention to continuities in thinking about bodies and sex: concept may have changed, but hey nevertheless draw on older ideas and language. 31 02 An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century 13 02 KATE FISHER Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter, UK, and has published Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain c.1918-1960 (2006) and (with Simon Szreter) Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918-1963 (2010). She co-directs, with Rebeca Langlands, Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History , funded by the Wellcome Trust.  SARAH TOULALAN Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter, UK. Her book Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-century England was published in 2007. She is now working on a project on children and sex (knowledge and abuse) in early modern England funded by the Leverhulme Trust.