Rationalizing Rape: The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France

FAIN: FEL-288312-23

Mary McAlpin
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

Research and writing leading to a book on the scientific, literary, and philosophical discourse on sexual violence during the French Enlightenment.

This study demonstrates that the Enlightenment promotion of human sexuality as natural and desirable produced a novel, secularized narrative for how sexual violence against women functioned. This new account represented female desire as fundamentally contradictory, with women said to want and need sex as much as men, but to possess an innate resistance to the act itself. By first attracting only to then refuse men, it was argued, women ensured the survival of the species by heightening male desire, thus fulfilling nature’s hidden agenda. This reimagining of female modesty as an instinctual response is documented in medical treatises, socio-political essays on human development over deep time, travel narratives, paintings, and the era’s most popular novels. My analysis intervenes in a far-ranging assortment of disciplines, brought together by a focus on how new assumptions about the “natural” sex act effaced the possibility of “real” rape, with lasting consequences down to our own time.

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The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France: Rationalizing Rape (Book)
Title: The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France: Rationalizing Rape
Author: Mary McAlpin
Abstract: This book argues that rape as we know it was invented in the eighteenth century, examining texts as diverse as medical treatises, socio-political essays, and popular novels to demonstrate how cultural assumptions of gendered sexual desire erased rape by making a woman’s non-consent a logical impossibility. The Enlightenment promotion of human sexuality as natural and desirable required a secularized narrative for how sexual violence against women functioned. Novel biomedical and historical theories about the "natural" sex act worked to erase the concept of heterosexual rape. McAlpin intervenes in a far-ranging assortment of scholarly disciplines to survey and demonstrate how rape was rationalized: the history of medicine, the history of sexuality, the development of the modern self, the social contractarian tradition, the global eighteenth century, and the libertine tradition in the eighteenth-century novel. This intervention will be essential reading to students and scholars in gender studies, literature, cultural studies, visual studies, and the history of sexuality.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-New-Logic-of-Sexual-Violence-in-Enlightenment-France-Rationalizing-Rape/McAlpin/p/book/9781032255538?utm_source=cjaffiliates&utm_medium=affiliates&cjevent=e1e31b5fde4f11ef82799d150a82b82c
Primary URL Description: Publisher's link.
Publisher: Routledge
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781032255538
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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