Histories Of French Sexuality

Histories of French Sexuality contends that the history of sexuality is at a crossroads. Decades of scholarship have shown that sexuality is implicated in a wide range of topics, such as studies of reproduction, the body, sexual knowledge, gender identity, marriage, and sexual citizenship. These studies have broadened historical narratives and interpretations of areas such as urbanization, the family, work, class, empire, the military and war, and the nation. Yet while the field has evolved, not everyone has caught on, especially scholars of French history. Covering the early eighteenth century through the present, the essays in Histories of French Sexuality show how attention to the history of sexuality deepens, changes, challenges, supports, or otherwise complicates the major narratives of French history. This volume makes a set of historical arguments about the nature of the past and a larger historiographical claim about the value and place of the field of the history of sexuality within the broader discipline of history. The topics include early empire-building, religion, the Enlightenment, feminism, socialism, formation of the modern self, medicine, urbanization, decolonization, the social world of postwar France, and the rise of modern and social media.

These essays collectively cover a stretch of French history from Medieval times to the twentieth century, deploying a wide variety of analytical techniques in an effort to understand people's perceptions of their own lives as well as the institutional and cultural factors affecting their decisions.

An examination of how Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge transformed notions of sex and sexuality in France.

Histories of French Sexuality contends that the history of sexuality is at a crossroads. Decades of scholarship have shown that sexuality is implicated in a wide range of topics, such as studies of reproduction, the body, sexual knowledge, gender identity, marriage, and sexual citizenship. These studies have broadened historical narratives and interpretations of areas such as urbanization, the family, work, class, empire, the military and war, and the nation. Yet while the field has evolved, not everyone has caught on, especially scholars of French history. Covering the early eighteenth century through the present, the essays in Histories of French Sexuality show how attention to the history of sexuality deepens, changes, challenges, supports, or otherwise complicates the major narratives of French history. This volume makes a set of historical arguments about the nature of the past and a larger historiographical claim about the value and place of the field of the history of sexuality within the broader discipline of history. The topics include early empire-building, religion, the Enlightenment, feminism, socialism, formation of the modern self, medicine, urbanization, decolonization, the social world of postwar France, and the rise of modern and social media.

Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century. Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

Deconstruct changing representations of homosexuality with this important new work of cultural criticism! Homosexuality in French History and Culture explores episodes, patterns, and images of same-sex attraction in France from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, from the essays of Michel de Montaigne to pride parades in contemporary Paris. This groundbreaking book documents the ways homosexuality has been named, experienced, regulated, understood, and imagined. During these centuries, homosexuality has been stigmatized as a sin, crime, or disease, and denounced as a threat to social order and national identity. Yet the rhetoric of condemnation has always co-existed with the reality of toleration. This groundbreaking collection analyzes the ways in which persecutions, as well as differences within minority sexual subcultures, have highlighted stereotypes and anxieties about class and age differences, gendered roles, and separatism. Homosexuality in French History and Culture offers historical and literary studies based on a wide variety of sources, including: novels, plays, and poetry gossip and satires police reports medical texts travel literature newspapers and periodicals memoirs Homosexuality in French History and Culture combines fresh, creative re-interpretation of familiar texts with exciting new explorations of neglected historical episodes and cultures. It is a landmark of meticulous scholarship and rigorous theoretical analysis, and a vital resource for scholars of queer theory, French history and culture, and literary criticism.

The fourth and final volume in Michel Foucault’s acclaimed History of Sexuality, completed just before his death in 1984 and finally available to the public One of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault made an indelible impact on Western thought. The first three volumes in his History of Sexuality—which trace cultural and intellectual notions of sexuality, arguing that it has been profoundly shaped by the power structures applied to it—constitute some of Foucault’s most important work. This fourth volume posits that the origins of totalitarian self-surveillance began with the Christian practice of confession. The manuscript had long been secreted away, in accordance with Foucault’s stated wish that there be no posthumous publication of his unpublished work. With the sale of the Foucault archives in 2013, Foucault’s nephew felt that the time had come to publish this final volume in Foucault’s seminal history. Philosophically, it is a chapter in his hermeneutics of the desiring subject. Historically, it focuses on the remodeling of subjectivity carried out by the early Christian Fathers, who set out to transform the classical Logos of truthful human discourse into a theologos—the divine Word of a pure sovereign. What did God will in the matter of righteous sexual practice? Foucault parses out the logic of the various responses proffered by theologians over the centuries, culminating with Saint Augustine’s fascinating discussion of the libido. Sweeping and deeply personal, Confessions of the Flesh is a tour de force from a philosophical master