Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex

by Pamela Cheek

Overview

Sexual Antipodes is about how Enlightenment print culture built modern national and racial identity out of images of sexual order and disorder in public life. It examines British and French popular journalism, utopian fiction and travel accounts about South Sea encounter, pamphlet literature, and pornography, as well as more traditional literary sources on the eighteenth century, such as the novel and philosophical essays and tales. The title refers to a premise in utopian and exoticist fiction about the southern portion of the globe: sexual order defines the character of the state. The book begins by examining how the idea of sexual order operated as the principle for explaining national differences in eighteenth-century contestation between Britain and France. It then traces how, following British and French encounters with Tahiti, the comparison of different national sexual orders formed the basis for two theories of race: race as essential character and race as degeneration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804780308
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Pamela Cheek is Associate Professor of French at the University of New Mexico.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	1
Part 1.	Metropolitan Allegories
1.	National Character, Publicity and Sex	25
2.	Public Women in the French Body Politic	46
3.	Public Life in Enlightenment Pornography	82
Part 2.	Antipodes
4.	The Sexual Nature of South Sea Islands	123
5.	British Encounter: Recognizing Sensibility	137
6.	French Encounter: Crafting Transparency	164
	Notes	195
	Index	237

Editorial Reviews

"Well-written, richly referenced, and persuasively argued, Sexual Antipodes is compelling both in the sweep of its synthetic arguments and in the bold, original claims it makes."

French Forum

"Sexual Antipodes is an important contribution to the ongoing attempts to historicize globalization . . . By demonstrating how a political theory of sex was crucial to the ways in which Enlightenment Europe thought of itself, and by asserting that this consciousness was necessarily global, this provocative study raises questions about the supposed provincialism of the Enlightenment."

Comparative Literature Studies - Betty Joseph

"Sexual Antipodes is an important contribution to the ongoing attempts to historicize globalization . . . By demonstrating how a political theory of sex was crucial to the ways in which Enlightenment Europe thought of itself, and by asserting that this consciousness was necessarily global, this provocative study raises questions about the supposed provincialism of the Enlightenment."—Betty Joseph, Comparative Literature Studies


"Well-written, richly referenced, and persuasively argued, Sexual Antipodes is compelling both in the sweep of its synthetic arguments and in the bold, original claims it makes."—French Forum


"Sexual Antipodes is a bold, wide-ranging, and consequential book. Cheek has drawn important conclusions regarding the globalization of the Enlightenment sexual imagination. Featuring a triangulation among the sexual spaces of Britain, France, and the South Seas, the book conveys a complex sense of the changes that took place in the representation of sex from the early to the late eighteenth century. Sex is described as a form of cultural and conceptual 'trafficking' that has been ignored in analyses of colonialism that have until now focused exclusively on the staple areas of commerce, politics, and religion. Cheek's book is a much-needed corrective, and when it is read in eighteenth-century studies, comparative literature, and sexuality studies, it will place her as a powerful voice alongside other emerging scholars of sexuality." —Srinivas Aravamudan,Duke University

From the Publisher