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

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 womens non-consent a logical impossibility.

Introduction: The Rise of the Modern Self and the Erasure of Female Sexual Autonomy

Introduction

1. Uterine Furors: Vitalist Neo-Humoralism and the Impossibility of Non-consent

2. DAlemberts Wet Dream: The Gendered Hygiene of Nocturnal Emission

Introduction

3. Rousseaus Natural Woman: On the Origin and Foundations of Sexual Inequality

4. Rape in Paradise: Tahiti and the (Hetero)Sexual Imperative

Introduction

5. Erasing Rape in Riccoboni: The Story of Miss Jenny Montfort

6. Sexual Violence in Laclos: Consent and the Virtuous Swoon

Afterword The Enduring Legacy of an Enlightenment Narrative

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 womans non-consent a logical impossibility.