New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France

<p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>This intervention will be essential reading to students and scholars in gender studies literature cultural studies visual studies and the history of sexuality.</p>