Homosexuality in Modern France / Edition 1

by Jeffrey Merrick, Bryant T. Ragan

Overview

This volume explores the realities and representations of same-sex sexuality in France in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the period that witnessed the emergence of "homosexuality" in the modern sense of the word. Based on archival research and textual analysis, the articles examine the development of homosexual subcultures and illustrate the ways in which philosophes, pamphleteers, police, novelists, scientists, and politicians conceptualized same-sex relations and connected them with more general concerns about order and disorder. The contributors—Elizabeth Colwill, Michael David Sibalis, Victoria Thompson, William Peniston, Vernon Rosario II, Francesca Canade-Sautman, Martha Hanna, Robert A. Nye, and the editors Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. and Jeffrey Merrick—use the methods of intellectual and cultural history, the history of science, literary studies, legal and social history, and microhistory to outline the development and evolution of homosexual patterns of repression and liberation . This collection shows how the subject of homosexuality is related to important topics in French history: the Enlightenment, the revolutionary tradition, social discipline, positivism, elite and popular culture, nationalism, feminism, and the construction of identity.

Given the role of gays and lesbians in modern French culture and the work of French scholars on the history of sexuality, this collection fills an important gap in the literature and represents the first attempt in any language to explore this subject over three centuries from a variety of perspectives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195093049
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/15/1996
Series:	Studies in the History of Sexuality
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.68(d)
Lexile:	1680L (what's this?)

About the Author

Jeffrey Merrick is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century, along with numerous articles on early modern French political culture.
Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., is Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University. He is the co-editor of Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France, and has authored articles on rural political culture during the French Revolution.

Table of Contents

	Contributors	ix
	Introduction	3
1.	The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality	8
2.	The Marquis de Villette and Mademoiselle de Raucourt: Representations of Male and Female Sexual Deviance in Late Eighteenth-century France	30
3.	Pass as a Woman, Act like a Man: Marie-Antoinette as Tribade in the Pornography of the French Revolution	54
4.	The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789-1815	80
5.	Creating Boundaries: Homosexuality and the Changing Social Order in France, 1830-1870	102
6.	Love and Death in Gay Paris: Homosexuality and Criminality in the 1870s	128
7.	Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes, and Hysterical Mollies: The Pederasts' Inversions	146
8.	Invisible Women: Lesbian Working-class Culture in France, 1880-1930	177
9.	Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon	202
10.	Michel Foucault's Sexuality and the History of Homosexuality in France	225
	Index	243

Editorial Reviews

"This book and others like it in series such as Oxford University Press' Studies in the History of Sexuality, are blowing the bounds of scholarship wide open."—Lambda Book Report

"...highly readable collection of lucid and useful essays...Homosexuality in Modern France should probably be regarded as the book in which gay and lesbian studies in modern French history "come of age" and confidently display their range, depth, and solidity."—The Committee on Gay and Lesbian History

"...This book is the best and most accessible effort yet to tell many stories about both men and women that are central to understanding the relationship between homosexuality and politics."—American Historical Review

"With this volume, Merrick and Ragan have provided students of early modern gender and sexuality a well-selected and well-organized collection of translated documents relating to male and female sodomy and homosexuality from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century in France.... The volume will be immensely useful not only for students of early modern France who do not know enough French to read the sources, but also for scholars who do no have access to archival sources that do not exist in modern editions.... The collection then is ideal for those beginning their study of early modern sexualities as well as for those seeking sources and source material for more advanced study and research in the area."—Sixteenth Century Journal

From the Publisher