The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America

by Greta LaFleur

Overview

How natural history made sex scientific in the eighteenth century.

If sexology--the science of sex--came into being sometime in the nineteenth century, then how did statesmen, scientists, and everyday people make meaning out of sex before that point? In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Greta LaFleur demonstrates that eighteenth-century natural history--the study of organic life in its environment--actually provided the intellectual foundations for the later development of the scientific study of sex.

Natural historians understood the human body to be a "porous envelope," eminently vulnerable to its environment. Yet historians of sexuality have tended to rely on archival evidence of genital-based or otherwise bodily sex acts for source material. Through careful readings of both elite natural history texts and popular print forms that circulated widely in the British North American colonies--among them Barbary captivity, execution, cross-dressing, and anti-vice narratives--LaFleur traces the development of a broad knowledge of sexuality defined in terms of the dynamic relationship between the human and the natural, social, physical, and climatic milieu.

At the heart of this book is the question of how to produce a history of sexuality for an era in which modern vocabularies for sex and desire were unavailable. LaFleur demonstrates how environmental logic was used to explain sexual behavior on a broad scale, not just among the educated elite who wrote and read natural historical texts. LaFleur reunites the history of sexuality with the history of race, demonstrating how they were bound to one another by the emergence of the human sciences. Ultimately, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America not only rewrites all dominant scholarly narratives of eighteenth-century sexual behavior but also poses a major intervention into queer theoretical understandings of the relationship between sex and the subject.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421438849
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.79(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Greta LaFleur is an associate professor of American studies at Yale University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction:Toward an Environmental Theory of Early Sexuality
1. The Natural History of Sexuality
2. The Complexion of Sodomy
3. "Egyptian Lusts" and Other Bad Habits: Narrating Sexual Deviance and Executing Racial Difference
4. "Columbia's Soil": Botanical Sexuality and the Colonial Landscape in Herman Mann's The Female Review
5. Vice, Race, and the Sexuality of Space: The Early Nineteenth Century in Boston's "Negro Hill"
Epilogue: Thinking Sex—Without the Subject
Notes
Works Cited

What People are Saying About This

Peter Coviello

LaFleur offers a wide reappraisal of the conditions of emergence for what was not then, but would become, 'sexuality.' In its attentiveness to an environmental etiology of sexuality, the book does the crucial work of uncoupling sex from the straitjacketed, privatizing frameworks of 'the subject.' An altogether fine accomplishment.

Jordan Alexander Stein

This book teaches us how to read the entwined histories of sexuality and the natural world in the context of the European imperial project in North America, and its deeply researched historical narrative is enlivened by rigorous intersectional thinking. The result is a wonderfully interdisciplinary study that unsettles many habits of the field and points the way forward.

Brian Connolly

Greta LaFleur sets out a bold, provocative intellectual and ethical project: how to write the history of sex before sexuality, taking the eighteenth-century British colonial world as her focus. Tracing the logic of sex and race found in natural history through a surprising archive, this promises to be a landmark book in early American studies and the history of sexuality.

From the Publisher

This book teaches us how to read the entwined histories of sexuality and the natural world in the context of the European imperial project in North America, and its deeply researched historical narrative is enlivened by rigorous intersectional thinking. The result is a wonderfully interdisciplinary study that unsettles many habits of the field and points the way forward.
—Jordan Alexander Stein, Fordham University, coeditor of Early African American Print Culture

Greta LaFleur sets out a bold, provocative intellectual and ethical project: how to write the history of sex before sexuality, taking the eighteenth-century British colonial world as her focus. Tracing the logic of sex and race found in natural history through a surprising archive, this promises to be a landmark book in early American studies and the history of sexuality.
—Brian Connolly, University of South Florida, author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America

LaFleur offers a wide reappraisal of the conditions of emergence for what was not then, but would become, 'sexuality.' In its attentiveness to an environmental etiology of sexuality, the book does the crucial work of uncoupling sex from the straitjacketed, privatizing frameworks of 'the subject.' An altogether fine accomplishment.
—Peter Coviello, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth Century America

The fact that sexuality has a ‘natural history’ shouldn’t come as a surprise, but LaFleur’s analysis of the pervasive import of environmental logics to sex in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic is a revelation. With its sophisticated understanding of how racialization proceeds by way of sexual tropes in the annals of natural history, this spirited genealogy is what many of us have been waiting for.
—Valerie Traub, University of Michigan, author of Thinking Sex With the Early Moderns

Valerie Traub

The fact that sexuality has a ‘natural history’ shouldn’t come as a surprise, but LaFleur’s analysis of the pervasive import of environmental logics to sex in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic is a revelation. With its sophisticated understanding of how racialization proceeds by way of sexual tropes in the annals of natural history, this spirited genealogy is what many of us have been waiting for.

Editorial Reviews

Greta LaFleur invites readers to consider a different body. The book effectively historicizes categories that are often taken for granted (sex, race, vice, habit), and shows us not only their temporal contingency, but also invites the reader to delve into the strangeness of early modern ontologies and epistemologies. LaFleur ultimately crafts a space of possibility for different futures as well. These are futures of greater intersectional solidarity in which we are invited to think about the collective, and move past the dominance of the individual, the subjective and modern biopoliticized body.
--New Books Network

While LaFleur's work speaks directly to early Americanists and scholars of race, gender, and sexuality, it also merits a far-reaching ecocritical audience . . . LaFleur offers us a compelling genealogy of environmentally determined sexuality, one that releases sex and sexuality from the individual subject while recognizing the racializing discourses that have shaped and constrained early American theories of sexual variety."
--ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

LaFleur's provocations are critical toward contending with the histories of those populations who have contested and continue to contest the Euro-American category of human as well as its environmental preconditions and presumed prerogatives.
--Catherine R. Peters, Harvard University, Environmental History

From the Publisher

LaFleur's provocations are critical toward contending with the histories of those populations who have contested and continue to contest the Euro-American category of human as well as its environmental preconditions and presumed prerogatives.

Environmental History - Catherine R. Peters

Greta LaFleur invites readers to consider a different body. The book effectively historicizes categories that are often taken for granted (sex, race, vice, habit), and shows us not only their temporal contingency, but also invites the reader to delve into the strangeness of early modern ontologies and epistemologies. LaFleur ultimately crafts a space of possibility for different futures as well. These are futures of greater intersectional solidarity in which we are invited to think about the collective, and move past the dominance of the individual, the subjective and modern biopoliticized body.

New Books Network

While LaFleur's work speaks directly to early Americanists and scholars of race, gender, and sexuality, it also merits a far-reaching ecocritical audience . . . LaFleur offers us a compelling genealogy of environmentally determined sexuality, one that releases sex and sexuality from the individual subject while recognizing the racializing discourses that have shaped and constrained early American theories of sexual variety."

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

"While LaFleur's work speaks directly to early Americanists and scholars of race, gender, and sexuality, it also merits a far-reaching ecocritical audience... LaFleur offers us a compelling genealogy of environmentally determined sexuality, one that releases sex and sexuality from the individual subject while recognizing the racializing discourses that have shaped and constrained early American theories of sexual variety."

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment - Abby Goode

"In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Greta LaFleur invites readers to consider a different body. The book effectively historicizes categories that are often take for granted (sex, race, vice, habit), and shows us not only their temporal contingency, but also invites the reader to delve into the strangeness of early modern ontologies and epistemologies. LaFleur ultimately crafts a space of possibility for different futures as well. These are futures of greater intersectional solidarity in which we are invited to think about the collective, and move past the dominance of the individual, the subjective and modern biopoliticized body."

New Books Network - Patricia Martins Marcos