Histories of French Sexuality: From the Enlightenment to the Present

Histories of French Sexuality contends that the history of sexuality is at a crossroads. Decades of scholarship have shown that sexuality is implicated in a wide range of topics, such as studies of reproduction, the body, sexual knowledge, gender identity, marriage, and sexual citizenship. These studies have broadened historical narratives and interpretations of areas such as urbanization, the family, work, class, empire, the military and war, and the nation. Yet while the field has evolved, not everyone has caught on, especially scholars of French history.

Covering the early eighteenth century through the present, the essays in Histories of French Sexuality show how attention to the history of sexuality deepens, changes, challenges, supports, or otherwise complicates the major narratives of French history. This volume makes a set of historical arguments about the nature of the past and a larger historiographical claim about the value and place of the field of the history of sexuality within the broader discipline of history. The topics include early empire-building, religion, the Enlightenment, feminism, socialism, formation of the modern self, medicine, urbanization, decolonization, the social world of postwar France, and the rise of modern and social media.

Author: Nina Kushner
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 05/01/2023
Pages: 360
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9781496235497
ISBN10: 1496235495
BISAC Categories:
- History | Europe | France
- Social Science | Human Sexuality (see also Psychology | Human Sexuality)
- Psychology | Human Sexuality (see also Social Science | Human Sexuality)

About the Author
Nina Kushner is an associate professor of history at Clark University. She is author of Erotic Exchanges: Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris and coeditor of Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France. Andrew Israel Ross is an associate professor of history at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris.