Homosexuality in Modern France
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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.
ContributorsIntroduction31The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality82The Marquis de Villette and Mademoiselle de Raucourt: Representations of Male and Female Sexual Deviance in Late Eighteenth-century France303Pass as a Woman, Act like a Man: Marie-Antoinette as Tribade in the Pornography of the French Revolution544The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789-1815805Creating Boundaries: Homosexuality and the Changing Social Order in France, 1830-18701026Love and Death in Gay Paris: Homosexuality and Criminality in the 1870s1287Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes, and Hysterical Mollies: The Pederasts' Inversions1468Invisible Women: Lesbian Working-class Culture in France, 1880-19301779Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon20210Michael Foucault's Sexuality and the History of Homosexuality in France225Index243
