Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present [Hardcover]

An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. It draws attention to continuities in thinking about bodies and sex: concept may have changed, but hey nevertheless draw on older ideas and language.List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction; S.Toulalan PART I: BODIES AND DIFFERENCE 'That ere with Age, his Strength is Utterly Decay'd': Understanding the Male Body in Early Modern Manhood; J.Jordan Confusion Embodied: Epistemologies of Sex and Race in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-9) and the Histoire Naturelle (1749-1804); A.Wells The Hermaphrodite, Fecundity and Military Efficiency: Dangerous Subjects in the Emerging Liberal order of Nineteenth-Century Spain; R.Cleminson ?& F.Vazquez Garcia Touching Bodies: Tact/ility in Nineteenth-century Medical Photographs and Models; E.Stephens 'Farewell to Frocks', 'Sex Change' in Interwar Britain: Newspaper Stories, Medical Technology and Modernity; A.Oram 'Perversity to Match the Curtains': Queering the Life Story with Grayson Perry; M.Jolly PART II: BODIES, SEX AND DESIRE 'Unripe' Bodies: Children and Sex in Early Modern England; S.Toulalan Urge without Desire? Confession Manuals, Moral Casuistry, and the Features of Concupiscentia between the Fifteenth and Eighteenth Centuries; F.Alfieri On the Unsteadiness of Sexual Truth in Eighteenth-Century France; P.Cryle 'Lay back, Enjoy it and Shout Happy England': Marital Duty and Sexual Pleasure; K.Fisher Eros and Thanatos in European and American Sexology; L.Downing Sadism as Social Violence: From fin-de-si?cle Degeneration to the Critiques of Nazi Sexuality in Frankfurt School Thought; A.MooreFERNANDA ALFIERI Researcher, the Bruno Kessler Foundation, Centre for Italo-Germanic Studies, Trento, ItalyPETER CRYLE Professor of French and Director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses, the University of Quel#1