The Making of the Modern Body

Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century

Catherine Gallagher, Thomas Laqueur

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520059610
• eBook ISBN: 9780520908284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Scholars have only recently discovered that the human body itself has a history. Not only has it been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, but it has also been lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar material cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain. The eight articles in this volume support, supplement, and explore the significance of these insights. They belong to a new historical endeavor that derives partly from the crossing of historical with anthropological investigations, partly from social historians' deepening interest in culture, partly from the thematization of the body in modern philosophy (especially phenomenology), and partly from the emphasis on gender, sexuality, and women's history that large numbers of feminist scholars have brought to all disciplines.


Scholars have only recently discovered that the human body itself has a history. Not only has it been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, but it has also been lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimi

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• THOMAS LAQUEUR Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology
• LONDA SCHIEBINGER Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy
• CATHERINE GALLAGHER The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew
• D. A. MILLER Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
• MARY POOVEY “Scenes of an Indelicate Character”: The Medical “Treatment” of Victorian Women
• LAURA ENGELSTEIN Morality and the Wooden Spoon:
• ALAIN CORBIN Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France; A System of Images and Regulations
• CHRISTINE BUCI-GLUCKSMANN Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern
• List of Contributors
• Index