Tag: book review

Some New Stuff

I had a couple items appear over the winter holidays. First, I reviewed Jeffrey Merrick’s Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France, an invaluable source collection for those interested in the history of sexuality in eighteenth century France:

Merrick’s contribution is unique in its ambition. Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in EighteenthCentury France forms one part of a broader reconceptualization of eighteenth-century sexual lives that explicitly invites readers to “track down, dig up, root out, and take in as much as we can about the operations and regulation of sexual desire and networks in eighteenth-century France and to locate the patterns and insights we extract from the sources in the context of the society that produced them and of larger issues in the history of sexuality” (p. 2). The give-and-take between Merrick, the documents, and readers thus produce new understandings of what the history of sexuality could mean to professional historians and students. As both a research intervention and a teaching tool, Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades accomplishes a rare feat. It simultaneously showcases the process and the results of archival research. It does so, however, without foreclosing the ways its readers will respond to and interpret the history it reveals.

Read the whole thing here.

Second, I was interviewed by Beth Mauldin of the New Books in History Podcast about Public City/Public Sex. I hate hearing my own voice, but I think it came out pretty well! Enjoy!

Brief Review: Anne-Marie Sohn, Du premier baiser à l’alcôve: La sexualité des Français au quotidien (1850-1950)

SohnAnne Marie Sohn’s Du premier baiser a l’alcove (1996) argues that the movement towards sexual liberation began in the century prior to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s.1 Explicitly contrasting her study against those that have focused on expert discourses on sexuality — a trend that she blames on the work of Michel Foucault — Sohn attempts to recuperate the sexual lives of “ordinary people.” Through an analysis of a dazzling amount of judicial records drawn from all over France, Sohn describes the sexual mores, practices, beliefs, and fears of both elite and popular classes.

However, the shear breadth of the material leads to two problems, one historical and the other theoretical. First, the evidence is presented without a great deal of context. While there are exceptions where Sohn effectively signposts moments of historical change, more often we are left wondering when exactly these various beliefs and practices went into and out of vogue. Second, the sheer volume of material leads her to a form of analysis through description. Rather than questioning the source material, she treats it largely as a transparent window onto historical truth.

The book therefore remains extraordinarily useful for researchers such as myself because of its documentation and narrative sweep. But it ultimately reifies the “repressive hypothesis” not simply through its argument that the Third Republic saw “a moral rupture which paves the way towards sexual liberation” [une rupture éthique qui ouvre la voie à la liberté sexuelle], but also through its unwillingness to complicate and situate its sources.2 Foucault’s lesson was not simply to pay attention to discourse, but to recognize the ways in which the “reality” that Sohn seeks to recover does not exist outside it.

1. Sohn, Anne-Marie. Du premier baiser à l’alcôve: La sexualité des Français au quotidien (1850-1950). Paris: Aubier, 1996↩

2. Ibid, 307↩