Homosexuality in Modern France [ electronic resource ] /
by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan.
- Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011
This book explores the realities and representations of same-sex sexuality in France in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, the period that witnessed the emergence of “homosexuality” in the modern sense of the word. Based on archival research and textual analysis, the chapters examine the development of homosexual subcultures and illustrate the ways in which philosophers, pamphleteers, police, novelists, scientists, and politicians conceptualized same-sex relations and connected them with more general concerns about order and disorder. The book uses the methods of intellectual and cultural history, the history of science, literary studies, legal and social history, and microhistory. This book 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.