Confusion Embodied: Epistemologies of Sex and Race in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49) and the Histoire naturelle (1749–1804)

Abstract

In the vast majority of scholarly works which trace the emergence of racial thought, the eighteenth century is viewed as a crucial period. Even if, as in more recent accounts, the century did not see the birth of ‘modern’ racial thought, it remains one in which these attitudes developed from their earl-ier, less ‘scientific’ forms.1 It is not difficult to see why. A period of booming scientific endeavour coupled with commercial and imperial expansion to provide new sources and outlets for European industry, culture, ethnocentrism and, ultimately, racialism. As a result, the pluralism and ‘multiplicity’ characteristic of earlier discourses of race gave way, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to a more crystallized taxonomy (and hence hierarchy) of races.2 Nor was race the only category of thought to undergo such change at this time. Gender and sex — by which is meant sexual difference — likewise arguably underwent a transition to a more stable and binaristic mode.3 The reasons behind this change are more obscure, although those who have argued in its favour point to crises of confidence in masculine identity starting around 1775 and the consequent need to subjugate women.4 According to Thomas Laqueur, whose seminal Making Sex (1990) almost single-handedly spawned this branch of scholarship, the political need to confine women to the ‘domestic sphere’ produced a current of scientific thought sympathetic to this aim.