Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex

Abstract

examines "how the idea of sexual order and disorder became a primary tool in British and French print culture for imagining globalization and defining modern national and racial identity" (2) "how the idea of sex underwrote this mode of global consciousness" begun with British and French encounters with Tahiti in the late 1760s "exotic identifications enabled the exploration of unavailable models of sexual identity. When their desires fell outside the acceptable contours of respectable domestic writing, men and women of letters identified with foreign places and past times." (3) Also explores "competing claims about national identity and national sexual character in the continuing contestation between the Enlightenment's internal Others - Britain and France" (4) "in the eighteenth century, colonial representations were the field in which competing metropoles expressed binding notions of sexual identity" (7)