Writer | Teacher | Humorist
As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a type of life, a life form, and a morphology. . . . Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul.—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction [1976], trans. Robert Hurley, Vintage, 1990, p. 43.
A man feigns impotence to cuckold unsuspecting husbands; a male and female couple compete for sexual favors from a male servant; a reformed prostitute recounts experiences with male and female partners. How should we interpret these literary episodes, since Foucault and others have dated the concept of sexual orientation to the 19th century? Posing such questions, this course aims to improve understandings of both the eighteenth century and today. Featured authors include Wycherley, Rochester, Behn, Pope, Swift, Montagu, Cleland, and Wollstonecraft. Featured scholars include Foucault, Rubin, Sedgwick, Butler, and Nussbaum.