Graduate Syllabus: Enlightenment Sexualities

Enlightenment Liberties / Libertés des Lumières, 2018

In considering the birth of the modern political and scientific discourse on sexuality, I contrast several theorists (Wollstonecraft, Sade, and E. Darwin) and one visual artist (James Gillray) applying Enlightenment ideas of natural human behavior and drawing moral conclusions from them. I argue that not only is a polemical medium like the political cartoon able to keep pace with the subtlety and complexity of contemporaneous writing on the subject, but that it can explore the weaknesses of those theoretical positions (esp. Sade's and Darwin's) in ways their authors might not have expected.

Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago

According to Foucault, a crucial part of the process of secularizing sex was the need to articulate sex, ‘to “tell everything”’ so that desire could be rendered ‘morally acceptable and technically useful’. Eighteenth-century popular culture played a crucial role in this process. By exploring the intersections between popular and apparently rarefied philosophical, legal and political discourses about sexuality, this chapter demonstrates that eighteenth-century debates about sex were closely tied in to the Enlightenment invention of the rational human.

Journal of The History of The Behavioral Sciences, 1999

English Studies Forum, 2004

Because I Have Voice, 2005

Hi St0ries 0f Desire: Sexuaities and cuIture in M0dern India, 2020

In this communication called a sexuality to civilize, I intend to answer a contemporary question, updated by the mass shooting in Orlando: how is it possible that sexual minorities, women, lesbians, gays, trans and so on, became strategically important in this early twenty first century?

Book, 1997

In this wide-ranging survey Joseph Bristow introduces readers to the most influential contemporary theories of sexual desire. Revealing how nineteenth-century scientists invented 'sexuality', he investigates why this term has been the source of such controversy in modern culture. Demonstrating the lasting influence of late-Victorian sexology, Sexu-ality turns a critical eye on many conflicting accounts of eroticism. Bristow shows why Freud and Lacan have been widely discussed within the fields of cultural studies, literary history and feminist theory. He explains the importance of Bataille, Baudrillard, Cixous, Deleuze, Irigaray and Kristeva, among many others. Analysing the work of Michel Foucault, Bristow considers how The History of Sexuality paved the way for queer theory in the 1990s. The conclusion looks at the decisive postmodern emphasis on erotic diversity. Presented in a clear and concise style, Sexuality makes complex theoretical ideas accessible to readers who wish to discover more about this exciting and rapidly developing field.