Book ID: CBB001510056

The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance (2014)

unapi

Frederickson, Kathleen (Author)


Fordham University Press


Publication Date: 2014
Physical Details: xi + 220 pp.; bibl.; index
Language: English

It is paradoxical that instinct became a central term for late Victorian sexual sciences as they were elaborated in the medicalized spaces of confession and introspection, given that instinct had long been defined in its opposition to self-conscious thought. The Ploy of Instinct ties this paradox to instinct’s deployment in conceptualizing governmentality. Instinct’s domain, Frederickson argues, extended well beyond the women, workers, and “savages” to whom it was so often ascribed. The concept of instinct helped to gloss over contradictions in British liberal ideology made palpable as turn-of-the-century writers grappled with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism. For elite European men, instinct became both an agent of “progress” and a force that, in contrast to desire, offered a plenitude in answer to the alienation of self-consciousness. This shift in instinct’s appeal to privileged European men modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender. The book traces these changes through parliamentary papers, pornographic fiction, accounts of Aboriginal Australians, suffragette memoirs, and scientific texts in evolutionary theory, sexology, and early psychoanalysis.

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Reviewed By

Review Claire Furlong (2016) Review of "The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance". Social History of Medicine (pp. 182-183). unapi

Review Jana Funke (2016) Review of "The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 647-648). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001510056/

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Authors & Contributors
Casini, Paolo
Rudnick, Lois P.
Silvano, Giovanni
Gianpiero Sironi
Heru, Alison M.
Mayhew, Robert
Concepts
Science and politics
Science and society
Science and culture
Sexuality
Historiography
National histories
Time Periods
Enlightenment
18th century
19th century
20th century, early
17th century
Places
Europe
Italy
France
Levant and Near East
United States
Sweden
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