Haynes, April Rose (Author)
University of California, Santa Barbara
Cohen, Patricia Cline
Edition Details: Advisor: Cohen, Patricia Cline
Physical Details: 560 pp.
Language: English
The dissertation, "Riotous Flesh: Gender, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice, 1830-1860," traces the dissemination of a profound sexual ideology and analyzes its impact on the history of gender, race, and sexuality in the United States. The most famous spokesperson identified with this ideology, Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), became an antebellum cultural icon by advocating "total abstinence" first from alcohol, then from coffee, tea, spices, and meat. He argued that stimulation produced pathology: it caused disease and incited sexual sins, the worst of which was masturbation. According to Graham and his followers, "the solitary vice" caused impotence, insanity, consumption, and death. Rather than revisit Graham's published texts, the dissertation analyzes the grassroots movement that adopted, transformed, and spread the discourse of solitary vice. With special attention to female advocates of Grahamite physiological reform, it interprets the often violent gendered and racialized conflicts that sex reform elicited. By drawing on newspaper reports, private correspondence, and the records of ladies' physiological societies, anti-slavery and moral reform societies, and women's medical colleges, the dissertation reconstructs a radical subculture developed by "popular physiologists" in the northeastern United States between 1830 and 1860. It argues that solitary vice rhetoric appealed to so many women by evoking competing sexual counterdiscourses that amplified conflicting gendered and racialized claims. Within a decade of its emergence it seemed that antimasturbation discourse legitimized almost any type of public sexual speech. It opened surprising opportunities for white women to challenge dominant notions of feminine purity by bringing sex and female embodiment into public venues while they agitated for self-representation. At the same time, free northern African American men and women appropriated the vocabulary of reform physiology to articulate embodied protests against slavery, hypersexualization, and scientific racism. Ultimately, however, the counterdiscourses engendered by these activists also set cornerstones of the later worldview that queer theorists describe as "heteronormativity." By hinging health, gender identity, social respectability, political rights and educational entitlements on the abjection of a particular sexual behavior, antimasturbation discourse defined normative sexuality as a prerequisite for inclusion in civil society.
...MoreDescription On 19th-century antimasturbation discourse in the United States. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 70/09 (2010). Pub. no. AAT 3375551.
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