In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex
  • Steven Pierce
Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex. By Pamela Cheek. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 246. $49.50 (cloth).

Among scholars who have been documenting the long-term and uneven emergence of "modern" notions of identity and sexuality, a consensus has emerged: contemporary systems of gender, race, and national affiliation are recent developments and grew up together. Pamela Cheek's Sexual Antipodes stands as a significant addition to this literature. In it, she argues that the late eighteenth century marked a watershed in the ordering of Western European sexual identities, particularly in Britain and France, her primary objects of analysis. At that time, sex began "to play an important role in organizing an emerging Western European sense of being placed on the globe" (2). This sexualized imaginary developed against a backdrop of "exotic" sexualities, which became known to Europeans from the accounts of travelers, explorers, and colonists. Cheek's study differs significantly from those of Anne McClintock and Felicity Nussbaum in that she finds the binary between European and non-European sexualities to be a phenomenon associated with nineteenth-century high colonialism. Eighteenth-century notions of non-Western sexualities, she believes, were equally informed by the rivalry between France and Britain. In that century, "Natives" had ideological importance not just as a non-Western "Other" but as subjects of rival empires. Since Enlightenment thinkers placed sexuality at the center of located identity, travel accounts, ethnography, political pornography, and utopian writings were integral to national self-fashioning. Their British, French, and non-European subjects emerged in mutual self-constitution. [End Page 234]

This is a fascinating contention, which Cheek goes a long way toward demonstrating. Sexual Antipodes is divided into chapters that examine representations of the national character as attested by heterosexual sociality, "public women" (e.g., actresses and prostitutes) in France, political pornography, and British and French travel writing, particularly about the South Seas. Cheek's readings of her texts, which range from Cleland's Fanny Hill to Restif's Austral Discovery by a Flying Man, are consistently insightful, erudite, and convincing. She employs these readings to make broader claims about the history of sexualized identity by relying on the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, specifically, the emergence in the Enlightenment of a public culture of literate debate. Cheek's texts are all located within this domain and are thus symptomatic of changing concerns and paradigms of sexual identity. She is careful to avoid treating them as transparent reflections of culture. Thus, on pornography she argues, "My intention . . . is to approach eighteenth-century pornography or scandalous writing not as a form representative of an eighteenth-century psyche or sensibility but rather as a significant phenomenon in eighteenth-century Western European print culture, a phenomenon that can be examined for the information it provides about how readers were situated with respect to public life and national identity in and through the texts they read" (84).

At this point, historians reading Sexual Antipodes may have a significant reservation, a common one when social scientists read work by literary critics. While Cheek's stance on reading is more than reasonable, it does pose a serious methodological challenge that she is never fully able to meet. Her practice is to examine how texts situate their reader in the wider world, with particular regard to sexuality. By following the patterns of [End Page 235] argument the reader also follows a particular pattern of emplacement within global and sexual imaginaries. So, for example, the tendency of British political pornography to sexualize the landscape humorously (as in Thomas Stretser's A New Description of Merryland) reflected a more general tendency in Britain to delibidinize the public realm, which in France was increasingly sexualized. This is fair enough, and one is willing to grant that Cheek's texts are representative of the milieus from which they emerge. However, one would prefer to see more evidence of the ways in which they were received than the internal, reader-response analysis that Cheek provides.

In this regard, it is surprising how little Cheek depends upon Foucault for theoretical inspiration. While she...

pdf

Share