Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex (review)

Pamela Cheek's Sexual Antipodes is a wide-ranging and ambitious study of how Enlightenment print culture used ideas of sexual order and disorder to imagine national and racial identities in France, Britain, and the South Seas. The book argues that ideas about the role sexuality should play in public life shaped French and British national identity in the eighteenth century and extends these arguments to address the sexual organization of human variety or race in late Enlightenment thought. In the eighteenth century, Cheek claims, the "placement" of sexuality became an essential means of interpreting not only individual identity in Western Europe but also cultural identity and difference within a global frame that embraced the antipodes. Opposites, it seems, do more than attract.

The argument is developed in two stages. The opening chapters outline the contesting visions of female publicity and domesticity that distinguished French and British national character in the eighteenth century. The prominent role of French women in cultural and courtly politics fostered the civility, politeness and sociability for which the French were celebrated, while British female domesticity upheld a delibidinized, rational, masculine public sphere, preserving the liberty and independence of the Briton. Chapter 2 , "Public Women in the French Body Politic," analyzes representations of the actress and the prostitute in order to show how the sexuality of French public women created alternate models to the public authority incarnated in the monarchical body. Chapter 3 contrasts British and French pornography, arguing that the less-than-titillating trope of "woman-as-land/land-as-woman" often featured in British pornography allows elite men to claim possession over the abstraction of "unsexed" public life represented in print culture. In contrast, French pornographic proposals for state-run brothels depict sex as the motor of public life, seeking to harness male sexual desire towards the reproduction of the population.

The second half of the book argues that French and British writers used the visibility and availability of sex in Tahiti to test these models of delibidinized or sexualized public life. "The Sexual Nature of South Seas Islands" sketches out the construction of sexual order in utopian writings on the antipodes. In these texts, species identity is alternately recognized through sexual desire (attraction as a sign of human likeness) or produced (through the eugenic management of a group's sexual arrangements). Chapter 5 , "British Encounter: Recognizing Sensibility," analyzes how British accounts deal with the public nature of sex in Tahiti by subsuming sex into colonial description: it becomes an attribute in natural histories, a sign of moral sensibility, and a diagnostic sign of national moral character in Malthus and Bentham's discussions of population. Chapter 6 , "French Encounter: Crafting Transparency," takes up Restif de la Bretonne's La Terre Australe, Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, and Sade's Aline et Valcour to show how mixing, hybridity, and amalgamation incorporate differences through sexual union. The French endeavor to make colonial identities physically legible through the public administration of sexual desire, imagining national regeneration through the eugenic crafting of exotic bodies.

Suggestive, insightful, and provocative at every turn, Sexual Antipodes furnishes an illuminating and much-needed comparative discussion of French and British models of sexuality, national identity, and the public sphere in relation both to the metropolitan and colonial domains. The book beautifully weaves together not only disciplines but also national literatures too often kept asunder. The inclusion of both Britain and France prevents the "antipodes" of the title from resolving into the binary poles associated with nineteenth-century colonial histories, while the comparative model dispels the aura of teleological inevitability that occasionally hovers over accounts of race and empire in the eighteenth century. In particular, Cheek's contentions about the role of sexuality in constructing eighteenth-century racial models along national lines are likely to foster productive debate. "Sex in the British racial model," Cheek argues, "was a descriptive term for identity; it explained what was already there. Sex in the French racial model was...