Sex in Translation: Antoine Léonard Thomas’s Essai sur les femmes and the Enlightenment Debate on Women

Antoine Thomas Léonard’s Essay on the Character of Women vexed philosophers in both camps of the “Querelle des Femmes” [Quarrel on Women]. In sparking such bipartisan controversy, the Essay articulated contradictory views on women, a complexity made all the more evident by its multiple translations’ repeated attempts to smooth them out. Most of all, in their attempts to make the Essay alternatively more naturalizing or more historicizing, this genealogy of translations crystallizes an ideological shift from Thomas’s still ambivalent juxtaposition of discourses on sex and gender to the polarized views of identity that triumphed by the end of the century.