Rape in Paradise: Naturalizing Sexual Violence in Diderot's Tahitian Reverie

This study explores the toleration of heterosexual rape in the Tahitian culture imagined by Denis Diderot in his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772) to argue that Diderotian gender relations are best understood in the context of a scientific discourse concerning how the human species came to exist in such cultural variety across the globe. This complex set of embedded dialogues contains the most telling theoretical development of Diderotian sexual politics, a stance that combines solidarity with and deep frustration toward an oppressed Other.