Dans les reigles du plaisir...: Medecine et obscenite au siecle des lumieres.

"Dans les reigles du plaisir...: Medecine et Obscenite au siecle des Lumieres" analyzes the contributions of clandestine and marginal literary cultural productions and practices to the development and enforcement of an ideological system of exclusion based on biological differences. More specifically, "Dans les reigles du plaisir..." studies "obscene" and medical documents involved in the construction of the "opposite sexes" in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. The first three chapters focus on L'Ecole des filles, Tableau de l'amour considere dans l'etat du mariage and L'Academie des Dames and the last two chapters study more philosophical XVIIIth-century medical and obscene texts, Therese philosphe and L'Onanisme. Between 1655 and 1775, obscene and medical documents, two supposedly oppositional genres, apparently collide but in fact contribute to the emergence of a new female body which is incommensurable with the male body and which codes women as a "different species" in spite of the fact that the same obscene and medical texts recognize only one human body: the seminal body, the body endowed with semen, be it male or female. Dans les reigles du plaisir... examines the textual and narrative strategies which make it possible for texts to create ideological differences where there are theoretically none, to develop hierarchies from an undifferentiated and thus undifferential system of knowledge, and which recuperate an older form of knowledge and encode it as a binary gender system. This system and epistemology will serve as the ideological justification of women's exclusion from power and public life in the XIXth century. The obscene and medical texts I analyze are symptomatic of a resistance to medical and philosophical discourses that threaten phallocentric hegemony. Dans les reigles du plaisir... studies how these texts resist resistance and oppose oppositionality in order to maintain a social, political, biological and erotic organization based on male superiority.PhDRomance Languages and Literatures: FrenchUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104174/1/9500992.pdfDescription of 9500992.pdf : Restricted to UM users only