© 2001 by Oxford University Press
A Place Called Sex: Gender, Space and Modernity in Eighteenth-century England
1 Sheffield
In the historiography of the long eighteenth century, both the city and the body became ‘modern’. This article explores how particular spaces and bodies were mutually constitutive in eighteenth-century erotica. The changing understandings of bodies and gender of enlightened modernity have been located in pornographic and erotic material, and this material has itself been regarded as the epitome of the Enlightenment. In analysing the characteristics that were considered essential attributes of the settings of erotica in eighteenth-century erotica, this article challenges these assertions. It argues that attitudes to feminine spaces in erotica cannot be understood solely in terms of an Enlightenment, masculine desire to control and possess. Moreover, it argues against the views that women were increasingly regarded as sexually passive and sexual intercourse as phallocentric over this period. For the male authors and readers of eighteenth-century erotica, the act of sexual intercourse was rendered spatial. Indeed, sex the act was externalized as thoroughly feminine spaces in which men experienced comfort, seclusion and pleasure.