Les sexes et les sciences

The Sexes and the Sciences

Special issue of Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies

This special issue marks approximately three decades since Londa Schiebinger, Ludmilla Jordanova, and Thomas Laqueur carved out new intellectual terrain with their respective cultural histories that similarly located modern scientific definitions of sex and sexual difference in the eighteenth century. Following those studies, there has been all manner of fascinating research and debate on this subject. In a 2003 review, George Haggerty declared that ‘the study of gender and sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has come of age’. Cultural, literary, and social historians investigating sex and science continue to point to the long century as a breeding ground for the gendered self, for biological determination, for modern gender politics, and for sexual dimorphism as we know it.

In recent years, scholars researching this subject have engaged with new materials and contexts—from collections and correspondences to communities and clubs. There have been innovations in methodology too, and particularly with interdisciplinary approaches. Reassessments of boundaries between the eighteenth-century arts and sciences have had profound implications for readings of sex and gender in the period.

Out of the above historiographies, this special issue of JECS explores how ‘the sexes’ and ‘the sciences’ were mutually influential as enlightenment developments.

Collectively, the articles demonstrate that eighteenth-century scientific understandings of the sexes—male and female—were diverse and debated, and that, while formal scientific institutions and publications were almost exclusively comprised of men, their gendered relationships were various, and numerous women still meaningfully contributed to science as both practitioners and patrons.

DARREN N. WAGNER and JOANNA WHARTON, 'The Sexes and the Sciences'

KAREN HOLLEWAND, 'Eggs, Sperm and Desire: Sex and Science in the Dutch Golden Age'

LISA WYNNE SMITH, 'Remembering Dr Sloane: Masculinity and the Making of An Eighteenth-Century Physician' 

KAREN HARVEY, 'Epochs of Embodiment: Men, Women and the Material Body'

RAYMOND STEPHANSON, 'Fictional Science and Genre: Ectogenesis and Parthenogenesis At Mid-Century'

MARY MCALPIN, 'Denis Diderot and the Masturbating Girl'

ELENA SERRANO, 'Sex and Prisons: Women and Spanish Penitentiary Reform, 1787-1808'

MILLIE SCHURCH, '"All the Productions of That Nature": Ephemera, Mycology and Sexual Classification At the Bulstrode Estate'

JON MEE, '"Some Mode Less Revolting to Their Delicacy": Women’s Institutional Space in the Transpennine Enlightenment, 1781-1822'