The Ploy of Instinct : : Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance / / Kathleen Frederickson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Frederickson, Kathleen,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Forms of Living
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (236 p.)

It is paradoxical that instinct became a central term for late Victorian sexual sciences as they were elaborated in the medicalized spaces of confession and introspection, given that instinct had long been defined in its opposition to self-conscious thought. The Ploy of Instinct ties this paradox to instinct’s deployment in conceptualizing governmentality.Instinct’s domain, Frederickson argues, extended well beyond the women, workers, and “savages” to whom it was so often ascribed. The concept of instinct helped to gloss over contradictions in British liberal ideology made palpable as turn-of-the-century writers grappled with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism. For elite European men, instinct became both an agent of “progress” and a force that, in contrast to desire, offered a plenitude in answer to the alienation of self-consciousness.This shift in instinct’s appeal to privileged European men modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender. The book traces these changes through parliamentary papers, pornographic fiction, accounts of Aboriginal Australians, suffragette memoirs, and scientific texts in evolutionary theory, sexology, and early psychoanalysis.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Reading Like an Animal -- 2. The Case of Sexology at Work -- 3. Freud’s Australia -- 4. Angel in the Big House -- Coda -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index