The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780823262519)

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.

Author: Kathleen Frederickson
ISBN-10: 0823262510
ISBN-13: 9780823262519
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Language: English
Published: 09/15/2014
Pages: 236
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.00h x 5.90w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 10/17/2014 pg. 18