Fleming, Thomas;
(2025)
Refiguring Sexual Difference, Desire, and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century: A Critical Study of Moravian Mysticism and Piety, c.1740-1790.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Thomas Laqueur’s ‘one-sex, two-sex’ theory has monopolised the historical narrative of sexual difference “from the Greeks to Freud.” For Laqueur, before the eighteenth century, it was understood that there was only one sex, by which ‘woman’ was an inverted version of ‘man’. In the eighteenth century, however, scientific thought produced a new model of sexual difference, enshrining ‘male’ and ‘female’ as two incommensurable sexes. Despite counterarguments from period specialists, Laqueur’s theory still holds a privileged position in the historiography. This project attempts to dislodge this theory’s authority through a critique of its historiographical framework, challenging its universalising, teleological narrative. In constructing the two-sex model as the inevitable historical end point, Laqueur forecloses the possibility of other representations of sexual difference in the past. By turning to eighteenth-century mystical and religious textuality, belonging to the Moravian Church, this thesis sets out to offer an alternative history of sexual difference for this period. Through employing an interdisciplinary approach, this history will provide a “less teleological, less identitarian” understanding of sexual difference, one that refrains from engaging in a “chronology determines identity” paradigm. Representations of sexual difference, gender, and sexuality in Moravian texts point not only to the multiplicity of the past, but also to the close ties between historical studies, ‘French’ feminist theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. The framing of sexual difference as subject to representation, of femininity and masculinity as dispositions to be assumed by any subject in relation to ‘the other’, recalls what can be found in Moravian texts. Here, the contingent, discursive, and fragmented formation of (sexed) subjectivity questions a historicist approach which presents a unity to the cultural inscription of bodies. To demonstrate the complexities of the supposedly ahistorical, innate category of sexual difference in the past is to recognise the plurality and mutability of sexual difference in the present.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Refiguring Sexual Difference, Desire, and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century: A Critical Study of Moravian Mysticism and Piety, c.1740-1790 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10204073 |
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