The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America by Greta LaFleur

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America by Greta LaFleur Kate Luce Mulry (bio), Jessica Choppin Roney, and Whitney Martinko Keywords Sexuality, Sexual behavior, Gender, History of sex The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America. By Greta LaFleur. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. Cloth $64.95, paper $34.95.) Greta LaFleur’s The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, recently reissued in paperback, reveals how residents of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic understood human sexuality as environmentally situated. It asks how we might rethink a history of sex outside of the body and “without the subject” (189). According to LaFleur, early modern environmental understandings of sexuality emerged in natural history texts that were engaged in debates about the relationship of environment and race. While historians of race have investigated how conceptions of porous humoral bodies shaped how early modern people understood health and inchoate ideas about race, LaFleur’s novel contribution suggests that scholars interested in the history of sexuality should be similarly attentive to how sexual behavior was seen as “highly contingent on one’s environment” (34). The book is not designed to be comprehensive but instead offers new frameworks for understanding how early Americans thought about sex and sexual behaviors. By examining natural history treatises produced by elite writers as well as multiple genres of popular print material—including Barbary captivity narratives, execution narratives, cross-dressing narratives, and anti-vice narratives in the study—LaFleur uncovers a range of writers who charted how the environment shaped human bodies and behaviors. Efforts to comprehend human difference mattered a great deal to natural philosophers, governments, colonists, and merchants during a long [End Page 651] eighteenth century of accelerated globalization and colonization. As early modern authors struggled to articulate the nature of “human variety,” their efforts regularly rested on assertions about the sexual practices of the people they described and they “began to scrutinize sexual behavior as something of a racial symptom” (6). Early modern people understood both race and sexuality as malleable features of humoral bodies that were “vulnerable” (6) to the environment. While various scholars have analyzed colonizers’ anxieties about their bodies when consuming novel foods in new colonial climates, LaFleur instead delves into how these humoralist or environmentalist beliefs also informed eighteenth-century understandings of sexual behavior.1 In doing so, LaFleur reframes scholarship on early sex by moving it away from an exclusive focus on the body. While the structure of the book is roughly chronological, the thematic structure of each chapter facilitates LaFleur’s close and incisive readings. She demonstrates that writers contributed to tangled histories of race and sex across multiple print genres, and in doing so, LaFleur “unit[es] the archives of popular narrative and natural history” (5). By investigating varied texts, LaFleur brings out the mutually imbricated and influential connection between genres and reveals an Atlantic conversation about sexuality, race, and the environment. LaFleur’s book will likely introduce to scholars to an unexpected archive by revealing the numerous popular print sources that incorporated naturalists’ investigations into the nature of human variety. If eighteenth-century science writing became a vehicle for ideas about racial difference, these lesser-known texts offer additional rich resources for investigating how writers articulated human difference through claims about sexual behavior. Indeed, the non-elite vernacular literature of the era asks many of the “same questions” (23) as authors of natural history treatises. [End Page 652] After an introduction that clearly defines the terms and parameters of the work, the first chapter, “The Natural History of Sexuality,” acquaints her readers with an array of natural history texts composed by elite authors such as Cotton Mather, Carolus Linnaeus, the Comte de Buffon, and Thomas Jefferson. These authors articulated human difference through race and sex. The “environmental logic” (6) that underpinned their claims about race similarly underpinned their claims about sex. The second chapter, “The Complexion of Sodomy,” tracks a trope that appeared consistently in Barbary captivity narratives, in which sailors within the British Empire expressed fears about what Muslims might do to their endangered and vulnerable Christian bodies and their writings “turned to the figure of sodomy to stage their concerns about...