Frigidity : an intellectual history / Peter Cryle, Alison Moore.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cryle, P. M. (Peter Maxwell), 1946-

Contributor:

Moore, Alison, 1972-

Series:

Genders and sexualities in history

Genders and sexualities in history series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Frigidity (Psychology).

Frigidity (Psychology)--History.

Sexual Dysfunctions, Psychological--history.

Sexual Dysfunctions, Psychological--psychology.

History, 19th Century.

History.

Medical Subjects:

Sexual Dysfunctions, Psychological--history.

Sexual Dysfunctions, Psychological--psychology.

History, 19th Century.

Physical Description:

vi, 317 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Summary:

Frigidity: An Intellectual History is the first major study of this curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality. It represents an exciting new approach to culturally informed intellectual history and is essential reading for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the way notions of feminine desire and its failure have been conceived across time. With a primary focus on France, it also considers the broader European and transatlantic scope of sexual coldness, frigidity, anaphrodisia, and vaginismus, considering how ideas migrate from one cultural context to another. It is a study that ranges across seventeenth-century canon law, eighteenth and nineteenth-century medicine, nineteenth-century marital advice, literary works, and psychiatric theories; twentieth-century psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexology. Though the word 'frigidity' may have fallen into disuse among specialists, there is now an array of new terms with which psychiatrists and sexologists continue to theorise sexual lack. This book puts both old and new into historical context. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Frigiditas and Impotentia 23

2 Female Impotence in the Nineteenth Century 37

3 Vaginismus 57

4 The Late Nineteenth Century: A Multiplicity of Genres 100

5 The Wedding Night 232

6 Treatment 1: Medicine 151

7 Treatment 2: Psychology 191

8 Relocating Marie Bonaparte's Clitoris 222.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780230303454

0230303455

OCLC:

727303188