The Ploy Of Instinct Victorian Sciences Of Nature And Sexuality In Liberal Governance Kathleen Frederickson by Kathleen Frederickson 9780823262533, 0823262537 instant download after payment.

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.