ABSTRACT
This chapter examines issues around family, gender and sexuality that were present in both ‘science’ and ‘literature’, paying particular attention to their implications for the relations between the domain of nature and that of culture and society. It explores some of the issues involved in late eighteenth-century treatments of sexuality, reproduction and the family as phenomena which were at once natural and social. The bio-medical sciences were concerned with reproduction and gender as natural phenomena to be explored along with other facts of nature. Scientific and medical writings are composed of clusters of images and packages of ideas. The concern with the recesses of the living body carried levels of meaning beyond the explicit claim of physiology to be a new and more sophisticated bio-medical perspective. The picture of awakening sexuality is identical to that found in any number of contemporary scientific and medical treatises.
