ABSTRACT
Cultural contestation in the eighteenth century was highly sexualized, and charges of effeminacy or female prostitution were commonly used to discredit certain cultural forms as deviant in order to validate others as proper - that is to say, as "manly" and thus worthy of true Englishmen. 5 These negative constructions of feminine subjectivity established all that this high culture was not, that is, all that it needed to oppose in order to constitute itself. Women were positioned in relation to high art culture - that is to say in, relation to all the cultural sites and practices from which they were excluded by virtue of their sex - by being positioned in relation to certain specific constructions of masculine subjectivity: the artist, the critic, the artisan, the connoisseur, to name but a few. 6 Foucault has reflected on the fact that it is the transgressive act that establishes the norm, not the other way around (Foucault 1977: 34-5). Finally then I would like to suggest that what was/is always is already at stake in the construction of feminine subjectivity as high culture's transgressive Other is not femininity but high culture. Moreover, in so far as that cultural ideal can be said to be non-feminine, what is ultimately at stake in this construction is all that can be understood to be masculine.
