SOURCE: "The Social Construction of Sexuality in Three Novels by Rachilde," in Michigan Romance Studies, Vol. 9, 1989, pp. 49-59.

In the following essay, Hawthorne regards Rachilde as a novelist whose works presented a view of human sexuality that was in opposition to the dominant psychological and medical theories of the late nineteenth century.

In his multi-volume work on the history of sexuality, Michel Foucault explains how, with the rise of capitalism, sexuality passes from action to discourse: the energy previously invested in action is transformed into discourse about action. One of the resulting intersections of power, sexuality, and knowledge is what Foucault calls scientia sexualis, a system in which "le sexe [a] été constitué comme un enjeu de vérité," a system which "ours" is the only culture to have elaborated.

The emergence of the discourse of scientia sexualis has been charted even more specifically by feminist historians such...