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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Illusive Materialisms: The Pleasures of Femininity in Eighteenth-Century France

Illusive Materialisms: The Pleasures of Femininity in Eighteenth-Century France

Meeker, Natania

Paperback

Literary CriticismGeneral Gender StudiesGeneral World History

ISBN10: 1531512577
ISBN13: 9781531512576
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: Jan 6 2026
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.83
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Illusive Materialisms brings a close attention to gender to bear on the philosophical and political argument that sensual pleasure, framed as a mode of feminine responsiveness, is the primary business of enlightenment. Ultimately, the book argues on behalf of a history of feminine speculation that resonates with contemporary feminist and queer efforts to recenter pleasure and its generative illusions in the necessary work of critique. Through its analysis of a materialism that is often hiding in plain sight, Illusive Materialisms explores different ways to cultivate delight in a world in ruin.

While most studies of materialism during the French Enlightenment focus on works by men, Illusive Materialisms foregrounds responses by women to the materialist currents that cut across the eighteenth-century canon and that aim to recast femininity as the privileged condition of the modern, enlightened subject. For the women writers examined here, femininity is both a form that is embodied and an art that is practiced, often with transformative effects.

Illusive Materialisms illuminates the crucial role played by femininity in a long history of materialist philosophy. At the same time, it uncovers a specifically feminine engagement with the materialist thought and practice of eighteenth-century France. The book shows how three women authors (Madeleine de Puisieux, Émilie Du Châtelet, and Françoise de Graffigny) rework, revise, and reuse materialist texts and ideas in order to craft an ethic of pleasure whose effects traverse their writing and their life. At the same time, it demonstrates that feminine forms, images, and persons lie at the heart of a tradition of materialist thought stretching from antiquity into the present day.

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