Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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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
Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700 1815

Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700 1815

Hull, Isabel V.

Hardcover

Series: Suny Series in Chinese Philosophy and

General Political ScienceGerman HistoryWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 0801431263
ISBN13: 9780801431265
Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
Published: Jan 25 1996
Pages: 488
Weight: 2.02
Height: 1.41 Width: 6.37 Depth: 9.59
Language: English

This long-awaited work reconstructs the ways in which the meanings and uses of sex changed during that important moment of political and social configuration viewed as the birth of modernity. Isabel V. Hull analyzes the shift in the sexual system which occurred in German-speaking Central Europe when the absolutist state relinquished its monopoly on public life and presided over the formation of an independent civil society. Hull defines a society's sexual system as the patterned way in which sexual behavior is shaped and given meaning through institutions. She shows that as the absolutist state encouraged an independent sphere of public activity, it gave up its theoretically unlimited right to regulate sexual behavior and invested this right in the active citizens of the new civil society. Among the questions posed by this political and social transformation are, When does sexual behavior merit society's regulation? What kinds of behaviors and groups prompt intervention? What interpretive framework does the public apply to sexual behavior? Hull persuades us that a culture's sexual system can be understood only in relation to the particularities of state, law, and society, and that when state and society are examined through the sexual lens, much conventional wisdom is cast in doubt.

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German History

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