Please contact mpub-help umich. For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy. Scholars have long remarked on how, in texts aimed at a popular audience, a wide gallery of social types has served to people the French cultural imagination. From widely circulated prints through middlebrow novels, popular discourses relied on the classification and characterization of recognizable social identities.
One type, though, has been marginal even to the cast of outsiders who preoccupy cultural historians. Here is his physiognomy: Hair curled, face made up, neck bared, waist cinched to accentuate his curves, the fingers, ears, and chest covered with jewels, the most penetrating perfume wafting from the whole person, and in his hand a handkerchief, flowers or some needlework: such is the strange, repulsive, and by all rights suspect physiognomy that betrays pederasts. This vivid description of the "pederast" is drawn from one of the founding works of nineteenth-century legal medicine, Ambroise Tardieu's volume, Les attentats aux moeurs Outrages Against Morals.
Although Tardieu's description purports to be of the pederast as a general type, he embeds it within and makes it exemplary of his broader discussion of male prostitution as an outrage against morals. The figure Tardieu outlines is not merely a pederast, but a pederast who sells his tightly-clad, bejeweled, and over-scented body. Tardieu's easy and unselfconscious movement from a treatment of pederasty as a general social phenomenon to an examination of male prostitution is central to my current research, a reconstruction and analysis of the articulation and circulation of popular understandings of male same-sex sexuality in France between and Their conclusions, though, were based on elite, expert, or official discourses and practices.
What Foucault called the "putting into discourse" of male same-sex sexuality increased significantly, if unevenly, throughout this period, with the highest concentration of texts appearing between and While taken up in a variety of discourses, pederasty was not, for the most part, the central or primary topic of discussion within the texts I have identified. Popular discourse on male same-sex sexuality was, unsurprisingly, hostile, and it built upon earlier, more scattered but equally hostile representations of sexual dissidence from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Among all these discursive regularities, though, most striking is the pre-eminence of the figure of the male prostitute in discussions of pederasty and the elision of the distinction between sex between men and sexual commerce between men. Consider a group of texts produced some forty years after Tardieu's work. While comparatively little medical writing was directed to a general public before and even less addressed sex between men, in the first decade of the twentieth century a flurry of popular manuals about sex appeared.
