American insides: Popular narrative and the historiography of sexuality 1674--1815

American Insides: Popular Narrative and the Historiography of Sexuality, 1674--1815 takes as its focus unofficial and multi-faceted studies of sex before the onset of sexology. I argue that the eighteenth-century investigation of what I am calling "insides"---the many forms of human interiority, including bodily, psychic, religious, and behavioral, all of which shaped early American understandings of sex, but none of which were explicitly sciences of sexuality---congealed by the beginning of the nineteenth century into a cultural understanding of sex and sexuality as scientific components of the human. American Insides argues for a reconsideration of scholarly approaches to the history of sexuality before the institutionalization of sciences of interiority (medicine, psychology) and prior to the onset of formal sexology with the 1815 anti-vice campaigns in Boston.;The project begins with a reading of Samuel Danforth's The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into (1674), the first execution sermon published in north America. Delivered before the execution of a local teenager caught in flagrante delicto with a mare, Danforth's sermon locates the teen's bestial transgression along a continuum of other sexual crimes in a genealogy of "lewd Predecessors" and "lecherous Kindred" dating as far back as Onan, "Jezabel," and other Biblical sex offenders. Danforth uses predecession and kindred, history and belonging, to contextualize this crime. American Insides takes this text as a point of departure, asking what other categories of knowledge were developing in early America for the cultural analysis of sex and sexuality. It turns to four genres of popular narrative---Barbary captivity narratives, execution narratives, seduction novels and cross-dressing narratives---and argues that these forms allow scholars of early American literature to consider multiple, intersecting technologies for representing interiority within eighteenth-century north American culture. The larger stakes of my dissertation are methodological, and insist on a queer approach to the history of pre-sexology sexuality. The project builds on the growing body of work on queer time by scholars such as Carolyn Dinshaw, Valerie Traub, Elizabeth Freeman, and Jonathan Goldberg to theorize and argue for the use of a presentist, affective historicism as an alternative methodology for producing histories of sex.