Abstract

This historiographical survey examines the new concept of sex emerging during the Age of Enlightenment and its links to a different type of relationship developing between humans and animals in both metropolitan France and the colonies. For the past thirty years or so, the history of emotions and the history of social science have shed light on the historical circumstances in which the anthropological paradigm of the Enlightenment was constituted. This article will identify a number of themes – domestication, the presence of animals as household pets, the practice of selective breeding – which can be studied in such a way as to reconfigure approaches via gender. By paying fresh attention to the relations between gender and animality, these studies have made a decisive contribution to our understanding of the learned and political debates of the Enlightenment about the frontiers of the human and the nature-culture binary.