Frigidity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vi

   PDF

2. Introduction: A Long History of a Pseudoscientific Object

   • Peter Cryle, Alison Moore

   Pages 1-22

3. Frigiditas and Impotentia

   • Peter Cryle, Alison Moore

   Pages 23-36

4. Female Impotence in the Nineteenth Century

   • Peter Cryle, Alison Moore

   Pages 37-66

5. Vaginismus

   • Peter Cryle, Alison Moore

   Pages 67-99

6. The Late Nineteenth Century: A Multiplicity of Genres

   • Peter Cryle, Alison Moore

   Pages 100-131

7. The Wedding Night

   • Peter Cryle, Alison Moore

   Pages 132-160

8. Treatment 1: Medicine

   • Peter Cryle, Alison Moore

   Pages 161-190

9. Treatment 2: Psychology

   • Peter Cryle, Alison Moore

   Pages 191-221

10. Relocating Marie Bonaparte’s Clitoris

    • Peter Cryle, Alison Moore

    Pages 222-247

11. Conclusion

    • Peter Cryle, Alison Moore

    Pages 248-256

12. Back Matter

    Pages 257-317

    PDF

This first major study of a curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality will intrigue students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, showing how notions of sexual coldness and frigidity have been thought about by legal, medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and literary writers.

• history
• intellectual history
• medicine
• psychoanalysis
• psychology
• thought
• treatment

• University of Queensland, Australia

  Peter Cryle

• Cultural Studies Group, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

  Alison Moore

PETER CRYLE is author of Geometry in the Boudoir (1996), The Telling of the Act (2002), and La Crise du plaisir, 1740-1830 (2003). He also co-edited Libertine Enlightenment with Lisa O'Connell (2004) and Sexuality at the Fin de Siècle (2008) with Christopher Forth.

ALISON MOORE is a Scholar of Modern European Intellectual History. She teaches and researches in International Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.She is the author of Sexual Myths of Modernity; Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology (2011).

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