Book Reviews
Book Reviews
These are some of the reviews I have received for my books.
Licentious Worlds. Sex & Exploitation in Global Empires
THE AUSTRALIAN By ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE NOVEMBER 2, 2019
Julie Peakman’s Licentious Worlds: Sex and Exploitation in Global Empires opens with her condemnation of the impact of male elitism on our understanding not only of empire but of history itself. To illustrate, she quotes fellow historian Robert Johnson, who, in 2002, said: “The problem which arises is that in trying to write in a role for women, there is a risk of exaggerating their
importance.” Peakman brings a compellingly direct intelligence and clarity to her analysis of the key role of women in negotiations and the maintenance of peace between cultures, and of their unconscionable sexual exploitation by men.
As she points out, all stories of empire are, in essence, tales of derring-do by and for men: “Great sailing feats across oceans, military campaigns involving thousands of men and incredible acts of bravery in foreign climes place the white male European at the heart of studies of imperialism, colonialism and empire-building.” Other than for sentimental or ornamental purposes, women are almost entirely absent from these narratives, creating a falsely unilateral perspective of history, consolidating the patriarchal model and ignoring the impact of perceptions of gender, race and sexuality on colonial law and
administration.
These celebrated conquests, however, always involved the slaughter, rape, disease and radical cultural overhauls for native populations, whose women were subjected to monstrous assaults and abuses by soldiers, sailors and officers. “(M)ore often than not these sexual relationships underpinned the trading, exploration and development of the new worlds,” Peakman explains, “By violating native women, it was their intention to effectively emasculate the whole of the native male population; if the natives failed to hand over their goods, they became the enemy, to be destroyed, and the women became simply part of the spoils of war.” As Peakman notes, everything about empire – “the building of it, the practices, its structure and people’s relationships” – was founded on the perception of sexual difference. A 16th-century Venezuelan priest reported that local women were being raped by Spanish soldiers in front of their husbands and fathers. Another wrote of a Spaniard taking “a maiden by force to commit the sin of the flesh with her, dragging her away from her mother, finally having to unsheathe his sword to cut off the woman’s hands and when the damsel still resisted they (the soldiers) stabbed her to death”.
Native women, in an attempt to avoid being raped, brutalised, chained or loaded onto ships, would abandon their infants on the ground and flee. In 1772, a Franciscan missionary in San Diego wrote that the Spanish had not only violated the women but had starved the natives by allowing their animals to consume all the crops. Diseases sexually transmitted by soldiers had fatal consequences, and newborns resulting from rape were sometimes murdered by their mothers to avoid dishonouring the family. For conquered women, the tableau was one of unforgettable horror, and the resulting emotional disorder has reverberated through generations of native populations around the world. At times, the exploiters, catering to male appetites, were female. The notorious Ah Toy, who arrived a widow in California in 1849, soon began luring penniless “fresh-faced girls” from China,
some as young as 11, under false pretences of reputable employment or marriage. Instead, Ah Toy assigned them to a narrow “crib” in one of her three brothels, where they were expected to copulate side by side with six other slaves until they became too ill to function.
Eighteenth-century British sailors were equally exploitative – if less brutal – in the Pacific, where young Tahitian women were traded by their husbands or fathers for a single ship’s nail apiece: the more beautiful the woman, the bigger the nail. As so many nails had been withdrawn from its joints, one of the ships was soon in danger of falling apart. Peakman writes: “The traditional values of Europe, in which female chastity had been prized, dissolved in a dreamland where sex was overt, plentiful and easy to come by, a place where a woman could roam nearly naked and ‘showed her sex for a song’.”
Captain James Cook found such sexual practices offensive, in particular that of grown sailors raping little girls (“young as she was, [she] did not seem to want it”). Despite this, he did nothing to stop the perversion. Throughout the centuries, responsibility for the violation of native women by invaders was projected onto the victims, who were tarred as lascivious or shameless. This, in combination with the dehumanisation of native populations as bestial, made it easy for invaders to justify their
brutality. African women were – and, in many quarters, continue to be – fetishised as animalistic in their passions and, in that, undeserving of humane treatment. European men “simultaneously reviled the appearance of African women and became excited by them, particularly when seeing them naked’’.
Africans were, in their millions, forced into exile where they worked as slaves. Before colonial rule, female slaves were abused as prostitutes in tribal communities. A paradoxically empathetic 18th-century Dutch slave factor on the west African coast witnessed the purchase of a female slave by a chief for the sexual use of male villagers. Subjected to degrading rituals, this woman was then forced to have sex with every man who came to her. “These Women are very miserable when they have caught Venereal Infection,” he reported, “from which they seldom escape long free; for prostituting themselves … they are in continual danger … and thus these unhappy creatures come to a miserable end.” European men also subjected African women to intrusive “scientific” studies during which they would examine their genitalia. In 1805 the Scottish doctor William Somerville, on behalf of the Royal Society, forcefully undertook intimate examinations of female ‘‘Hottentots’’ – southwest Africa’s Khoikhoi tribe. Some of these women were shipped back to England, where, naked, they became sideshow exhibits. In 1810 Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman, was advertised as the “Hottentot Venus” in London. The Times reported that Baartman was “produced like a wild beast … and ordered to move backwards and forwards, and come and go into her cage, more like a bear on a chain than
a human being”.
Children were sexualised for the same reason. East India Company chaplain John Ovington, who in 1689 stated that native women grow frenzied in the heat (“The nature of the Climate incline them much to this Amourous Passion, which stings them with impatient desires”), believed that children who were married off to adults – sometimes at ages three or four – had “been born Lovers”. The social power and wealth of European men in relation to the peoples they conquered became synonymous with sexual brutality and excess. Native girls and women were not only utilised as masturbatory objects but as a means to consolidate their invaders’ sense of potency, value and perfected humanity; to these men, local female populations were little more than cattle, with no narrative, spiritual weight or entitlement to consideration, objects to be used. Arguably the most interesting aspect of Licentious Worlds: Sex and Exploitation in Global Empires is the way it contextualises the commodification of the female body, a commodification that continues through the global pornography industry.
The current trivialisation of the feminine is, as Peakman shows, a philosophical echo, and one that limits our understanding of equality to economic considerations. As she makes clear in this careful, incisive and scholarly work, centuries of disregard have created an understanding of the feminine as synonymous with currency, and for one purpose: to maintain masculine supremacy
in a world where anyone “other than the sexually dominant white heterosexual male tend(s) to be persecuted or made subservient”.
Amatory Pleasures. Explorations of C18th sexual Culture
Reviewed by: Rachel Hope Cleves
Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture. By Julie Peakman
(London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) 224pp. $114.00 cloth $29.95 paper
Peakman collects eight previously published articles and book chapters, plus two new articles based on earlier shared material, in this new volume of her writings. The work, all produced in the last fifteen years, combines to paint a portrait of British sexual culture in the eighteenth century as various and shifting. “There was no one coherent attitude to sex in the eighteenth century,” Peakman argues (147). Old and new beliefs, the enlightened and the bawdy, the normative and the perverse coincided and competed.
Peakman’s focus on sexual culture leads her to explore a wide range of sources, which in turn substantiate her argument about the diversity of eighteenth-century attitudes. Individual chapters examine whores’ biographies, courtesans’ memoirs, erotic gardens, medical texts, manuscript letters, and pornography. Peakman describes her work as taking a “multidisciplinary approach,” although all the chapters fit comfortably within the framework of cultural history (xiii).
Despite the diversity of the chapters, certain themes recur through-out the text. Peakman is centrally concerned with the role of gender in eighteenth-century sexual culture. Her analysis emphasizes the agency of eighteenth-century women. “Far from being meek inhabitants of an ideological straightjacket of gendered roles, eighteenth-century women did on occasion use opportunities to secure new forms of power and authority,” Peakman argues, concluding that women engaged in a form of “practical feminism” even in the absence of feminist rhetoric (51). This approach frequently leads her to counter arguments that diminish women’s power. She rejects those literary critics who have dismissed the genre of courtesans’ memoirs as written by men for men’s titillation, insisting instead that the works capture “the world of female sexuality as understood by the women themselves” (82). In another example, whereas Trumbach reads scenes of female tribadism in pornographic literature as instructional to readers at a time when no conception of lesbianism existed, Peakman argues that these narratives drew from readers’ extant knowledge of female same-sex sexual practices. While Peakman takes a broad view of women’s agency, she balances that approach with clear recognition of the misogyny of the era under study. Her chapter about women’s defloration, which discusses the period’s fetishism for bloody devirgination, makes for tough reading.
If the collection has a weakness, it is that the chapters seem a little cobbled together—unsurprisingly for a book that began as separately published articles and chapters. The book also contains some repetition and lacks a consistent voice. Nonetheless, it is a fun read that should have wide appeal. There’s great pleasure to be had from reading Peakman’s knowledgeable explorations of whores’ biographies, or her insights into the intimacies of Emma Hamilton and Queen Maria Carolina of Naples. This collection has appeal for lay readers and undergraduates, not just specialists.
Rachel Hope Cleves
University of Victoria
The Pleasure's All Mine
Serious, historically informed, and as close to an exhaustive account as we are likely ever to see of the extravagant creativity that humans have invested in sex. A masterpiece.' - Thomas W. Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley
'Throughout history, sexual norms have shifted drastically: an act that is seen as deviant at one time may be widely accepted at another. Peakman argues that sexual acts have not changed much through the ages, but the cultural response to them has. Today, discussions about sexual preferences are still taboo in many parts of the world, and many opinions are still colored by society's long-held beliefs . . . This is a history for the general reader, primarily coveringWestern thought; it's also a wonderful reference source for sexual studies and research . . . Peakman asks readers to think about how society dictates their own opinions, and her work helps pave the way for more open discussions of sexuality in the future.'
- Publishers' Weekly
For those with an erudite interest in debauchery, this latest from author, historian, and sex scholar Peakman (Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century) is just the ticket. Along with the expected whips, handcuffs, and nipple clamps, readers will explore a gamut of alternative sexual predilections ranging from paraphilic infantilism (adult baby syndrome) to acrotomophilia (eroticization of amputees). Historical accounts include those of accused zoophile Thomas Hogg, prosecuted for fathering a piglet; the legend of a ninth-century pope, presumed male until she went into labor; and the lurid tale of a 1930s radiologist who fell in love with a corpse and slept with it for years, using wax, piano wire, and perfume oils to keep the body intact. Peakman's broad overview is stunning, sweeping, and very carefully nonjudgmental. She recounts the history of each so-called perversion from its earliest recorded occurrence through the present, showing how the shifting mores of society color our views on this endlessly fascinating subject. VERDICT Exhaustively researched and packed with startling images, this work is a fact-filled, entertaining read for sex history neophytes and scholars alike. - Jeanne Bogino, Library Journal
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Peg Plunkett. Memoirs of a Whore
The Irish Times Review
These days every postal area in Dublin has its share of sexual services available on the internet. Contemporary female practitioners of the oldest profession in the world prefer to be called escorts, sex workers, hookers, or plain old-fashioned, “prostitutes”. But in the Dublin of the late 18th century, they were known as courtesans, women on the town, demireps, nymphs and impures. The latter two names were favoured by the fabulously feisty Peg Plunkett, a beautiful woman who was no slouch when it came to defending her honour, be it verbally or, on occasion, by indulging in fisticuffs.
Born in Westmeath, some time between 1727 and 1740 – even her biographer can’t be sure – Peg was one of eight children. She came from a relatively privileged background but after her mother died, her father “lost heart” and passed over the running of the home to Peg’s brother Christopher, who “frequently horse-whipped” her.
By the age of 16 she had moved to Dublin, “gave up her chastity easily” to a Mr Dardis and later sagely reflected in one of her three volumes of memoirs, “How can I call him seducer, when I met the seduction halfway?” Very 18th century.
Peg got pregnant and Dardis promised her they would marry but she reckoned, “What reliance could I justly have on his honour, when I had weakly given up my own?” Some of the most fascinating parts of this book are the quotes from Plunkett’s own writings, which should be re-published in full.
However Julie Peakman, a historian of 18th-century culture and the history of sexuality, clearly delights in exploring these areas and provides the kind of socio-political context that, no doubt, Peg’s memoirs would lack. On the other hand, Peakman is relatively reticent when it comes to the services available in Plunkett’s brothels, although we do learn that the contemporary synonym for ejaculation, “happy ending”, had its Georgian equivalent, “perfect enjoyment”.
Overall, the author has a lovely, light touch, and this book is devoid of the aridity often encountered in academic tomes.
Peakman’s evocation of Peg’s life during her early 20s – when she lived on Ranelagh Road, where she was “kept” by a “wealthy English gentleman” called Mr Leeson, while also including among her lovers a pair of scamps called Mr Lawless and Mr Jackson – makes one want to keep nix for the patently sexually assertive Plunkett. And, once again, Peg’s rationale for her indulgences is irresistible. “Stolen pleasures are generally held to be very sweet and, in spite of his vigilance, I sometimes enjoyed them to compensate for the external constraint I was forced to assume.” That could almost be the mantra of any modern married Irish woman.
The book is at its best chronicling the period after Peg and fellow courtesan Sally Hayes opened a brothel in Dublin. Particularly telling – although not enough to warrant its in-depth inclusion twice in the narrative – is the description of the assault Plunkett suffered on her premises at the hands of a gang of well-to-do Trinity College thugs, called the Pinking Dandies. It led to the death of the child Peg was pregnant with and the death of a second child who was traumatised by seeing her mother being beaten up. Peg’s feistiness and self-assertiveness, in the broadest sense, roared to the fore after that attack. She took the gang leader, Robert Crosbie, to court. He could have been hanged but sheriffs prevailed upon Plunkett to drop murder charges which she did and he was sent to jail.
This is just one example of why you come away from reading this book with an abiding sense of respect for Plunkett and utterly disinclined to see the woman purely in terms of the reductive label that is invariably slapped upon sex workers, namely victim. She “blitzed her way through balls and masquerades . . . leaving dukes, barristers and lieutenants smitten and stranded in her wake,” to cull a quote from the back cover of this book. Her obituary in the Dublin Evening Post on May 17th 1797, reported: “She figured for a long time in the bon ton – and absolutely made the fashion. It was her practice to confine her favours to a temporary husband. In this state she lived with several gentlemen in the style of fashionable elegance.” Let’s erect in Dublin a statue of Peg Plunkett.
Joe Jackson
Hitler's Island War
The best stories are the forgotten stories; the stories of battles that have been ignored and of ordinary men and women whose voices have never been heard. Hitler s Island War is both of these. Detailed, moving and authentic, this is a story that needs to be heard, both for its human aspect and for its strategic importance in the struggle for the Adriatic in World War II. This is required reading for military historians and for those who are fascinated by the experiences of ordinary soldiers at war, told with their own voices and through their own eyes. --Paddy Ashdown
Julie Peakman's riveting tale of the battle for Leros during the Second World War combines a precise analysis of politics and strategy with a deft sensitivity to the traumatic experiences of those war-weary men who fought and died on that island. Through their letters, diaries, and oral accounts, she provides a way for us to understand something of their fears, suffering, hopes, and, in the end, despair. --Professor Joanna Bourke, author of The Second World War
Lascivious Bodies BBC History Magazine: BOOK OF THE MONTH.
'Peakman's book is distinguished by careful scholarship and a refusal of generalised theories...This pleasurable bedside encyclopedia offers eloquent testimony to the anarchic misrule of 18th-century sexuality.' Rachel Holmes
Telegraph
- 'Lascivious Bodies is a romp, full of racy anecdotes, and a pleasure to read.' Luscasta Miller.
The Spectator 'Peakman is a rarity: a scholar with all the credentials....who knows how to write a popular book...Deep research and erudition underpin all her allegro vivace discursiveness, insights and levity. She is like an artist who has drawn from plaster casts, then in the life class, before allowing herself of the leash for a bit of "self-expression"...most impressive.' Bevis Hillier
BBC History Magazine, 100 Books of the Year
-'a treat '
New Statesman - 'Peakman is an energetic researcher', Edwina Currie
The Sunday Times - 'soundly researched and spiced with lurid detail...sparkling', Miranda Seymour
The Times - 'entertaining survey of C18th sexual tastes and habits
Contact Details
juliepeakman@btinternet.com
Agent:
Michael Alcock
E.mail: Michael@johnsonandalcock.co.uk
Johnson & Alcock Ltd
Clerkenwell House
45-47 Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
(020) 7251 0125
