Tumultuous nineteenth-century political debates, fears of violent revolutions, and the rise of women’s rights campaigns in Britain, the United States, and France provide a context for considering Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and its engagement with feminism. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) identified sexual differences, male–male combat, and female choice in courtship as key elements of animal copulation, while insisting that male choice controls human sexual relations, ideas that inspired radically different reactions from feminists, who objected to what they regarded as Darwin’s sexism, and fiction writers, who highlighted women characters resisting patriarchal expectations and making independent decisions. The long history and profound consequences of the concepts of sexual difference and sexual selection call for careful consideration of the intertwining of Darwin’s scientific theories about sexual difference and choice with divergent cultural formations, ranging from social Darwinism to feminist theory, and propose a more fluid understanding of sex and gender that supersedes the earlier two-sex model.

Chapter 2 explores how Behn’s works use earnest commitments to heighten and refine her more traditional satirical attacks on political enemies, resulting in complex and multilayered subversive ironies: it is often Behn’s insistence on affirming certain political commitments that endows her work with its acerbic bite. Her supposedly conservative fictions antedate, rather than satirically reacting against, the later more progressive, Whiggish novels, and her works thereby demonstrate the complex symbiotic relationship between irony and earnestness. In her work, satiric attack functions not simply as a way of denigrating enemies, but also as a means of inoculating and immunizing creative energy against possible attack. Her satire on the Whigs also has an earnest dimension, implicitly praising a new model for sovereignty that identifies it closely with women’s vulnerable positions in a patriarchal world. This earnest deployment of satire emerges as Behn engages the problem of actresses and women in the theater more generally to emphasize her subtle differences with some of her male peers and to reimagine Tory politics from their perspective.

The transformation of the ancient world from paganism to Christianity brought with it not only a new set of ethical injunctions, but a new 'moral cosmology'—that is, a new way of conceiving of humanity in relation to God and the cosmos. One important element of such a moral cosmology is the distinction between the sexes. Why did God create humanity in two sexes, and what is the ultimate meaning of one’s sexual identity? The thought of the Greek Fathers on this subject was heavily indebted to that of Greek philosophy, especially Plato. For Plato the soul is fundamentally sexless and acquires sexual identity only upon embodiment. Although Christians (with the exception of Origen) generally rejected the pre-existence of the soul, they accepted the premise that the soul itself is intrinsically sexless. Many carried this further to the conclusion that in the afterlife there will be a gradual movement away from our current sexual condition to a higher, asexual form of existence. This chapter traces the development of such views from Plato through Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor. It further argues that on this point Christian authors accepted the pagan philosophical inheritance rather too uncritically, and that a careful consideration of their rejection of metempsychosis suggests a very different view.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over prison dietaries in Britain and in its overseas colonies are the subject of Chapter 2. Although uniformity could easily have been imposed through the issue of a single dietary mandated across the nation, and then converted into local ingredients for use in all the colonies, differences of sex, race, and ethnicity were central considerations in the preparation of prison diet scales. This chapter explores gendered understandings of bodily labor within the British prison system and the impact of these ideologies on the dieting of different incarcerated populations. It then investigates how the racial and ethnic taxonomies deployed within a range of colonial prisons shaped the feeding of prisoners and in turn shored up broader imperial ideologies. It argues that prison authorities were animated by, and in the process reinforced, a variety of bodily imaginaries that distinguished British subjects from each other and thus had effects well beyond the walls of the prison. While in theory all might be equal before the law, after the law had passed its judgment, the bodies of criminals played an active role in performing, inhabiting, and thus reinforcing the categories of difference that structured British society.