Transgressive Intimacies and Male Sexual Reputation in Colonial Quebec, 1760-1820

Abstract

Based on the testimony of litigants in both the civil and criminal courts of post-Conquest Quebec, this article argues that sexual reputation formed an integral part of the identities of men irrespective of age, marital status and social rank, so that it constituted a key component of masculinity.  It examines how the judicial archives recorded a variety of transgressive intimacies, encompassing premarital fornication, illegitimate births, adultery, and rape, but it also moves beyond the sexual regulation of heterosexuality to examine the charge of sodomy as a slander increasingly deployed to impugn the good character of men.  While the fact that Chatellier lost his case points to the role played by the state in regulating the sexual lives of men, we follow the lead of practitioners of the new legal history like Julie Hardwick and Martin Ingram by focusing less upon formal discourses of law than upon the attitudes of ordinary litigants as a way to uncover the ways in which both men and women interpreted the meaning of the illicit sexuality of men.  Our intent is to better understand the slippages between state moral policing and broader cultural ideas about the intersection of gender, sexuality and repute.  While our evidence shows a substantial degree of illicit sexual practices in the colony, the fact that ordinary people, particularly women, sought to use the courts as a public venue for shaming male transgressors casts doubt on the recent assertions by Clare Lyons and Faramerz Dabhoiwala that the eighteenth century saw a distinct rise in sexual permissiveness on both sides of the Atlantic as a result of the Enlightenment.