Author: Jeremy Chow, Department of English, Bucknell University - Knowledge Commons, ORCID

Abstract: »This article magnifies a fraught episode in John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) in which a man with cognitive disabilities, Good-natur'd Dick, is gang raped by two women sex workers. Fanny, the titular woman of pleasure, explicitly identifies the assault as an ‘attack’, and the anecdote reveals the novel's conceptual tensions among consent, gender, and disability. That Fanny's epistle later details Good-natur'd Dick assaulting Louisa, the second sex worker, in what appears as potentially retributive violence, only further complicates the account in which assailant and survivor become subject positions uneasily exchanged among the three. By re-reading this tense incident, this article seeks to theorize, through Fanny Hill, the co-constitutive constructions of consent and disability in the eighteenth century, especially as they inform the new rape studies.« (Source: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies)

Contents:

	Abstract (p. 189)
	1. Locating Gang Rape in Fanny Hill (p. 191)
	2. Rape and Cleland’s Bildungsroman (p. 192)
	3. Sex Work: Disability (p. 194)
	4. Disability and Consent (p. 196)
	5. Absolution and Exoneration (p. 198)
	6. Conclusion (p. 199)
	Conflict of Interest Statement (p. 200)
	Notes (p. 200)
	Acknowledgements (p. 203)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of England / Georgian era | Literature: English literature / John Cleland | Literature: Fiction about rape / Fanny Hill | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape in England