Sodomié! Egalité! Fraternité!
An Embodied History of Democracy in England, 1533-1770

During the 18th Century, Western Europe underwent a revolutionary transformation. In place of a hierarchical political order organized around hereditary privilege, citizens increasingly pledged fidelity to democratic principles of freedom and equality as they recast “The People” as a new source of sovereignty. How did ordinary people become invested in these new political ideals? The 16th and 17th Century world of the ancien régime was suffused by vertical chains of subordination and submission. Born into naturalized hierarchies of rank and status, few thought themselves equal to the nobility, let alone the king. Given these conditions, how did individuals learn to value and practice democratic norms and values in their everyday lives?

Sodomy, Equality, Fraternity endeavors to answer this question by exploring fraternity as a central part of the democratic heritage.

The book explores the emergence of fraternity as a dominant symbol, bodily practice, and political feeling of democracy in early modern Britain. It explores how novel practices of gender and sexuality emerging after the English Revolution of 1688 displaced dominant forms of political embodiment and gave rise to new relations of fraternity between men. The book shows how heterosexual manhood became a political category capable of overturning an aristocratic society rooted in principles of blood, status, and rank.

This historical process was neither linear nor uncontested. The book demonstrates how the history and theory of men’s equal citizenship is inseparable from anxieties about sodomy. In this new history of modern democracy, Sodomy, Equality, Fraternity reveals how fraternity became a dominant ideal of a democratic society out of everyday struggles of gender and sexuality taking place through the body.