| Summary: | This thesis explores changes in conceptions of body, gender and sexual behaviours in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.' It argues that changes in how various body parts were conceptualised and gendered, how the transgression of gender roles was treated and understood, and how different types of sexual behaviours were theorised all had their own separate trajectories and time lines which cannot be neatly fitted into the same time-delimited model. Many historians adopt Thomas Laqueur's sex model thesis to interpret changes in understandings of body and sex differences and shifts in attitudes towards the transgressions of gender roles and sexual behaviours during the period under scrutiny. However, this thesis contends that conceptions of distinctions between the sexes did not always create a coherent or unified understanding of the whole body. Rather, each separate body part, and the significance of that part in understanding the nature of sex differences, followed a particular journey. Similarly, shifts and continuities in how individuals whose bodies, gender presentations and sexual behaviours transgressed the sex/gender boundaries were perceived and interpreted respectively had their own developments and chronologies. Forcefully fitting all of these variations into the linear narrative of the sex model thesis obscures, rather than clarifies, how body, gender, and sexual behaviours were conceptualised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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