Nancy Christie & Michael Gauvreau

Nancy Christie & Michael Gauvreau, “Transgressive Intimacies and Male Sexual Reputation in New France and Quebec, 1685-1830,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 34, no. 1 (January 2025): 63-90.

Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau weave an original and provocative narrative about the complex dynamic between imperial politics and sexual scandal in New France and Quebec from the late 17th to the early 19th century. Describing the historical context as largely homosocial, patriarchal, and framed by gendered and sexual colonial violence, Christie and Gauvreau demonstrate through an array of archival sources how legal and social apparatuses often constructed pre-material sex and adultery as moral offences. The focus on Quebec allows for a “counterpoint” to existing US and British historiography on related topics due to the colony’s “profound sociopolitical discontinuity” produced by the abrupt and uneven transition from a French to British colonial society, particularly in the shift to British criminal law with the retention of some aspects of French civil law. In addition, Christie and Gauvreau argue that while colonial governance enjoyed an “autocratic conservative revival,” especially between 1780 and 1830, ensuring “male heads of the family were seen as commensurate with that of the state,” elite men and government officials remained socially vulnerable to charges of sexual misconduct. They shed light on the myriad ways that women (and some men) used the courts and their public audiences to expose male sexual impropriety involving both heterosexual and homosexual activity. In doing so, Christie and Gauvreau steer sexuality to the very center of historiographical discussion about colonial governance and social relations in New France and Quebec.