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The "Hottentot Venus," sexuality, and the changing aesthetics of race, 1650-1850.

This essay examines the joint emergence of the sciences of "race" and "aesthetics," particularly as mediated through the goddess Venus in European thought and art. A "double natured" goddess embodying both ideal beauty and carnal desire, Venus shows how the creation of these interdependent sciences resolved internal conflicts in Eurocentricism and male sexuality.

As now widely recognized in modern scholarship, changing conceptions of race, beauty, and sexuality during the eighteenth century must be regarded as interrelated phenomena in a broader transformation of Western culture. None of these categories emerged in isolation from the others. In obvious ways, aesthetic standards ...

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