The history of the self is a flourishing field. Nevertheless, there are some problems that have proven difficult to overcome, mainly concerning teleology, the universality or particularity of the self and the gap between ideas and experiences of the self. In this article, I make two methodological suggestions to address these issues. First, I propose a 'queering' of the self, inspired by recent developments in the history of sexuality. By destabilizing the modern self and writing the histories of its different and paradoxical aspects, we can better attend to continuities and discontinuities in the history of the self and break up the idea of a linear and unitary history. I distinguish 4 overlapping and intersecting axes along which discourses of the self present themselves: (1) interiority and outer orientation; (2) stability and flexibility; (3) holism and fragmentation; and (4) self-control and dispossession. Second, I propose studying 4 'practices of self' through which the self is created, namely: (1) techniques of self; (2) self-talk; (3) interpreting the self; and (4) regulating practices. Analysing these practices allows one to go beyond debates about experience versus expression, and to recognize that expressions of self are never just expressions, but make up the self itself.

This article investigates how gossip developed as a tool of social control in eighteenth-century Kortrijk, an average-sized town in Flanders. Through gossip, people influenced others' behaviour, by performing social norms, by punishing violators of norms, by publicising the punishments of these deviants, and finally, by spreading information about improper behaviour, possibly leading to other sanctions. Previous research has insufficiently considered how the effects of gossip as social control were influenced by the historical situations in which it occurred. Most notably, the decline of honour and the formalisation of social control altered the ways in which people could effectively use the power of gossip, as in the second half of the eighteenth century, gossip was less a direct deterrent of deviant behaviour, but became more important in formal control settings.

This article examines the relationship between prostitutes and the communities in which they lived through the lens of stigma and stigma management. In the Southern Netherlands between 1750 and 1800, prostitutes were well aware of social tensions and negative sanctions that could result from their behaviour. To avoid conflict, they often concealed their trade in everyday interactions. If they were unable or unwilling to do so, families, neighbours, and authorities often felt the need to take action to safeguard the values of the social orderand their own reputations. For immediate support, prostitutes therefore often turned to each other.

This article studies the changing meanings given to the bodily behaviour of suspects during criminal interrogations in France between 1750 and 1850. Contrary to the suggestion that the body became less important for criminal procedures with the end of the old regime, I argue that the body's relevance increased in the nineteenth centurybut its meanings altered. If the body had been a means to destroy the self through judicial torture, it became a means to access the self instead. Early modern legal scholars and magistrates already developed a crude practical understanding of the bodily behaviour of suspects during interrogations: a calm body signified innocence, an agitated body suggested guilt. In practice, however, eighteenth-century magistrates displayed little interest in suspects' bodies. In the early nineteenth century, as torture was abolished and legal thinking about the body became somewhat more sophisticated, bodily behaviour could, at least in some criminal trials, play a more decisive role. Introduction: TheEnd of the Body? In June 1844, celebrity lawyer Gustave Chaix d'Estange made a rousing plea in the Paris assize court. His client, Edouard Donon-Cadot, had been falsely accused of parricide! Towards the end of a six hour speech -a "magnificent plea, full of oratory movements", according to the Gazette des Tribunaux -Chaix came to the capstone of his defence. 1 "In my belief," he orated, Acknowledgments: Research for this article was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship of the Belgian American Educational Foundation and a postdoctoral fellowship of the Research Foundation -Flanders. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2019 conference of the International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2"in these sorts of cases, there is one definite proof, one decisive sign of innocence or guilt: it is the attitude of an accused at the very moment when the crime is committed, his attitude in the first moments that follow." The body of a suspect immediately after the crime inevitably revealed their guilt or innocence.The man who has just committed a crime, his first crime, the child who, at the age of eighteen, has had his father's throat cut before his eyes and heard his last cry, is not calm and quiet. See, the emotion is on his face; the sweat, a cold sweat floods him. Try and talk to him, his voice shakes, he can't answer. Look, his hand is shaking with incontrollable movements, his legs quiver under his body and refuse to carry him.And yet, his client had been calm and composed when investigators had first met him, shortly after the murder had taken place. There could be no clearer proof, Chaix proposed, that Donon-Cadot was innocent.No, no, nature has never produced the sort of monsters man's imagination has sometimes dreamt of. No doubt she has put culpable tendencies and bad instincts in the hearts of some men. Early corruption overtakes them and leads them to crime; that I consent. But it did not make them calm, stoic from the beginning, cold and impassive amidst their first crime....

This article analyses discourses concerning male same-sex sexuality produced in the context of law and policing in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands between 1770 and 1830. Intervening in the debate over the making of “the homosexual” and the change from homosexual “acts” to “identities,” I argue that shifts in sexual discourses were not linear. In the late eighteenth century, the courts and the police displayed a strong “will to knowledge” in same-sex sexual matters, collecting, requesting, and recording discourses on inclination and, in some regions, even innateness. This will to knowledge all but disappeared in the early nineteenth century, when in the aftermath of the official decriminalization of sodomy, same-sex sexual acts became mostly devoid of further meaning in legal and police records. The emergence of sexual discourses was therefore uneven.