Resumen de Le “singe de Nicolet”: animalité, féminité et voyeurisme interspécifique dans le théâtre de la foire (1760-1768)
The aim of this article is to analyse the presence of “animaux savants” in the Parisian théâtre de la foire of the second half of the eighteenth century and their interaction with the female audience. Through the examination of chronicles, reviews and other literary output of the time that depicted or referred to the figure of Turco, the celebrated monkey that was displayed by Jean-Baptiste Nicolet in the Théâtre des Grands Danseurs de Corde during the 1760s, I address the type of contact established between the animal and the women who delighted in his antics. Such interactions, I argue, are revealing of man’s voyeuristic gaze upon female animality, at the same time that they hint at a zoophilic tension that is consistent with the type of observations and arguments collected in travel narratives and scientific writings of the time. I conclude that such spectacle foreshadowed the image of the abject femininity that would, only a century later, become so integral to the circus exhibitions of animal interactions with women.
