Sexing Political Culture In The History Of France

"Alison Moore's sparkling collection of essays offers a host of fascinating perspectives on gender in French politics from the European witch-craze through to the current head-scarf controversy." - Colin Jones, Professor of History, Queen Mary University of London "Sexing Political Culture in the History of France gathers together several compelling essays that nuance older studies about how gender and sexual symbols stand in for the nation in its various incarnations from the Early Modern period to the present. By combining a long historical trajectory with detailed analyses of how the state or its opponents have used symbolic meaning to mobilize political action, clarify or criticize hierarchy, or simply make sense of social norms, these essays demonstrate the distinctive power of such symbolism and thus of this area of focus, which traverses intellectual, social, cultural history as well as the history of gender and sexuality. This is a cutting-edge collection that moves coherently from the early modern witch hunt to race in postcolonial France." - Carolyn J. Dean, John Hay Professor of International Studies, Brown University "Sexing Political Culture in the History of France marks a genuinely new departure in European history of sexuality studies. Alison Moore has gathered together contributions which demonstrate the manifold ways in which the language of gendered and sexualized stereotypes, behaviors, and practices has been deployed in the service of patriotic propaganda and the othering energies of nationalism in the French context. Further, she urges a nuanced focus on the fact that scholars too have embraced the tendency to metaphorize national, religious and political situations using sexual and gendered symbols. As such, the book also stands as a meditation on the political and libidinal character of historiography itself. The essays collected together in the volume cover a broad historical span and treat a wide-ranging array of fascinating topics from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts to historically recent debates about French secularism, Islamophobia, and the wearing of the veil. This book is a must-read for all students and scholars of French and European studies, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of ideas." - Lisa Downing, Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality, University of Birmingham

This book, first published in 1989, is an analysis of what changed in 1789 with the French Revolution and what contemporary life owes to the event, particularly with regards to the body and public life, as the revolutionary middle class set new ideals and behaviours.

How did marriage come to be seen as the foundation and guarantee of social stability in Third Republic France? In Sexing the Citizen, Judith Surkis shows how masculine sexuality became central to the making of a republican social order. Marriage, Surkis argues, affirmed the citizen's masculinity, while also containing and controlling his desires. This ideal offered a specific response to the problems—individualism, democratization, and rapid technological and social change—associated with France's modernity. This rich, wide-ranging cultural and intellectual history provides important new insights into how concerns about sexuality shaped the Third Republic's pedagogical projects. Educators, political reformers, novelists, academics, and medical professionals enshrined marriage as the key to eliminating the risks of social and sexual deviance posed by men-especially adolescents, bachelors, bureaucrats, soldiers, and colonial subjects. Debates on education reform and venereal disease reveal how seriously the social policies of the Third Republic took the need to control the unstable aspects of male sexuality. Surkis's compelling analyses of republican moral philosophy and Emile Durkheim's sociology illustrate the cultural weight of these concerns and provide an original account of modern French thinking about society. More broadly, Sexing the Citizen illuminates how sexual norms continue to shape the meaning of citizenship.

This fascinating book examines how the past pervades French public life, how the French both commemorate their past triumphs, heroes, and martyrs and attempt to erase the more violent events in their history. The book surveys the ways that various political communities in France during the past two centuries have manufactured different versions of the past in order to define their identities and legitimate their goals. Beginning with a discussion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, Robert Gildea moves backward in time to show how rival factions have used various elements of French political culture--from the grandeur of the ancien r�gime to Catholicism, Jacobinism, Anarchism, and Bonapartism--to further their ends. Gildea shows how proponents of revolution and counterrevolution, church and state, centralism and regionalism, and national identity and nationalism campaigned to achieve the widest possible acceptance of their own view of the past. He describes the continuing battle between Left and Right for association with national heroes such as Joan of Arc and Napoleon. He exposes the reworking of collective views of the past by political communities, in order to increase or recover political legitimacy. Written in clear and trenchant prose, the book offers a new perspective on French history and political culture.

The connection between fashion, femininity, frivolity and Frenchness has become a cliché. Yet, relegating fashion to the realm of frivolity and femininity is a distinctly modern belief that developed along with the urban culture of the Enlightenment. In eighteenth-century France, a commercial culture filled with shop girls, fashion magazines and window displays began to supplant a court-based fashion culture based on rank and distinction, stimulating debates over the proper relationship between women and commercial culture, public and private spheres, and morality and taste. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those particularly critical of this 'vulgar' obsession with 'tawdry finery', declaring it to be 'merely the external mark of a depravity shared with slaves'.The story of how la mode was 'sexed' as feminine offers a compelling insight into the political, economic and cultural tensions that marked the birth of modern commercial culture. Jones examines men's and women's relation to fashion at this time, looking at both consumption and production to argue how clothing was becoming increasingly conceptualized as feminine/effeminate.A concise history of French fashion culture suitable for anyone interested in eighteenth-century culture, women and gender studies or fashion history.

Showing how gender history contributes to existing understandings of the Second World War, this book offers detail and context on the national and transnational experiences of men and women during the war. Following a general introduction, the essays shed new light on the field and illustrate methods of working with a wide range of primary sources.