Historicizing sexual symbols

There is little doubt that gender and sexual imagery have played a uniquely symbolic role in the modern French history of politics, religious struggle, and nationalism. That role was at no time more obvious than it is at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the belief that certain types of religiously symbolic corporeal attire conflict with the republican secular values of France as a nation, the French state has now introduced new laws that most conspicuously intervene in the personal grooming of Islamic French female citizens who wear headscarves for religious reasons. 1 Heads, it might be argued, have often been the focus of profound symbolic signification in French national politics.