Sexing Political Culture in the History of France

Research output: Book/Research ReportAuthored Book

Abstract

This is not a book about the history of women, gender, or the history of sex per se, nor even about the history of sexuality in its narrower discursive sense, but is instead a study of the history of the particular uses to which gendered and sexual symbols have been put in the service of the nation, the republic, the revolution, religion, progress, race, colonialism, secularism, and the state. The genealogies traced here proliferated diffusely across state discourses, propaganda, and popular media, through historical precedence and cultural habit. The approaches employed to tease out their salience and examine their emergence and transmission are necessarily grounded in a diverse range of disciplinary approaches - political, cultural, social, and intellectual history, cinematic reading and contemporary feminist political analysis. To invoke gender or sexual desire, perversion or difference, is to suggest something of our bodily experience, of our intimate relationships, of our parental imagos, and of our inner longings. Thus it gives the state, ideological communities or social elites the power to reach into popular imagination and activate symbols that will engage others in collective agendas––even those which may stand against their own particular social interests. That strategy became marked in times of nation-building and especially in times of war during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it pre-dated the modern nation state, as the copious evidence of sexual and gender discourse in religions of the medieval and early modern era suggests.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationU.S.
PublisherCambria Press
Number of pages376
ISBN (Print)9781604978223
Publication statusPublished - 2012

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Sexing Political Culture in the History of France'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this