Sexing Political Culture in the History of France By Alison M. M ...

divide in gender studies, the position of defining gender as always and everywhere constructed and never given, among its many contextualizing benefits, has also “foreclosed more ambitious investigations of specificity and difference by fostering a certain paranoia around the perceived threat of essentialism.”⁴¹ The current volume is precisely such an ambitious study in that it reopens the question of how a sexual metaphorics can recur across a long and diverse historic period.

But the leap to universalist speculation is not the necessary next step once a long historic pattern of recurrence has been established. A volume such as this might reasonably hope to promote alternatives, both to the narrow version of constructionism that cannot account for seemingly unrelated recurrences over a long period, and to a resigned universalism that throws up its hands to be rescued by a metanarrative tale of biological determinism. It is not that biological or other kinds of explanations are impossible to consider, or are beyond the humanities pale (as Fuss suggests), or that they must always be counterpoised to the social in a version of what is now a rather tired dichotomy. Rather, the issue is that, as historians, it is our concern to extend explanation as far as possible according to historical criteria. It is far from obvious that all such lines of inquiry have been exhausted in the study of gender and sexuality metaphor in the long history of French politics and culture. The concern here is not fear of risking essentialism, but patience to continue grounding the question in the rich scope of remaining possibilities of historical explanation.⁴²

A historicist commitment does not preclude considering the broader question of why sexual behavior and gender difference ever matter as questions of state policy, ideological vision, or religious belief across time and place. By focusing on these domains across the long history of France, the essays in this volume point to a larger possibility of speculation about the role that such concerns might play in the construction and the defense of political power systems, of state governance and its acceptance by populations of a given territory, of class hierarchy and