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

but rarely has it undergone any sustained consideration as a historical phenomenon in its own right.

The ongoing invocation of gendered and sexualized bodies in historiographic representation of the nation suggests that historical consciousness remains more entrenched than we might like to think in the nineteenth-century historiographic habits of farming the poppies for the nationalist opiate, to paraphrase Eric Hobsbawm’s famous metaphor of the relationship of historians to nationalism.³⁴ Even when scholars aim to subject national tropes to historicization, they risk substantiating the tropes’ mythical contents. The nation as a sexual body is not yet a thing of the past; it is a living body, not a corpse (as Henri Rousso once famously wrote about le syndrôme de Vichy).³⁵ Unlike Rousso, we propose here that the subject at hand needs neither an autopsy nor psychotherapy, but rather a nontherapeutic form of historicized treatment by a collective of French gender and sexuality scholars of diverse kinds.

There are several assumptions such an approach might well challenge—that gender and sexuality were only fields of marginal reference in cultures prior to the late twentieth century, or that such themes only appeared in precise kinds of texts dedicated to the study of psychology, bodies, health, deviance, desire, and marriage. In fact, all the essays in this volume help us to appreciate the absolute centrality of gender and sexual motifs in the some of the most official domains of representation across French political history—domains that were ostensibly not at all concerned with gender or sexuality and yet referred to them repeatedly as symbolic or metaphoric devices.

The purpose of this book is to propose some questions about the nature of this sexual metaphorics while considering why and how gender and sexuality operate so recurrently as themes for the representation of political entities, through the collation of multiple examples of it across a long period in France. But it might seem that we are assuming much here. Are we even dealing with the same phenomenon across time in viewing the