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

bare-breasted Marianne of the 1840s republican movement as a product of the same kind of sexualization as the later attribution of “collaboration horizontale” to the women who were targeted in the tontes of the Liberation? In deciding that there are good reasons to take these different phenomena as in some way contiguous, we have in fact, further extended that rubric to consider the attribution of sexual sin and deviancy to the demonically possessed in the early modern era, and the Neoplatonist debates about androgyny in Renaissance thought. If coherent tendencies can be sketched across such long and diverse histories, how, then, do we account for the profound contextual differences in how these examples arise? Of particular concern here, it must be said, is the crucial difference between that earlier era when “la France” had political meaning only to a tiny minority of northern elites among the linguistically and culturally diverse inhabitants of l’Hexagone, and the more recent era since the French Revolution, and especially since the advent of the Third Republic, when ideological movements consciously sought to reshape local traditions into visions of collective interest toward the concept of a singular nation of alike citizens.

Clearly, the assemblage of diverse examples across both time and culturally conceived space is unlikely to provide any sharp lines of continuity or pattern because the very terms of such a long view of the sexual, the erotic, sin, and woman are also historically contingent and differently conceived from the early modern era to the present. It is, nonetheless, of value to consider incomparable examples over time because new trends rarely (if ever) emerge out of nowhere. Comparisons allow us to discern when distinct shifts in representation and concern occurred. But it is also clear that in the era of mass politics, popular forms of ritual, habits of iconography, and socially embedded modes of gender relating manifested in modern national uses of gender and sexual themes. Fears of androgyny, forms of group violence against women and men marked as outsiders through suppositions about their sexual conduct, worship of symbolic feminine icons, depictions of sexually corrupt priests in popular humor—these all are recapitulating features of cultural history