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

from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century in the land mass now known as France.

The structure of this volume is roughly chronological, and many of the chapters provide clues to the origins of practices and discourses emerging later in the history of France. As such, there is an element of genealogy in our study of the emergence and transmission of sexualizing and gendering political traditions. But 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.

If our methods were broad then there was a need to limit the scope of chapters in this volume to the history of France. But that focus was not selected because gendering and sexualizing discourses are nationally bound, nor even because the name “France” signified the same thing in the early modern period, in the revolution of 1789, or in the era since nationalist ideologies have dominated European politics. This may be a history of France, but that does not mean we took the continuity of the nation as a category of coherence for granted, thus ourselves sustaining national myths of continuity and longevity, as Eric Hobsbawm and Patrick Geary gloomily worried.³⁶ Rather, a national focus is justified here because our study is precisely about the transmission of ideological patterns in state building and national construction over time. The modern national phenomenon produced new habits that specifically relied upon identification with the reproduction of past antecedents as the site for the imagination of tradition. Nations frequently look to craft their imagery from an imagination of traditional forms.³⁷ That has been so in relation to the images of France in gendered and sexualized terms as well.