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

However, the first two chapters of this volume concern the practice of gender and sexual thematics in ideological struggles that predate modern nationalism. Here it might be argued that a more coherently historicist collection would only have begun in the age of modern nationalism, leaving out those earlier antecedents that complicate the questions at stake in this study. However, it is clear that by ignoring earlier forms of this style of metaphoric representation, we lose sight of some of the deeper and more troubling reasons for the continuous exploitation of gender and sexual imagery in politics over the longue durée. Sexualized and gendered patterns of othering were established in prenational times, providing the substrate for such practices in later nationalist tropes. Modern national expressions of gender and sexual metaphorics owed much to these earlier habits, and we would not do justice to the depth of their reach into culture if we characterized them crudely as the sudden inventions of nationalist ideologues. Popularist movements by definition must craft their imagery from material that is culturally recognizable and psychologically assimilable among populations. Sexual and gendered motifs are perhaps especially appealing to nationalists and to other ideological currents for that reason—they refer to old traditions, they relate to realms of intimacy and interiority, and they mimic established religious forms.

A national definition is also pertinent here because France provides a particularly striking case of recurrent uses of this kind of imagery in political representation. It is, in many respects, the ur-example of sexualized, gendered national identification. That is, perhaps, unsurprising if we consider that gender metaphorization is one of the common themes across a range of nation-state ideologies. Considering the politically influential nature of the first French republican experiment of 1789 and, perhaps more importantly, how widely its values were exported throughout Europe during the Napoleonic invasions, it is credible to speculate that France may have provided the prototype for the tendency toward gendered imagery in European nationalisms of the nineteenth century. The mechanisms of transmission included both direct export