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

equality across gender lines by creating the illusion of universality, or by reiterating a purely symbolic appreciation of women’s value to the state.

This volume occupies a position of mediation between those views of nationalism that emphasize its construction or invention by European elites of the late modern era, and that view which has tended to emphasize its emergence in long cultural traditions within particular territorial contexts. Many of the chapters in this volume focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when gendered and sexual motifs in politics became particularly richly elaborated. However, several of the contributions relate to earlier examples of the centrality of gender and sexuality in political and religious discourses at times prior to the formation of modern nationalism of the kind that emerged only after the French Revolution of 1789. That longevity is both troubling and suggestive to the account outlined here of the relationship between gendered or sexualized motifs and nationalism. It complicates the view that such imagery can be simply explained as part of the apparatus of modern nation states in their attribution of feminine corporeality to the body of the nation that male citizens must protect, and their use of sexual slander for the vilification of enemies in wartime conflict. It suggests that, at the core of what makes such imagery compelling, there is something more deeply embedded in cultural, religious, and political traditions, something older even than the nation.

Given that the symbolic preoccupation with sex as a sign of something other than itself is so persistently salient across a wide range of cultures, it is reasonable to postulate that these may, in fact, be aspects of human existence that inevitably and universally form the content of discourse. Here we could point to the many studies of sexual metaphor in cultures of war, ranging from the ancient Athenian visions of sex and violence,³⁹ to the tendency among contemporary American defense theorists to describe weapons of mass destruction in distinctly phallic terms.⁴⁰ As Diana Fuss remarked in her 1989 account of the essentialist/constructionist