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

the acceptance of it by even those whom it benefits the least, and of colonial conquest and its domestication among both home and foreign populations. Whenever political elites seek to construe their own narrow interest as a lofty ideal to be defended by all, gender and sexual imagery are evoked to seduce, to romanticize, or to give substance to the abstraction. Their role might be to distract where doubt would otherwise reign, to humanize where abstractions would otherwise be hard to care about, to vilify where opponents would otherwise inspire indifference, or to repulse where enemies would otherwise be left alone. To invoke gender or sexual desire, perversion, or difference, is to suggest something of one’s bodily experience, of one’s intimate relationships, of one’s parental imagoes, and of one’s inner longings. Thus it gives the state or social elites the power to reach into one’s imagination and activate symbols that will engage one in collective agendas—even those that stand against one’s own particular social interests. That strategy became marked in times of nation building and especially in times of war during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it predated the modern nation state, as the copious evidence of sexual and gender discourse in religions of the medieval and early modern era suggests.⁴³

Images of benevolent, motherly, and virginal femininity in nationalist imagery probably owed something to Catholic Marianite traditions.⁴⁴ Twentieth-century depictions of enemies as perverse, diseased, homosexual, and sexually monstrous had much in common with medieval preoccupations with heresy, leprosy, and sexual sin.⁴⁵ In this respect, Benedict Anderson’s claim that modern nationalism was the successor to early modern religion would appear to hold some validity.⁴⁶ Medieval Christian cosmology, with its vision of the substandard morality and humanity of women alongside its visionary symbolic worship of feminine divinity, provided a prototype to gendered national arrangements of the nineteenth century, with their accounts of women as subpar citizens alongside their metaphoric vision of feminized national symbols. Such dyads are found recurrently across the history of France.