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

Our volume thus begins with a study of the sexualization of witches, and the emergence of androgyny as an ideological concern in the early modern period. As Maryse Simons shows in the chapter “Sexual Crimes in the Early Modern Witch Hunt,” the marginalization of women accused of witchcraft in France over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries occurred through a nexus of meaning linking deviancy, corporeal defilement, feminine gender, and worship of the devil, whose influence in worldly affairs was recurrently construed in bodily and sexual terms. Questions of gender difference and appropriate sexual desire were at the forefront of emerging humanist thought and challenges to religious doctrine in the early modern period, too. Katherine Crawford’s chapter, “The Renaissance Androgyne and the Making of Sexual Ideology,” examines how French writers inspired by Italian humanism and by ancient Greek philosophy attempted to accommodate a vision of androgyny within the construction of a sexual ideology that precluded the same-sex desire of the ancients. The Platonic androgyne thus became the site for negotiation of appropriate sexual desire and the assertion of gender difference within the new challenges of post-Reformation theology, both Catholic and Protestant. Both these authors’ chapters demonstrate how gender and sexuality were yoked into place as central ideological concerns across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the new French state moved toward greater secular consolidation.

Given these precedents, it is unsurprising to find that, in the great social and political rupture of the events of 1789–1901 in France, gender difference and women’s bodies again figured centrally in conceptions of political ideology. Christine Bard’s thematic chapter, “Le Pantalon: Toward A Political History of Trousers,” takes a novel approach to that question by tracing the continuities in French political views of feminine dress from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, examining how gendered attire was implicated in struggles to exclude women from state governance, and in feminist challenges to that exclusion. Republican thought, from its foundations in France, coopted earlier models of gendering and sexualizing politics and the conflation of the Republic