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

used ideals of masculinity to promote recruitment against a vision of communism as gender compromising. Gender and sexuality became central concerns in the cultural politics of the interwar Third Republic, prompting conservative fears about androgyny, moral corruption and national decline, but also suggesting for some the liberating possibilities of sexual expression outside marriage, monogamy, and other-sex choice in visions of a new egalitarian society. In both the fascist and the anarchist examples, sexual and gender ideals formed part of the modes of induction into radical political commitments, lending weight to the view that gender and sex may recur so frequently in politics because of their capacity to personalize abstractions, and their affective power of erotic seduction and personal identification.

Guillaume de Syon’s chapter examines another manifestation of the interwar French fixation with gender in the public fascination with female flyers as Joan of Arc–like figures of androgyny and national heroism. Like Marianne busts in city halls, the aviatrix was promoted to inspire the public, but her representation in press sources indicated that clear boundaries were also drawn to show she should not be taken to exemplify female behavior beyond established feminine attributes. Here, it seems one edges closer to an understanding of the raised stakes of gender and sexual questions in the period between the wars. France at that time saw a proliferation of erotic imagery, a publicization of feminist ideas and new female role models, an expanding popular consciousness of the possibilities of gender acculturation and sexual expression. Alongside these trends, though, gender and sexuality were increasingly deployed to name enemies, define outsiders, and blame scapegoats, and the Second World War provided the scene for some spectacular demonstrations of that symbolic convergence.

Mark Meyer’s chapter, “Crowd Psychology, Gender, and Sexuality in French Antifascism,” shows how the later trend of ascribing sexual perversion, homosexuality, and failed masculinity to the Nazis had its origins in interwar thinking about crowd psychology, popularism, and