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

right-wing ideology among left-wing writers such as Henri Pollès. If the far right could be most consistently relied upon to imply that gender failure and national decline went together, left-wing tradition of political thought also begun to assume sexual perversion lay at the heart of fascism. Fabrice Virgili’s chapter, “The Reconstruction of a Virile France 1944–1945,” extends the question of sexuality as ideological target through an examination of gender and sexual retribution in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation. In spite of the feminine icon that had characterized Germany as Germania prior to the rise of Nazism, during the Second World War the Third Reich promoted a vision of the nation as ultra-masculine, and was perceived as such in its conquest of France. As Virgili shows us, the occupation was experienced by many as a blight on French masculinity, requiring the restoration of virility through the ritual punishment of women who were popularly, and often falsely, imagined to have sexually betrayed the nation. At no point had it been clearer just how dramatically the gender and sexual metaphorization of nationhood could catalyze the social realities of gender relations.

There is no doubt that the period from the French Revolution to the end of the Second World War represented a heightened elaboration of connections of meaning between gender, sexuality, and political ideology in France. But the story did not end there. As Yasmine Debarge shows in her chapter, “Cinema, Politics and Gender,” challenges to gender customs in the 1960s combined with Cold War visions to produce a view of communism and consumerism as implicated in cinematic visions of sexual difference. The final chapter, by Bronwyn Winter, entitled “Foulard or cocarde?” brings us up to the turn of the twenty-first century, showing how the Islamic headscarf debates and laws about religious symbols underscore republican views about the relationship between secular power, gender, sexual allure, and racialized nationhood in the postcolonial French context. The French romance with gendered and sexualized national identity is clearly not over yet but, as Winter shows us, not all French female citizens are equally the target of its exoticism and of its exclusionary motives.