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

in this volume, owe an obvious debt to them. This volume makes no apology for omitting specific chapters on Marianne in visual culture, on gendered symbols in the French Revolution, or on Vichy’s mobilization of gendered icons such as Joan of Arc (though these questions are referred to in several of this volume’s chapters), because they are exhaustively historicized topics in the works of Landes, Agulhon, and Muel-Dreyfus and, as such, have been formative questions in the development of the field tout court. Here we expand the project into some novel permutations, and reflect upon its epistemological foundations.

It is not only in France, but in numerous global cultures, that modern nationalist ideologies have often referenced gendered and sexual motifs in order to seduce, provoke, and embed their political and social values in the population, or in order to inflame animosity toward competing nations and ideological enemies. Marianne, Mother Russia, Germania, and Britannia are just a few of the feminine archetypes around which European states have metaphorized their national identification. Sexual slander of the kind that implied that Hitler had one testicle (in British wartime propaganda), or that Jews were lascivious and sexually diseased (in Nazi ideology), further indicated the readiness of political discourses to use sexualized motifs in the definition of national identity, cultural difference and ideological conflict.¹⁶ That general practice is intriguing in itself and has been the focus of a new field of scholarship by historians and gender scholars over the past fifteen years, pioneered by the work of Joan Landes, George Mosse, Klaus Theweleit, Maurice Agulhon, Anne McClintock, and others.¹⁷ More recent scholarship on the sexual politics of Nazi Germany has been particularly inspiring to gender and sexuality historians of modern Europe in advancing an approach to these themes that is grounded in the study of political ideology and its practical application. That is a striking development in the field of gender and sexuality history, which more commonly has tended to focus on the social and cultural dimensions of everyday life, legal and social hygiene practices, popular presses, and literary and cinematic representation, or else has been grounded in the textual history of religious, medical, psychiatric,