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

and psychoanalytic views about sex. Through the study of Nazism and of colonialism in particular, and now also through the study of French gendered nationhood, it has become clear that, in fact, sexual and gender history might also be constituted as the study of the political ideologies which deploy them symbolically.

The turn toward historical consideration of the role of gender and sexuality in political discourse has, for some time, been a Europe-wide phenomenon, and more recently, has become a global academic trend. A number of historians of various European cultures have considered how gendered and sexual myths have been instrumentalized in the elaboration of colonial power,¹⁸ in the naming of enemies during war, and in the settling of accounts following the Nazi occupation.¹⁹ Masculinity has been a particularly conspicuous feature of European nationalist imagery, as examined by historians such as Christopher Forth, Robert Nye, Judith Surkis, Charlotte Hooper, John Tosh, Karen Hagemann, and many others.²⁰ Klaus Theweleit’s Männerphantasien was one of the first major historical works to suggest, in a finely grained study of German interwar militiamen’s diaries and letters, that sexual metaphorics lay embedded in proto-Nazi racial and military ideology. What Theweleit’s work succeeded in showing was, not that the Nazis were sexually repressed and therefore perverse (as he has been misconstrued as arguing), but rather that their linguistic articulation of racial others, enemies, and dangers was richly encoded with a sexual metaphorics.²¹ German ultranationalism relied on generating horror and disgust, and so metaphoric and symbolic images of bodily fluids, transgendered bodies, sexual disease, and castration were effective tools for fleshing out hatred toward racialized others and ideological enemies.²² While historians of Nazi sexuality remain deeply divided over the extent to which Nazism constituted a sexually repressed or sexually excessive ideology, they nonetheless all agree that sexual and gendered dimensions lay at the very heart of the Nazi symbolic imagination.²³ That body of scholarship has been instrumental in inspiring the present study, both for its exemplary model of methodology in the focus on gendering and sexualizing mechanisms