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

in history, and for its content, because Germany has historically been more implicated than any other nation as a competing nationalist power in relation to France. The recurring Franco-Germanic conflict has, in itself, often been the site of intense generation of gendered and sexualized images of the nation, as several of the chapters in this volume discuss.

Scholars focused on many different cultures across the globe have similarly been drawn to a concern with gender and sexuality as political and ideological metaphors.²⁴ As the editors of one such volume of international scope remarked: “Wherever the power of the nation is invoked…we are more likely than not to find it couched as a love of country: an eroticized nationalism.”²⁵ If it is now clear that the trend has international currency, it also has a particularly rich history of precedence in European societies. Among them all, France has most persistently and consistently placed gendered and sexual metaphors at the center of its political culture. In a methodological sense then, our collection makes no pretense to being the first to notice this rather striking phenomenon of a gender and sexual metaphorics in the politics of nationhood and nationalism. Rather it aims to clarify the methodological distinction between our research on this peculiar kind of political representation, and the wider field of gender and sexuality history in culture and society. Indeed, it now seems clear that a new theoretical approach has emerged in response to the particularly recurrent metaphoric instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in the political domain of several cultures. The study of this kind of phenomenon is now an established research field, central to the work of a wide range of political, cultural, intellectual, and social historians. The idea of this book was conceived precisely in recognition of this growing body of work, and with the aim of interrogating the recurrence—particularly apparent throughout French history—of uses of gender and sexual imagery in forms of national, racial, colonial, religious, and ideological representation, propaganda, and wars.