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

This is not a book about the history of women, gender, or sex per se, nor even about the history of sexuality in its narrower discursive sense, but is instead a study of the history of the particular uses to which gendered and sexual symbols have been put in the service of the nation, the republic, the revolution, religion, progress, secularism, and the state. Other gender and sexuality historians of France might, of course, be included in the sketch provided here of scholarship on symbolic and metaphoric political usages. The field of political culture is not quarantined from other kinds of gender and sexuality studies and the interactions between nation/state and gender/sex have been noted, too, in the context of broader examinations of the cultural and social history of gender and sexuality in France by scholars such as Sian Reynolds, Susan Foley, Robert Aldrich, and Christine Bard (who is also a contributor to the present volume), among others.²⁶ However, here we choose to make of these interactions a particular point of thematic concern and methodological reflection.

One benefit of collecting a set of chapters together with this kind of focus is the opportunity it affords for some consideration of the hermeneutic implications entailed in such an approach. In relation to our topic, there are certainly good reasons to consider how intellectual frameworks and publishing titles might implicate historians in the very processes they look to deconstruct. Many continue to use the feminine icon of Marianne as shorthand for the French nation. A recent study by Elizabeth Vlossak metaphorizes the contested status of Alsace between France and Germany as the choice between Marianne and Germania.²⁷ Vlossak’s evocation of these icons is for historicist ends because her work is also, in fact, focused on the relationship between gender, nationalism, and French-German claims on Alsace from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries—across the period in which those national feminine icons were most prevalent. In a similar vein, the cartoon artist Tomi Ungerer represents his own transnational, neither French nor German, Alsatian identity in a series of sexualized images entitled Zwischen Marianne und Germania. Alsace appears in these images as a tiny male figure