These essays collectively cover a stretch of French history from Medieval times to the twentieth century, deploying a wide variety of analytical techniques in an effort to understand people's perceptions of their own lives as well as the institutional and cultural factors affecting their decisions.
In France as elsewhere in recent years, legislative debates over single-parent households, same-sex unions, new reproductive technologies, transsexuality, and other challenges to long-held assumptions about the structure of family and kinship relations have been deeply divisive. What strikes many as uniquely French, however, is the extent to which many of these discussions—whether in legislative chambers, courtrooms, or the mass media—have been conducted in the frequently abstract vocabularies of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates on the family—and on the nature of French republicanism itself. She focuses on the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, both of whom highlighted the interdependence of the sexual and the social by positing a direct correlation between kinship and socialization. Robcis traces how their ideas gained recognition not only from French social scientists but also from legislators and politicians who relied on some of the most obscure and difficult concepts of structuralism to enact a series of laws concerning the family. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan constructed the heterosexual family as a universal trope for social and psychic integration, and this understanding of the family at the root of intersubjectivity coincided with the role that the family has played in modern French law and public policy. The Law of Kinship contributes to larger conversations about the particularities of French political culture, the nature of sexual difference, and the problem of reading and interpretation in intellectual history.
In the decades after World War II, French ideas about gender and family life underwent dramatic changes, laying the groundwork for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. This book offers a broad view of changing lives and ideas about love, courtship, marriage, giving birth, parenting, childhood, and adolescence in France from the Vichy regime to the sexual revolution of 1960s.
This is a masterful study of the ways in which sex and law were inextricably intertwined in the elaboration of French rule in Algeria. Its great virtue is to demonstrate in careful detail, with an impressive range of material (from court records to novels), exactly how the conquest of Algeria repeatedly challenged the very ideals of the secular universalism in whose name colonization was carried out.― Joan Wallach Scott, author of Sex and Secularism During more than a century of colonial rule over Algeria, the French state shaped and reshaped the meaning and practice of Muslim law by regulating it and circumscribing it to the domain of family law, while applying the French Civil Code to appropriate the property of Algerians. In Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, Judith Surkis traces how colonial authorities constructed Muslim legal difference and used it to deny Algerian Muslims full citizenship. In disconnecting Muslim law from property rights, French officials increasingly attached it to the bodies, beliefs, and personhood. Surkis argues that powerful affective attachments to the intimate life of the family and fantasies about Algerian women and the sexual prerogatives of Muslim men, supposedly codified in the practices of polygamy and child marriage, shaped French theories and regulatory practices of Muslim law in fundamental and lasting ways. Women's legal status in particular came to represent the dense relationship between sex and sovereignty in the colony. This book also highlights the ways in which Algerians interacted with and responded to colonial law. Ultimately, this sweeping legal genealogy of French Algeria elucidates how "the Muslim question" in France became—and remains—a question of sex.
Originally published in 1989. This is the first history of modern France to explore the long-term origins of the libertarian revolt. It traces the moral history from the eighteenth century to the 1960s, examining the questions of marriage and divorce, homosexuality, and sexual morality. It includes detailed chapters on the Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, André Gide, and Daniel Guérin in order to illustrate the changing legislation, popular thought and public opinion. The result is an enlightening and provocative account which will be of interest to students of modern French history, moral thought and the history of sexual attitudes.
Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century. Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.
This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a daring, multidisciplinary investigation of the imaginative foundations of modern politics. Hunt uses the term `Family Romance', (coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and belonging to one of higher social standing), in a broader sense, to describe the images of the familial order that structured the collective political unconscious. In a wide-ranging account that uses novels, engravings, paintings, speeches, newspaper editorials, pornographic writing, and revolutionary legislation about the family, Hunt shows that the politics of the French Revolution were experienced through the network of the family romance.
This is a major new textbook, designed for students in all disciplines seeking an introduction to the very latest research on all aspects of women's lives in Europe from 1500 to 1750, and on the development of the notions of masculinity and femininity. The coverage is geographically broad, ranging from Spain to Scandinavia, and from Russia to Ireland, and the topics investigated include the female life-cycle, literacy, women's economic role, sexuality, artistic creations, female piety - and witchcraft - and the relationship between gender and power. To aid students each chapter contains extensive notes on further reading (but few footnotes), and the approach throughout is designed to render the subject in as accessible and stimulating manner as possible. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe is suitable for usage on numerous courses in women's history, early modern European history, and comparative history.