Sexing the Citizen

Sexing the Citizen

Author: Judith Surkis

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1501729993

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How did marriage come to be seen as the foundation and guarantee of social stability in Third Republic France? In Sexing the Citizen, Judith Surkis shows how masculine sexuality became central to the making of a republican social order. Marriage, Surkis argues, affirmed the citizen's masculinity, while also containing and controlling his desires. This ideal offered a specific response to the problems—individualism, democratization, and rapid technological and social change—associated with France's modernity. This rich, wide-ranging cultural and intellectual history provides important new insights into how concerns about sexuality shaped the Third Republic's pedagogical projects. Educators, political reformers, novelists, academics, and medical professionals enshrined marriage as the key to eliminating the risks of social and sexual deviance posed by men-especially adolescents, bachelors, bureaucrats, soldiers, and colonial subjects. Debates on education reform and venereal disease reveal how seriously the social policies of the Third Republic took the need to control the unstable aspects of male sexuality. Surkis's compelling analyses of republican moral philosophy and Emile Durkheim's sociology illustrate the cultural weight of these concerns and provide an original account of modern French thinking about society. More broadly, Sexing the Citizen illuminates how sexual norms continue to shape the meaning of citizenship.


Sexing Political Culture in the History of France

Sexing Political Culture in the History of France

Author: Alison Moore

Publisher:

Published: 2014-05-14

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 9781624993657

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"Alison Moore's sparkling collection of essays offers a host of fascinating perspectives on gender in French politics from the European witch-craze through to the current head-scarf controversy." - Colin Jones, Professor of History, Queen Mary University of London "Sexing Political Culture in the History of France gathers together several compelling essays that nuance older studies about how gender and sexual symbols stand in for the nation in its various incarnations from the Early Modern period to the present. By combining a long historical trajectory with detailed analyses of how the state or its opponents have used symbolic meaning to mobilize political action, clarify or criticize hierarchy, or simply make sense of social norms, these essays demonstrate the distinctive power of such symbolism and thus of this area of focus, which traverses intellectual, social, cultural history as well as the history of gender and sexuality. This is a cutting-edge collection that moves coherently from the early modern witch hunt to race in postcolonial France." - Carolyn J. Dean, John Hay Professor of International Studies, Brown University "Sexing Political Culture in the History of France marks a genuinely new departure in European history of sexuality studies. Alison Moore has gathered together contributions which demonstrate the manifold ways in which the language of gendered and sexualized stereotypes, behaviors, and practices has been deployed in the service of patriotic propaganda and the othering energies of nationalism in the French context. Further, she urges a nuanced focus on the fact that scholars too have embraced the tendency to metaphorize national, religious and political situations using sexual and gendered symbols. As such, the book also stands as a meditation on the political and libidinal character of historiography itself. The essays collected together in the volume cover a broad historical span and treat a wide-ranging array of fascinating topics from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts to historically recent debates about French secularism, Islamophobia, and the wearing of the veil. This book is a must-read for all students and scholars of French and European studies, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of ideas." - Lisa Downing, Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality, University of Birmingham


Gender and the Second World War

Gender and the Second World War

Author: Corinna Peniston-Bird

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-09-16

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 113752460X

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Showing how gender history contributes to existing understandings of the Second World War, this book offers detail and context on the national and transnational experiences of men and women during the war. Following a general introduction, the essays shed new light on the field and illustrate methods of working with a wide range of primary sources.


Sexual Myths of Modernity

Sexual Myths of Modernity

Author: Alison M. Moore

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1498530737

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The notion of sexual sadism emerged from nineteenth-century alienist attempts to imagine the pleasure of the torturer or mass killer. This was a time in which sexuality was mapped to social progress, so that perversions were always related either to degeneration or decadence. These ideas were internalized in later Freudian views of the drives within the self, and of their repression under the demands of modern European civilization. Sadism was always presented as the barbarous past that lurked within each of us, ready to burst forth into murderous violence, crime, anti-Semitism, and finally genocide. This idea maintained its currency in European thought after the Second World War as Freudian-influenced accounts of the history of philosophy configured the Marquis de Sade as a kind of Kantian “superego” in a framework that viewed the Western Enlightenment as unraveled by its own inner demons. In this way, a straight line was imagined from the late eighteenth century to the Holocaust. These ideas have had an ongoing legacy in debates about sexual perversion, feminism, genocide representation, and historical memory of Nazism. However, recent genocide research has massively debunked assumptions that perpetrators of mass violence are especially sexually motivated in their cruelty. This book considers how the late twentieth-century imagination eroticized Nazism for its own ends, but also how it has been informed by nineteenth-century formulations of the idea of mass violence as a sexual problem.


Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture

Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture

Author: Manon Mathias

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-11-17

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 3030018571

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This book considers the historical and cultural origins of the gut-brain relationship now evidenced in numerous scientific research fields. Bringing together eleven scholars with wide interdisciplinary expertise, the volume examines literal and metaphorical digestion in different spheres of nineteenth-century life. Digestive health is examined in three sections in relation to science, politics and literature during the period, focusing on Northern America, Europe and Australia. Using diverse methodologies, the essays demonstrate that the long nineteenth century was an important moment in the Western understanding and perception of the gastroenterological system and its relation to the mind in the sense of cognition, mental wellbeing, and the emotions. This collection explores how medical breakthroughs are often historically preceded by intuitive models imagined throughout a range of cultural productions.


Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past

Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past

Author: Kate Fisher

Publisher: Classical Presences

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0199660514

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Sex: how should we do it, when should we do it, and with whom? How should we talk about and represent sex, what social institutions should regulate it, and what are other people doing? Throughout history human beings have searched for answers to such questions by turning to the past, whether through archaeological studies of prehistoric sexual behaviour, by reading Casanova's memoirs, or as modern visitors on the British Museum LGBT trail. In this ground-breaking collection, leading scholars show that claims about the past have been crucial in articulating sexual morals, driving political, legal, and social change, shaping individual identities, and constructing and grounding knowledge about sex. With its interdisciplinary perspective and its focus on the construction of knowledge, the volume explores key methodological problems in the history of sexuality, and is also an inspiration and a provocation to scholars working in related fields - historians, classicists, Egyptologists, and scholars of the Renaissance and of LGBT and gender studies - inviting them to join a much-needed interdisciplinary conversation.


The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 1, General Overviews

The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 1, General Overviews

Author: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-04-30

Total Pages: 645

ISBN-13: 110890128X

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Volume I offers historiographical surveys and general overviews of central topics in the history of world sexualities. Split across twenty-two chapters, this volume places the history of sexuality in dialogue with anthropology, women's history, LGBTQ+ history, queer theory, and public history, as well as examining the impact Freud and Foucault have had on the history of sexuality. The volume continues by providing overviews on the sexual body, family and marriage, the intersections of sexuality with race and class, male and female homoerotic relations, trans and gender variant sexuality, the sale of sex, sexual violence, sexual science, sexuality and emotion, erotic art and literature, and the material culture of sexuality.


The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing

The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing

Author: Alison M. Downham Moore

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-10-06

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 0192654527

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Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doctors' professional identities in postrevolutionary biomedicine. Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses. However, menopause owed much of its conceptual weft to earlier themes of women as the sicker sex, of vitalist crisis, of the vapours, and of astrological climacteric years. This is the first comprehensive study of the origins of the medical concept of menopause, richly contextualising its role in nineteenth-century French medicine and revealing the complex threads of meaning that informed its invention. It tells a complex story of how women's ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry. It reveals the nineteenth-century French origins of the still-current medical and alternative-health approaches to women's ageing as something to be managed through gynaecological surgery, hormonal replacement, and lifestyle intervention.