Sexing the Citizen - by Judith Surkis (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Sexing the Citizen is a carefully researched book that provides a fresh perspective on public debates and policies related to masculinity, morality, and citizenship in Third Republic France. Judith Surkis's clear and engaging style will appeal to readers in a variety of disciplines including history, gender studies, and French studies.

Judith Surkis's Sexing the Citizen expands the field of gender studies in French history by focusing on the ways in which republic educators imagined, regulated, and reflected upon the meanings of male adolescence, adult manhood, and monogamous marriage in the founding decades of the Third Republic.

Judith Surkis's masterful study of conjugality in the Third Republic's efforts to establish, affirm, and regulate its new citizens' heterosexual masculinity reminds us how powerfully different modes of interpretation can shift the ground of historical understanding.

This deeply researched and powerfully argued book demonstrates how a masculinity that was apparently in 'crisis' nonetheless succeeded in maintaining material and symbolic power.

About the Author

Judith Surkis is a Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.