Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920

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.

In this closely argued, intelligent, and original book, Judith Surkis gives the notion of 'sexual politics' an exciting new meaning. Male sexuality, Surkis argues, was central to the stabilization of political authority in the French Third Republic. Through promotion of heterosexual marriage, French republican educators and officials were able to anchor wider debates about moral and social order, and thus promote their political agendas. Male sexuality became a source of disorder, a problem to be solved, but also, when contained and controlled through marriage, the foundation of republican politics. Surkis makes a major contribution to the study of masculinity by viewing it as both a highly unstable 'speculative unity' and a powerful regulatory norm. With its impressive mix of political, cultural and intellectual history, as well as the history of gender and sexuality, Sexing the Citizen is destined to become a 'big book' across many different fields.

Judith Surkis argues forcefully that the conjugal couple was (and perhaps remains) the core of the French republican vision of society. This is a lucid and highly original work on the construction of masculinity in Third Republic France.

This fabulous book shows just how much fantasies and worries about heterosexual masculinity-its frequently fragile and unstable nature, its excesses, and all-too-often inchoate aims-shape fundamental assumptions about citizenship and national identity. It is a brilliant demonstration of the significance of sex for politics.