Carnival Balls and Penal Codes: Body Politics in July Monarchy France

Abstract

Over the past several decades, historians have focused on the absence and occasional presence of women in public spaces and in the normative realm of reasoned discussion that is described as the public sphere. They have elaborated and critically interrogated theoretical formulations of modern liberal politics as based on an opposition between, on the one hand, a rational, abstractable, public, and male citizen, and on the other, a sensible, particularized, and private femininity. In the process, however, persistent theoretical slippages between spatialized notions of publicity and the public as a normative or political category have created considerable analytic confusion. As a result, this paradigm remains unable to address the question of why women were politically marginalized even when they were visibly present in many spheres of public life. Paradoxical as it may seem, I want to argue that what is regularly elided in this discussion—namely, the political and psychic history of male embodiment—can help us to answer this question. It is useful here to recall the two-sexed model of the body, or sexual dimorphism, that notoriously shadowed Enlightenment-era theories of universal rights. As Thomas Laqueur observed: “Ironically, the genderless rational subject engendered opposite, highly gendered sexes.” Laqueur and others have, in turn, shown how presumptions about men and women’s bodily differences were mobilized in arguments against and sometimes for women’s civil and political equality. As Christopher Forth has pointed out, however, this two-sex model depended on the fact that men, too, had bodies. If, in other words, the location of incommensurable gender difference in biology blocked women’s claims to political equality, then it also produced the male body as a cumbersome problem. In 1849, a year after the Second Republic definitively adopted universal male suffrage, feminist Jeanne Deroin aptly seized on this problem of male embodiment. When Jean-Joseph Proudhon dismissed her bid for election as no more logical than male wet nursing, she quipped: “In that case, it should be easy to tell us what organs are necessary