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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Claudia Moscovici. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. xvii + 129 pages.
Moscovici proposes to add to a considerable body of feminist scholarship regarding women's roles in the society of post-revolutionary France by studying the shifts that the concept of subject-citizenship underwent from the end of the eighteenth well into the nineteenth century. Although the author never explicitly defines what she means by "subject-citizenship," a key-term throughout the book, I glean from the course of the argument that the extent to which one is considered a qualified participant in public affairs depends upon the degree to which one is acknowledged by men as a thinking, autonomous subject.
Moscovici begins by discussing Rousseau's model of citizenship. This model is masculine, she argues, because of the way in which masculine identity is constructed in the works of the philosopher: men define themselves as not-women; by this process men come into being as both subjects and citizens, while denying that double status to women and relegating them to the private sphere. Despite the fact that women are necessary to men if men are to define themselves in this way, they are condemned to remain wholly secondary beings. Moscovici also underlines the logical failure of Rousseau's thought: since his definition of "men" requires the elimination of the qualities that they attribute to "women," these excluded qualities become part of "men's" self-definition (xi), what Judith Butler has called a "constitutive exterior" (112). Viewing Rousseau from this theoretical perspective, Moscovici redefines his model of citizenship as "inherently" or "fundamentally androgynous" (xi).
From Rousseau, Moscovici moves on to Hegel. In addition to setting up the highly abstract, even abstruse philosophical vocabulary that she uses in her arguments, this first chapter examines the masculine model of citizenship that the German philosopher proposes in his Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right. Moscovici considers that Rousseau's and Hegel's models of citizenship are so similar because the two philosophers share the same basic logic of self-definition. Using Rousseau and Hegel as foils, Moscovici will study the emergence of different models of citizenship in the nineteenth century through her readings of Comte's General View of Positivism (1851-54), Balzac' s La Cousine Bette (1846), Sand's Indiana (1832), and Foucault's edition of the journal of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin (1860). According to this new model, which she defines as both "ambisexual" and "androgynous" (xi), Moscovici maintains that Rousseau's neat oppositions and hierarchies give way to more reciprocal relationships...
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