Overview

Moscovici proposes a new understanding of how gender relations were reformulated by both male and female writers in nineteenth-century France. She analyzes the different versions of gendered citizenship elaborated by Friedrich Hegel, George Sand, Honore de Balzac, Auguste Comte and Herculine Barbin revealing a shift from a single dialectical (or male-centered) definition of citizenship to a double dialectical (or bi-gendered) one in which each sex plays an important role in subject-citizenship and is defined as the negation of the other sex. Moscovici further argues that a double dialectical pattern of androgyny endows women with a (relational) cultural identity that secures their paradoxical roles as both representatives and outsiders to subject-citizenship in nineteenth-century French society and culture.

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Reviews

Gender and Citizenship brings together a number of important debates in feminist scholarship in interesting ways. . . . Moscovici helps us get beyond two poles which have too frequently sundered feminist theory: the pole represented by difference feminism that has worked to preserve what has been unique to women's situations and the pole represented by more integrationist models that has worked to overcome women's differences from men.--Linda Nicholson

Author Information

Claudia Moscovici is assistant professor of humanities at Boston University. She is the author of From Sex Objects to Sexual Subjects (Routledge 1996).

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