Queer Nation, Female Nation: Marguerite de Navarre, Incest, and the State in Early Modern France

Following Foucault, feminist scholars, critical race studies scholars, and historians of sexuality have argued that the modern European nation-state manages its population through the proliferative discursive production of differentially categorized human bodies. ¹ Such discursive production is seen to be dispersed in a way that extends Althusser's notion of "ideological state apparatuses" to disciplines such as medicine, psychology, and education. ² In Foucault's argument, the genealogy of this process charts an important shift from the state's legislative prohibition toward a typological specification and description, and thus toward greater indirection and local, contingent deployments, of power knowledge (History of Sexuality, 92-102). While this historical account helps clarify the dispersal of state power in modernity, it also may obscure what continuities there are between premodern juridical formations in the nascent state and modern efforts to manage bodies through forms of identifiable state power. Thus my argument unfolds within what may at first glance appear to be an older historical and theoretical framework. I want to examine the way that the state and "classes" of persons collude in the production and management of human bodies across time. This is intended not to minimize historical differences between pre- or early modernity and modernity but to highlight the persistence of the state in gender, race, and sexual formations and to provide a critical genealogy for certain acts of resistance by human agents to the state's efforts at social management and control.

In short, I am interested in the ways that gender, race, and sexuality interrelate in early statist attempts to fashion the nation. In many analyses of feminism's histories—as in Foucault's accounts of the emergence of counterdiscursive movements, or "reverse discourse," aggregated around the claim of identity (History of Sexuality, 101)—the modern nation-state plays an important role in precipitating feminism as a critique and a political and social movement. ³ My focus on a sixteenth- century literary text by a woman highly placed in the French monarchy suggests a long trajectory for the counterdiscourse that might be called feminism, and it also points to ways that, very early in western Europe's nationalist histories, nation, gender, sexuality, and race are intertwined— queerly so—both from the point of view of the state and in the utopian counter-orders imagined to intervene in the state's workings. Further, early modern French nationalism demonstrates that gender, race (or blood), and heteronormativity all are at stake in the construction of the nation-state from its inception. The coarticulation of these elements in the production of national subjects may also help explain why feminist responses, when they target "gender" or "women" alone, shore up rather than dismantle the exclusionary imperatives of the nation.

The 1999 Pacte Civil de Solidarité (PACS), which created a new section in the French civil code and established national domestic partner legislation, again brought into sharp relief the French state's investment in legally defining and configuring kinship arrangements. Michael Lucey links this moment to the earlier Napoleonic civil code's regulation of the hegemonic normative family form, especially in relation to the inheritance of property. ⁴ The PACS, which permits persons of the same sex to be legally declared partners, nevertheless retains much of the Napoleonic code's definition of who counts as an heir. In other words, because domestic partners are excluded from the category of "spouse" for the purposes of inheritance, among other things, the French civil code preserves not only the patently juridical definition of "family" but also its heteronormative intent. ⁵ As Lucey notes concerning the domestic partnership debates triggered by the PACS, "Talk about nature and sexual difference is in fact little more than an alibi for a discussion and for legislation that is much more centrally about property rights and inheritance practices, as well as sexual oppression...