Nationalizing Sexuality: Sexual Stereotypes in the Habsburg Empire

Love takes a unique form among every nation in the world, which depends on its temperament and character. Among some nations, love is a fleeting coquetry, by others a serious and honorable thing.

—"Character der Liebe in Paris," Allgemeine Moden-Zeitung, 8 September 1807

Sexual Typologies as Nationalizing Agents

During the nineteenth century a series of authors divided Europe's population into discrete and homogeneous national groups on the basis of sexual characteristics. These pseudo-objective taxonomies reflect the arbitrary figments of nationalist fantasy but introduced national categories into the thought and subjectivity of individuals far removed from political power. The nationalization of sexuality is both a symptom and a contributing cause of the nineteenth-century spread of national feeling and reflects its concrete political and cultural environment. The Habsburg Empire provides an excellent case study, showing that female sexuality was associated with cultural or linguistic concepts of nationality, while male sexuality reflected statehood and political nationalism. Habsburg "sexual nationalism" reflected the patriotic desire to develop one's own nationality, but it also reflected the desire for good relations between the different nationalities within the multinational empire: nationalized sexuality encouraged not only conflict but also cooperation.

Describing this rhetoric as "sexual" may cause misunderstanding. In the following discussion the adjective "sexual" does not refer to biological "sex," distinguished from socially constructed "gender." It instead refers to "sexuality," understood as sexual desires, sexual desirability, and putative sexual behavior. Nationalism, of course, influenced the social construction of sexuality, but here the focus instead is on how sexuality, broadly conceived, contributed to national stereotypes.

Sexuality has not been a major theme in historical studies of the intersection between gender and nationalism in Eastern Europe. Several case studies have examined how feminist activists fought to participate in Central European national politics and the influence of motherhood on nationalist discourse.¹ A huge literature demonstrates that ideas of masculinity inform nationalist conflict; some of this has discussed sexual stereotypes of foreigners.² Wendy Bracewell's study of Serbian stereotypes of Albanian sexuality, for example, showed that "competition, dominance and honor, seen as simultaneously masculine and national," contributed to the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia.³ Scholarly attention has focused on violence and conflict, even though periods of cooperation and peace equally deserve scholarly attention. Few scholars, however, have asked how sexual stereotypes of foreign sexuality might have contributed to peacetime nationalism.

Perhaps the most insightful theoretical work on gender and nationalism in peacetime concerns the analogy of kinship, namely, the ubiquitous metaphor of "national brotherhood." Carole Pateman, in a somewhat Oedipal study of social contract theory, derived the rhetoric of "national brotherhood" from male sexual desire: men overthrow the father figure and distribute access to women among themselves. Pateman argues that this "national brotherhood" sees women primarily in terms of their sexual characteristics as mothers and wives.⁴ As the spread of nationalism recast ideas of political legitimacy, the gendered content of national concepts had important legal consequences.⁵ The spread of nationalism, however, was not just a legal or political trend: it affected the social interpretation of daily experience. Pateman's insights can also be applied to these cultural spheres.⁶

This essay examines the nationalization of sexual perception. If a given stereotype became widely accepted, patriots could use it to police the behavior of the nation's members. National sexual stereotypes also facilitated the social enforcement of social norms. The stereotypical national woman was sexually virtuous, the national man was heroic and self-sacrificing, so individuals who failed to live up to the ideal could be stigmatized as bad patriots. Perhaps the most important effect of such stereotypes was to nationalize perception: when a group of authors who might be called "taxonomizers" classified European sexuality on national lines, they taught their audience to think about nationalism and nationality not only in political contexts but also in sexual contexts...