Friday, May 2, 2008

androgyny in the 1840s

A random connection, about which, or around which, there is perhaps already a book: Celestin Bouglé, in a 1910 article about Proudhon, mentions that it is the couple ‘androgyne’ which is the basic unit of justice for Proudhon (this is on page 371 of the September 15th 1910 issue of Revue de Paris). I remember from reading Barthes’ book on Michelet that this historian, a contemporary of Proudhon’s, also speaks about the necessity of androgyny for true historical understanding. Certainly Fourier and Saint-Simon (or at least his followers) did some serious thinking about the nature and meaning of gender difference. I wonder how much this has been worked out? Certainly it's an argument for thinking harder about the roots of Third Republic-era republican gender ideology.

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