Judith Surkis
Biographic Data
| ID | 201772 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Judith Surkis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Judith |
| FAMILY NAME | Surkis |
| SIGNATURE | SURKIS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
À la Carte: Potential Histories in Katia Kameli's Le Roman algérien
How is it possible to imagine history beyond a nation-state narrative? Franco-Algerian artist Katia Kameli's multipart experimental documentary, Le Roman algérien , offers more than one answer to this question. Taking a popular outdoor postcard kiosk in the center of Algiers as her point of departure, Kameli collects a "polyphonie de récits" prompted by its display. Across three successive "chapters", her alternative national "novel" relays perso…
The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean
Custody Battles and the Politics of Franco-Algerian Divorce, 1962-1992
Based on previously untapped archives, this article explores Franco-Algerian custody battles in order to offer a new perspective on the economic, political, and emotional history of decolonization. These disputes both personified and gendered contests over sovereignty in the wake of the 1970s economic crisis: French courts granted the custody of children to the mothers, while Algerian law, partially based on Muslim law, privileged the fathers. Di…
Minor Threats and the Biopolitics of Youth
In contemporary France, the problem of “immigrant youth”—French citizens, born to migrant parents, often from former French colonies—symbolizes the question of minority and national belonging. The development and disciplining of immigrants have, for several decades, formed the focus of sociological, anthropological, as well as political discourse, especially in the wake of the 2005 urban riots. Considering their case can help us to understand the…
Family Law Matters
This essay analyzes how new histories of family law help to dismantle developmentalist accounts of legal, economic, and political modernity. Far from being backwaters, they have recently emerged as sites of theoretical and practical innovation. Recombining methodologies from genealogy to social reproduction theory and psychoanalysis, they do more than denaturalize categories, destabilize familiar narratives, and demonstrate ideological contradict…
Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930
S arah F ishman . From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France
Sarah Fishman’s From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France grapples with a persistent historical puzzle—namely, how postwar French society shifted from the oppressive Catholic moralism of Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist regime to the permissive attitude toward pleasure that burst forth in May 1968. During this period, Fishman argues, subtle modulations in family relations and in sexual norms incubated a more …
An Effective and Affective History of Colonial Law
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Moral Economies of Corruption: State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria
all made sharp comments that made me reconsider key aspects of my argument.The anonymous readers for Duke University Press and my editor, Miriam Angress, have vastly improved the book with their careful attention to my argument and its implications.With such interlocutors, this book should be much better than it is; the fault for that, of course, is mine rather than theirs.I owe many people thanks for personal and professional support over the ye…
Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France by Naomi Davidson
Only Muslim: Embodying in Twentieth-Century by Naomi Davidson. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012. xi, 299 pp. $25.95 US (paper). For more than two decades, French public discourse has cast a challenge to French secularism. Journalists and politicians have taken headscarves and halal meat, prayers in public streets and requests for women's-only swimming pool hours, evidence that recent immigrants to France, especially from North Africa, pose …
When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy
La Responsabilité De L'écrivain - About Gisèle Sapiro, La Responsabilité de l'écrivain: Littérature, droit et morale en France (xixe-xxie siècle) (Paris, Le seuil, 2011)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920
How did marriage come to be seen as the foundation and guarantee of social stability in Third Republic France? In Sexing the Citizen, Judith Surkis shows how masculine sexuality became central to the making of a republican social order. Marriage, Surkis argues, affirmed the citizen's masculinity, while also containing and controlling his desires. This ideal offered a specific response to the problems-individualism, democratization, and rapid tech…
Carnival Balls and Penal Codes: Body Politics in July Monarchy France
Research Article| April 01 2011 Carnival Balls and Penal Codes: Body Politics in July Monarchy France Judith Surkis Judith Surkis Judith Surkis is currently a Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study. A historian of modern France, she has published Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920 (Cornell, 2006) and is completing Scandalous Subjects: Intimacy and Indecency in France and French Algeria,…
Sex, Sovereignty, and Transnational Intimacies
issue, this journal featured an AHR Forum on how histories of sexuality can and do contribute to the writing of transnational history. 1 Does the current forum's focus on postwar France indicate a reversion to an exclusively national frame?Not exactly.By attending to recent transnational and international concerns, this collection of essays recasts "French" history, illustrating that a national story cannot be isolated from broader contexts, whic…
Ethics and Violence: Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and the Algerian War
This article situates Simone de Beauvoir's involvement in the case of Djamila Boupacha, an FLN militant who was tortured by the French Army in 1960, in the context of the repeated revelations of torture in course of the Algerian War. Drawing on Beauvoir's writings on ethics and other contemporary denunciations of torture, the essay illuminates how Beauvoir worked to overcome wide-spread public “indifference.” By focusing public attention on the A…
Hymenal Politics: Marriage, Secularism, and French Sovereignty
This essay situates a recent French marriage annulment scandal in the context of debates about Islam, gender, and immigration; the relationship between the secularism of French law and Catholic marriage law; and the history of Muslim law under French colonial rule
Introduction: Transgressing Boundaries
A public scandal that followed the 2005 exhibition of Tanja Ostojić's remake of Courbet's L'origine du monde revealed the contemporary sexual politics of the European Union. This essay analyzes how what was at stake in this "obscenity" was not the sex but rather the sexualization of Europe that the politics of immigration entail. This explicit representation uncovered the logic of inclusion and exclusion that defines today the boundaries of sexua…
Forum: The Idea of the Self
The Idea of the Self is a book which really made me think. Within the history of selfhood that it sets forth (and within which it is inscribed), this is precisely what a book about the self should do. For, as Seigel explains, reflectivity—our ability as selves to think critically about our own positions—is a constitutive, and pre-eminent, aspect or dimension of our selfhood. His work raises important questions about the normative implications of …
Hymenal Politics: Marriage, Secularism, and French Sovereignty
This essay situates a recent French marriage annulment scandal in the context of debates about Islam, gender, and immigration; the relationship between the secularism of French law and Catholic marriage law; and the history of Muslim law under French colonial rule
Ethics and Violence: Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and the Algerian War
This article situates Simone de Beauvoir's involvement in the case of Djamila Boupacha, an FLN militant who was tortured by the French Army in 1960, in the context of the repeated revelations of torture in course of the Algerian War. Drawing on Beauvoir's writings on ethics and other contemporary denunciations of torture, the essay illuminates how Beauvoir worked to overcome wide-spread public “indifference.” By focusing public attention on the A…
Custody Battles and the Politics of Franco-Algerian Divorce, 1962-1992
Based on previously untapped archives, this article explores Franco-Algerian custody battles in order to offer a new perspective on the economic, political, and emotional history of decolonization. These disputes both personified and gendered contests over sovereignty in the wake of the 1970s economic crisis: French courts granted the custody of children to the mothers, while Algerian law, partially based on Muslim law, privileged the fathers. Di…
Introduction: Transgressing Boundaries
A public scandal that followed the 2005 exhibition of Tanja Ostojić's remake of Courbet's L'origine du monde revealed the contemporary sexual politics of the European Union. This essay analyzes how what was at stake in this "obscenity" was not the sex but rather the sexualization of Europe that the politics of immigration entail. This explicit representation uncovered the logic of inclusion and exclusion that defines today the boundaries of sexua…
Family Law Matters
This essay analyzes how new histories of family law help to dismantle developmentalist accounts of legal, economic, and political modernity. Far from being backwaters, they have recently emerged as sites of theoretical and practical innovation. Recombining methodologies from genealogy to social reproduction theory and psychoanalysis, they do more than denaturalize categories, destabilize familiar narratives, and demonstrate ideological contradict…
Forum: The Idea of the Self
The Idea of the Self is a book which really made me think. Within the history of selfhood that it sets forth (and within which it is inscribed), this is precisely what a book about the self should do. For, as Seigel explains, reflectivity—our ability as selves to think critically about our own positions—is a constitutive, and pre-eminent, aspect or dimension of our selfhood. His work raises important questions about the normative implications of …
Sex, Sovereignty, and Transnational Intimacies
issue, this journal featured an AHR Forum on how histories of sexuality can and do contribute to the writing of transnational history. 1 Does the current forum's focus on postwar France indicate a reversion to an exclusively national frame?Not exactly.By attending to recent transnational and international concerns, this collection of essays recasts "French" history, illustrating that a national story cannot be isolated from broader contexts, whic…
Ethics and Violence: Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and the Algerian War
This article situates Simone de Beauvoir's involvement in the case of Djamila Boupacha, an FLN militant who was tortured by the French Army in 1960, in the context of the repeated revelations of torture in course of the Algerian War. Drawing on Beauvoir's writings on ethics and other contemporary denunciations of torture, the essay illuminates how Beauvoir worked to overcome wide-spread public “indifference.” By focusing public attention on the A…
Hymenal Politics: Marriage, Secularism, and French Sovereignty
This essay situates a recent French marriage annulment scandal in the context of debates about Islam, gender, and immigration; the relationship between the secularism of French law and Catholic marriage law; and the history of Muslim law under French colonial rule
Introduction: Transgressing Boundaries
A public scandal that followed the 2005 exhibition of Tanja Ostojić's remake of Courbet's L'origine du monde revealed the contemporary sexual politics of the European Union. This essay analyzes how what was at stake in this "obscenity" was not the sex but rather the sexualization of Europe that the politics of immigration entail. This explicit representation uncovered the logic of inclusion and exclusion that defines today the boundaries of sexua…
Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920
How did marriage come to be seen as the foundation and guarantee of social stability in Third Republic France? In Sexing the Citizen, Judith Surkis shows how masculine sexuality became central to the making of a republican social order. Marriage, Surkis argues, affirmed the citizen's masculinity, while also containing and controlling his desires. This ideal offered a specific response to the problems-individualism, democratization, and rapid tech…
Carnival Balls and Penal Codes: Body Politics in July Monarchy France
Research Article| April 01 2011 Carnival Balls and Penal Codes: Body Politics in July Monarchy France Judith Surkis Judith Surkis Judith Surkis is currently a Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study. A historian of modern France, she has published Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920 (Cornell, 2006) and is completing Scandalous Subjects: Intimacy and Indecency in France and French Algeria,…
When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy
La Responsabilité De L'écrivain - About Gisèle Sapiro, La Responsabilité de l'écrivain: Littérature, droit et morale en France (xixe-xxie siècle) (Paris, Le seuil, 2011)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France by Naomi Davidson
Only Muslim: Embodying in Twentieth-Century by Naomi Davidson. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012. xi, 299 pp. $25.95 US (paper). For more than two decades, French public discourse has cast a challenge to French secularism. Journalists and politicians have taken headscarves and halal meat, prayers in public streets and requests for women's-only swimming pool hours, evidence that recent immigrants to France, especially from North Africa, pose …
Moral Economies of Corruption: State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria
all made sharp comments that made me reconsider key aspects of my argument.The anonymous readers for Duke University Press and my editor, Miriam Angress, have vastly improved the book with their careful attention to my argument and its implications.With such interlocutors, this book should be much better than it is; the fault for that, of course, is mine rather than theirs.I owe many people thanks for personal and professional support over the ye…
An Effective and Affective History of Colonial Law
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930
S arah F ishman . From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France
Sarah Fishman’s From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France grapples with a persistent historical puzzle—namely, how postwar French society shifted from the oppressive Catholic moralism of Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist regime to the permissive attitude toward pleasure that burst forth in May 1968. During this period, Fishman argues, subtle modulations in family relations and in sexual norms incubated a more …
Minor Threats and the Biopolitics of Youth
In contemporary France, the problem of “immigrant youth”—French citizens, born to migrant parents, often from former French colonies—symbolizes the question of minority and national belonging. The development and disciplining of immigrants have, for several decades, formed the focus of sociological, anthropological, as well as political discourse, especially in the wake of the 2005 urban riots. Considering their case can help us to understand the…
Family Law Matters
This essay analyzes how new histories of family law help to dismantle developmentalist accounts of legal, economic, and political modernity. Far from being backwaters, they have recently emerged as sites of theoretical and practical innovation. Recombining methodologies from genealogy to social reproduction theory and psychoanalysis, they do more than denaturalize categories, destabilize familiar narratives, and demonstrate ideological contradict…
Custody Battles and the Politics of Franco-Algerian Divorce, 1962-1992
Based on previously untapped archives, this article explores Franco-Algerian custody battles in order to offer a new perspective on the economic, political, and emotional history of decolonization. These disputes both personified and gendered contests over sovereignty in the wake of the 1970s economic crisis: French courts granted the custody of children to the mothers, while Algerian law, partially based on Muslim law, privileged the fathers. Di…
À la Carte: Potential Histories in Katia Kameli's Le Roman algérien
How is it possible to imagine history beyond a nation-state narrative? Franco-Algerian artist Katia Kameli's multipart experimental documentary, Le Roman algérien , offers more than one answer to this question. Taking a popular outdoor postcard kiosk in the center of Algiers as her point of departure, Kameli collects a "polyphonie de récits" prompted by its display. Across three successive "chapters", her alternative national "novel" relays perso…
The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean
Law (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Politics (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · French Historical and Cultural Studies (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · North African History and Literature (6 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis (4 works)