Une histoire revisitée. Le pays des fourrure: du castor à Brigitte Bardot

This current research project centers on women in furs. The author insists on this conjunction « In ». She is not simply analyzing women and fur; rather she analyzes how the contact between (female and animal) skin, between skin and fur, facilitates the construction of a critical history of the nation. These points of contact reassert the importance of material and economic culture in the construction of the national, a nation understood less as a geographic constituency than as a sexualized space. The author works from two central concepts : fur ladles and the beaver. The project is informed by two intertwined questions : how does the nation work ? And how to think sexuality outside of its materiality; outside the boundaries and limits of the body as the sole marker of the sexualized subject? More than a metaphor, this approach challenges a traditional understanding of the historical archive and redefines sexuality as a locus of national formation.