The good prince or the good mother: Reassessing the question of gender in Rousseau’s political theory

The article argues that Rousseau's fairy tale 'La Reine Fantasque' (1754-1756) must be read in connection with his theory of government; doing so clarifies the significance of the gender metamorphoses he narrates. Engaging with scholarship on Rousseau's oeuvre and gender, economic and family transformations between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, the essay argues that this tale should be understood as a fictional laboratory for the construction of a new kind of governmental agent. This new governmental agent was a feminised and maternalised subject whose power was passive and merely administrative, thus allowing a peculiar coalition between the economico-political archives of the Reason of State, the theory of sovereign power and a new paradigm of economic governmentality. This article demonstrates that Rousseau was interested in the construction of motherhood, and its relationship to political theory, long before Emile.