Sex, Law and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930

Judith Surkis’s extraordinary book accomplishes several things at once. First, and most centrally, it demonstrates the ways that presumptions about sex and sexuality served as an organizing principle for the elaboration of civil law in French Algeria during the first century after the conquest. This argument has important implications for our understanding of the ways that particular ideas about family and sexuality have historically been baked into law codes, a subject that has been much discussed in the field of comparative legal studies. Second, Surkis’s book connects this French legal discourse about sex not only to discussions of the Algerian family’s place in the social order with regard to marriage, inheritance, paternity etc. but also to the often unstable definitions of French sovereignty that served to organize the colonial regime 1830. The instability that complicated legal definitions of sovereignty during this period, Surkis argues, stemmed from the contradictions between the...