In Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, Isabel V. Hull argues that the philosophical and legal arguments surrounding sexuality, in terms of what were legal and illegal, moral and immoral, sexual relations, was a key element to the development of political identities in post-enlightenment Germany. She draws most of her evidence from various Bavarian legal codes, as well as the writings of influential thinkers, such as Johann van Justi and Immanual Kant and political reformers like Anselm Feuerbach and Napoleon. Using these sources, Hull concludes that the legal codes as well as the social pressure exuded by a burgeoning civil society formed a conceptualization of citizenship that was based on heterosexual relations within marriage. In effect, Hull's book demonstrates that rather than existing in separate social and analytical sphere, sexuality was fundamentally connected to political issues. While her prime interest is the relationship between sexuality and politics, her secondary arguments are just as important. In analyzing local and national laws and practices, Hull concludes that the 18th century was not a period of institutional centralization; local governments on the municipal and provincial level were still permitted considerable leeway in enforcing and developing the policies that regulated their populations. Also, she collapses the distinction between a public and a private sphere, arguing that especially when considering the importance of bedroom behavior to political matters, the private was public and vice versa. In this case she is directly challenging Jurgen Habermas' early theoretical distinction between the public and private. Additionally, she cites the growth of a civil society that pressured the official domain of the state as a key step in Germany's overall political transformation. Hull argues that the civil society's dissoanate voice debated and shaped enlightenment- inspired ideas, especially those regarding sexuality and citizenship.
In making her argument, Hull builds on some of the theoretical models advanced by Michel Foucault in the History of Sexuality Vol. 1. Firstly, she refutes the notion of sexual repression during the era, presenting the various debates surrounding masturbation, the sexual nature of men and women, as well as "deviant" sexual behavior (homosexuality, bestiality etc) as clear evidence that bedroom behavior was a primary subject of a larger public/political debate on citizenship. Moreover, Hull presents the legal/philosophical debates surrounding sexuality and gendered as serving the same "rationalizing" function in German society as scientia sexualis that, according to Foucault, legitimated the discussion and exploration of sexuality throughout the western world during the supposedly "repressed" Victorian era. However, while she clearly utilizes post-modern theoretical models, Hull is not ready to give up the conscious subject as a major factor in the development of gendered sexual/political standards. One of the key turning points in her narrative occurs when legislators and thinkers recognized that is was virtually impossible to police behavior, legal and illegal, in the bedchamber and thus actively shifted their regulatory ambitions to the one public sexual act: marriage.