Laure Bereni ([email protected]) Institute of French Studies, NYU “Accounting for French Feminism’s Blindness to Difference: The Inescapable Legacy of Universalism” Paper presented at the NYU Symposium: “Feminism/s without Borders: Perspectives from France and the United States” Friday, October 16th, 2009 Working paper Let me begin with the question I had in mind when I was preparing this talk, which was how French feminists have addressed the issue of differences among women since the Second wave. And actually, I am going to give an answer to that initial question very quick, as a starting point of my talk today: it is striking that French feminism has predominantly not taken into account the interweaving between gender and other power relations, and especially the overlap between gender and race/ethnicity. A striking illustration of this persistent feminist blindness to differences was given recently with the so-­‐called headscarf affair in 2004 (Guénif-Souilamas & Macé
2004; Nordmann 2004; Ezekiel 2006; Scott 2007). During the controversies triggered by the legal ban on the wearing of religious signs in public schools, a large majority of the feminist movement considered the headscarf as an absolute sign of male domination, and viewed the authoritarian reaffirmation of French secularism – “laïcité” – as the unique way for women’s emancipation. Now I am not saying that all the French self-­‐
identified feminists favored the ban. Some feminist groups, especially from the younger generations, and a couple of prominent feminist intellectuals, including the Second wave theorist Christine Delphy (Delphy 2006), claimed that equating feminism and Republican laïcité had the effect of imposing an ethnicized, and even racist definition of feminism, placing young Muslim girls of Arabic origin out of the realm of the feminist subject. But these dissonant voices were violently dismissed as non feminist by the gate-­‐keepers of the movement. They were mainly considered as drawing on anti-­‐racist, as opposed to feminist, political foundations. In other words, the debate was framed by dominant feminist voices as a dilemma between feminism and antiracism (Delphy 2006). Taking 1
racism into account was widely viewed as working outside, or in this instance against feminism. For this talk, the question I have been trying to answer is: how can we make sense of this persistent misrecognition of differences by the dominant voices of the French feminist movement? For sure, the institutionalization undergone by the French women’s movement in the past 30 years might have played a role in the promotion of this unitary female subject. But it cannot account by itself for this process. The lack of consideration of intersectionality is not limited to the mainstream, institutionalized wings of the French feminist movement. In fact, a large part of the radical wing of the movement has been sharing the same inability to articulate a feminist project taking into account power relations among women (Schor 1995; Lloyd 1998; Bourcier 2003; GuénifSouilamas & Macé 2004; Dorlin & Bessin 2005; Hamel 2005; Lépinard 2005; Lépinard
2007a; Scott 2007; Bassel & Lloyd 2008). During the headscarf controversy, liberal and radical feminists alike predominantly converged around the same universal definition of women’s emancipation, viewed as incompatible with the wearing of the Islamic headscarf. What I would like to suggest here is that one of the ways to account for the inability of the French feminist movement to think differences among women is to examine its strong allegiance to the dominant universalism that strongly pervades the French contemporary left, all the way from its more moderate, republican, tendencies, to its more radical, Marxist, tendencies (Schor 1995; Scott 2004). The two major strands of French feminism, that I will identify here as radical and liberal, share a complex, ambivalent relationship with political universalism. On the one hand, the history of both radical and liberal feminism for the past 30 years, in line with a long history of feminist protest (Scott 1996), has consisted in unmasking the false universalism that hides the male political subject. However, on the other hand, these two tendencies have in the same move reaffirmed their loyalty to the universalistic framework, through universalizing the category of women. What I would like to suggest here is that this dominant feminist commitment to universalism should be understood as the sign that universalism still plays out as a dominant constraint on any attempt to redefine equality in the French universe of 2
political discourse (Jenson 1998; Scott 2004). In other words, this commitment to a universal vision of gender has been a discursively constrained response to the gender blindness of the French political left, whether Marxist or republican. 1.Radical feminism and the universalism of patriarchy Let me start with radical feminism. Contemporary radical feminism in France is still strongly shaped by the legacy of the second wave. The dominant figures and voices of the radical movement are those activists and theorists who were at the forefront of the Second wave feminist movement, the “Mouvement de liberation des femmes” of the 1970s. More precisely, the contemporary radical movement is deeply influenced by the intellectual legacy of “materialist feminism” (féminisme matérialiste), whose most prominent theorists include Christine Delphy and Monique Wittig (Delphy 1984;
Guillaumin 1996 [1978]; Wittig 2000 [1981]). One of the main characteristics of materialist feminism was its commitment to a radically anti-­‐essentialist and constructivist stance on gender relations, in contrast with the current of difference (“courant de la différence”), which made a strong case for the valorization of sexual difference and femininity, and whose main figures included Cixous and Irigaray. I should precise that this courant de la différence, which is strangely known in the US academia as embodying “French feminism”, has actually had a very limited influence on the French feminist movement and even a smaller influence on its radical wing (Moses 1992; Delphy 1995; Adkins & Leonard 1996; Moses 1998; Ezekiel 2002). From its emergence in the 1970s on, the new wave radical feminism has been characterized by an ambivalent relationship with Marxism. The movement was born in the aftermath of May 68 students and workers’ protests, and it attracted a large number of female activists from far-­‐left organizations. The French radical second wave movement was both a rejection, and a re-­‐appropriation of, Marxist thought (Jenson 1988;
Picq 1993; Moses 1998; Lépinard 2007a). On the one hand, radical feminists denounced the false universality of the Marxist revolutionary subject. They contested the Marxist idea that women’s liberation would be an automatic consequence of the workers’ revolution, and made the case for the autonomy of the struggle against patriarchy besides the struggle against capitalism. But on the other hand, radical feminists strongly drew on Marxist thought to build their theory of women’s oppression. French 3
materialist feminists considered women and men as two antagonist classes produced by the patriarchal system, a specific system of material oppression distinct from capitalism but to a large extent based on analogue mechanisms. Radical feminists defined the gender divide in close analogy with the class divide. Strikingly, this analogical definition of class and gender, which was elaborated in reaction to the denial of gender domination within the dominant workers’ movement at that time, brought into the feminist movement the same deadlock that affected the workers’ movement. The “class” of women has been defined as resulting from women’s common dominated position in a coherent patriarchal order. In this radical feminist framework reproducing the dominant Marxist conception of power relations, one could hardly consider women as being at the same time dominated and dominant. In this conception, no room has been left for thinking that there might be different experiences of sexism, mediated by racism and class domination, and leading to conflicting definitions of women’s oppression. So this conception has led to the homogenization of the category of women, even if it relied on a strong anti-­‐essentialist stance. The “other” power relationships besides gender subordination (such as racism, homophobia, class domination…) have been acknowledged by a number of radical second wave feminists as being the object of important political struggles, but these struggles have tended to be located besides, and therefore outside, the realm of feminist politics. While in the US the universal definition of women asserted by the first new wave feminist theories has been revised under the criticism of women of color, lesbians and non-­‐Western feminists (hooks 1981; Mohanty 1984; Hill Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1991;
Volpp 1996), the universal stance on gender has remained persistent through years in radical French feminism. And my suggestion is that one of the reasons of this persistent allegiance to this universal definition of women is to be found in the strong pervasiveness of the universalistic Marxist framework within the dominant radical left since the 1970s. Radical feminists have been faced with the workers’ and antiracist movements’ ignorance of their critiques of the universal revolutionary political subject. As a consequence, radical feminists have been pushed to maintain their universal definition of gender oppression. In other words, universalizing gender has been the radical feminists’ response to the gender-­‐blindness of the dominant French Marxist left through years. 4
2.Liberal feminism: universalizing the sexual difference Let me turn now to the second dominant wing of contemporary French feminism, which is liberal feminism. As I will argue, it is trapped in a similarly ambivalent relationship with dominant political universalism. Although the term “liberal” is scarcely used among the moderate wing of the French feminist movement1, I will use the term “liberal feminism” to designate a set of women’s groups that work in the continuity of, or within mainstream political institutions: I am talking about mainstream autonomous women’s organizations, women’s sections within dominant political parties, and women’s rights agencies within the State, which have developed since the 1970s in France. This liberal wing of feminism, promoting a moderate agenda in line with previous generations of reformist feminists, has gained a new momentum from the 1990s on. The campaign for gender parity (equal representation of men and women in political bodies) constituted a decisive step in this new impetus of liberal feminism (Bereni 2007). The campaign for parity was also a moment during which liberal feminism crucially redefined its political subject, the category of women (Lépinard 2007a). Indeed, this campaign was the starting point of a renewed relationship of liberal feminism with dominant republican universalism. In the same way as the radical new wave of feminism had criticized the false universalism of the Marxist left, the movement for gender parity was a decisive occasion for liberal feminists to challenge the gender blindness of republican universalism. As Joan Scott and other students of the parity campaign have shown (Scott 1997; Bereni & 1
In contrast with the United States, in France the term “liberal” commonly refers to free marketeconomy rather than to progressive politics, and is thus more associated with the right than with leftwing ideologies. For this reason, the term has not been successful among the “moderate” wing of the
French second wave feminist movement. It seems useful, though, to use the term liberal as an
analytical category, since there are a number of similarities between what has been called in France
“moderate” or “reformist” feminism, and the liberal wings of other women’s movements
internationally.
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Lépinard 2004; Scott 2004; Scott 2005; Lépinard 2007b), parity advocates – in line with their suffragist predecessors in the first part of the twentieth century – grounded their claim on a criticism of the gender bias of the Republic. Republican universalism, they argued, had long served to mask and legitimize a political life seized by and for male citizens, rendering the women’s presence in the public realm illegitimate. For liberal feminists who enrolled in the parity campaign, formal equality between the sexes, which had been secured since the 1944 law enfranchising women, was only the first step of women’s political inclusion. Parity campaigners argued that the universalistic rejection of gender out of the political realm was working to maintain male domination. A true political equality could only be secured through recognizing gender difference within the definition of political representation. In their attempt to unveil the male bias of republican universalism, parity campaigners faced powerful obstacles. Orthodox republicans dismissed gender parity as an unacceptable breach in the principles of the nation. They argued that republican universalism could only recognize abstract citizens and representatives, and did not allow acknowledging any difference in the political sphere. Such a claim, they asserted, pertained to the supposedly American multicultural conception of democracy, and was incompatible with the very essence of the French Republic (Fassin 1999; Bereni &
Lépinard 2004; Scott 2005). Faced with such discursive obstacles in the name of universalism, parity campaigners’ response was to assert their loyalty to the dominant universal discourse of the Republic. Gender difference, they argued, unlike differences based on race, religion, class, or sexuality, was the only “universal difference”, cutting across all societies and groups. Although the meaning of this difference could vary in space and time, the divide between the sexes was, in their view, a universal divide. Thus, gender difference, they argued, should be the only difference to be fully recognized within the universal definition of the political subject. Opposing the universality of gender to the contingency of all other differences, parity campaigners managed to dismiss the accusation that gender parity reform would lead to the generalization of identity politics in France. This dominant parity discourse has worked toward further obliterating the power relations among women in the feminist movement. Gender has been considered 6
as the primary divide, taking precedence over any other axes of subordination, which have been thereby rejected outside the category of women. No wonder that during the headscarf debate, in 2004, the majority of liberal feminists favored the ban in the name of the obvious precedence of the feminist battle over the antiracist struggle, considering these two battles as exclusive from one another, and obliterating the effects of racism on the definition of women’s interests. In the same period, and in the same political logic, many liberal feminists protested against the new antidiscrimination legal framework imposed in France by the European Union legislation, on the ground that gender should not be considered at the same level as other discriminations. Therefore, in the same way as radical feminists’ definition of the category of women has been a response to the dominant universalist framework of the French Marxist left, the manner in which liberal feminists have defined gender difference should be understood as a response to the discursive constraints imposed by the republican universalist ideology on any attempt to (re)define equality politics. In conclusion, it seems as if the dominant currents of the French feminist movement might not be able to think the interweaving of gender and other power relations without an overhaul of the dominant universalist frames that strongly inform the French left’s political frames, whether Marxist or republican. 7
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