Table Of ContentBeyond French Feminisms
Beyond French Feminisms
Debates on Women, Politics,
and Culture in France, 1981–2001
Edited by
Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin,
and Isabelle de Courtivron
BEYONDFRENCHFEMINISMS
Copyright © Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin, Isabelle de Courtivron, 2003.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-0-312-24019-6
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ISBN 978-0-312-24040-0 ISBN 978-1-137-09514-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-09514-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beyond French feminisms : debates on women, politics, and culture in France,
1980–2001 / edited by Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin, and Isabelle de Courtivron.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Feminism—France. 2. Women—France—Social conditions—20th century. 3.
I. Célestin, Roger. II. DalMolin, Eliane Françoise. III. De Courtivron, Isabelle.
HQ1613.B44 2003
305.42’0944—dc21
2002072829
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Letra Libre, Inc.
First edition: January 2003
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Transferred to Digital Printing in 2010.
We dedicate this book
to the memory of
Elaine Marks and Françoise Pasquier,
and to the future of Cassandra, Lara, and Sophie.
Contents
Permissions ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin, and Isabelle de Courtivron
I. POLITICS AND SOCIETY
1. Sylviane Agacinski
The Turning Point of Feminism:
Against the Effacement of Women 17
2. Pierre Bourdieu
Symbolic Violence 23
3. Eric Fassin
The Politics of PaCS in a Transatlantic Mirror:
Same-Sex Unions and Sexual Difference in France Today 27
4. Christine Fauré
Women’s History after the Law on Parity 39
5. Geneviève Fraisse
Exclusive Democracy: A French Paradigm 51
6. Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar
The Headscarf and the Republic 61
7. Benoîte Groult
The Feminization of Professional Names:
An Outrage against Masculinity 69
8. Jeanine Mossuz-Lavau
The Politics of Reproduction 77
9. Véronique Nahoum-Grappe
Sexualities on Parade 87
10. Chiennes de garde of the World, Unite!
The Bitch Manifesto, March 8, 1999 93
11. Mireille Rosello
New Gendered Mosaics: Their Mothers, the Gauls 97
12. Mariette Sineau
Paritéin Politics: From a Radical Idea to Consensual Reform 113
II. ARTS AND LITERATURE
13. Odile Cazenave
Francophone Women Writers in France in the Nineties 129
14. Whitney Chadwick
Body as Subject: Four Contemporary Women Artists 143
15. Hélène Cixous
Unmasked! 155
16. Catherine Cusset
The Nieces of Marguerite: Novels by Women
at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century 161
17. Marie Etienne
The Doorway of the World:
Women in Contemporary French-Language Poetry 177
18. Anne Gillain
Profile of a Filmmaker: Catherine Breillat 201
19. Geneviève Sellier
French Women Making Films in the 1990s 213
III. FRANCE—USA
20. Debate. Women: A French Singularity? 225
I. Elisabeth Badinter. “The French Exception”
II. Joan Wallach Scott. “Vive la difference!”
III. Mona Ozouf. “Counting the Days”
21. Judith Feher-Gurewich
Lacan and American Feminism: Who Is the Analyst? 239
22. Jean-Philippe Mathy
The Symptom of “American-Style Feminism” 247
23. Claire Goldberg Moses
Made in America: “French Feminism” in Academia 261
About the Contributors 285
Bibliography 289
Permissions
We gratefully acknowledge the following organizations and publishers for the per-
mission to reprint the articles listed, which in some cases were modified, updated,
and translated for this volume:
Taylor & Francis/Routledge (U.K.), Sites: The Journal of 20th-century/contemporary French
studies, revue d’études françaises(4.1, Spring 2000, Women/Femmes)
———.“The Turning Point of Feminism: Against the Effacement of Women,” Syl-
viane Agacinski
———.“The Feminization of Professional Names: An Outrage against Masculin-
ity,” Benoîte Groult
———.“Body as Subject: Four Contemporary Women Artists,” Whitney Chadwick
Mariette Sineau
———.“Paritéin Politics: From a Radical Idea to Consensual Reform”
Taylor & Francis/Routledge (New York) 1998, Stigmata
———.“Unmasked!” Hélène Cixous
Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique, 1995, De l’égalité des sexes,ed. Michel
de Manassein
———.“Symbolic Violence,” Pierre Bourdieu
Seuil (Paris), Pouvoir. Femmes en politique82, 1998
———.“Exclusive Democracy: A French Paradigm,” Geneviève Fraisse
Découverte (Paris), 1995, Le foulard et la république
———.“The Headscarf and the Republic,” Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khos-
rokhavar
Esprit(Paris), March-April 2001
———.“Sexualities on Parade,” Véronique Nahoum-Grappe
Gallimard (Paris) Le Débat87 (November/December 1995)
———.“The French Exception,” Elisabeth Badinter
———.“Counting the Days,” Mona Ozouf
———.“Vive la différence,” Joan Scott. (The version contained in this volume is
the original English version; the essay previously appeared in French in the same
issue of Le Débat.)
Feminist Studies24.2 (summer 1998), University of Maryland
———. “Made in America: ‘French Feminism’ in Academia,” Claire Goldberg
Moses
The Manifesto of the Chiennes de Garde is available as public domain on the
Worldwide Web (http://www.chiennesdegarde.org).
Acknowledgments
We are extremely grateful to Margaret Colvin and Audrey Sartiaux for their effi-
cient and always good-humored assistance. At the University of Connecticut, we
also thank David Herzberger, Head of the Department of Modern and Classical
Languages, for his support of our work in general and for his commitment to this
volume in particular. At MIT our thanks go to Philip Khoury, Dean of the School of
Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, for his generous support of this project. At
Palgrave/St. Martin’s, we were fortunate to work with Karen Wolny, who initially
took on the project, and with Kristi Long, who took over as our editor; Meg Weaver
and Erin Chan were superlative production editors, and Annjeanette Kern a no less
superlative copyeditor; Roee Raz was, throughout, a patient, efficient, and under-
standing editorial assistant. We thank them all.
This work, published as part of the program of aid for publication, received support from
the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy
in the United States.
Introduction
Roger Célestin,
Eliane DalMolin,
Isabelle de Courtivron
From the 1970s to the 1990s
The “beyond” in the title of this book is not meant to indicate that women’s issues
have been resolved in France, or elsewhere for that matter, and that the concept of
feminism is no longer needed and can begin to wither away like the proverbial state.
Rather, it aims to stress a number of new phenomena that illustrate the differences
between recent debates about women and gender in France and those that took
place in the 1970s, which became known in the United States as “French feminisms.”
What the essays in this collection also reveal, however, are the culturally specific
continuities between these recent developments and the French feminisms of three
decades ago.
Today, many would agree with the analyses made by Claire Goldberg Moses and
by Christine Delphy, among others, that “Made-in-America French Feminism” was
in large part a construct of Anglo-American academics during the late 1970s and
early 1980s.1 Indeed, the abstract work of theorists influenced by psychoanalytic
theory and literary deconstruction such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce
Irigaray did not represent the much broader activities occurring in the French
women’s movement at the time. This body of work did, however, reflect an original
and culturally specific approach to theorizing the effacement of women. The con-
troversial nature of concepts such as l’écriture féminine accounted for a great deal of in-
tellectual excitement on some U.S. campuses, in part because academics already
steeped in “French theory” were drawn to the philosophical, literary, and psychoan-
alytical approach of a small but provocative group of writers and intellectuals. These
“French imports” also caught the imagination in ways that battles for abortion rights
and rape laws did not, insofar as these were more familiar to American feminist con-
cerns and practices. The concrete efforts that were being made to change real—legal,
medical, and social—conditions for French women were thus somewhat neglected in
academic circles. By the mid-eighties, however, most of the writings about sexual dif-
férence had fallen out of fashion in France, much sooner, in fact, than they did in the
United States. Nevertheless, their impact should not be discounted for they point to
a cultural constant that has marked French debates about women historically and
that is still very much present in today’s discussions among French feminists. In this
respect, the arguments around l’écriture féminineof the 1970s are not as unconnected
