FOREWORD
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
The prefaces, the acknowledgments, and the first twenty-two chapters are from Antoinette Fouque, Il y a deux sexes: Essais de féminologie, revised and augmented edition (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).
3. For the significance of these two dates, see chapter 1, pp. 1–2, and chapter 19, pp. 152–53.—T
RANS.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
1. The Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, or Women’s Liberation Movement, often referred to by its acronym MLF, was founded in October 1968.—T
RANS.
2. Psychanalyse et Politique (Psychoanalysis and Politics), known informally as Psych et Po, was founded by Antoinette Fouque at the beginning of the Movement.—T
RANS.
3. See chapter 2, pp. 25–26. In French, this term plays on the similarity between the words
génialité, “genius,” and
génitalité, “genitality.”—T
RANS.
4. As Serge Leclaire put it in
Rompre les charmes (Paris: InterÉditions, 1981), 233–34.
5. Chapters 20–22, plus “Tant qu’il y aura des femmes,” which has not been included in the present English-language edition; see Antoinette Fouque,
Il y a deux sexes (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 273–80.—T
RANS.
6. Comparable to the Velvet Revolution once advocated by Vaclav Havel in the hope that love and peace might replace hatred and war.
The French révolution de soi(e) is a revolution of the self (soi), nonviolent and as soft as silk (soie).—TRANS.
8. It should be noted that the French word
libéralisme strongly connotes giving free rein to market forces.—T
RANS.
9. See chapter 19, p. 175.
10. The law of May 4, 2002, allowing the transmission of the mother’s surname has been revised, its scope limited, and its application postponed.
11. See the appeal made by
Elle to President Chirac on “women’s rights and the Islamic veil”: “
Elle s’engage!” Elle, December 8, 2003, p. 9.
12. “Spare us the complaint about the slippery slope toward communitarianism,” wrote Michel Rocard.
L’Express, June 20, 1996.
The French term communautarisme is often used pejoratively to designate a form of ethnocentrism that places a higher value on the ethnic or minority group than on the individual or the larger society.—TRANS.
13. Article 75 of the 1958 Constitution.
14. As early as 1989, the Alliance des Femmes pour la Démocratisation (the Women’s Alliance for Democratization, a nonprofit cultural-political organization founded by Antoinette Fouque in 1989), which had already voiced its support for the struggle of Algerian women against the Family Code on several occasions, held public forums in Paris and Marseille in which the absence of women from public debate on the veil was stressed: “In the debate between secularism and fundamentalism, the discussion of the veil has left women out” (assemblies held on November 22 at the Institut Océanographique in Paris and on December 8 at the Maison des Associations in Marseille). See also Michel Fize, Les
pièges de la mixité scolaire (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 2003).
15. Instituted on November 9, 1999, the Pacte civil de solidarité, or PACS, offers nonmarried couples, particularly same-sex couples, many of the legal rights (in the realms of taxation, welfare, and inheritance, for example) enjoyed by married couples.—T
RANS.
16. “La bande à mono,” as Jean-François Josselin dubbed them in a facetious article in
Le Nouvel Observateur, July 6, 1995.
The term is an allusion to Bande à Bonnot or Bonnot Gang, the designation given an anarchist group famous in the years prior to World War I for its politically motivated holdups, and to monotheism, monarchy, and monosexuality.—TRANS.
17. For a discussion of backlash, see chapter 2, p. 26. Susan Faludi has analyzed the way the exclusion of women was engineered in the U.S. following the initial victories of the women’s movement; see Susan Faludi,
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (New York: Vintage, 1993).
18. The need for this neologism was impressed upon me by the reality of the massacres of women reported day after day by the Observatoire de la Misogynie (Observatory of Misogyny) that I founded at the same time as the Alliance des femmes pour la démocratie, in 1989.
19. Amartya Sen, “One Hundred Million Women Are Missing,”
New York Review of Books 37, no. 20 (December 20, 1990): 61–66; see chapter 19.
20. Amartya Sen, “The Many Faces of Gender Inequality: When Misogyny Becomes a Health Problem,”
New Republic 225, no. 12 (September 17, 2001): 40 (35-40).
21. Reference to Primo Levi’s
If This Is a Man; see chapter 21, “If This Is a Woman.”
22.
Paris Match, November 13–19, 2003;
Marianne, January 12–18, 2004.
23. On October 9 I addressed a letter to Blandine Kriegel, special assistant to the president of the republic, to denounce this misogynist crime and to try to come up with ways to ensure that similar crimes will not be committed in the future; see chapter 22.
24. Michèle Fitoussi, “Sohane tuée par le machisme!”
Elle, October 21, 2002, p. 24.
25. François Corbara, “Brûlée vive par son compagnon,”
Le Parisien, October 1, 2003, p. 16.
26. “Chronologie,”
Le Monde, December 28, 2003.
27. A number of the texts in this volume aim to increase public attention to the growing feminization of poverty in France, in Europe, and around the world; see especially chapter 19.
28. “La précarité des familles monoparentales s’enracine,”
Le Parisien, November 5, 2003.
29. Sen, “More Than One Hundred Million Women,” p. 61.
31. See Viviane Forrester,
The Economic Horror (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
32. The Harkis were Algerians who fought on the French side in the Algerian struggle for independence. The word rhymes with
marquis, a reference to the Marquis de Sade—T
RANS.
33. See chapter 2, pp. 31–32.
35. Psychanalyse et Politique (MLF), leaflet issued in 1970.
36. Friedrich Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 26:129–276. But the “determining factor in history,” which Engels considers to be “the production and reproduction of immediate life” (p. 131) as well as the distinction he makes between “the production of means of subsistence” and “the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species” (p. 132) were to remain dead letters (see chapter 12).
37. Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty on the Path of Psycho-Analysis,”
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 17:135–43.
38. See chapter 1, pp. 4–5.
39. See chapter 3, p. 41.
40. Denis Diderot,
Éléments de Physiologie, ed. Paolo Quintili (Paris: Champion, 2004); Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert,
Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 10 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1950 [1751]).
42. Sigmund Freud,
A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses (London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987) and “Moses and Monotheism,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1964), 23:3–137.
43. Jean-Pierre Dupuy,
Le sacrifice et l’envie: Le libéralisme aux prises avec la justice sociale (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1992).
44. The French term
production de vivant has been translated as “production of living beings” when it refers to the real (production of children) and as “production of the living” when it refers to the symbolic (production in the realms of art, ideas, politics, and so on), though sometimes the real and the symbolic overlap.
45. Nancy Folbre,
De la différence des sexes en économie politique (Paris: Des femmes, 1997).
46. Jean-Joseph Goux, “Numismatiques,”
Tel Quel, no. 35 (Fall 1968): 64–89, and no. 36 (Winter 1969): 54–75,
Économie et symbolique (Paris: Seuil, 1973).
47. Gilles Lipovetsky,
La troisième femme, permanence et révolution du féminin (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); see also Fouque, “Tant qu’il y aura des femmes,” p. 273.
48. Jacques Lacan, “The Hysteric’s Question (II): What Is a Woman?” in
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 3,
The Psychoses,
1955–1956, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 179.
49. The available English translations of Euripedes do not refer to “the race of women.” Cf. Euripides,
Medea, in
Euripides I: The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Greene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983): “It is the thoughts of men that are deceitful, / Their pledges that are loose. / Story shall now turn my condition to a fair one, / Women are paid their due” (415–418, p. 73); “It would have been better far for men / To have got their children in some other way, and women / Not to have existed. Then life would have been good” (573–575, p. 77).—T
RANS.
50. In book 1, chapter 4 of
The Politics, Aristotle describes the slave as a “living instrument.” Aristotle,
The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), book 1, chapter 4, 1253b:25–30, p. 5.
51. For Freud, there are three unsustainable positions, three impossible tasks: governing, educating, and analyzing.
52. The French
un retour de femme is an untranslatable pun on the expression
retour de flamme, meaning either “sudden burst of flames” or “sudden rekindling of passion,” using the word
femme in place of
flamme, as well as a play on the expression
retour du refoulé (“return of the repressed”).—T
RANS.
54. See chapter 21, p. 190.
55. See chapter 19, pp. 154–55. Twelve exceptional women from five continents received trophies from the Alliance des Femmes: twelve exceptional French women presented each of the honorees with a jewel designed by Sonia Delaunay. The event brought together political figures, journalists, mathematicians, philosophers, creative artists, athletes, and actresses, including Simone Veil, Elena Bonner, Danielle Mitterrand, Ela Bhatt, Edith Cresson, Kanitha Wichiencharoen, Françoise Giroud, Yvonne Choquet Bruhat, Blandine Kriegel, Charlotte Perriand, Sonia Rykiel, Michèle André, Albertina Sisulu, Jeannie Longo, and Arielle Dombasle.
Alliance des
femmes 8 Mars:
Journée internationale des
femmes 1990 (Des femmes, France-U.S.A., bilingual edition, 1992). On the topic of women’s strength, see also Françoise Barret-Ducrocq and Evelyne Pisier,
Femmes en tête (Paris: Flammarion, 1997).
56. VSD, December 31,2004.
57. See Blandine Grosjean, “Liberté, égalité, maternité,”
Libération, April 29, 2003, pp. 2–4.
58. In a declaration adopted by the Assemblée générale in November 1967.—T
RANS.
59. Adopted in December 1965, effective January 1969.—T
RANS.
60. See chapter 16, p. 144.
61. Jean-Claude Michea,
Impasse Adam Smith (Paris: Climats, 1992); Hans Jonas,
The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); René Frydman,
Lettre à une mère (Paris: L’Iconoclaste, 2003).
62. Luca and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza,
The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), v (dedication).
63. See chapter 3, p. 41.
64. Cf. Marcel Gauchet,
La condition historique (Paris: Stock, 2003).
65. Cf. Peter Brown,
The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
66. See chapter 3, p. 48.
67. The word
délivrance in French refers both to childbirth and to deliverance in the sense of freedom or release.—T
RANS.
68. Erri de Luca,
Le contraire de un (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), back cover.
1. OUR MOVEMENT IS IRREVERSIBLE
Text delivered as the opening paper at the États généraux des femmes, an assembly held on March 8, 1989, at the Sorbonne on the occasion of International Women’s Day, in the year of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. See États Généraux des femmes (Paris: Des femmes, 1990): 9–21.
1. See the second preface, this volume, note 1.
2. Mouvement pour la Liberté de l’Avortement et de la Contraception (Movement for freedom of abortion and contraception), a feminist association founded in France in April 1973.—T
RANS.
3. Choisir la Cause des Femmes (Choose the cause of women), an association formed in April 1971 to denounce the criminalization of abortion.—T
RANS.
4. The law legalizing abortion under certain conditions was presented to the National Assembly by Minister of Health Simone Veil in November 1974 and adopted in January 1975.—T
RANS.
5. The French antiracist slogan “Touche pas à mon pote!” was created in the mid-1980s in a campaign by SOS Racisme to support the integration of young foreigners, especially those of North African origin.—T
RANS.
6. Gabriel Riquet de Mirabeau, speech to the National Assembly, July 21, 1789, in
Collection complète des
travaux de M.
Mirabeau l’aîné, à l’Assemblée, ed. Étienne Méjean (Paris: Veuve Lejay, 1791), p. 61.
7. Ernest Renan, “Réponse au discours de réception de M. Pasteur (27 avril 1882),”
Œuvres complètes, 10 vols. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947–1961), 1:774.
8. This term combines the French words
phallisme (“phallism” or, more commonly, “phallicism,” the worship of the phallus) and
laïcité (“secularism,” with a special emphasis on the separation of church and state).—T
RANS.
9. The Algerian Code de la Famille, adopted in 1984, set forth legislation governing familial relations in terms often drawn from Islamic law.—T
RANS.
10. In April and again in November 1989 the National Organization for Women organized mass protests in Washington, DC, in defense of women’s reproductive rights.—T
RANS.
12. In 1989 we were already engaged in long-standing debates about parity as a means and/or as a goal of true political equality. That year in particular we had tried an active approach: the Women’s Alliance for Democracy had presented two lists of candidates—the majority of them women—in the March 12 municipal elections (Paris, sixth district, and Marseille, fourth district). In 1992 I created the Club Parité 2000 (Parity Club 2000), which presented a list in the March 22 Bouches-du-Rhône regional elections.
13. I use the term
gyneconomy in reference and in deference to Élisabeth de Fontenay’s brilliant text, “Diderot gynéconome,” published in
Digraphe (1976): 29–50, and incorporated for the most part in her
Diderot, Reason and Resonance, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Braziller 1982 [1981]).
This text brings together interviews conducted by Pierre Nora and Marcel Gauchet between October 1989 and February 1990, published in April 1990 by Gallimard in the bimonthly magazine Le Débat, no. 59, pp. 122–37.
1. See the second preface, this volume, note 2.—T
RANS.
2. Or “to talk nonsense,” “bullshit.”—T
RANS.
3. Adélaïde Fouque was the founding mother of the Rougon-Macquart family to which Zola devoted a cycle of twenty novels (1852–1870).—T
RANS.
4. Le Seuil was the publishing house that brought out the works of France’s intellectual avant-garde (Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, and others). The journal of literary and social theory
Tel Quel was also published by Le Seuil.
5. The École Normale Supérieure, or Normale Sup, was created at the end of the nineteenth century as an elite state institution of higher education specializing in the training of future academics and scholars; its students are known as
normaliens.—T
RANS.
6. Université Paris VIII was founded as an experimental academic centre in Vincennes in 1969. It moved to Saint-Denis in 1980.—T
RANS.
7. A French feminist writer; several of her novels became best sellers in the 1950s and 1960s.—T
RANS.
8. To be able to keep on thinking “differently,” I had to say no to Simone de Beauvoir and to all the other women who brandished her as their intellectual authority in the name of feminism.
Les femmes s’entêtent can be translated as “Women put their feet down,” or “The Headstrong Women,” but it is also a pun on les femmes sans tête, or “headless,” that is to say, “leaderless women.”—TRANS.
9. A group of feminists from the women’s movement was organized in the fall of 1970 around the pamphlet titled For
a Revolutionary Feminist Movement.
10. The École Freudienne (Freudian School) was founded by Lacan in 1964 and dissolved by him in 1980 shortly before he died.
11. The Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne is a psychiatric hospital in Paris.—T
RANS.
12.
Le torchon brûle was the first newspaper published by the Women’s Movement (six issues between 1971 and 1973). The title can be translated as “The dishcloth is burning,” but also as “There is a running battle” or a “flare-up.” Un torchon is also a dismissive term for a newspaper (cf. the English “rag”).—T
RANS.
13. In 1971, as a protest against the criminalization of abortion, at the initiative of the MLF and a journalist from
Le Nouvel Observateur, 343 women, including a number of celebrities, signed a petition declaring that they had had abortions. The petition appeared in the national press.—T
RANS.
14. Even if we had to wait until 1982 for abortion to be reimbursed by the national health insurance system, thus making it effectively free for most women.
The law that authorized abortion in 1975 bears the name of Simone Veil, minister of health in the Giscard d’Estaing administration, who defended the law before the French government.—TRANS.
15. Left-wing writer François Maspero started his own publishing house in 1959; it became Éditions de la Découverte in 1983.—T
RANS.
16. Hélène Cixous,
Dedans (Paris: Grasset, 1969); in English as
Inside, trans. Carol Barko (New York: Schocken, 1986).
17. See, among other documents, reports on the UNESCO General Conference, twenty-fifth session (Paris, October 17-November 16, 1989), and on the annual meeting of the UN Committee to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women (New York, January 22-February 2, 1990). For newspaper coverage, see “Égalité professionelle, pas de passe-droit pour les femmes,” Les Échos, August 21, 1989; “Participation des femmes à la vie parlementaire: Un recul général,”
Profession politique, December 18, 1989; “Un bilan des plans d’égalité professionnelle,”
Le Monde, October 19, 1989; “La formation des femmes reste en plan,”
Libération, March 8, 1990; “Les statistiques de la honte,”
Le Monde, January 29, 1991.
18. A widely influential French Marxist and philosopher, Louis Althusser strangled his wife in a fit of madness.—T
RANS.
19. An autodidact interested in psychoanalytic issues, Daniel Karlin produced and cohosted (with Tony Lainé) a weekly television show about the sex lives of the French titled
L’amour en France. It aired during the 1988–89 season. The reference here is to an occasion when Karlin declared his phantasmatic identification with a man who had killed his (female) lover.—T
RANS.
20. The neologism filse is composed from
fils (son) and the feminine ending “-e”; a
filse is a daughter who identifies herself as a son.—T
RANS.
21. A terrorist group, founded in the early seventies, similar to other European commandos (such as the Italian Red Brigades or the German Red Army Faction), who proclaimed their affiliation with the far left.—T
RANS.
22. The author writes
hommosexuée, doubling the “m” to invoke the word
homme, “man.”—T
RANS.
23. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits:
A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977).
24. Albert O. Hirschman,
The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
25. Bernard Pivot was the creator and host of the influential literary television program
Apostrophes, which ran from the late 1970s until 1990. Antoinette Fouque plays on his surname to comment on his pivotal role.—T
RANS.
26. See Otto Fenichel, “The Symbolic Equation: Girl = Phallus,” in
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 18 (1949): 303–24.
27. Georges Devereux,
Baubo, la vulve mythique (Paris: Godefroy, 1983).
28. The
Bébête Show was a televised series popular in the 1980s that featured puppet caricatures of political figures. “Marchy” and “Pencassine” were derogatory feminized representations of Georges Marchais, head of the French Communist Party from 1972 to 1994, and Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right Front National party.—T
RANS.
29. See the second preface, this volume, note 14.
3. THERE ARE TWO SEXES
This text is based on a lecture given at a colloquium titled “Lectures de la différence sexuelle” (Readings of sexual difference) organized in October 1990 by the Collège international de philosophie at the initiative of the Centre de recherches en études féminines (Center for research in women’s studies) at Paris VIII. The proceedings were published as Colloque de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Des femmes, 1994); “Il y a deux sexes” appears on pp. 283-317.
1. The DES (Diplôme d’études supérieures) was a degree required of teachers in the higher education system who were preparing to take the
agrégation, a competitive examination for prospective university professors.—T
RANS.
2.
Jouissance, referring to an intense, orgasmic sensation, is sometimes translated as “enjoyment” or “pleasure,” but neither English term captures the meaning adequately; thus the French term will be retained throughout.—T
RANS.
3. See chapter 2, note 20.
4. In modern French the word
femelle is generally reserved for discussions of plant and animal life.—T
RANS.
5. Earlier this year, in Diderot’s
Éléments de Physiologie, ed. Paolo Quintili (Paris: Champion, 2004), under the heading “Raison,” I found a lovely definition of anthropoculture: “Reason, or man’s instinct, is determined by his/its organization, and by the tendencies, tastes, and aptitudes that the mother communicates to the child, who for nine months is one with her.”
6. Ever since I formulated the concept of
uterus envy, which appeared in 1970 in a leaflet that set forth a research program for Psychanalyse et Politique, I have never stopped trying to work out its political and psychoanalytical implications. This theoretical advance has recently been taken up in part by contemporary anthropology.
7. René Frydman and Julien Cohen-Solal,
Ma grossesse,
mon enfant: Le livre de la femme enceinte (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1989).
8. In French, a
non-lieu, which denotes the verdict in a case that is dismissed, carries the offensive connotation that the criminal act has “not taken place,” never happened, and is in this sense a negation of the victim’s experience of the crime.—T
RANS.
9. A subscription television channel premiered in France in 1984, supplementing the five free public channels.—T
RANS.
10. See chapter 2, note 22.
11. An allusion to a well-known book by philosopher and Marxist critic Guy Debord,
La société du spectacle (1967), in English as
The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1994).—T
RANS.
13. An allusion to the fact that the words inscribed on the pediments of city halls in France are
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.—T
RANS.
14. See chapter 5, p. 60.
15. Robert Antelme,
The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haigh and Annie Mahler (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro, 1992), p. 111.
16. For example, students in an all-female group would be called
étudiantes; however, if even one male were to join them the masculine term
étudiants would be used for the whole group.—T
RANS.
17.
Reconnaissance, a French synonym for gratitude, can be broken into morphemes roughly translatable as “rebirth together.”—T
RANS.
18. Paul Celan,
Poèmes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986).
19. Emmanuel Levinas,
Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996 [1975]), pp. 38–39.
4. D
OES P
SYCHOANALYSIS H
AVE AN A
NSWER FOR W
OMEN?
Interview with Emile Malet, “La psychanalyse a-t-elle réponse à tout?” in Passages 37 (April 1991): 16–17.
1. Paul Celan, Bremen Prize speech, in
Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), p. 13.
2. See Martin Heidegger,
What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 163.
5. THE PLAGUE OF MISOGYNY
First published in the proceedings of a conference titled “Three Days on Racism,” organized in June 1991 by the monthly magazine Passages and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme; reprinted in Michel Wieviorka, ed., Racisme et modernité (Paris: La Découverte, 1993): 289–97.
1.
Dictionnaire Quillet de la langue française (Paris: Quillet, 1975).
2.
Dictionnaire usuel illustré, ed. Henri Flammarion, Charles-Henri Flammarion, Guy Rocaut, and Christian Rocaut-Quillet (Paris: Quillet-Flammarion, 1980).
3. See chapter 2, note 13.
4. The woman Lacan called a “brilliant tripe butcher.” Écrits:
The First
Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006, p. 632, cf. p. 374. See Melanie Klein,
Envy and Gratitude and Other Works
1946–1963 (London: Virago, 1988).
5. Florence Arthaud is a champion sailor who broke the record for a solitary crossing of the Atlantic in 1990. Edith Cresson, a politician, was the first (and so far the only) woman to serve as prime minister of France, under François Mitterrand, from May 15, 1991, to April 2, 1992.—T
RANS.
6. See chapter 2, note 17. The women in the Jospin government broke with this practice and insisted on being called Madame la Ministre. They had the support of the prime minister, who made this the general practice with a decree (March 6, 1998) recommending the feminization of occupational names, functions, ranks, and titles in all regulations and official documents published by the state and the establishment of a commission on terminology. In his preface to
Femme, j’écris ton nom, ed. Annie Becquer et al. (Paris: La Documentation française, 1999), Lionel Jospin wrote: “Parity has its place in our language” (p. 6).
7. I established the Observatoire de la misogynie (Observatory of Misogyny) in 1989, at the same time as the Alliance des femmes pour la démocratisation (Women’s Alliance for Democratization). The Observatoire records threats to women’s lives and dignity, ensures that the laws are applied, promotes solidarity, suggests ways of fighting discrimination, and in this way promotes the democratization of society.
8. The
banlieues are suburban rings around major French cities.—T
RANS.
9. In 1982 Gisèle Halimi pushed through a law stipulating that “lists of candidates cannot include more than 75 percent individuals of the same sex.” The law was repealed by the Constitutional Council on November 18, 1982, on the grounds that article 3 of the Constitution provides for equal voting rights for all citizens.
6. AND IF WE WERE TO SPEAK OF WOMEN’S POWERLESSNESS?
Published in Passages 40 (September 1991): 28–29, in the special issue “Les femmes aiment-elles le pouvoir?” (Do women like power?).
1. See Jean-Claude Chesnais, “Les trois revanches,”
Le Débat 60 (May-August 1990): 99–101.
2. The press had a field day with crime this summer, turning several women criminals into stars so that at least in this field we might see some equality. A mirage, as always, when it is a question of equality between men and women: according to the Ministry of Justice statistics on crime in France published by
Le Nouvel Observateur, June 6–12, 1991, p. 102, more than 88 percent of murderers are men.
3. The Confédération générale des cadres (General Confederation of Cadres) is a trade union for middle management.—T
RANS.
4. See
Elle (French edition), August5,1991.
7. “IT IS NOT POWER THAT CORRUPTS BUT FEAR”
This essay was published in Passages 43 (December 1991): 12–13. The title is a quotation from Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 180. Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
1. Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedomfrom Fear and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 1991).
2. Aung San Suu Kyi,
Aung San of Burma: A Biographical Portrait (Edinburgh: Kiscadale, 1991).
3. Preface,
Freedom from Fear, pp. xvi-xvii.
4. Václav Havel,
Václav Havel or
Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays
Published on
the Occasion
of the Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel, ed. Jan Vladislav (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 5.
5. Dominique Lecourt,
Contre la peur (Paris: Hachette, 1990).
6.
Le Monde, October 19,1991.
7. Jean-Pierre Clerc, “Nul ne sait où Mme Suu Kyi est détenue en Birmanie,”
Le Monde, October 19, 1991.
8. MY FREUD, MY FATHER
First published in Passages 46 (April 1992): 27–28.
1. See Elisabeth Roudinesco,
La bataille de cent ans: Histoire de la psychanalyse en France (Paris: Seuil, 1986), p. 430.
2. Paris: Gallimard 1964 (c. 1946).
3. See chapter 2, note 20.
4. Yesterday, Antigone, today, “queer Anna,” unquestionably less than ever me. See Isabelle Mangou, “Queer Anna,” in
L’Unebévue, revue de psychanalyse 19 (Winter 2001-Spring 2002): 9–42.
5. See Jacques Lacan, On
Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Language; Encore
1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1999).
6. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits:
The First
Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006).
9. FROM LIBERATION TO DEMOCRATIZATION
Text in support of Antoinette Fouque, “Une expérience du mouvement des femmes en France, 1968–199,” doctoral thesis submitted to the Université de Paris VIII, July 1, 1992. The jury consisted of Hélène Cixous (chair), Francine Demichel, André Demichel, Francine du Sorbier, and James Y. Siegel.
1. Sigmund Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1964), 22:80.
2. Monique Wittig, Les
Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay (New York: Avon, 1971 [1969]).
4. See chapter 2, note 18.
5. See Thomas Laqueur,
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
10. O
UR E
DITORIAL P
OLICY I
S A P
OETHICSFirst published in Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, ed., Traduire l’Europe (Paris: Payot, 1992), pp. 142–146.
1. See the second preface, this volume, note 14.
2. “But language—the performance of a language system—is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.” Roland Barthes, “Inaugural Lecture,” trans. Richard Howard, in
A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 461.
3. “Profession … traductrice?”
Des femmes en mouvements, April 4, 1978, pp. 74-76.
4. Excerpts from a lecture given at Hofstra University in 1985 and from an interview with Jean-Pierre Salgas published in
La Quinzaine littéraire (December 1, 1986).
5.
Childhood, trans. Barbara Wright in consultation with the author, preface by Alice Kaplan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013);
Tropisms, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Braziller, 1967).
6. Marcel Proust,
In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, the C. K. Moncrieff translation edited and annotated by William C. Carter (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 47. François
le Champi is a novel by George Sand first published in periodical form in 1847–48, in book form in 1850.
11. DIALOGUE WITH ISABELLE HUPPERT
First published in Cahiers du cinéma 477 (March 1994): 36–47; this special issue was designed and edited by the actress.
1. Trans. Barbara Wright, in consultation with the author, pref. Alice Kaplan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
2. In Claudel’s play
La ville (Paris: Mercure de France, 1970), a female character defines herself as “the promise that cannot be kept.”
12. RECOGNITIONS
Excerpt from a request for accreditation to supervise research submitted to Université de Paris VIII on March 9, 1994; jury members were Hélène Cixous, Francine Demichel (chair), André Demichel, Jean-Pierre Gastaud, and Blandine Kriegel.
1. Cf. Montaigne, “On Experience,” in
The Essays
of Michel de Montaigne, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (London: Allan Lane, Penguin, 1991), book 3, pp. 1207–1269.
2. Cf. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin: Harmonds-worth, 1961), 4:4.
3. See chapter 2, note 11.
4. See the second preface, this volume, note 1.
6. Answer to an inquiry about “experience,” Mise
en page 1 (May 1972), cited in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,
Poetry as Experience. trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 128, note 15.
7. Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
8.
N’être fille, “not to be a girl,” is ahomophonefor
naître fille, “to be born a girl”; it introduces a note of negativity and hints at the deprecatory
n’être que fille, “to be merely a girl.”
9. An anastrophe is a figure of speech in which the normal order of syntactic elements is reversed or disrupted.
10. Alain Rey, ed.,
Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1992).
11. Henri Ey, Paul Bernard, and Charles Brisset, eds.,
Manuel de Psychiatrie (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1960).
12. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis,
The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 166–69.
13. Jacques Lacan, “The Hysteric’s Question (II): What Is a Woman?” in
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
III, The Psychoses,
1955–1956, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), pp. 179–80.
14. Discussion following a paper read by André Green to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s seminar on identity: André Green,
Atome de parenté et relations oedipiennes (Paris: Grasset, 1977), p. 100.
15. André Green, “La réserve de l’incréable,” in
Créativite et/ou symptôme, ed. Nicos Nicolaïdis, Elsa Schmidt-Kitsikis, and Antonio Andreoli (Paris: Clancier-Guénaud, 1982); reprinted in André Green,
La déliaison. Psychanalyse, anthropoculture et littérature (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1992), pp. 313-40.
16. Arendt,
The Human Condition, pp. 8–11.
17. Diplôme d’études approfondies, a degree in advanced studies roughly equivalent to a masters degree in the United States.—T
RANS.
18. Work at the legal level resulted, for example, in a letter to UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali putting forward the view that the rapes in the former Yugoslavia should be considered not simply as “war crimes” but as “crimes against humanity” and should be punished accordingly. This position was defended at a Human Rights Conference held last June; it will be defended again at future UN conferences on population and especially at the conference on women to be held in September 1995.
13. WARTIME RAPES
First published as “Les viols en ex-Yougoslavie sont désormais reconnus comme des crimes contre l’humanité,” Passages 61 (April 1994): 34–35.
1. In the UN Security Council’s resolution 827 (May 25, 1993), which defines the competence of the Tribunal, rapes committed for “political, racial, or religious reasons” are considered to be “crimes against humanity.”
2. A European public cultural television channel targeting French and German audiences in particular.—T
RANS.
3. See chapter 12, p. 117–18.
4. The Nazis sterilized Jewish women in the camps and also organized
Lebensborn (Himmler, 1935; the word might be translated as “fountains of life”) in order to produce a “pure Aryan race” that would rule the world “for a thousand years.” These
Lebensborn centers took in women (blond, blue-eyed women in good health) and SS personnel for the purpose of making babies. The centers took care of the pregnant women and their children. After a few months the children were handed over to adoptive Nazi families. It is estimated that twenty-five thousand babies were born in the
Lebensborn between 1936 and 1945.
14. RELIGION, WOMEN, DEMOCRACY
Presented at a conference titled “Europe et Migrations” organized by the journal Passages. March 18–19, 1994, during a round-table discussion on churches, mosques and secularism.
1. Jules Ferry, “De l’égalité de l’éducation,” speech given in Paris on April 10, 1870, in
Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry, ed. Paul Robiquet (Paris: Armand Colin, 1893), 1:305.
2. The word
man does not appear in the title of the standard English translation.—T
RANS.
3. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who later became Iran’s supreme leader, spent a period of exile in Neauphle-le-Château, a small town in north central France, in 1978–79.—T
RANS.
4. Emmanuel Levinas, “It Is Indispensable for Us Westerners to Adopt the Perspective of a Promising Time.” Interview,
Le Monde, June 2, 1992.
5. See chapter 13, p. 124.
6. Bruno Étienne makes the same point in “Les femmes et les intégrismes: Des définitions à l’exemple musulman,”
Après-demain 330 (January 1991): 19–20, 25.
Après-demain is a journal published by the Ligue des droits de l’homme (League for Human Rights). See
www.fondation-seligmann.org/ApresDemain/AD330/330_3618.pdf (accessed December 2, 2013).
7. Georges Bernanos (1888–1848) was a French Catholic writer whose novels include
Under the Sun
of Satan, Diary of a Country Priest, and
Dialogues of the Carmelites.—T
RANS.
8. Albert Memmi said as much in remarkable terms at the time of the “headscarf affair”: “Portrait de femme sous le monothéisme,”
Libération, January 12, 1990.
9. See chapter 5, note 8, and chapter 12, p. 120.
10. The Parc de la Villette is a park and cultural complex on the northeast edge of Paris.—T
RANS.
11. Despite an article published in
Libération in late 1993 denouncing Nasrin’s plight, and despite the information campaign launched by the Alliance des femmes pour la démocratie, the defenders of human rights remained silent for a long time. In July 1994 Nasrin sent me an alarming fax: “I am in great danger. The fundamentalists could kill me at any moment. Save me, I beg you.” While the Alliance des femmes alerted public opinion and held daily demonstrations outside the Bangladeshi Embassy throughout the month of July, I repeatedly contacted the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Presidency of the Republic, set up a defense committee on behalf of the writer, sent two lawyers to Dacca to make sure she was safe, and put her name forward for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize. With the exception of the few who demonstrated alongside us in July, the democratic intellectuals took a long time to rouse themselves to action. They eventually did so, and at that point the media stepped up in support.
12. “Beur Chicks”; the designation
Beurs refers to French-born children of North African immigrant parents.—T
RANS.
13. Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet,
Allez les filles! (Paris: Seuil, 1993).
14. The Falloux law, adopted in 1850, in effect authorized Catholic instruction in public primary and secondary schools.—T
RANS.
15. See François-Georges Dreyfus,
Histoire de la démocratie chrétienne en France, de Chateaubriand à Raymond Barre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988).
16. Alain Finkielkraut, “Voiles: La sainte alliance des clergés,”
Le Monde, October 25, 1989.
17.
Contrat d’insertion professionnelle: a short-term employment contract for job seekers under age twenty-six.—T
RANS.
18.
Salaire minimum interprofessionnel de croissance: minimum wage.—Trans.
19.
Revenu minimum d’insertion: income support for unemployed people of working age who have no other employment benefits.—T
RANS.
20. See “Le retour de l’ordre moral,” in Antoinette Fouque, Il
y a deux sexes (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 203–8.
15. OUR BODIES BELONG TO US
This dialogue with Taslima Nasrin first appeared in Passages 62 (June 1994): 44-45. Taslima Nasrin is a Bangladeshi doctor and writer. She is living under a fatwa because she has denounced Islam’s oppression of women in a collection of articles. Thanks to the international mobilization in which the Alliance des femmes pour la démocratie (Women’s Alliance for Democracy) played a part, she was able to leave her country and travel to Paris. She now teaches at Harvard.
1. Taslima Nasrin,
Femmes, manifestez-vous! (Paris: Des femmes, 1994).
2. The United Nations held an International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in September 1994.
3. See chapter 1, note 9.
4. See chapter 2, note 14.
16. HOMAGE TO SERGE LECLAIRE
Text read at an event honoring Serge Leclaire’s memory organized by his wife and children on October 23, 1994.
1. Serge Leclaire,
Rompre les charmes: Recueil pour des enchantés de la psychanalyse (Paris: InterÉditions, 1981).
2. “Quocirca et absentes adsunt … et, quod difficilius dictu est, mortui vivunt”: epigraph in Jacques Derrida,
Politics of Friendship, fans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. vi.
17. H
OW TO D
EMOCRATIZE P
SYCHOANALYSIS?
Excerpted from an interview with Vanina Micheli-Rechtman, “Comment démocratiser la psychanalyse?” Passages 65 (November 1994): 48–51.
1. See the second preface, this volume, note 2.
2. The French construction paraphrased here,
ne … que , is normally translated as “only.” But these terms are also near homophones of French nouns,
noeud, “knot,” and
queue, “tail”: both are familiar terms for “penis.”—T
RANS.
3. See the second preface, this volume, note 1.
5. See chapter 2, note 20.
6. I now call it
libido creandi. See the second preface, this volume p. xxx.
7. This phrase designating a dance sequence for two people can also be read as “not two,” or “no two.”—T
RANS.
8. In Serge Leclaire, “Un soulèvement de questions: Le mouvement analytique animé par Jacques Lacan,”
Cahiers confrontation 3 (1980): 69–76, reprinted in
Rompre les charmes: Recueil pour des enchantés de la psychanalyse (Paris: InterÉditions, 1981), pp. 199–210.
18. DEMOCRACY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
First published in Profession politique 149 (February 1995): 2.
1. Articulated in two complementary texts in which Freud set forth a program for modernity that is more contemporary than ever: Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in
The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1961), 21:3–56 and 59–145; citations from pp. 42, 29, and 79.
2. Gilles Kepel,
The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern World, trans. Alan Braley (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994 [1991]).
3. Monseigneur Gaillot served as bishop of Evreux from 1982 to 1995, when he was removed from the post by papal decree after expressing controversial positions on social, political, and religious topics, including abortion.—T
RANS.
4. See chapter 1, note 9.
5. As a woman journalist emphasized in
L’Express on January 12, 1995, referring to one of M. Balladur’s first proposals for dealing with youth unemployment. Édouard Balladur was prime minister under François Mitterrand from March 29, 1993, to May 10, 1995.—T
RANS.
6. Philippe de Villiers and Charles Pasqua are right-wing politicians noted among other things for expressing anti-Islamic sentiments.—T
RANS.
7. A reference to then President François Mitterrand.—T
RANS.
19. TOMORROW, PARITY
An abridged version of this text was presented on March 8, 1995, at the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, in the context of a roundtable discussion titled “Bridging the Gender Gap: Open Dialogue Between Parliamentarians and Civil Society.” The roundtable was set up by two nongovernmental organizations: Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA) and Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO).
1. See the second preface, this volume, note 1.
2. A founder of the modern Russian women’s movement.—T
RANS.
3. Jacques Delors was president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995.—T
RANS.
7. The explicit goal of UNCED was to “lay the foundation of a world association between developing countries and industrialized countries, based on common needs and interests, to secure the future of the planet” (Maurice Strong, secretary general of the Rio Conference).
10. Along with two other militant women from the (French) Women’s Alliance and Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira from Terra femina, I had met with Mr. Fall in early 1993, before the Vienna Conference. We spoke to him about the action the alliance was carrying out in solidarity with raped women from the former Yugoslavia and we drew his attention to the importance of women’s rights.
11. Forty-Seventh World Health Assembly, agenda item 19, “Maternal and Child Health and Family Planning: Traditional Practices Harmful to the Health of Women and Children,” WHA47.10, May 10, 1994,
http://whqlibdoc.who.int/wholis/3/WHA47_R10_eng.pdf (accessed December 8, 2013).
12. For comments on the danger of this notion of equity, see this chapter, p. 165.
17. To pursue higher education without their husband’s consent, however, married women had to wait for the law of 1938 that abolishing their “civil incapacity.”
18. The schools known as
grandes écoles in France are prestigious public or private institutions of higher education specializing in a wide variety of fields (engineering, education, business, agriculture, veterinary science, and many others). Students are admitted on the basis of highly competitive examinations, typically after several years of preparatory study.—T
RANS.
19. The École Normale Supérieure de Sèvres was founded under the Third Republic at a time when there was still separate schooling for girls.
20. See the second preface, this volume, note 2.
21. The prohibition of abortion under the 1810 penal code was followed by the prohibition of contraception in 1920. In 1942, under the Vichy regime, abortion was a state crime punished by death. It was only in 1967 that the Neuwirth law authorized contraception.
22. The Maison de la Mutualité was owned by a regional nonprofit insurance federation; its conference facilities were regularly rented to outside users for political meetings.—T
RANS.
23. With Gisèle Halimi and the association Choisir, during the famous Aix trial.
In early 1978 two men went on trial on charges of having repeatedly raped two teenage girls several years earlier. Attorney Gisèle Halimi represented the girls, with the support of feminist organizations such as Choisir (Choose). The case drew national attention and triggered both widespread outrage at the attacks and a vociferous backlash against the feminists.—TRANS.
24. In the European Union the poor are defined as those whose income is less than half the average income of the population as a whole; in poor countries the poor live on one dollar a day. To try to reduce this great gap, Gustave Speth, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, has invented the Human Development Index (HDI), using the criteria of life expectancy, educational level, and buying power; these make it possible to come a little closer to the realities of life, especially in poor countries. See
Démographie et pauvreté 8 (February 1995).
25. It is interesting to note, too, that women own only 1 percent of the world’s wealth.
26. Of 100 million children aged six to eleven who do not go to school, 70 percent are girls.
28. If one applies to the world population as a whole the ratio of 1.05 women for each man found in developed countries, 100 million women are lacking in the overall census; see Amartya Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,”
New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990, and
On Ethics and Economics (Oxfordshire: Blackwell, 1987).
30. “Women’s Action,”
Equality Now (March 1995).
31. In the United States, according to a survey carried out at the request of the federal government, more than 12 million women appear to have been raped at least once; 61 percent of the victims were under eighteen years old at the time of the rape, and three out of ten were not yet eleven. In 80 percent of the cases the rapist was known to the victim. Only 16 percent of these attacks were reported.
Newsweek. July 1990; Observatoire de la Misogynie.
32. Figures cited by the Chinese minister of public safety, probably on the low side.
33. Particularly by the Zenska group Tresnjevka, from Croatia-Zagreb.
34. According to the latest report from Amnesty International, women represent more than 80 percent of refugees or displaced persons.
35. Along with death threats against those who do not wear the headscarf, there are sometimes threats of reprisals from the other side against those who do.
36. The Family Code was promulgated in 1984 in spite of massive protest from women’s associations.
See chapter 1, note 9.—TRANS.
37. Koudil received an award for her work on behalf of human rights in 1994 in recognition of the courage she showed by producing the film.
38. The victim was Louisa Lardjoune; see Nicole Penicaut and Emmanuèle Peyret, “Une femme sur sept serait victime de violences conjugales.”
Libération, March 2, 1995.
39. As I make the final corrections to this text, I can say with relief that the term
equity is not mentioned in the draft platform for the Beijing Conference as discussed during the last preparatory meeting in New York.
40. Lissy Gröner, report on the poverty of women in Europe for the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights, February 10, 1994.
41. In the Brandenburg region the number of sterilizations has grown tenfold in two years: from 827 in 1991 to 8,224 in 1993.
43.
Libération, March 2,1995.
44. “L’Hebdo,” Canal Plus, March 4, 1995.
45. In 1988,89,082 boys and 119,597 girls received baccalaureate degrees. Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet,
Allez les
filles (Paris: Seuil, 1988), p. 29.
46. In France the term
laïcité refers to the principle of separation between the secular and the religious sectors of society: the state holds no religious power and churches no political power.—T
RANS.
47. The rate of activity varies with age, however; the highest rate, 78 percent, is among women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine. INSEE (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies),
Les femmes, contours et caractères, February 1995.
48. According to a survey by the Caisse d’allocations familiales (Bureau of family allowances) in Yvelines (a department west of Paris) carried out in December 1993 and released on February 25, 1995, by INSEE.
49. See Antoinette Fouque, “Le retour de l’ordre moral,” Il
y a deux sexes, rev. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 203–15.
50.
Info Matin, March2, 1995, p. 15.
51. Of 3 million unemployed, 1.7 million are women. Young unemployed women constitute such a large majority that INSEE, in
Données sociales 1993 (an annual statistical report on the French workforce), noted that “the typical unemployed person is a young woman without a diploma who has just lost a temporary position in the administration of a business.”
52. Statement by Michel Giraud, minister of labor, cited in “Le chômage confirme sa reprise,”
Libération, November 3, 1994.
53. Christiane Cordero,
Le travail des femmes (Paris: Le Monde, 1995).
Île-de-France is the administrative region immediately surrounding Paris.—TRANS.
54. The ratios of women’s membership in French political institutions in 1995 were as follows: 5.6 percent in the National Assembly, 5 percent in the Senate, 12.6 percent in regional councils, 5.1 percent in general councils, 17.1 percent in municipal councils, 5.4 percent among mayors, and a total of 3 women ministers.
55. In this section I shall focus primarily on political parity between the sexes, that is, equal representation of men and women in political institutions.
56. See chapter 2, note 22.
57. The text of our 1973 poster read as follows: “We are women; we are not voting. The workers vote for the bosses, the blacks vote for the whites, women vote for men …” For its part, the association Choisir planned to present “one hundred women for women” at the 1978 legislative elections; because of the difficulties they encountered the number of candidates was reduced to forty-four. They were all eliminated in the first round, but Gisèle Halimi, president of the association, won 4.3 percent of the votes.
58. On March 8, 1981, as the various feminist tendencies were scattered among minor lists, I issued the MLF appeal to vote for François Mitterrand in the first round, without any illusions, but in the hope of contributing to the maturation process of the left. Our posters read: “Let the heart speak: no candidate for women. Let reason speak: François Mitterrand in the first round.” In the subsequent legislative election we supported women wherever they were candidates with this slogan: “To the left of the left, women.”
59. In the 1989 local elections, many women expressed a desire to propose lists of women candidates. Some did so, for example Annie Dubourgel in Tanninges, Maria-Andréa Pélegrin in Violès, and Nicole Tournebise in Sarreguemines; Tournebise was elected.
Bouches-du-Rhône is the department that includes Marseille.—TRANS.
60. Shortly before the 1981 presidential elections, and probably with women voters in mind, the right-wing government put a bill through that set the representation of each sex on electoral lists at a minimum of 20 percent. This was the first time there was a quota. Under pressure from Gisèle Halimi, the proposal of a 25 percent quota was adopted again by the left and supported almost unanimously by Parliament. However, the amendment was invalidated by the Constitutional Council on November 18, 1982.
62. Claudette Apprill, an expert serving on the Steering Committee for Equality Between Women and Men (CDEG) in “Les apports du Conseil de l’Europe au concept de parité” (The contributions of the Council of Europe to the concept of parity), an article published in September 1994 in Belgium in a handbook,
Women’s Studies, put outby the Belgian services of scientific, technical, and cultural affairs, claimed that she had invented the concept of “parity-based democracy.” Under the heading “La démocratie paritaire, quarante ans d’activité du Conseil de l’Europe” (Parity-based democracy, forty years of activity by the Council of Europe), the CDEG organized a study group on parity in November 1989. The first part of the Belgian handbook contains interesting articles on parity, especially Éliane Vogel-Polsky’s article “Les impasses de l’égalité, ou pourquoi les outils juridiques visant à l’égalité des femmes et des hommes doivent être repensés en termes de parité” (The impasses of equality, or why legal means aiming at equality between women and men must be rethought in terms of parity”). See
Women’s studies: Manuel de ressources, ed. Point d’appui, U.L.B. (Brussels: Services fédéraux des affaires scientifiques, techniques et culturelles, 1994).
63. The manifesto called for the adoption of “an organic law containing a straightforward statement requiring that the assemblies elected at the subnational and national levels be composed of as many women as men.”
Le Monde, November 10, 1993.
64. I met with Michel Rocard as early as March 1993 to try to convince him to observe parity on the Socialist Party list. I had not expected him to choose a form of parity that excluded all the feminists of his party.
65. See chapter 2, note 20.
66. Originally, the English word
gender designated the masculine and feminine genders, as
genre does in French; in theoretical feminist texts, however, it tends more and more to replace the word
sex. Thus Western feminism markedly rejects any reference to biological reality to assert the exclusively cultural and historical (and therefore transformable) character of sexual difference.
67. “Mourir à Ankara pour délit d’opinion,”
Libération, September 9, 1994.
20. WOMEN AND EUROPE
This text was written in my capacity as member of the European Parliament for the First Conference of Parliamentary Committees on equal opportunities in the fifteen member states and the European Parliament (Brussels, May 23, 1997). The text was revised for the negotiations over the Amsterdam Treaty and published in Lettre de la Députée 3 (third quarter, 1997): 1–2.
1. A ruling of the European Court of Justice in 1995 invalidating a local German law that, given equal qualifications, gave priority to women candidates for recruitment and promotion in civil service positions,
www.senat.fr/rap/r96–293/r96–2932.html (accessed December 6, 2013).
21. IF THIS IS A WOMAN
Excerpted from Antoinette Fouque, “Si c’est une femme,” Informations Sociales 80, “Regards vers le XXIe siècle” (fourth quarter, 1999): 38–50.
1. Primo Levi,
If This Is a Man and
The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 17.
2. In Belgium a so-called prostitutes’ defense committee has introduced training schemes for prostitutes (legislation governing prostitution, accounting, commercial management, and sexual techniques). In the Netherlands, thirty-seven pimps organized a demonstration calling for the abolition of new regulations restricting the opening hours of prostitutes’ windows and demanding government compensation for loss of earnings.
Marianne 127, (September 27, 1999).
3. Amartya Sen, “One Hundred Million Women Are Missing,” New York
Review of Books 37, no. 20 (December 20, 1990): 61–66.
4. Developed in 1990 and published by the United Nations Development Program, the Human Development Index takes into account life expectancy, literacy, percentage of children in school, and share of salaried income.
5. Sen, “One Hundred Million Women Are Missing,” p. 66.
7. Girl children who are infibulated (as are almost 90 percent of girls born in Sudan) are in immediate danger of death after the operation or from the infections that often result from it. As for the survivors, they will suffer for the rest of their lives from the irreversible lesions caused by these mutilations. United Nations Population Fund reports for 1995 and 1997.
8. See chapter 19, p. 167. According to a study carried out in five countries (the United States, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and Zambia), 58 percent of women who prostitute themselves were victims of childhood sexual abuse. Melissa Farley, Isin Baral, Merab Kiremire, and Ufuk Sezgin, “Prostitution in Five Countries: Violence and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,”
Feminism and Psychology 8, no. 4 (November 1998): 405–26.
9. And one hundred fifty million remain seriously handicapped for life. Three hundred million women who do not wish to have more children lack access to contraceptives. Seventy thousand die each year as the result of an abortion.
10. An anonymous midwife quoted by Peter Adamson in “A Failure of Imagination,”
The Progress
of Nations 1996, UNICEF,
www.unicef.org/pon96/womfail.htm (accessed December 9, 2013).
11. In Kosovo and Albania, the Code of Leke Dukagjani, which has been in force since the fifteenth century in some regions, condemns women who have been raped to silence, confinement to the home, or even suicide. Gordana Igric, Institute for War and Peace, in
Le Courrier des Balkans (June 18, 1999).
12. Figure for 1990; Observatoire de la misogynie.
13.
Libération, April 10,1999, citing the Russian daily
Vremia. A UNICEF report published September 21, 1999, stresses that the “transition” to capitalism in the former USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe “is building upon, rather than levelling, existing inequalities,” and that “violence against women, including domestic violence, was more prevalent under Communism than previously assumed … [and] “is now on the rise.” UNICEF Press Release, September 22, 1999,
www.unicef-irc.org/files/documents/d-3054-UNICEF-report-provides-fi.pdf (accessed November 16, 2013).
14. NTM (Nique ta mère, “Fuck your mother”) is a French rap-graffiti group. Lio is the stage name of a Portuguese-born Belgian singer who became an activist in the defense of battered women after being beaten by her lover, a French singer, in the late 1990s.—T
RANS.
15. The GDI measures achievement in the same basic capabilities as the HDI does, but takes note of inequality in achievement between men and women. The GDI figures, in which equality is indexed at 1, show the relative standing of females to males as, at best, 0.939 in Canada and, at worst, 0.155 in Sierra Leone.
16. Three-quarters of the children who do not have access to primary education are girls. See the annual report of the UN Development Program for 1997.
17. The directive on parental leave (1996), in the name of a purported “reconciliation of work and family life,” is weighted most heavily on the family side and ends up with triple precariousness for women. The second directive, on part-time work (1997), claims that such work is to the benefit of women, whereas the European Commission itself recognizes that part-time work serves entirely to increase the competitive position of businesses. The employment guidelines adopted at the Luxemburg Employment Summit in 1997—when thirteen of the fifteen countries in the Union had left-wing or social-democratic governments—openly defended the principles of employability and flexibility, whose negative effects on the professional rights of women are known.
See La Lettre de votre Députée (The newsletter from your [female] deputy), published during my mandate as member of the European Parliament: no. 4 (fourth quarter, 1977), and nos. 5 and 6 (fourth quarter, 1998).
18. On one occasion a woman cabin crew member left her baby at home in a basket in the bathtub because she could not find anyone to take care of the child. She was distraught when she learned that the flight that should have brought her home was postponed. That was in 1991, but there is still no crèche at Roissy for flight crews. The unpredictable hours crew members work are off-putting for qualified nursery staff. And yet the forty-five thousand people employed at Roissy have a total of five thousand children under age three. Anne Fairise, “La cruelle inadaptation des systèmes de garde,”
Libération, August 30, 1999.
19. Only 52 percent of mothers of two children, including at least one under the age of three, were economically active in 1997, as against 63.5 percent in 1994. Françoise Battagliola, “Les trajectoires d’emploi des jeunes mères de famille,”
Recherches et prévisions , no. 52 (Paris: Caisse Nationale des Allocations Familiales, June 1998).
20. The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), which has been calculated for forty countries on the basis of the number of women in parliament, senior management and leadership positions, and women’s share of salaried income, reveals that there is no equality—indexed as 1—in any country. In 1997 it did not reach 0.8 percent in Norway, which was the most advanced country, and was below 0.2 in Mauritania. The average for the countries analyzed is 0.4.
21. “Women are men, just like other men …”: such is the philosophy of a journalist writing in
Libération. François Wenz-Dumas, “Hommes-femmes: L’égalité par la mixité”
(Libération, September 2, 1999) discovers behind the latest report submitted to the prime minister by Socialist Party deputy Catherine Génisson. According to Génisson, we must above all avoid any specific measures that might favor women and encourage the recruitment of men in sectors where the vast majority of workers are women.
22. A French racing cyclist who won the world championship thirteen times.
23. The American feminist economist Nancy Folbre has looked at the disproportionate share of nonmarket labor that is assumed by women. Nancy Folbre,
De la différence des sexes en économie politique (Paris: Des femmes, 1997).
24. See chapter 2, note 22.
25. See the second preface, this volume, notes 1 and 2.
22. THEY’RE BURNING A WOMAN
Excerpt from a letter sent by Antoinette Fouque in her capacity as chair of the Alliance des femmes pour la démocratie to Blandine Kriegel in her capacity as an official representative of the presidency of the republic.
1. The recent attack on Bertrand Delanoë reminds us of the need to include this phrase.
Delanoë, the openly gay Socialist mayor of Paris, was stabbed at a public event on October 2, 2002, by a man who allegedly claimed to hate politicians, Socialists, and homosexuals. The mayor’s injuries were not life threatening, though he remained hospitalized for about two weeks.—TRANS.
23. WHAT IS A WOMAN?
Testimony published in Génération MLF: 1968–2008 (Paris: Des femmes-Antoinette Fouque, 2008), reprinted in Antoinette Fouque, Génésique: Féminologie III (Paris: Des femmes, 2012), pp. 89–115.
1. See the second preface, this volume, note 1.
2. See chapter 2, note 11.
3. See chapter 3, note 1.
4. See chapter 3, note 2.
5. Jacques Lacan, “The Hysteric’s Question (II): What is a Woman?” in
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 3,
The Psychoses,
1955–1956, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 179.
6. Jacques Rancière,
La nuit des
prolétaires (Paris: Fayard, 1981), in English as
The Nights
of Labor: The Workers’
Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
7. See the second preface, this volume, note 2, and this chapter, pp. 202–3.
8. Monique Wittig, Les
Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay (New York: Avon, 1971 [1969]).
9. See chapter 2, note 13.
10. See the second preface, this volume, note 6.
11.
Libération, September 14,2008.
12. Blandine Grosjean, “Liberté, activité, maternité,”
Libération, April 29, 2003.
13. This is confirmed by the evocative title of the September 14, 2008, article in
Libération: “Génération Benoît XVI” (The generation of Benedict XVI).
14.
Génération MLF:
1968–2008, ed. Antoinette Fouque (Paris: Des femmes, 2008).
15. See the second preface, this volume, note 15.
16. See chapter 12, note 8.
17. George Sand, Story
of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand, ed. Thelma Jurgrau, group trans. (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1991), part I, chapter 14, p. 271.
24. G
ESTATION FOR A
NOTHERExcerpted from an interview with Marcel Gauchet, first published as “Les enjeux de la gestation pour autrui,” Le Débat 157 (November-December 2009): 145–57; reprinted in Antoinette Fouque, Génésique: Féminologie III (Paris: Des femmes, 2012), pp. 15–39.
1. See the second preface, this volume, note 1.
2. Pierre Nora and Marcel Gauchet interviewed Antoinette Fouque in October 1989 and February 1990; the interviews were published in April 1990 in
Le Débat 59 and appear in this volume as “Women in Movements—Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” (chapter 2).
3. See the second preface, this volume, note 6.—T
RANS.
4. Nadine Morano served as secretary of state for family under Prime Minister François Fillon in 2008–2009.
5. In French abortion is described in legal terms as
interruption volontaire de grossesse or IVG.
6. Jacques Lacan, “The Hysteric’s Question (II): What Is a Woman?” in
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 3,
The Psychoses,
1955–1956, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 179.
7. Sigmund Freud,
A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, trans. Axel Hoffer and Peter T. Hoffer (London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 13–14.
8. Jacques Derrida,
Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 93, cited in François Poirié,
Emmanuel Levinas: Essai et entretiens (Arles: Actes Sud, 1996), p. 29.
9. Emmanuel Levinas,
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on
Exteriority. trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), p. 50; cited in Poirié,
Emmanuel Levinas, p. 29.
10. For the play on words, see the second preface, this volume, note 3.—T
RANS.
11. She initiated the appeal of March 28, 2009, in favor of legalizing gestation for another in France.
12. Jean-Luc Nancy,
L’intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000). Nancy had a heart transplant in the early 1990s.
13. See the second preface, this volume, note 6.—T
RANS.
14.
Commère is an archaic French word for “godmother.”—T
RANS.
15. The multiparty Grenelle agreements signed in May 1968 have come to serve as a reference for other open debates in France that bring together representatives from all sectors (government, business, professional associations, NGOs), with the goal of establishing public policy on specific issues. The
Grenelle de l’environnement process began in September 2007 and led in 2008 to the adoption of the law known as Grenelle 1.—T
RANS.
16. Élisabeth de Fontenay,
Diderot ou le matérialisme enchanté (Paris: Grasset, 1981).
17. Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1964 [1957]), 11:97.
25. GRAVIDA
Interview with Antoinette Fouque conducted by Jean Larose in 1980, published in two parts in the first two issues of the Canadian journal Gravida (Fall 1983): 22–42, (Winter 1984): 55–74, reprinted in Antoinette Fouque, Gravidanza: Féminologie II (Paris: Des femmes, 2007): 67–108. This text is added to the collection to highlight Antoinette Fouque’s psychoanalytic analysis of feminism.
1. See the second preface, this volume, notes 1 and 2.
2. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977 [1972]).
3. According to Freud, the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle also corresponds to the psychic conflict between the ego and the repressed. The sexual maturation of the subject and the subject’s access to what Freud calls “complete object-love,” as well as the gradual constitution of that libidinal object, thus arise from submission to the reality principle just as much as the recognition of what is real or unreal in the external world does. This comes down to saying that access to reality and control of the appetite for jouissance do not come simply through the recognition of material reality but above all through the traversal of the oedipal dialectic, which is governed by the law of the father and by the “final” completion of castration. This is what makes it possible to speak of a principle of phallic, or phallogocentric, reality, based on a particular economic organization of the libidinal stages. Human access to “reality” is no more “natural” than any other component of the human. It is attained by way of the symbolic law. It can thus be analyzed, challenged, worked over, transformed. See Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957), 14:109–40, and “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 18:3–64.
4. Kate Millett,
Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970).
5. See Jacques Lacan, “Le cas Aimée,” in
De la psychose
paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (Paris: Seuil, 1975); and Valerie Solanas,
Society for Cutting Up
Men, Manifesto (1968), published as SCUM
Manifesto (London: Verso, 2004). Solanas is also known for her attempt to kill Andy Warhol.
6. “Even when in fact it is represented by a single person, the paternal function concentrates in itself both imaginary and real relations, always more or less inadequate to the symbolic relation that essentially constitutes it. It is in the
name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law.” Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits:
A Selection . trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 74.
7. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer,
Studies in Hysteria, trans. Nicola Luckhurst (London: Penguin, 2004); Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in
New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis , ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965).
8. Among other texts, see Michel de Certeau,
The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
9. See the second preface, this volume, p. xxviii, note 44.
10. For that very presidential election, held on March 8, 1981, it was the talk of the town: the MLF issued a strong appeal for voters to support Mitterrand in the first round.