French Feminism

Les films "Trois hommes et un couffin" de Coline Serreau et "Three Men and a Baby"
de Leonard Nimoy sont analysés ici de façon comparative. L’auteure explique
la façon dont la version américaine fait une « re-vision » du regard attendri
que Coline Serreau portait sur les nouveaux hommes nés des mouvements et des
analyses féministes. La nouvelle masculinité (non phallique) illustrée (désirée?) dans le film français est totalement abolie et remplacée par l’idéologie patriarcale américaine chez Nimoy.

The films "Trois hommes et un couffin" by French filmmaker, Coline Serreau, and "Three Men and a Baby" by American director and actor,  Leonard Nimoy, are analyzed here in a comparative way. The author explains how the American remake "re-vises" Serreau's tender gaze on the new men born out of the feminist movements and gender relations. The new (non-phallic) masculinity illustrated (wished-for?)  in the French film is totally abolished and replaced by the patriarchal ideology of the American film.

Feminists have long criticized Rousseau for his patriarchal political theory. But when his lesser-known writings on women from the 1740s are taken into account, including a nearly 900 page manuscript critiquing Montesquieu from a feminist perspective, we see how the early Rousseau robustly converged in feminist ideas with his employer Madame Louise Dupin, before he gradually diverged from this egalitarian school of thought over the course of the 1750s. I add to the evidence of the early Rousseau's egalitarian response to 'the woman question' by showing his philosophical convergence with the feminist arguments of the anonymous 'Critique of the Spirit of the Laws' (c. 1749) as well as Madame Dupin's 'Ouvrage sur les femmes' (c. 1745-51)—manuscripts largely in his secretarial hand. Through this triangulation of understudied texts, we find that the early Rousseau was not a patriarchal apologist, but rather a feminist secretary and a secretary to a feminist.

History of European Ideas, forthcoming

One of the ways to account for the inability of the French feminist movement to think differences among women (as illustrated by the recent controversies around the wearing of the Islamic veils) is to examine its firm 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.

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, 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 universalist framework, by universalizing the category of women.

I argue 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 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.

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Cet article propose une interprétation sociologique, esthétique et féministe des Chiennes savantes, deuxième roman de Virginie Despentes qui demeure peu étudié. Despentes révèle les processus de socialisation menant à la construction de l'identité féminine qui, selon Pierre Bourdieu, repose sur la domination masculine. Cette socialisation conduit à la construction binaire et à la naturalisation des identités de genre. À travers la caractérisation des personnages, les dynamiques de pouvoir et l'ironie dramatique, Despentes dénonce la mise en scène de l'opposition entre le masculin et le féminin. Cette ironie fonctionne comme une resignification et subversion qui engendrent l'« agency, » selon Judith Butler, de la protagoniste.

Laurell Hamilton in her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter Series portrays a large community of monstrous creatures that populate a violent near-future American landscape. A number of critics have already explored the forms in which Anita, the leading heroine, emerges in the 1990s literary scene as a strong figure who challenges traditional narratives of female subordination and alters predictable romantic entanglements with the male protagonists (Crawford 2014; Veldman-Genz 2011; Siegel 2007; Holland-Toll 2004). Moving beyond this approach that centres on Anita, this paper explores the forms in which the author designs her male companions and lovers. Her choice of lovers suggests that there are multiple desires at play in Hamilton's popular fiction in relation to masculinity in the context of a heterosexual erotica. Following a methodological approach of cultural studies (Saukko 2003), this study seeks to illustrate how conflicting desires, emblemized by her plurality of lovers, represent a literary effect of paradoxical yearnings at play in contemporary white, middle-class American women's lives.

This essay illuminates the recent philosophy of Luce Irigaray by following how she develops her key trope of home. Thus, it elaborates her critique of a certain closed “homely” formation of man’s subjectivity and it advances her thesis that woman might function as the salutary advent of the other sex, unhousing man, exposing his subjectivity as not-whole and sheltering him in a more open and unhomely existential home. The first section outlines man’s efforts to carve form and thought from primordial flux and to establish a world and home defined by discrete objects. However, as the second section shows, man goes too far, enveloping himself in fantasies that maladaptively deny the incompletion of human existence. Man would do better, Irigaray argues, to grant the universe its living sense of becoming. The final section reads Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion in Homer’s Odyssey to elaborate upon Irigaray’s privileging of woman as home.

Taking as my object the Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les guérillères, I mean to explore the difficulties of ambiguously “utopian” science fiction, especially with regard to the intersection and tensions between French “postmodern” and “feminist” political strategies in the early seventies. Les guérillères’s three-part, dialectical structure, as well as its status as radical feminist science fiction, at first suggests a utopian vision of a future synthesis born of a revolutionary women’s struggle, and indeed it has been read that way (Chisolm, Nelson-McDermott, etc). But the circles marking the beginning of each section, as well as Wittig’s statement about how the text “should” be read – that is, with the chronological end of the narrative at the locational beginning of the book – makes it hard to find a beginning or an end at all, calling to mind the “always already” of deconstruction. In fact, both a dialectical and deconstructive readings of Les guérillères are possible, and coexist in tension. Wittig manages to blur the line between two camps –that of the dialectical revolution and that of the deconstructive revolution – and thus serves to parody both. Rather than proclaiming a vision of utopia, Les guérillères pushes back against the very idea of a "future" to be eventually arrived at, challenging rhetorics of revolution based on progression towards a common, collective goal. Wittig's narrative of revolution doubles back on, contradicts, and undoes itself… presenting a myriad of different strategies, Wittig allows the political goals of Les guérillères to shift as often as the referent of its ubiquitous pronoun, elles, also shifts. Taking seriously the question of space-time explored in Julia Kristeva’s “Women’s Time,” as well as questions raised by Wittig’s own descriptions of the “shape” of her novel, I want to ask the question: what shape is the narrative in Les guérillères, and what does that mean for its understanding of the “future”? I will argue that the shape of Les guérillères isn’t a circle, but a Möbius strip; the future is here presented as a paradox without beginning or end, where two sides actually become one.

Abstrak La loi du 7 novembre 1800 merupakan aturan yang mengatur perempuan Prancis untuk berpakaian feminin. Berselang kurang lebih satu abad, muncul gerakan yang menuntut kesetaraan dan kebebasan antara kedua jenis kelamin pada akahir abad ke-19 yang disebut sebagai feminisme gelombang pertama. Berkaitan dengan gerakan ini, muncul tiga produk mode baru yang ditujukan dan dikenakan oleh perempuan, yaitu jupes-culottes, gaun siluet lurus, dan potongan rambut pendek. Artikel ini akan memperlihatkan cara mode dalam menunjukkan perjuangan kebebasan dan kesetaraan. Tujuan dari penulisan artikel ini adalah untuk menemukan serta menguraikan mode yang diciptakan untuk dapat beraktivtas dengan bebas, sebagai representasi gerakan perempuan Prancis dalam memperjuangkan kebebasan pada tahun 1890 hingga tahun 1930 dengan menggunakan metode kualitatif melalui studi kepustakaan serta teori identitas Kathryn Woodward untuk menguraikan mode sebagai representasi dari kebebasan perempuan Prancis. Tiga produk mode ini merupakan identitas individu yang dimiliki oleh perempuan dan sebagai produk mode yang berusaha membebaskan diri penggunanya dari tuntutan masyarakat. Lewat ketiga produk ini, perempuan Prancis mengidentifikasi diri mereka sebagai pihak yang memperjuangkan kesetaraan dan kebebasan antara laki-laki dan perempuan. Kata kunci : mode di Prancis, feminisme di Prancis, Prancis, tahun 1890-1930. Pendahuluan Melalui question écrite n o 00692 yang dikeluarkan pada tanggal 12 Juli 2012, Alain Houpert, selaku Sénateur de la Côte d'Or (Senator Côte d'Or) dari Partai Union pour un movement populaire (UMP), meminta kepada Najat Vallaud-Belkacem selaku Ministre des droits des femmes (Menteri Hak Perempuan) untuk menghapus L'ordonnance du 16 brumaire

In this article, I shall consider the newly resurgent and visible feminist movement in France, ca. 1878-80, as a context for understanding the sometimes ambiguous and much debated meanings of many of Edgar Degas's works of this period, spe- cifically the Spartan Girls Challenging Boys (which, as evidence presented here will show, must have been revised and its figures given a more contemporaneous appearance at this time), the brothel monotypes, and the bather compositions. The writings of the Italian critic, Diego Martelli, a man who was a committed feminist activist and who was closely associated with Degas in Paris during these years, will be adduced to establish the extent to which feminist issues had become an accessible and relevant part of the modern world that Degas set out to interpret.

The Immaculate Guilt of Conception: The Empty Chalice of Body and Mind in Gilead and Postmodern America
Like the protagonist Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, postmodern women also continue to only feel worthy of self love and love of others if they are able to have a baby and be a good mother.  According to Luce Irigaray, the woman’s vagina is a non-organ, existing only to be open for a penis to fill:
“Rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person, or as two. She resists all adequate definition. Further, she has no "proper" name. And her sexual organ, which is not one organ, is counted as none. The negative, the underside, the reverse of the only visible and morphologically designatable organ (even if the passage from erection to detumescence does pose some problems): the penis (26).
This construct, while necessary to achieve conception in the old fashioned way of a penis entering a vagina, does not have to be reproduced as the important binary to describe the two genders.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred defines her existence by her ability, or inability, to become pregnant. In this way she sees body: namely her vagina and ovaries, as a chalice that is detached from her -it is something that must be filled. If she does not conceive, she will face death or a sentence to the colonies; she will become another virilized unwoman. If she succeeds in becoming pregnant her body’s fertility will have purchased her safety and she will be permitted to remain part of the society while earning the respect from and jealousy of the other wives and handmaids.
This pattern of a woman’s worth being determined by the worth of her womb is still relevant and alive in postmodern society today. Despite the overpopulation of the earth and the supposed advances in women’s rights to be worthy of an education and their own productive careers there is still immense pressure for women to become pregnant and carry a healthy, undeformed baby to term. Like Offred, women of today’s society feel pressure from society, family, friends, other women to conceive and if they fail they face labels of stigmatization from others such as being defined as selfish, unhealthy, or barren old maids.
In her blog, Sarah Larson tries to convince us why having children is the most important thing people (implying the gender of woman, as we are the ones to conceive the baby) should do:
“Why do I feel sad for people without children? Because they’re missing out on this incredible thing that gives you an entire new scope of what it means to love, and to give of yourself, and to care for someone else more than yourself. It’s an insanely powerful thing, and it challenges you to deal with the intensity of that” (Larson, 1).
This is written by someone who has been able to have children, who has judged and defined herself as “complete and improved” by her success in having children. The very nature of the title of her essay, “I Think People Without Kids Have Empty Lives and Why I am Not Sorry About It”, is an example of how women without children are made to feel: selfish and empty: failures as females.
The guilt we feel as women is deep and true. As Cixous so desperately urges us - we must speak and write - express ourselves if we are to overcome the guilt that is still the place where women dwell:
“she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being “too hot”; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing…(8). 
As women, we continue to feel the burn of inadequacy in our wombs and let it determine the levels of self-worth we maintain in our hearts and minds thus depleting our love for ourselves and for each other. If we could kill the imagined “false women”, as Cixous suggests, we would have a fighting chance to take back control of our bodies and our minds. Until we love ourselves and each other unflinchingly and without guilt and constant disapproval, we are the false woman and we are man’s servant, as Offred knows so well.

This article uses an actual scholarly encounter in order to work out the feminist methodological strengths of diffraction. I meditate on the current state of affairs in contemporary theory circles, where new materialisms and OOO are parting ways. In order not to meditate from a disembodied location and fall into the trap of reflection, new materialisms and OOO have been sought with/in my body, where posthuman forces rule and a generative text of Chantal Chawaf was encountered…before I knew it.

Si la question de la différence a historiquement été centrale au projet féministe, comme politique et comme théorie, elle est aujourd’hui insuffisante pour penser des rapports de genre qui apparaissent, à la lumière de la critique postcoloniale et des politiques de l’identité, traversés par d’autres rapports de pouvoir. Toutefois, cette critique semble avoir des difficultés à émerger en France où l’histoire du mouvement, en particulier la place qu’y a occupé la question de la lutte des classes, le lien qu’il a entretenu entre théorie et politique, et l’histoire du postcolonialisme — ou plutôt son absence — ont participé à tenir la question de l’articulation entre genre, « race » et ethnicité à l’écart des revendications et de la théorie féministe. Cette configuration historique, sociale et théorique a engendré un certain malaise dans le concept, c’est-à-dire une difficulté à critiquer les acquis théoriques du féminisme et à déconstruire la catégorie « femmes », autrement dit le sujet même du féminisme.

In the milieu of exegetical readings, Jouissance asks “can she be read?” Jouissance asks whether it is possible that a poetic text characterized by star falls and shadows can be systematised; an object of exegesis. An-‘other’ kind of reading is proposed; a kind of reading that resists the exegetical economy as absolute by disclosing an open system. It would be a kind of textual encounter. It would orient itself as one of unlimited possible readings but it would be naked, unique and ‘true’. In the reading, the reader-author would inhabit the text, bringing her ‘whole being’ to it; allowing herself to be taken in its jaws, one time, and once only. If this could be called reading, it would be live-reading, or reciprocating-reading or corporeal reading. It is a reading of the Song of Songs that is birthed and dreamed; that joins breath with breath.

En moins d’une décennie, l’insertion professionnelle des enseignant·es immigrants a suscité un important corpus de recherches au Québec et au Canada francophone. Dans l’ensemble, ces recherches mobilisent des cadres d’interprétation surexposant l’analyse des écarts culturels entre les enseignant·es immigrants et la société d’immigration. En dépit du dispositif mis en place en 2001 afin de corriger les effets de la discrimination systémique en emploi dans les organismes publics, aucune recherche ne lie l’expérience de ces enseignant·es à la sous-représentation persistante du personnel enseignant de groupes racisés au Québec et, de manière plus notoire encore, dans les commissions scolaires francophones de la région métropolitaine de Montréal (RMM) (CDPDJ, 2015).

Menée à partir d’une perspective épistémologique interprétative-critique et d’un cadre d’analyse féministe, cette thèse s’éloigne de ce prisme essentialisant afin de produire de nouveaux savoirs visant à accroître la justice sociale au sein de l’institution éducative. Les courants féministes guidant la thèse se rejoignent dans leur volonté de dévoiler les configurations des rapports sociaux et du pouvoir par lesquelles se matérialise la domination dans les différentes sphères de la société, dont le travail. Inspirée par la méthode sociologique de l’ethnographie institutionnelle, cette recherche prend la forme d’une enquête cherchant à comprendre comment les rapports sociaux, notamment de race, sont organisés et re-produits dans les distributions dissymétriques du travail enseignant. L’enquête a été menée depuis le point de vue d’enseignant·es en insertion professionnelle assignés par des rapports sociaux de race et travaillant dans les commissions scolaires francophones de la RMM (14). Leurs récits et questionnements ont engendré l’exploration des processus institutionnels et pratiques régulant l’obtention d’une autorisation d’enseigner et de contrats de travail. L’enquête a été approfondie par des entretiens menés avec des directions d’établissement d’enseignement (4), des conseiller·es pédagogiques (2), des conseillères syndicales (2) et des employées du secteur des ressources humaines (2) rattachés à deux commissions scolaires de la RMM. Des documents –lois, règlements, rapports, conventions collectives, etc.– organisant à différents égards ces processus ont également été analysés.

Les résultats de la thèse se situent à plusieurs niveaux. Le dévoilement des configurations des rapports sociaux dans le travail enseignant ne peut se faire sans rendre visible, plus largement, les multiples hiérarchies structurant ce travail à même son cadre législatif. À partir de différents fragments de matériaux, la thèse révèle empiriquement comment l’accroissement du travail atypique et précaire en enseignement – plus marqué depuis les années 1990– induit une augmentation des possibilités de hiérarchisation entre les employé·es, desquelles émergent de nouvelles reconfigurations de la division du travail. La thèse montre comment les rapports sociaux de race organisent la distribution du travail dans cette profession déjà structurée historiquement par des rapports sociaux de sexe. Les résultats mettent en exergue la création de « classes » d’enseignant·es hiérarchisées afin de pourvoir à des affectations elles-mêmes classifiées selon qu’elles permettent ou non de progresser dans la carrière. En l’absence de dispositif conséquent en matière de discrimination systémique, cette thèse montre comment l’arbitraire des processus et critères à partir desquels les enseignant·es sont sélectionnés risquent de confiner de manière disproportionnée les enseignant·es de groupes racisés aux emplois atypiques et précaires. À la lumière de ces résultats, la thèse interpelle les acteurs intervenant à plusieurs niveaux de l’institution éducative afin de confronter les inégalités de traitement compromettant l’effectivité du droit à l’égalité entre les personnes composant le personnel enseignant.

Mots-clés : travail enseignant, division du travail, rapports sociaux, domination, rapports de régulation, idéologie raciste, discrimination systémique, ethnographie institutionnelle

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In less than a decade, the professional integration of immigrant teachers has generated a large body of research in Quebec and French-speaking Canada. In general, these studies use interpretive frameworks that rely on an analysis of cultural gaps between immigrant teachers and the host society. Despite measures put in place in 2001 to mitigate the effects of systemic discrimination in employment in public bodies, there is no research linking the experience of these teachers to the persistent under-representation of racialized teachers in Quebec or, even more notably, in the French-language school boards of the Montreal Metropolitan Region (MMR) (Quebec Human Rights Commission, 2015).

Based on a critical/interpretative epistemological perspective and a framework of feminist analysis, this dissertation moves away from this essentializing prism in order to produce new knowledge aimed at increasing social justice within educational institutions. The feminist perspectives guiding the thesis have in common their desire to expose the configurations of social and power relations through which domination in the various spheres of society is materialized, including in the workplace. Inspired by the sociological method of institutional ethnography, this study takes the form of an enquiry seeking to understand how social relations, especially of race, are organized and (re)produced in the asymmetrical distributions of teaching work. The study was conducted from the point of view of vocational integration teachers who were assigned by racial social relations and were working in French-language school boards in the Montreal MRR (14). Their stories and questions led to an exploration of the institutional and practical processes regulating the obtention of a teaching licence and employment contracts. The study was expanded through interviews with principals of educational institutions (4), academic advisers (2), union advisors (2) and employees in the human resources sector (2) within two school boards of the MMR. Documents that codify these processes in different ways –laws, regulations, reports, collective agreements, etc.– have also been analyzed.

The thesis conclusions explore several aspects. The exposure of the configurations of social relations in teaching work cannot be done without more widely exposing the multiple hierarchies structuring this work and even its legislative framework. From various fragments of materials, the thesis reveals empirically how the increase of atypical and precarious work in teaching –which has become more pronounced since the 1990s– induced an increase in the possibilities of hierarchization among employees, from which arose a reconfigurations of the division of labour. The thesis shows how racial social relations organize the distribution of work in a profession already historically structured according to gender social relations. The results highlight the creation of hierarchical "classes" of teachers in order to fill assignments, which are themselves classified according to whether or not they make career advancement possible. In the absence of effective measures to counter systemic discrimination, this thesis shows how the arbitrary nature of the processes and the criteria by which teachers are selected run the risk of disproportionately confining teachers from racialized groups to atypical and precarious jobs. In light of these results, the thesis calls on educational leaders to intervene at several levels of academic institutions to confront inequalities in treatment that effectively compromise equality rights among teaching staff.

Keywords: teaching work, division of labor, social relationships, domination, regulation, racist ideology, systemic discrimination, institutional ethnography

This thesis explores how the novels of Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys – To the Lighthouse (1927), Between the Acts (1941), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) – despite being set in times of wars and social change that influence personal lives, maintain an attachment to and love for life. This thesis proposes that Woolf and Rhys ‘locate’ this attachment to life in the moments and atmospheres of ‘strange intimacy’ – in sensual, affective, and oddly intimate moments and settings where characters realise their bodily connection to the world of others, things, and places.

This work suggests that this love for life is cultivated when life is seen as ‘a life’ and selves as ‘haecceities’ in the Deleuzian sense, and when we consider modern life as enchanted, not disenchanted. To examine the love for life and strange intimacies further, this thesis rethinks the works of Hélène Cixous in the light of contemporary theories of affect and new materialism that are inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophies. This theoretical framework allows the examination of the complex ways in which intimacy, selfhood, and desire are portrayed in Woolf’s and Rhys’s modernist fiction. This thesis also demonstrates how post-structural feminism’s focus on radical alterity and its emphasis on and (re)turn to materiality, the non-human, bodies, and affects, which are drawn together in the notion of écriture féminine, pre-figures the concerns of affect studies and new materialisms.

The reading of Cixous’s, Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Bennett’s works performed in this thesis demonstrates how their theories of affect and the non-human help us to further our understanding of intimacy in the works of Woolf and Rhys and to reconsider the life-affirming, affective, and anti-Oedipal qualities of their modernism. Such an approach allows not only the discovery of a new understanding of Woolf’s and Rhys’s writings, but it contributes significantly to how we understand these theories and modernism in general.

“Groupe du 6 Novembre: Lesbiennes Issues du Colonialisme, de l’Esclavage et de l’Immigration.” In Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History, Howard Chiang (editor in chief). New York: MacMillan Reference, 2019. IN ENGLISH...

Este trabalho realiza um mapeamento da circulação do pensamento feminista entre Brasil e França buscando compreender sob quais condições houve encontros e trocas entre o pensamento feminista brasileiro e francês. O período de análise parte de 1974, época de fortalecimento do movimento no Brasil e durante o lançamento da revista Nosotras com a consequente criação do Círculo de Mulheres Brasileiras em Paris, indo até a década de 2010, momento caracterizado pela dinamização e globalização das relações de saber e poder. É feito um mapeamento dos trajetos do pensamento feminista a partir da associação deste à produção e publicação teórica, a debates de ideias, e do esforço para o estabelecimento de redes colaborativas internacionais. A estratégia metodológica é composta pela aplicação de entrevistas semi-estruturadas e pela análise de conteúdo. Através da análise das entrevistas aplicadas a pesquisadoras feministas brasileiras e francesas e da análise comparativa de periódicos acadêmicos sobre ciência política, gênero e feminismo de ambos os países, identificamos percursos inusitados e desafios à difusão do pensamento feminista que se firma no espaço da pesquisa científica e social. O desenvolvimento desta tese justifica-se pela necessidade de mapear o acúmulo de capital simbólico e científico – que permearam as trocas, os conflitos e diálogos estabelecidos entre a reflexão feminista francesa e brasileira. A contribuição deste trabalho opera no sentido de dar visibilidade às trocas teóricas e ao estabelecimento de diálogos na consolidação do campo de pesquisa feminista, o qual apresenta um processo de ampliação e diversificação por meio de novas pautas de discussão científica e epistemológica, abrangendo a diversidade teórica proveniente do Sul Global.

Como forma de contribuir para a compreensão da luta das mulheres por direitos, sobretudo na evolução e retrocessos vivenciados pelos personagens femininos, o presente artigo enseja esboçar um panorama das mulheres francesas do século XIX. O trabalho toma como pressuposto acompanhar as mudanças políticas ocorridas no cenário da França, e como elas marcaram a vida das cidadãs. Ao lado dos grandes marcos, lançamos luz sobre as “re-ações” de personagens femininos que culminaram na estruturação do chamado feminismo.

This text, published in the 30th anniversary edition of Qui Parle, consists of a response to the question "Who Speaks" osed by the editors to many authors who published in Qui Parle over the years including Bacchetta. In it she reflects upon QTPOC in Paris by transforming the question into "who is not being heard" and how that not being heard is unfolding, and the statement "speaking (here-now). As it reflects on subaltern speech, it  distinguishes this particular not-being-heard from Spivak's very insightful not-speakingness (in "Can the Subaltern Speak?"), among other things.

The work is focused on the problem of feminine identity in the contemporary world. Modern discussion about the feminine identity is still alive and lead by most of engaged feminists. One of them is Elisabeth Badinter, French feminist, historian and professor of philosophy at the École Polytechnique in Paris. Her standpoint is called liberal feminism and it accepts all achievements of modern naturalism and pro-maternity organization of La Leche League. The main controversy of Badinter’s views is the conviction that women themselves are responsible for the crisis of their feminine identity. Presenting this radical statement, the work shows various roots of feminist philosophy, indicating in particular existentialist thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, who was the first to speak about independent feminine identity. In addition, it is crucial to compare Badinter with another modern liberal feminist Betty Friedan, with a view to show that the problem of feminine identity has an essential meaning in the modern feminist philosophy.

What are we doing, really, when we either venerate or condemn Simone de Beauvoir? What do we hope to accomplish when we decide for or against her? What sorts of concerns motivate the impulse to categorize her work as feminist or non-feminist? What, in other words, do we have at stake in the symbolic Beauvoir: in the good and the bad “Beauvoirs” produced through generations of feminist interpretations? In posing these questions I treat Beauvoir scholarship as a site for thinking critically about our desire to settle what I argue to be Beauvoir’s important teaching about the fundamentally unsettled character of feminine subjectivity and feminist politics. Whether savior or scapegoat, the symbolic Beauvoir tells us something about a persistent yearning in American feminism for definitive theories of women’s oppression and for prescriptivism in feminist theory. Our rhetorical productions of the good (feminist) Beauvoir versus the bad (not so feminist or not the right kind of feminist) Beauvoir are symptomatic of our reluctance to accept a feminist theory without solace, by which I mean a feminist theory that refuses to yield the identities of victim and victor, oppressed and oppressor, and, consequently, a feminist theory that resists our understandable but also potentially dangerous desire for directives in the face of social injustice. There are numerous other ways in which Beauvoir’s feminism denies us solace, and some of these will be elaborated as I proceed. But the central idea that I want to advance here is this notion of a feminist theory that does not tell us what is wrong and how to fix it, a theory that pushes us rather to accept incertitude and even confusion as the achievement rather than the failure of feminist theory and ambiguity as the vital condition of feminist politics. Beauvoir’s texts, and especially The Second Sex, are neither feminist nor anti-feminist: rather they open up and onto the space of feminine contradictions; they give voice to a feminine subjectivity that is at best at odds with itself.

Intersectionality has been adopted as the preferred term to refer to and to analyze multiple axes of oppression in feminist theory. However, less research examines if this term, and the political analyses it carries, has been adopted by women's rights organizations in various contexts and to what effect. drawing on interviews with activists working in a variety of women's rights organizations in France and Canada, i show that intersec-tionality is only one of the repertoires that a women's rights organization might use to analyze the social experience and the political interests of women situated at the intersection of several axes of domination. i propose a typology of four repertoires that activists use to reflect on intersectionality and inclusiveness. drawing on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interview data, i show that hegemonic repertoires about racial or religious identity in one national context shape the way activists and organizations understand intersectionality and its challenges. The identity of organizations, as well as their main function (advocacy or providing service), also shape their understanding of intersectional issues.