Voix Blanche?

One of the most important ‘nouvelle vérités’ that has challenged 1970s feminisms in the Anglophone world is intersectionality, and particularly the need to address race and ethnicity as constantly interacting with gender, sexuality, class and other variables; This chapter provides some general reflections on the extent to which a similar crisis and trajectory are present in French feminist histories and narratives, but its main focus is a case-study of Annie Ernaux’s work in this regard, considering questions that have rarely been asked in Ernaux criticism to date: to what extent does Ernaux engage with race and ethnicity as well as class and gender in her writing? If she is an unusually intersectional writer in terms of gender, sexuality and class, and in more recent years one might add age and ageing, does this approach and the strong influence of sociology on Ernaux’s writing lead to awareness of dimensions of oppression that she herself as a white French woman has not personally experienced? How does Ernaux write her own whiteness? Is the ‘I’ of Ernaux’s texts, whether fictional or autobiographical, ‘unevoix blanche’, adopting the cloak of universal whiteness?

Time to Laugh or to Cry?

Hélène Cixous’s 1975 ‘Le Rire de la méduse’, later expanded into ‘Sorties’, represented a defining moment in both feminism and literary criticism/theory. When for the first time the French text was republished in 2010, Cixous speculated that the text was – disappointingly – still timely after all those years, contrary to her hopes at the original time of writing. This chapter explores Cixous’s text in relation to time in a number of different respects. It examines the significance of its very particular reception over time, and the implications that the signal failure to read it may have for both feminism and literary criticism/theory. But the chapter also considers the significance of Cixous’s work on time. The very notion of an anniversary, which simultaneously marks both a movement forward and a return to the past, is at odds with the linear, teleological idea of progress that remains dominant in discourses of political struggle. Yet the term ‘revolution’ indicates the importance of a cyclical movement of turning around or returning in effecting political change. This chapter therefore also studies the political dimension of Cixous’s approach to temporality.

Third Wave Collective Manifestos

37 years after Les Femmes s’entêtent, the Féministesen movement published Maisqu’est-cequ’ellesveulent encore?, thus reprising and expanding the secondary title of the original anthology. The 2012 manifesto—published shortly before the presidential election—charted contemporary discriminations in France and proposed a series of measures to be implemented by the next government, illustrating how, since the 1990s, a third wave of French feminism has emerged. In particular, the new millennium produced a plethora of individual and collective (anti)feminist manifestos by a younger generation of women, ranging from Isabelle Alonso’s Pourquoi je suischienne de garde (2001) to FEMEN (2013), the Ukrainian organization now in Paris. Considering the themes from Les Femmes s’entêtent, this chapter focuses on a series of collective feminist manifestos in order to ask: what are the contemporary “encirclements”? What solutions do third wavers offer to break those circles? What are their “désirs-délires”?

‘Les hommes et les femmes, c’est vraiment pas pareil’ (‘Men and women just aren’t the same’)

Annie Leclerc’s writing, most famously the iconic 1974 text Parole de femme, speaks with lyricism and humour for the différencialiste (difference) current of French women’s writing – the current that has been widely identified outside France with ‘French Feminism’. At the time of its initial publication, the book created intense controversy within the French feminist movement: it was the object of a searing critique by materialist feminist Christine Delphy in the pages of Les Temps modernes, and led to Leclerc’s expulsion from the circle around Simone de Beauvoir.When Leclerc died in 2006, her friend and fellow author Nancy Huston wrote an essay on her work, Passions d’Annie Leclerc (2007), that is at once a tribute, a biographical sketch and a meditation on female friendship. The two writers, of slightly different generations (Leclerc b. 1940, Huston 1953) shared a feminism committed– sometimes disturbingly –to the notion of gender difference and hence to some degree sceptical of the Beauvoirian, constructivist model. Analysing Leclerc’s influential text through the lens of Huston’s contemporary essay, this chapterdiscusses the ‘difference’ strand in French feminism, in the 1970s and now, and its relationship to the innovatively hybrid form of Huston’s memorial essay.

Feminist Publishing in France 1975–2000

This chapter examines the place of feminist publishing in both the French and international publishing industries from 1975 until 2000. It uses the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in order to analyse the ways in which feminist publishers attempted to gain a foothold in an industry that was marked by broader economic, political and cultural shifts in French society in the decades following the 1970s. It considers both the publishing industry and feminism as ‘fields’, following Bourdieu, the intersection of which allowed French feminists and women writers a means of expressing and disseminating their ideas and experiences. Structural and political changes in the 1980s and 1990s, however, meant that the context was generally less favourable for feminist publishing, although some publishers were able to adapt to the shifting context and markets. Internal division and disagreements within the feminist movement also contributed to a decline in specialist collections devoted to feminism.

1975 The Year of Women

The relationship between 1970s French radical feminists (the MLF) and Françoise Giroud, the first ‘Minister for Women’ in France, was a difficult one. Second-wave feminism in France was grounded in the contestation of the status quo, in the wake of the 1960s student movement out of which some of the groups emerged. Being part of the political establishment was therefore in itself an anathema to some second-wave feminists, as can be seen, for example, by satirical feminist films mocking Giroud’s role and her interventions. Through the prism of 1975, officially declared ‘International Women’s Year’ by the United Nations, this chapter explores the key campaigning and cultural themes of the MLF and their relationship to Giroud’smore reformist and, arguably, impossible task as Minister for Women.

Across the Waves

BenoîteGroult’s caustic yet humorous essay Ainsisoit-elle was published in 1975, the same year as the innovative feminist text Les Femmes s’entêtent, and, just as the collective volumedemanded a radical refusal of women’s oppression, so Groult’s text is also a call to arms. Espousing views too moderate for the most radical tendenciesof French feminism, Groult is often depicted as an ‘equality feminist’; this chapter firstly puts Groult’s polemical and popular Ainsisoit-elle in conversation with Les Femmes s’entêtent and, in so doing, provides a fuller picture of the heterogeneous nature of French feminism in the mid-1970s. Secondly, it assesses Groult’s legacy some forty years on by analysing Catel Muller’s representation of Groult in the biographical graphic novel AinsisoitBenoîteGroult (2014), which, as its title suggests, engages with Groult’s original essay.

A Mediterranean Bazaar

Marseille, France’s second largest city, was one of the two European ‘capitals of culture’ in 2013. The MuCEM, a museum dedicated to the idea of ‘The Mediterranean’ and its diverse cultures, opened on 7 June 2013 as one of the centrepiece’s of Marseille’s capital of culture stint. One of the MuCEM’s two inaugural temporary exhibitions was “Au Bazar du Genre” (at the Gender Bazaar). It was dedicated to exploring the recent history of feminist—and LGBT—challenges to the order of male domination in the twenty-one countries that surround the Mediterranean Sea. The expression ‘bazar’ is ambiguous in French. It calls up a mythified popular culture of the Mediterranean at the same time as it refers, in familiar parlance, to a mess or an assemblage of paraphernalia. This double entendre is surely deliberate, as ‘messing with gender’ is an explicit brief of the exhibition. At the same time, the choice of title leaves the curators of the exhibition open to the critique of bittiness. This chapter discusses these various facets of the exhibition and reactions to it in France, as an example of a certain institutionalisation of feminist memory that has both salutary and problematic aspects.

Work–Family Reconciliation Policy in France

This chapter examines the history of French work-family reconciliation policies from the 1970s until the present day. It considers the extent to which the development of these policies does and does not link to second wave feminist ideas about women’s domestic labour that emerged in the 1970s. It argues that while in Scandinavian countries, for example, debates and policies addressing work-family reconciliation debates considered men’s roles in the home as well as women’s employment, in France men’s roles were not addressed. This has meant that while French women today are well integrated into the labour force, and have used a variety of resources available to them to free themselves from domestic and caring responsibilities, men’s role in the family has changed very little in comparison with women’s role in the workforce.

Conclusion

Successive waves of feminism have produced significant gains for women, in France as elsewhere. Even though progress stalls and is reversed, even though the same battles have to be fought over and over again, it would be unduly pessimistic to deny that the daughters and granddaughters of mid-1970s activists live in a society that offers more life chances to women. The metaphor of waves is a rich one: waves gather, crash and fall, are sucked back into the ocean by the gravitational pull of moon and sun, but they are also powerful in their effects, their swash...