This chapter contains sections titled: Simone de Beauvoir Luce Irigaray Colette Guillaumin Hélène Cixous Julia Kristeva Monique Wittig Sarah Kofman Michèle Le Doeuff Christine Delphy Conclusion.

"... Fraser and Bartky have brought the encounter between U.S. and French feminism to a new level of seriousness." —Ethics In the last decade, elements of French feminist discourse have permeated and transformed the larger feminist culture in the United States. This volume is the first sustained attempt to revalue French feminism and answer the question: What has been gained and what has been lost as a result of this intercultural encounter? Interviews with Simone de (...) Beauvoir open the book; essays by French feminists Sarah Kofman and Luce Irigaray follow; the North American contributors are Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Diana J. Fuss, Nancy J. Holland, Eleanor H. Kuykendall, Dorothy Leland, Diana T. Meyers, Andrea Nye, and Margaret A. Simons. (shrink)

French Feminism Reader is a collection of essays representing the authors and issues from French theory most influential in the American context. The book is designed for use in courses, and it includes illuminating introductions to the work of each author. These introductions include biographical information, influences and intellectual context, major themes in the author's work as a whole, and specific introductions to the selections in this volume. This collection includes selections by Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Delphy, (...) Colette Guilluamin, Monique Wittig, Michele Le Doeuff, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Helene Cixious. (shrink)

Introducing the work of three French feminists - Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Michele L Doeuff - "Sexual Subversions" provides access to the work of these writers. In doing so this book raises some key issues of relevance to feminist research, addressing debates around the nature of feminist theory; the relationship between feminist thinking theory; the relationship between feminist thinking and male-dominated areas of knowledge; the strategies appropriate for developing non-patriarchal or woman-centered knowledges. No book on French feminists (...) would be complete without including the contributions of Kristeva and Irigaray. The inclusion of Le Doeuff's work, which brings a different perspective to bear on the question of sexual difference, provides a counterbalance to literary appropriations of French feminism by Anglo-American readerships. Kristeva, Irigaray and Le Doeuff are the focal points of this study, precisely because each highlights the differences of the others, revealing the frameworks to which the others are committed. Nevertheless, while these writers do not present a common political or theoretical position or form a school, each does address the question of women's autonomy from male definition, affirms the sexual specificity of women, seeks out a femininity women can use to question the patriarchal norms and ideals of femininity and rejects the preordained positions patriarchy allots to woman. This book is intended for students and researchers in women's studies, philosophy and feminism. (shrink)

This article opens with the questioning of a now established scholarly category, `French feminism'. It proposes that theoretical and polemical understandings of `French feminism' have been founded on an opposition to its counterpart, `Anglo-American feminism'. The measure of this opposition has been defined mostly as geographical, linguistic and cultural. But underneath such constructions often lies the old sameness vs difference debate that has captivated feminism since the suffragettes. The article argues for a less oppositional (...) and less discounting definition of the two strands of feminism. It proposes to read oppositional classifications as motivation for a dialogue addressed to the `other ' of theoretical constructs; questioning the likelihood of foregoing oppositional classification. (shrink)

Have we entered a historical moment of 'post-feminism'? This volume presents a timely and convincing 'no'. These essays demonstrate that there is a new generation of French women who take up questions of equality and difference from a position distinct from either first or second wave feminism, a position that often attempts to move beyond the binary of equality and/or difference to a new form of the individual.

This paper examines some French feminist uses of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I focus on two Lacanian influenced accounts of psychological oppression, the first by Luce Irigaray and the second by Julia Kristeva, and I argue that these accounts fail to meet criteria for an adequate political psychology.

Literary art that is identifiably feminist approaches reality from a feminist perspective and endorses female experience. A feminist perspective demystifies patriarchal assumptions about the nature of human beings, their relation to nature, and the relation of physical and moral qualities to each other. To endorse female experience, the artist must defy or stretch traditional literary conventions, which often means offending or alienating readers. Traditional literary conventions are rooted in philosophical assumptions several thousand years old and still widely current. A third (...) principle of feminist art-which not all feminists subscribe to-is accessibility. When feminist art is difficult, the reason usually lies not in purposeful obfuscation, but in the poverty of our language of feeling, and the difficulty of rendering feeling. (shrink)

Although at times criticized for its philosophical density, French cultural theory remains a flourishing, if highly contested, area of academic study. Four feminist thinkers in this tradition continue to be especially prominent: Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. This new collection from Routledge gathers together the very best secondary literature on these thinkers to provide an indispensable conspectus of their works. Each of the four thinkers is represented by an individual volume, and each volume includes (...) a newly written introduction to that thinker’s work and her philosophical relevance. (shrink)

"Portions of this work were originally published as La racaille de la Republique by Fadela Amara and Mohammed Abdi, Editions du Seuil, 2006"--T.p. verso.

Emphasizing the relevance of celibate singleness for the French women's movement, Ly affirmed that "more and more, we will recruit the elite of our adepts and militants from these noble freethinkers, these inspiring rebels" who were not legally "under their husbands' authority" or otherwise restricted by familial obligations.1 Given the early twentieth-century context of heightened national fears about France's flagging birth rate and the degeneration of the French "race," Ly's argument for political spinsterhood hardly encountered a popular reception, (...) either within liberal or feminist circles. Citing passionate fears of female political activism and the New Woman against an anxious background of nationalistic and conservative revival, scholars have underscored the French movement's need to present a nonviolent and "feminine" image to the public, one that did not openly challenge women's primary sexual, marital, or reproductive roles.5 Historian Karen Offen has most notably argued that the majority of feminists in France emphasized women's "maternal and nurturant functions" and stressed the notion of "equality-in-difference" rather than espousing a more individualistic Anglo-American philosophy.6 Although maternity and sexual difference were certainly dominant tropes in French feminist discourse, focusing on the question of single women allows us to view the French movement from a different angle. (shrink)

Diotima at the Barricades argues that the debates that emerged from the burgeoning of feminist intellectual life in post-modern France involved complex, structured, and reciprocal exchanges on the interpretation and position of Plato and other ancient texts in the western philosophical and literary tradition. Paul Allen Miller shows how individual works of Anglo-American figures such as Toril Moi, Judith Butler, and Kaja Silverman, as well as movements such as queer theory, are rooted in feminist theoretical debates that began in the (...) sixties in France and have continued right up to the present day. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“We all love with the same part of the body, don’t we?”Iuliia Voznesenskaia’s Zhenskii Dekameron, New Women’s Prose, and French Feminist TheoryYelena Furman (bio)Starting out as a poet who eventually turned to fiction, Iuliia Voznesenskaia was also one of the main figures of the Soviet feminist movement, a fact that makes her biography both unusual and courageous. In the 1970s, Voznesenskaia’s involvement with the dissident movement in Leningrad (...) resulted in several arrests, imprisonment, and time in the camps.1 Although she was not initially interested in women’s issues, her incarceration in all-women’s camps and prisons convinced her that “the situation of women in our country demands special attention” (“Zhenskoe dvizhenie v Rossii” [“The Women’s Movement in Russia”] 41). Along with several other women dissidents, she founded the Soviet feminist movement, putting out the samizdat women’s journal Zhenshchina i Rossiia (Woman and Russia), which precipitated immediate reprisals from the KGB. A women’s club, Mariia, and a journal by the same name followed, as did more KGB reprisals. For her feminist activity, Voznesenskaia was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980, settling in West Germany.2In 1985, in West Germany, Voznesenskaia wrote her first and best-known novel, Zhenskii Dekameron (The Women’s Decameron). The novel is set in a Leningrad maternity ward containing ten new mothers from different backgrounds with different life experiences: Larisa, Emma, Natasha, Nelia, Galina, and Valentina are educated and all have careers except Galina, whose occupation, admittedly strange for a feminist novel, seems to be a dissident’s wife; Ol’ga works in a shipyard; Irishka is a secretary; Al’bina is an Aeroflot flight attendant doubling as an escort on the KGB’s payroll; Zina is homeless and has served time in the camps; Valentina is a Party worker, whereas Galina is part of the dissident community. Quarantined together for ten days because of a spreading infection and inspired by Emma’s reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the women begin to tell each other stories to pass the time. As its title makes clear, Voznesenskaia’s novel is heavily indebted to Boccaccio’s, borrowing its structure and many of its themes, such as an emphasis on storytelling and sexual explicitness. The humor and poignancy of the women’s stories make it a highly enjoyable read, and the focus on female sexuality and the author’s play with the narrative set this novel apart from other Soviet writers’ works.3 The novel also features what is surely a unique occurrence in Russian and Soviet literature: an openly feminist character (Larisa), referred to by the authornarrator as “zhenshchinoi vpolne emansipirovannoi, mogushchei ukrasit’ soboi liuboe zapadnoe feministicheskoe obshchestvo” [“a completely emancipated woman, capable [End Page 95] of adorning any Western feminist group”] (13), who is moreover depicted in a wholly positive light.4Yet despite enjoying a modicum of success, including being translated into several languages and staged as a play, Zhenskii Dekameron remains an under-read and underrated work.5 The reasons for its relative obscurity are closely allied with Voznesenskaia’s political activities in the 1980s. Exiled abroad for being politically undesirable to Soviet authorities, she could not have her work published in the Soviet Union; rather, the novel came out in Russian in Israel in 1987 (Curtis 186n2).6 The lack of visibility from which she suffered in her native country changed only in the (post)glasnost’ period: in 1991, the novel was published in Russian in Tallinn, and in 1992, in Moscow.7 Despite being able to be published, however, Zhenskii Dekameron seems not to have made a strong impact on either readers or critics, and there does not appear to be any discussion of it in Soviet/ Russian literary journals.The novel likewise suffers from a lack of familiarity in the West. The interest Voznesenskaia generated among Western European and American feminists in the early 1980s was for her feminist activism in the Soviet Union, which preceded her novel writing. Zhenskii Dekameron seems to have made a modest impact on readers; scholars, too, discuss it only occasionally. The most comprehensive treatment of the work to date has been Jerzy Kolodziej... (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which 1970s French feminists who participated in the Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de libération des femmes – MLF) wielded the spectre of lesbianism as an American idiosyncrasy to counteract the politicisation of lesbianism in France. It argues that the erasure of lesbian difference from the domain of French feminism was a necessary condition for making ‘woman’ an amenable subject for incorporation into the abstract unity of the French nation, wherein heterosexuality (...) is conceived as a democratic crucible where men and women harmoniously come together and differences are deemed divisive. Looking at the history of feminism from the standpoint of a lesbian perspective reveals unforeseen continuities between French ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ genealogies insofar as they rest on common heterosexual and racial foundations. Finally, the article demonstrates that the alleged un-Frenchness ascribed to the word ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s feminist movement spectrally returned in the 1990s when the word ‘gender’ was, in its turn, deemed radically foreign to the French culture by feminist researchers. Fiercely reactionary constituencies against the legalisation of same-sex marriage have more recently taken up this rhetorical weapon against sexual and racial minorities. (shrink)

Through a discussion of the work of Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux, this article aims to problematize the anglophone academic world's tendency to associate French feminisms predominantly with avant-garde or highly theoretical texts. The work of Ernaux and Cardinal is presented alongside a discussion of its reception by readers and critics in France, and by academics in English-speaking countries. The first part of the article identifies aspects of Ernaux's and Cardinal's works which cannot be encompassed within a critical framework (...) based on the dichotomy between naïve realism on the one hand and the politically and linguistically radical text on the other. Ernaux's plain language, for instance, is clearly very unlike the linguistic experimentation of ‘feminine writing’; nonetheless the emphasis on social class in her writing constitutes a political intervention which is at least equally valid. The reception study in the second part of the article provides further evidence of the relevance to gender politics in France of Cardinal's The Words to Say It (1975) and texts published by Annie Ernaux in the 1980s and 1990s. The ambivalent response of critics seems to indicate the troubling nature of writing which combines the codes of realism and autobiography (or autobiographical fiction in Cardinal's case) with the depiction of taboo subjects such as menstruation, or a daughter's response to her mother's debilitating illness and death. The article also charts the widespread popularity of these texts in France, particularly with women readers, and gives some examples of the pleasures described in letters to the authors. In conclusion, we argue that the ambivalent space between popular and high culture occupied (albeit differently) by Ernaux and Cardinal may be particularly effective in terms of gender politics, and that even in the late 1990s, the personal may be as political as ever. (shrink)

Historienne américaine, Joan Scott est connue en France pour ses travaux d'histoire ouvrière française et pour la réflexion qu'elle a développée depuis les années 1980 sur l'écriture de l'histoire des femmes et du genre. Théoricienne du gender nourrie de philosophie française (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida) et de critique littéraire féministe, elle a introduit dans l'écriture historique les positions post-structuralistes qui considèrent toutes les catégories d'analyse comme contextualisées,...

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

"... some very serious critiques of French existential phenomenology and post-structuralism... the contributors offer some refreshingly new insights into some tried and 'true' philosophical texts and more recent works of literary theory." -- Philosophy and Literature "By bridging the gap between 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy, the authors of The Thinking Muse: Feminism and the Modern French Philosophy largely overcome the cultural polarity between 'male thinker' and 'female muse'." -- Ethics "These engaging essays by American Feminists bring toether (...) feminist philosophy, existential phenomenology, and recent currents in French poststructuralist thought. The editors provide an excellent introductory overview, making this an ideal book for courses in feminist theory and philosophy and modern French thought." -- Philosopher's Index "The concerns raised in this volume are substantial.... a solid addition to the canon of American feminist philosophy." -- Philosophy and Literature "... a forum for feminist appropriations of existential and post-structuralist philosophy." -- Canadian Philosophical Reviews Marking a radical shift in the traditional philosophical separation between muse (female) and thinker (male), The Thinking Muse revises the scope and methods of philosophical reflection. These engaging essays by American feminists bring together feminist philosophy, existential phenomenology, and recent currents in French poststructuralist thought. (shrink)

The collection also contains a comprehensive bibliography of feminist thinkers who are enacting French philosophy in English, German, and French.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to Creative Writing ContributionsAlexis Pauline Gumbs, Akasha Gloria Hull, Cheryl Clarke, doris diosa davenport, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Asha French, Sharon Bridgforth, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Alexis De Veaux, and Sokari Ekinewhen i first began to dream of creative writing contributions for this special issue of Feminist Studies celebrating the fortieth anniversaries of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and All the Women (...) Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, I imagined a wealth of examples of the world and the work made possible by these two groundbreaking anthologies. I wondered what their editors and contributors were writing now. I wondered about the work of their students and people like me: those of us who understand everything we write as indebted to the path-making, silence-clearing, generative, and bodacious work of the participants in the miracles that are This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave.But today as I reread the contributions that actually emerged from this process, I realize that my dream was too small. I imagined writing that would provide evidence of the ongoing impact made by these two anthologies. Instead, the creative writing in this special issue offers something more crucial and beautiful than I had imagined. These works are not mere evidence of a transformed world; these works are continuing to transform the world in urgent and visionary ways. As repeated again and again by participants in the 2022 celebration for the fortieth anniversary celebration of This Bridge Called My Back, the work that inspired these anthologies is not over. The writings featured in this issue not only show [End Page 198] how this work continues, but they feed, nurture, and provoke us as we honor our responsibility to transform this world.For example, when Akasha Gloria Hull, coeditor of But Some of Us Are Brave, shares her daily early morning meditative writing in "Writing and Rebirth: A Set of Journal Poems," we remember not only her fundamental work excavating the daily lives of Black women writers from the nineteenth century—most notably in Give Us Each Day, her edited book based on the diaries of poet Alice Dunbar Nelson—but also our own imperative. Hull's reflections on health challenges, interpersonal conflict, resurrection, collaboration, and writing itself remind us that our feminist praxis is impactful because of its dailyness. Those of us who wake up tomorrow will need to ask the same critical questions the editors of But Some of Us Are Brave asked of the fields of Black studies and women's studies. We will find surprises and repetitions in the days we meet, and then we will have to do it again.When we read two new prose poems by Cheryl Clarke, an original contributor to This Bridge Called My Back, we have an opportunity to time travel. In "Living as a Lesbian in the Archive of Style," we venture into a critical engagement with the term "hardcore lesbian," displacing the desires of the person who needs to classify others using that term with those of someone who has been hailed by it. Clarke's poem is a reminder that as we work in literary traditions and fields of study made possible by the revolutionary identity politics of an earlier era, we are still responsible for centering the experiences of those most impacted by our fluent and fluid naming practices. In "History," Clarke offers us a timely Black lesbian feminist lens on many iterations of responding to police violence, centering the perspective of a lesbian, her lover, and her lover's husband.The poem "On Being an hbcu Graduate, Teacher, Professor-Scholar at Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, AL, in May 2015" by doris diosa davenport—an original contributor to But Some of Us Are Brave—highlights the intimacy, hilarity, and poignancy of the daily work of intergenerational critical and creative praxis. In particular, she considers the context of institutions and regions that are sometimes excluded from the imaginary of how and where feminist work happens. davenport transmits the lessons and energy gained through her practice of thinking and gathering otherwise... (shrink)

French materialist feminists such as Christine Delphy and Monique Wittig maintain that the social fact of women’s exploitation by men within the family pre-exists and produces gender differences as well as the perception that men and women belong to different biological sexes. They take this position to be ‘materialist’ because it puts social facts prior to ideas and beliefs and so puts the ‘material’ prior to the ‘ideal’. However, I shall claim, drawing on arguments of Sebastiano Timpanaro’s, that this (...) is an incomplete form of materialism because it neglects the shaping of social facts by their interaction with biological facts, notably the biological difference between the sexes. Wittig, though, denies that there is any ‘fact’ of biological sexual difference. Wittig claims that we only believe in and perceive two biological sexes due to the influence of gender expectations. I will try to show that Wittig’s arguments for this claim undermine themselves and actually presuppose that there are two biological sexes. I will conclude that, given that there are two biological sexes, a fully materialist form of feminism must take account of sex difference in theorising gender inequalities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 575 Geneviève Pagé Gender at the Crossing: Ideological Travelings of US and French Thought in Montreal Feminism This article recounts a story about Montreal feminism using the narrative thread of its conceptual language. It is a story of language as a political choice that guides our actions, but also language as a political issue, a (...) barrier, a tool that structures our thinking and that reflects and reproduces relations of power in knowledge production and dissemination. Gender is the central character in this story—its role representing the way US, French, and Quebec theoretical traditions are deeply in dialogue with each other; yet this dialogue is arbitrary and filled with long silences. In reviewing the dialogue, this article identifies a few elements that play a significant role in favoring or impeding the traveling of ideas and concepts, focusing, in the case of Quebec, on how part of the feminist movement, comprised of radical or “revolutionary” feminists, engages with and constructs theory. The article begins by briefly tracing the evolving meanings of gender in the United States from the 1920s to the twenty-first century. Then, turning to France, a second section identifies elements limiting the traveling of US understandings of gender in French feminist theory, especially the predominance of specific traditions of thought, namely existentialism and Marxism, leading to different ways of thinking about oppression, patriarchy, sexism, and the idea of womanhood. In a third section, I shift the focus to Quebec, particularly Francophone Montreal, to survey its feminist thought, political traditions, and 576 Geneviève Pagé translation. Its history, its people, and its geographic location put it at the convergence of US and French influences, but with a distinct added local imperative: the struggle for national liberation. The specific ways in which Quebec nationalism has foregrounded power and politics around language has had a major impact on how Quebec feminists have negotiated relations with their southern feminist neighbors. In this sense, Quebec feminism presents an excellent case study of language operating as an axis of power. Furthermore, in the context of globalization and resistances to globalizing processes, Montreal provides a perfect example by which to highlight both transnational influences and local specificities. Montreal, as a classic example of Mary Louise Pratt’s cultural and linguistic “contact zone”—the space where communities of practices interact—is a city in which one can clearly identify “the intellectual and linguistic points of contact between cultures, and make visible the political pressure that activates them.”1 I treat translations that occur in this context as the process of connecting and communicating between communities. As queer theorist Juana María Rodríguez has noted in another context, “the process of translation involves more than merely translating languages; it involves translating cultures, values, and institutions of power.”2 Similarly, translation here involves an exchange between symbolic and semiotic structures of both the original and the new communities. Zooming out of Montreal, I then address the politics of translation on a more global scale, pointing out the particular ways the production and dissemination of knowledge is especially beholden to market relations. All these reflections help us understand the traveling of ideas, concepts, and ideologies across linguistic barriers. I conclude that it is in the interest of feminists to pay particular attention to what knowledge is produced from different standpoints and in different languages and what it can teach us. 1. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), 36. 2. Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 19. Geneviève Pagé  577 Gender in the United States It is among US feminists that the conceptualization of the gender/sex dichotomy first developed. However, gender—the word—ironically comes to English from the French genre and shares with that word its derivation from the Latin genus, meaning “kind,” “sort,” or “type.” The derivation is most visible in the borrowing in English of the French genre, for example, in literary forms such as fiction or poetry. Similarly, both the English... (shrink)