Éléonore Lépinard

The contentious subject of feminism : Defining Women in france from the second wave to parity

T he 1990s were years of effervescence in the women’s movement in France, as a new claim for political representation emerged and reconfigured the shape and scope of women’s movement politics as well as feminist theory. In 1992, three women, Françoise Gaspard, Claude Servan-Schreiber, and Anne Le Gall—all of them longtime activists for women’s rights—published the book Au pouvoir citoyennes! Liberté, égalité, parité (Female citizens go for power! Liberty, equality, parity), which demanded equal political representation of women and men. They denounced the underrepresentation of women in political assemblies (at that time women made up 5.7 percent of the assembly and 5 percent of the members of the senate) and demanded reforms to ensure parité, meaning a fifty-fifty balance between men and women in all elected assemblies. The publication of Au pouvoir citoyennes! is often identified as the starting point of the long and vivid debate over parity, which took place from 1992 to 2000 in the political arena, academia, the women’s movement, and the media. In many ways this book is indeed a foundational document. It defined and propagated a new agenda for the French women’s movement.

Doing Intersectionality: Repertoires of Feminist Practices in France and Canada

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 intersectionality 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.

In the Name of Equality? The Missing Intersection in Canadian Feminists’ Legal Mobilization Against Multiculturalism

In Canada, women’s rights organizations have successfully mobilized the law to foster gender equality. In doing so, they have been constrained by legal understandings of equality and discrimination, which have shaped their strategies to seek justice. In return, their mobilization, mainly through litigation, has contributed to craft or to alter legal categories (such as “substantive equality,” “women,” “sexual harassment,” etc.), which in turn sustain their identities and their interests. However, claims made in the name of gender equality raise two issues: They tend to overlook the intersection of gender with other grounds of discrimination such as religion or race/ethnicity; and they tend to conflict with multiculturalism, a value enshrined in Canadian law. The recent decision taken by the province of Ontario to ban religious arbitration for family matters offers an illuminating case study of this tension between gender equality and religious rights in the Canadian context. This article analyzes women’s rights activists’ legal understandings of gender equality and religious/ethnic discrimination to explain how these representations have influenced women’s mobilization against religious arbitration in Ontario. Bringing together the insights developed by critical legal studies about intersectionality and the study of legal mobilization, this articles explores through a concrete example the tension between feminism and multiculturalism.

Impossible Intersectionality? French Feminists and the Struggle for Inclusion

The history of the origins of the concept of intersectionality is deeply embedded in the U.S. context. The intertwined histories of the American womens movements and American race relations as well as the conjunction of several theoretical strands, such as the philosophical critique of the modern subject, poststructuralism, the critique from feminists of color, and critical legal studies, have marked the genesis and the operationalization of the concept of intersectionality in American feminist studies (Ackerly and McDermott 2011, Dhamoon 2011). This legacy has given the concept of intersectionality particular analytical contents, preferred objects of inquiry, and methodologies as well as specific political aims (McCall 2005). Kimberle Crenshaws initial formulation of intersectionality exemplifies this U.S. genealogy since it represents a joint analytical and political effort, embedded in critical legal studies and black feminist theory, to identify and promote the political identity of African-American women or, as she writes, to “demarginalize” their political interests and to critique single axis approaches to inequality and discrimination (Crenshaw 1991). By doing so, the concept of intersectionality not only makes visible the categories and groups that were marginalized in theory and political practice, but also articulates a new set of political interests and, to a certain extent, contributes to construct and to represent intersectional identities.

From breaking the rule to making the rules: the adoption, entrenchment, and diffusion of gender quotas in France

Once a country allergic to any type of preferential treatment or quota measure for women, France has become a country that applies gender quotas to regulate womens presence and representation in politics, the business sector, public bodies, public administration, and even some civil society organizations. While research has concentrated on the adoption of electoral gender quotas in many countries and their international diffusion, few studies focus on explaining the successful diffusion of gender quotas from politics to other domains in the same country. This paper proposes to fill this gap by studying the particularly puzzling case of a country that at one point strongly opposed the adoption of gender quotas in politics, but, in less than a decade, transformed into one of the few countries applying gender quotas across several policy domains. This paper argues that the legal entrenchment of the parity principle, the institutionalization of parity in several successive womens policy agencies, and key players in these newly created agencies are mainly responsible for this unexpected development. The diffusion of gender quotas in France thus offers an illuminating example of under which conditions womens policy agencies can act autonomously to diffuse and impose a new tool for gender equality.

Intersectionality as a tool for social movements : Strategies of inclusion and representation in the Québécois women's movement

As a social movement strategy, intersectionality is used to foster the inclusion and representation of minority groups. In this article, we examine how Québécois women’s organizations use intersectionality as a tool to include immigrant and Native women. We argue that intersectionality can entail different practices with potentially conflicting goals. We conclude that social movement scholars would benefit from paying attention to intersectionality and to how it is practised by activists and organizations. Indeed, a focus on intersectionality sheds light on the tensions inherent in the processes by which organizations construct collective identities, formulate political demands, manage internal conflicts and build alliances.

Migrating concepts: Immigrant integration and the regulation of religious dress in France and Canada

Religion in general, and Islam in particular, has become one of the main focal points of policy-making and constitutional politics in many Western liberal states. This article proposes to examine the legal and political dynamics behind new regulations targeting individual religious practices of Muslims. Although one could presuppose that church–state relations or the understanding of secularism is the main factor accounting for either accommodation or prohibition of Muslim religious practices, I make the case that the policy frame used to conceptualize the integration of immigrants in each national context is a more significant influence on how a liberal state approaches the legal regulation of individual practices such as veiling. However, this influence must be assessed carefully since it may have different effects on the different institutional actors in charge of regulating religion, such as the Courts and the legislature. To assess these hypotheses I compare two countries, France and Canada, which are solid examples of two contrasting national policy frames for the integration of immigrants.

Écriture juridique et régulation du religieux minoritaire en France et au Canada

Pour contribuer a expliquer les decisions juridiques accommodant ou prohibant le port de signes religieux minoritaires tels que le voile islamique, cet article propose de s’interesser au role joue par les traditions d’ecriture juridique dans deux contextes nationaux contrastes : la France et le Canada. Il analyse la technique juridique en ce qu’elle permet de legitimer en droit des presupposes axiologiques plus ou moins favorables aux pratiques religieuses minoritaires. En comparant les styles d’ecriture du juge canadien et du juge francais, on met ainsi en lumiere comment le premier, grâce a des techniques juridiques specifiques, inclut le point de vue minoritaire dans ses decisions, alors que le second tend a favoriser le point de vue majoritaire et a delegitimer les demandes faites au nom de la moralite religieuse minoritaire, en particulier musulmane.