The 'Others' of French Feminism from the Second Wave to the Present

This Paper addresses the processes of “othering” within (dominant) French feminist theory and mobilizations from the second wave to the present, through a focus on two ambivalent feminist subjects: the lesbian in the 1970s and the headscarf-wearing Muslim woman in the 2000s. While the figure of the lesbian will be addressed in relation to her role in the 1970s as a “paradoxical” feminist figure, pointing as some of the limits of the universal subject “Women”, the headscarf-wearing Muslim woman will be discussed from a contemporary perspective in relation to her recent stigmatization within feminist discourses. Through the example of the frictions between homosexual and lesbian subject positions in the 1970s, we wish to highlight how the Women’s movement has taken up a universal approach to the female subject, which became even more obvious and pervasive when feminism was integrated into State institutions in the 1980s and during the debates on parity in the 1990s. In particular, this paper will explore how the opposition between homosexuality and lesbianism was very much embedded in an overarching distinction between the universality of sexual difference and the specificity of “other” minorities. Similar processes of identification and exclusion characterize the feminist conflicts over Islamic headscarves since the beginning of the 1990s. In a context of “colonial aphasia” (Stoler 2011) and heightened nationalism, the good subject of feminism has been defined as acculturated to the Republic, a univocal French secular subject. In spanning more than 40 years in our paper, we wish to highlight continuity through time within French feminist rhetoric as well as organizations and some individual actresses: while “good” and “bad” subjects of feminism have changed, processes of “othering” in a universalist context remain somewhat similar.