Resignation of Christophe Girard: "A more dissenting feminism has gained visibility"

Controversy is often compounded by controversy. After having urged Anne Hidalgo's deputy for Culture to resign, feminist activist Alice Coffin intends to continue her fight at the Council of Paris, where she has just been elected to the environmental benches. But his spectacular intervention in the Council of Paris also arouses controversy and questions about the feminist movement and its components as well as a political conflict within the municipal majority. Laure Bereni, sociologist and research director at CNR, teacher of a seminar at Sciences-Po on “Gender at the crossroads of social relations”, deciphers the evolution of the movement in recent years.

Has feminist speech taken on a new place in the media in recent years?

There has been a new boom, and even a new legitimacy of feminist speech, since the end of the 2000s. It coincided with what is commonly called the 3rd wave of feminism. Until then, speaking out publicly as a feminist was very stigmatizing. But we saw it at the time of the DSK affair: well-known personalities publicly expressed their feminism in the public space, which is now more open.

A new activism was then born in the same movement?

Yes, a more anti-establishment and more activist feminism has gained visibility in the public space. Alice Coffin is quite emblematic of this new wave since she was one of the founders of La Barbe, whose modus operandi was to intervene in entirely male places of power in an ironic fashion, made up of pastiche beards and dark costumes. A physical activism too, since these activists have been violently taken to task, like the Femen activists for example. And this new mode of action came up against the institutional feminism already in place.

Incarnated by certain female politicians, among others?

Exactly. In the case of the “affair” of Christophe Girard's resignation from the post of deputy for Culture at the town hall of Paris, Anne Hidalgo embodies this institutional feminism, the one that pushed the 2000 law on parity, the professional equality or the fight against sexual harassment, several areas of feminist struggles. This liberal feminism (in the American sense of the term) and the more anti-establishment tendencies belong to what I call “the space of the cause of women”: it is a space which is deployed in several social spheres, and which is very split and conflictual - like the history of feminism, this is a battleground. But be careful not to reduce it to that. This space for the cause of women also gives rise to convergences. The #MeToo movement is one example. In other contexts, cleavages take over.

Are these cleavages the prerogative of the 4th wave of feminism that is said to have emerged in recent years with social networks?

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We must be wary of the metaphor of waves, which tends to homogenize historical sequences. What is certain is that with this generation, digital mobilizations take on capital importance in the repertoire of feminist activists. In addition, over the past ten years, the intersectional perspective has entered the feminist movement in France. This more radical branch articulates several struggles, from anti-racism to anti-capitalism. It is de facto opposed to well-established elected women and institutions, such as the State Secretariat for Gender Equality. However, there are always centripetal forces that come together. We can see them in the mobilizations against sexual and gender-based violence in recent years: around the hashtag #MeToo, around Polanski's denunciation, around Adèle Haenel's speech or in major demonstrations for women's rights, in November and March each year.

Would you say that feminism is a series of ideological clashes?

The space of the cause of women is permanently crossed by dynamics of divergence and convergence. Even if a very hard conflict opposes them today, Anne Hidalgo and Alice Coffin have led in the past, and will lead in the future, common fights for the cause of women.

Do these chapel conflicts serve the cause?

Of course that undermines the overall discourse. There is always the risk of attributing to the whole movement the discourses and the ways of acting of one of its tendencies. But it also means that feminism is doing well: today, it has such a media surface that it can bring to light different trends and show its heterogeneity.

Some accuse feminist movements of playing the game of "separatism". Is it true ?

It depends on what we mean by separatism. If it is single-sex, getting together without men is the hallmark of second wave feminism, which was reborn in the 1970s close to Marxism. It also posed a lot of problems for the left at the time. We saw the re-emergence of single-sex people at the end of the 2000s, with certain anti-racist movements which intend to meet between minorities, and produce a voice of minorities, for minorities. It is a loan from the American anti-racist movements, but also from the feminist movement. Then the feminist movements again seized on this mode of operation which had lost its appeal in the 90s. At the time, associations like Mix-Cité, in which Clémentine Autain was involved, loudly claimed the inclusion of men. This standard of diversity is called into question by these movements today.

Does this create tensions within feminist movements?

In the history of feminism, there has always been a humanist and universalist tradition, for which the rights of women are everyone's business. And a more radical tradition, which claims to speak on behalf of women and for women. For the latter current, “separatism” is a militant strategy: organizing among women is a lever for emancipation. But politically asserting identity does not mean giving in to essentialism, which consists in attributing differences between the sexes to natural determinants. On the contrary: radical feminists are often those who most clearly reject essentialist discourses, and consider the difference between the sexes as the product of a relationship of domination.