Workshop no. 6:
"Feminist Politics: Assessing Thirty Years of Mixed Gains." The Fourth European Feminist Research
Conference.
French Feminist Studies Between Marginalization
and Recognition
At a 1998
colloquium organized by the Toulouse research group Simone, Françoise Collin
spoke of how hard it was for her to link the sum of her feminist reflections
with her discipline, philosophy. I was
surprised. For me, never having known
the Women's Movement and having learned
about feminism from Women's Studies, the questions were different. What seemed problematic to me was the lack
of recognition of Women's Studies, as evidenced by the bizarre experience of having
to explain, and even make excuses for my own field of study. On the other hand, when asked if I were a
feminist, I would answer "no," despite that little voice in my head
that nagged me about my inconsistencies.
Back then, I made a distinction between Feminist Studies and being a
feminist. The scrutiny of others, other students and people in my entourage,
prevented me from admitting that what I liked in Feminist Studies was the
feminism. (Please note I'm using Feminist Studies and Women's Studies interchangeably.)
These
were some of the reasons that led me to work on the institutionalization of
French Feminist Studies. Defining the
object of study was difficult. I wanted to take everything into account: the
different underlying hypotheses and paradigms, and the splits in the Women's Movement
and the boundaries between those who accept or reject the term feminist. Nevertheless, all these studies, whether
"feminist," "women's" or "gender," all have a
common denominator, a link to institutions of research and higher education.
It all
started with the Women's Movement of the 1970s, heir to the radical May 68. It
was an movement that generated issues and demands, mainly related to sexual
politics and it constituted a non-negligible force in society. Right from the start in the 70s, research
groups, created in universities, addressed the issues raised by the Movement:
the University of Paris VIII's Centre de recherche d'études féminines, The
Groupe Interdisciplinaire d'Etudes des Femmes (GRIEF) in Toulouse, and the
Nantes Centre de recherche-politique-femmes.
The Movement, with its links to the 68 student revolt, drew in women
from academia. For these women, the
task was to reconcile their feminism and the university.
The task
was not an easy one. Debates raged over
the co-optation of women's struggles by institutions. The women who carried the demands and ideas of the Movement into
the universities tried to bring together two opposing worlds. In 1975, the Groupe d'Etudes Féministes was
founded at the University of Paris VII, as both a research group and a
consciousness-raising group. The
minutes from a February 1975 meeting describe the group's objectives:
The group could be an arena of protest and subversion; from
it, can we change anything? Women's
consciousness? The university structure? Or, from the collective reflection and work,
an autonomous dynamic could be born, to raise feminist consciousness among
women in the university.
The question of the
connections is raised directly: "How can we link the studies on women and
current struggles?"
The 1982 Toulouse conference
entitled "Femmes, Féminisme et Recherche" revealed the proportions of
this dilemma. And, although the
beginnings of institutional recognition can also be dated to 1982, it is perhaps
more to the point to ask if this recognition was of Women's Studies per se. In
my analysis, as we will see later, by allowing the new conference to take
place, the Socialist administration of the period was showing recognition--not
necessarily of Women's Studies which were just taking shape--but of the
strength of Women's Movement as a social movement.
Shortly after the Socialists
came to power in 1981, the then-Research minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement,
decided to organize a vast inquiry to define a new policy in science and
technology. Various concerned parties were invited to regional meetings in
order to prepare a national conference.
Women's Studies were not on the agenda.
Liliane Kandel, an emblematic figure of the Women's Movement and Women's
Studies recalls the incident:
Along came the Socialists and
the Chevènement conference.... I
remember clearly--we met in a café across from the Sorbonne. A few women wrote up a communiqué that said,
"Well, a certain number of us have not been invited, as feminist scholars,
to this conference.... We wrote this
thing up in record time. So we went, and things happened quite differently from
what we anticipated. That is, one of us
raised our hand to say "this is a shocking state of affairs" and
someone from the podium answered "well then, come say what you have to
say." They really did let us
speak. In the end, since there actually
was not much space for women at the Chevènement conference, we ended up obtaining
an appointment at the Research Ministry with [Maurice] Godelier. He had understood that Women's Studies were
important. The Ministry asked, "Do
you want money?" And the utterly
unexpected feminist response was: "We want a conference; we want to take
stock of what's going on in the field." [Kandel, 1999].
Indeed, the objective at the
time was to take an inventory of feminist research and research on women and,
as Françoise Picq has written, to show its "material existence."
This date is also cited as a
transition from movement to research.
While this is not an obvious assertion, it does seem that 1982 marks the
beginnings of a divorce. With the
organization of the Toulouse conference and it aftermath, organizers and
participants showed their will to define themselves and to do so within the
framework of institutions. As Kandel recounts:
At first, we thought there
were two simple categories, one with the scholars, and one other with those
outside institutions. This didn't work
at all. We had to create a bunch of
subcategories, with those who had anchors in institutions but where they
couldn't practice their feminism.
Another category was those on the outside but trying to get in. In the end, there were three divisions.
The other
indispensable step in this process was the creation Women's Studies
associations and to obtain institutional academic of feminist research. The distinction activist and scholarly
groups was thus deemed essential.
Feminist scholarship was defining itself not in terms of "ideological
content," as Françoise Picq has written, "since the association
[here, the Paris group] no more intended to make judgements on a correct
feminist line than on the scientific content of the research." But, as
Picq, "if no criterion was established for membership in the association,
it would be but an ideological grouping, unrepresentative of feminist
scholarship, and lacking of credibility."
Although
the Socialist Left did acknowledge feminism as a political phenomenon, the
recognition did not extend to Women's Studies which was only beginning to
establish itself. There was thus
recognition, but there has been a misunderstanding, in my view, of just what
was being recognized. After Toulouse,
the process of institutionalization seemed to be accelerating, with integration
into spaces such as the national research institute, the CNRS, thanks to the
establishment of two related research programs (called ATPs). With subsequent CNRS funding of the
"Production-Reproduction Workshop," Women's Studies seemed to reach a
new level of recognition by French academic institutions. During the same period, the GEDISST (Groupe
d'études sur la division sociale et sexuelle du travail), a Feminist Studies
research group was created within the CNRS.
Concomitantly, four positions in Women's Studies were opened in the
universities (only three of which were filled). However, the CNRS's emerging recognition of Women's Studies did
not live up to initial expectations.
Despite the promise shown by the research projects conducted during the
ATP programs, the much awaited follow-up never materialized. The year-long preparation of a cooperative
research network to build upon the ATP ended in frustration. Women's Studies ended up dependant on the
institutions in which they had developed.
They were tolerated, but on the margins; integrated, but not recognized. Their rocky fate was that of a scholarly
field acknowledged for the questions raised, rather than for its scientific
analyses.
In the universities and research
institutes, scholars studying women from a feminist standpoint meet with an icy
reception. A Judith Ezekiel has
written:
This is what I
call the "black hole 'women.'"
A quite respectable topic [for a dissertation] is annihilated by the
prefix "women" or "feminist." A case in point: the request that my dissertation be classified
in "American History" was rejected because there was no historian in
my committee. On the contrary, the
classification "Women's History" encountered no objections. The word
"women," apparently, having cancelled out the weighty term
"history" [Ezekiel 1994].
Women's Studies are not
granted the same scientific status as other fields. The lack of recognition stems from a lack of credibility: the
link between the Women's Movement and Women's Studies was deemed too strong. Yet before the field became organized and established,
the driving force behind Women's Studies, the Women's Movement and its force in
society, was on the wane. Women's
Studies could thus rely only on its scholarly capacities and on its own
strength as a field of research. But
the long battle for scientific recognition had only just begun.
Here too, a more
epistemological side of the question must be taken into account: crucial to the
establishment of Women's Studies was that they were established "in
opposition to", in a process of
reaction. Scholars worked to
deconstruct all those things that "go without saying" in which their
disciplines were grounded, that is, their androcentrism [Mathieu 1991]. Feminists' "critique of the sciences"
was indeed a high point for feminist research.
The idea was that it was a collective and political process, to claim
visibility as a part of constructing a resistance to what was being expressed
about women. And yet, the critique
served to rehabilitate those being critiqued.
As Liliane Kandel said,
This idea of breaking away
went along with something else--a sort of epistemological fundamentalism. For instance, take "L'Ennemi
principal" [Christine Delphy's emblematic text]. The idea was not at all to criticize Marx, but rather to get him
back up on his feet: to be a better Marxist than Marx himself. Similarly, [Luce] Irigaray or [Antoinette]
Fouque aimed at being a better Freudian than Freud, or a better Lacanian than
Lacan, and, to a certain extent, to use them to surpass them. Thus, there was either a sense of breaking
away or that the great men had not gone far enough with their theory. Because if they had, they would have taken
into account the domestic economy for the former, or women's libido for the
latter, etc. [Kandel 1999].
This is
why it is important to understand the foundations of what I hesitate to call
"a field" of studies. My
analysis uses the theoretical tools of sociology and philosophy of science, and
in particular, the work of Bruno Latour [1989, 1991] and Isabelle Stengers
[1997]. The protest movements, Stengers
explains, moved things forward by inventing new
identities--or perhaps, since it is so clear that no female identity exists in
and of itself, one should speak, as she does, of new modes of appartenance
identitaire, which I'm translating here as "identity
affiliation." Second, they
transformed the demands, rights and obligations that come from these modes of
affiliation, by "bending these categories among themselves." Feminism as a liberation movement, has
reinterpreted what was the French commonly called "women's condition"
by adding a confrontative and collective dimension. It was by confounding these identities, by transforming what was
women's condition, strained between feminist demands and female identity, that
women, seen at most as an "object"--that is, not established as an
"issue"--were able to become a subject in the sense of a
"collective project," that of women's liberation. This is the project that has carried, and
been carried by both the Women's Movement and Women's Studies, albeit at
different levels, in different universes.
Both actively raise the question of women's place, the former on the
political and social scene, and the latter, in research, bringing us back
precisely to the criticism made in academia.
Feminism
has established itself simultaneously as a political and scientific project and
has as a result transformed modes of identity affiliation that have emerged
around the "subject" woman.
Obviously, not all women consider themselves feminists, far from it. But "women" bend the feminist and
female identity categories as if they had indeed transformed their affiliation
into an "identity" that means more than just being "women"
but rather creates for themselves new obligations and requirements.
And women
are indeed "bending categories."
In my 1998 study of contemporary representations of feminism, one
formula cropped up again and again in the respondents' discourses: "we
want feminine feminists." For
respondents, feminism means a revolt--a revolt in reaction to oppression. In
speaking of feminism, women do speak of this dimension; they nevertheless
cannot abandon what they call femininity--even when conscious of the male
domination contained within this notion.
For these women, feminism is a struggle and a movement that they deride,
while sometimes cheering it on simultaneously, and always linking it to
femininity. They see themselves as fighters, because they perceive, to varying
extents, the reality of domination.
They seem to struggle both as agents and as victims--victims for whom
this status is inappropriate. Indeed,
the position of victim is uncomfortable, but to deny it is to delude
oneself. Between agent and victim, forms
of resistance intercede. It is in this
logic that femininity can, according to some women, mean more than the marker
of a diminished specificity that allows what I call the "male generic
system of reference" to pass [Andriocci 2000].
Becoming
aware of oppression is a violent experience, but it does not, in and of itself,
rock the foundations of the system of oppression that is also violent. (Note that while to become conscious means
to do violence to oneself, one need not be aware of oppression to be subjected
to its violence.) The women interviewed
who had become aware of relations of domination, whether through feminism or
not, speak of their difficulty in reconciling their new consciousness and an
environment that remains, in their view, highly effective in maintaining power
relations.
In addition to
this "dual violence," as I call it, another type of problem arises
around this femininity. This femininity
was challenged because in essence it does not belong to them. It acts as a social mechanism that
over-empowers half of the human race by disempowering the other half for its
profit. They do not reject this
femininity that has does them disservice; they reappropriate it. Rejecting or ridiculing femininity means
debasing that which they embody.
Self-abasement is no doubt the most oppressive and effective violence of
all.
Feminism,
by condemning and analyzing oppression, has allowed certain women to become
aware of the multiple dimensions of male domination. The Women's Movement has made this consciousness-raising a
collective, and therefore a powerful process.
By deconstructing the mechanisms of oppression, feminism became, what I
call an "act of knowledge."
The Movement demanded women's rights and in this respect, represented
women and was thus highly political.
Women's Studies, on the other hand, deconstructed and problematized
women's status. Be it the Movement or
the Studies, feminism is an act of protest.
Consciousness of oppression can be based on individual experience and
formulated in individual terms, or it can be conceptualized, but the consciousness
that feminism embodies is not just a mere reading--experiential or
scholarly--of reality. It is engage: it
gets the individual involved, and catches up with the scholar. Even if we set aside this peculiar dimension
of women's studies, we still run up against its characteristics as a scientific
field. Can it correctly be termed a
field? In France, where we function by
discipline, the academic world rejects anything that is multidisciplinary. A field that cuts across these boundaries
and that is promoted by a vast majority of women, has all the attributes of a
scientific mirage. What's more, since
this field emerged from a social movement, and a feminist one at that, it has
every chance of being viewed with suspicion, scientifically speaking.
Reasons
for the slow institutionalization of Women's Studies go beyond those mentioned
above. When women's status can no
longer be contested collectively, that is in the political and social arena,
then feminism becomes merely an act of knowledge. Its militant dimension is limited to a fight for scientific
recognition and difficult, perhaps impossible to obtain. French Feminist Studies, too tainted with
activism, are first and foremost feminist, meaning that they develop readings
of reality that place awareness of male domination at the heart of their
analyses. French Feminist Studies are
activist, and at the same time their approach is scientific, even if they
question the scientific criteria of their disciplines.
French
Women's Studies' position on the periphery of the academic world is a mirror of
the discourse I encountered in my study and in the image of the women who
wanted to be neither like men nor against them. Not wanting to resemble men, not due to any
fear that similarity leads to neutralization, but rather because being like
them means functioning with identical consciousness. This is impossible both because of their position in power
relations [Mathieu 1991] and necessarily unsatisfactory due to their position
once they become aware. They can not
abandon the consciousness of being the oppressed in a system of oppression, nor
can they deny the violence of this domination.
They are pushed to the margins and aware of it, yet they refuse to be
considered as victims without means of recourse. French Women's Studies occupy a position that is no doubt the
equivalent of that of the women I interviewed: they are kept on the periphery
but nevertheless not the victims of academic and research institutions.
Women's
Studies, fiercely critical, have concentrated on deconstructing the analytical
models that exclude half of humanity. The departure point of French Women's
Studies was to defend a cause: women's liberation. With institutionalization in academia, the cause has been broken
up, diluted, and transformed. The new
products were then redisseminated both in feminist research and within the
Movement. This process of
institutionalization has reoriented debate, in some cases, weakening this
"cause."
What has been lost in current
debates is that it was initially a Women's Liberation Movement, and
the term liberation is more complex than difference and
equality. It seems to me that reducing
it all to a difference-equality duality, we sacrifice what constituted the
force of the Movement in its beginnings, this notion of liberation. [Ezekiel
1999]
Does the fight for
scientific recognition imply the rejection of activism and the will to effect
change? This is an impossible task for studies based on the struggle for a
cause, that is, exposing, denouncing and deconstructing power relations. As such, the activist connotation is
inevitable. As Liliane Kandel says,
One thing that seems clear
to me is that if we scholars have but one responsibility as activists, it is
that of transmission. Indeed, these
studies--irrespective of the name we give them: gender, female or whatever--are
among the things we had the privilege of doing in the activist groups that at
some point started losing their members.
We must indeed transmit what was being thought, said and written in the
Women's Movement so that we won't keep reinventing the wheel; so that future
generations don't feel as if they are always beginning anew. [Kandel, 1999]
Recognition
signifies sharing standards and also mutual acceptance. Another definition of recognition is
confessing or admitting one mistakes.
Women's Studies certainly do need to own up to their mistakes--but not
to erode the foundation of their analyses.
Indeed, the foundation carries the roots of marginalization, yet it is
precisely what brings them together.
This paradox is crucial to any discussion of the lack of recognition of
French Women's Studies.
New
generations of scholars who have never known the Movement will no doubt have
another vision of what Women's Studies should be. Their feminism may look different, but feminism itself resists
the neutralization of its militancy.
Concepts will continue to be exported to other fields of the social
sciences and humanities, proof that feminism can be a mode of scientific
analysis. But the feminist cause is in
a state of commotion; nevertheless, it is still with us.
Muriel Andriocci
Special thanks to Judith Ezekiel for her
translation (and more) of this article.
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Interviews
Judith
Ezekiel, May 24, 1999
Liliane
Kandel, May 31, 1999