Gender Springtime in Paris: A Twenty-First-Century Tale of Seasons
Gender Springtime in Paris: A Twenty-First-Century Tale of Seasons
Gender Springtime in Paris: A Twenty-First-Century Tale of Seasons
Prologue
I
n the spring of 2014, the Centre d’études féminines et d’études
de genre (Center for Women’s and Gender Studies) at the University of Paris
8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Among the
many events that took place on this occasion, an international conference
was convened titled (in French) the International Springtime of Gender: The
Scientific and Political Stakes of the Institutionalization and the Internation-
alization of a Field (Le printemps international du genre).1 What prompted
us at the University of Paris 8 to organize a conference on institutionaliza-
tion, internationalization, and their vexed relation today was the pressure
of a triple context: institutional, indeed, but also more broadly political and
intellectual, and inextricably so.
As astonishing as it must always have been for u.s.-based scholars
and activists in these areas, given the role that “French thought” played in
the intellectual constitution of the field, gender studies in France was only
recognized as a legitimate field of study worthy of state support and inclusion
in the national curriculum in the last few years. As a result, several new
programs, new research units, and one cnrs (National Center for Scientific
Research)-backed national research network have recently sprung up.2
The Centre d’études féminines et d’études de genre (cefeg)
was created at Paris 8 Vincennes in 1974 by Hélène Cixous. At the time, the
program was simply named Études féminines; it was the first and oldest
doctoral program in women’s studies in France and as far as we know in
Europe. The Centre soon became internationally renowned, but it had a
bumpy and fragile institutional life at both the local and the national levels
until the field as a whole received an official stamp. The reasons for the stub-
born resistance of the French academy to the inclusion of a women’s and/or
gender and sexuality studies curriculum are manifold and well known to
feminist scholars familiar with France. In a nutshell, the French tradition
of state centralism has made it very difficult for local or idiosyncratic initia-
tives to prosper and gain national acceptance. This same state centralism
has always worked to curtail academic institutional and scientific freedom;
in particular, it has slowed down efforts to broaden or renew academic cur-
ricula unless they are spearheaded from the top down. Finally, the widely
shared distrust across the political spectrum toward any initiative—politi-
cal, intellectual, or institutional—that appears to question the abstract unity
of the Republic and the ideal of (French) universalism has meant that any
attempt, academic or otherwise, to emphasize the predicament of specific
groups or segments of society, be they women, sexual minorities, or so-called
ethnic minorities, was met with hostility.
As it celebrated its fortieth anniversary, the cefeg was in the
middle of a local overhaul prompted by the new opportunities afforded by
national recognition. While this new state benevolence under the guidance
of the center-left government was ushering in an era of unprecedented
academic prosperity for the field of gender studies, a battle was raging in
the larger public sphere. The center-left government was trying to follow
through with its electoral promise to legalize same-sex marriage and to
expand homosexual parenting rights. These measures were met with unex-
pected hostility in a country known for its sexual liberalism. Throughout
the year 2013, huge popular demonstrations were organized against the
Mariage pour tous proposition by a coalition of rightist activists as well as
revivified Catholic traditionalists. A counterrevolution seemed to be on the
move.3 In a striking departure from traditional French political discourse,
the focus of rightist discontent was cultural rather than economic, recall-
ing the “culture wars” that regularly flare up in the rarefied air of u.s.
internal politics. This was due in large part to the fact that the center-left
d i f f e r e n c e s 3
government looked more proactive and more likely to succeed in the realm
of what Éric Fassin has called “sexual democracy” than in the area of eco-
nomic redistribution and other fields of social justice (“Double-Edged”).
Calling itself the “Printemps français,” the conservative response borrowed
the revolutionary rhetoric and appropriated for itself the historical mark-
ers of various liberation movements. In particular, such self-naming was
meant to suggest a symbolic connection with the “Arab Springs” that had
just swept through the Middle East before turning into wintry nightmares.
It also evoked ironically the May 1968 uprising,4 as if the “countersexual”
revolution it advocated in 2013 was the belated but pointed answer to the
sexual revolution unleashed in 1968. Finally, by calling itself “French,” the
rightist reaction underlined its nationalist character, thus casting efforts
at expanding civil rights for sexual minorities as foreign to the French
national ethos. Indeed, soon after the law promulgating same-sex marriage
was passed (while attempts to secure legal rights for same-sex parents were
stalled by the magnitude of the opposition staged), the focus of this shrewdly
engineered political unrest was displaced onto gender theory, as word was
spread by a well-crafted propaganda campaign smacking of extreme-right
tactics that the government was about to introduce the latter in the national
education curriculum. In this instance, gender theory was clearly marked
as “American” and understood to be what we might call queer. The fear was
that such teachings would encourage boys to become girls and would turn
innocent little beings into active practitioners of some form of sexuality
studies. Thus, no sooner was gender studies fully admitted in the French
academy that it became embattled in a public fight.
One has to say that the French media, left and right, had laid the
ground for the branding of gender theory as American, since the former
had clearly presented the belated development of gender studies in higher
education as an effect of the willful Americanization of intellectual life.
Gender studies was repeatedly described as “sea landing” (débarquant)
in France, conjuring up images of the landing of u.s. soldiers come to save
Europe in 1944.
All this was also happening in the context of what looked like an
inversion of the respective positions held by France and the United States in
the realm of academic and more broadly intellectual relations. Between the
late sixties and the first years of the twenty-first century, food for thought
was massively imported from France by the u.s. academy. As many among
the most important representatives of “French thought” died and the intel-
lectual effervescence of the sixties slowly dwindled, France ceased to be
d i f f e r e n c e s 5
d i f f e r e n c e s 7
d i f f e r e n c e s 9
translation, that is, of the conditions and ways in which certain discourses
and what one used to call “ideas” are made to cross borders, whether tem-
poral or spatial, internal (intralinguistic and/or within the confines of a
seemingly single context) or external (interlinguistic and/or across differ-
ent contexts), thus fostering connections between heterogeneous spaces
and times. All the contributors to this issue wrestled implicitly or explicitly
with the question of translation and the nature of its operation(s), hence our
decision to make it our framing issue.
Of course, any international scholarly endeavor, and especially
one that takes internationalization as its explicit theme, is bound to encoun-
ter the problem of translation. It is our contention, however, that gender
theory and the field of gender and sexuality studies as a whole have been
bound up from the beginning with the question of translation in specific
and intractable ways. This is so not only because the field initially developed
along a transatlantic epistemological and geopolitical axis, or because its
current extension is taking place in the context of what one calls globaliza-
tion, or because it was immediately constituted as an interdisciplinary field
requiring and fostering difficult conversations between disciplines that had
each developed their own conceptual languages, but also because it is indeed
centrally concerned with “crossing(s),” whether crossing(s) functions as a
political goal, a metametaphor for the field’s variegated theoretical endeav-
ors, or as the name of a multifaceted epistemological problem, and because,
in the epistemological and political history of the field, gender has not only
functioned as an analytical tool but more precisely as a conversion tool in
ways I will try to address shortly.
nor can its meanings be easily assumed or translated” (13). Only where gen-
der still feels foreign, then, “because it [falls] outside the national boundaries
of ‘ordinary usage’ ” (10), might it still retain its critical power. But, we might
ask, isn’t the whole world speaking English today anyway, in one form or
another? And, conversely, can one assume the easy translatability of gender
within the English language itself, such that an English dictionary might
provide a satisfactory definition of the term for native or neonative speakers
of the language? In fact, Scott makes a somewhat different kind of argument
in the last part of her piece. The “language of gender,” she warns, “doesn’t
reduce to some known quantity of masculine or feminine, male or female. It’s
precisely the particular meanings that need to be teased out of the materials
we examine” (13). The “particular meanings” of gender we need to tease
out of the materials we examine do not derive their particularity from the
language in which they are formed and conveyed, so much as they depend
on specific or “idiolectic” uses and contextual redeployments and displace-
ments of the term. It is those meanings that a dictionary, whether bilingual
or monolingual, can never account for. “When gender is an open question
about how those meanings are established, what they signify, and in what
contexts, then it remains a useful—because critical—category of analysis,”
Scott concludes (13). It is not enough, then, to be a native or neonative speaker
of a given language, even of English as “the language of gender”; it is not
enough, indeed, to be a reliable lexicographer. Only a “translator,” that is,
somebody who asks her- or himself how meanings are established and what
they signify in the particular context or text she or he is dealing with, might
be able to trace and convey these meanings.
I don’t have the space and time to tease out the many far-reaching
implications of Scott’s argument. Let me just stress that, when Scott links
the critical fate and force of gender to that of translation, what she means
by translation is not the ability to provide a proper equivalent based on the
most general, that is, generally agreed upon and hence most widely circulat-
ing, definition of the term. Quite the contrary. The act of translation, in her
view, is what resists the pull or lure of generalization. This pull is certainly
reinforced by the combined forces of globalization and globlishization, but
it doesn’t only happen between languages or between English and other
languages. It happens within English itself. Translation, conceived here
above all as an active task of detection as well as reception of “particular
meanings,” is thus paradoxically an act of resistance to translatability. And
when particular meanings are teased out and stressed over the general use
and the unity of meaning such use presumes, the work of (un)translation
d i f f e r e n c e s 11
d i f f e r e n c e s 13
Money and Robert Stoller in the fifties and sixties were meant precisely to
try to account for the breaking of the alignment between sex and gender
provoked, or rather revealed, by the double phenomena of intersexualism
and transsexualism. And they preceded the feminist critical appropria-
tion of the term that began in the seventies in the Western world. Today,
the story of Money’s and Stoller’s invention of the concept seems to be the
preferred tale of origins for gender theory circulating within the field of
gender and sexuality studies, at least in the Western world. Isn’t this one
more sign that gender has operated mainly as a queering agent in the
course of its career?
I have emphasized gender’s central role as a conversion tool
between various competing analytical frameworks and political agendas.
If gender exceeds the purview of lexical definitions and conceptual unity,
is sexual difference, by contrast, the monolithic notion that it is often said
to be, whether it is said to constitute the “rock” of mainstream psychoana-
lytic thinking or the (stumbling) block of thought in all places and ages?
Not according to Ranjana Khanna, at least, who, in her contribution, teases
out the productive ways in which such a notion has been or could still be
put to work. In her talk, Khanna recalled how, as the longtime director of
women’s studies at Duke University, she had argued in favor of renaming the
program “The Program for the Study of Sexual Difference.” Such a proposal
was bound to be defeated in the present intellectual landscape. For Khanna,
though, it was primarily intended as a reminder of the fact that sexual dif-
ference, when understood to index the sexual binary, was still either a or
the common problem (or concern) for feminist and queer scholars alike, as
well as transgender theorists and activists, busy as they all are trying to
figure out what it is, means, or does, coming up against it or going after it.
To study sexual difference doesn’t mean to try and promote one or the other
of its meanings, least of all its most conservative ones. As a quasi concept,
Khanna reminds us, sexual difference could in fact be put to vastly differ-
ent, even contradictory, uses and could index opposite psychical and politi-
cal temporalities: thus, whereas for Derrida sexual difference can never
present itself—that is, be simply present—as such and should therefore never
be presented as a total, easily recognizable fact of nature or culture; and
whereas, in still a different way, it has yet to come through for Irigaray (I
would say, in fact, that even more than sexual difference, it is heterosexuality
that is “to come” for Irigaray, as preposterous as such a claim may appear
to some); to the contrary, for Juliet Mitchell, sexual difference belongs to
a past that lives on. According to Mitchell, sexual difference is a matrix of
d i f f e r e n c e s 15
in the United States that started as women’s studies programs have taken
by renaming themselves, at various points in time, “women’s, gender, and
sexuality studies,” “feminist, gender, and sexuality studies,” or whatever
set of combinations they deem less unsatisfactory. True, some programs are
simply named “gender studies,” while others still call themselves “women’s
studies” and still others “feminist studies,” “transnational feminist stud-
ies,” and so on, but seen from France, one is struck by this ever-changing
plurality of options. Meanwhile, the programs of sexuality studies have
also adopted an “accretive” strategy, having grown from lgb to lgbtqi. In
France, by contrast, only one denomination, études sur le genre, has finally
been authorized by the state. Such a top-down policy has the felicitous and
unintended result of maintaining the institutional and collaborative link
between gender and sexuality studies (while, however, subsuming the lat-
ter under the former). On the other hand, it produces an illusion of unity or,
worse, works to erase the memory of the past, thus hindering the work of
transmission. Which brings me to my second point.
women’s groups and homosexual (both gay and lesbian) leagues of sort—all
point to the early, indeed, founding articulation of the connection between
gender and sexuality with its correlative issues, such as sexuality’s modes
of emergence and disruption or the question of the body as a site of compet-
ing political investments.
Yet, as both Griselda Pollock and Clare Hemmings point out with
a mixture of worry and regret, the story told about the advent of sexuality
studies and queer theory is too often one of epistemological break as well as
intellectual supersession, even of axiological (not to say moral) superiority
with regard to the feminism(s) of the seventies. This story, which pits queer
sexual liberationism against feminist sexual moralism, took shape, as I said,
in the wake of the North American sex wars. The divide these feminist wars
provoked was compounded by the aids crisis, which occurred roughly at
the same time. As a result, the early history of the so-called second wave
has become illegible and often simply unavailable in many gender and/or
sexuality studies programs, at least in the West. According to Pollock, 1968
and its immediate aftermath function at best as a kind of primal scene—
mysterious, doubted, and reimagined as such—for those who have heard
about it without having witnessed it. As for Hemmings, her concern that
gender is being retrospectively misread as catering to heteronormative,
essentialist, or, worse, conservative tendencies when cast as the “proper”
(and single) object of feminism resonates not only with Butler’s and Martin’s
early warnings against such narrative reordering but also with Annama-
rie Jagose’s more recent criticism of attempts “to typecast feminist theory
[. . .] as old-fashioned and passé, temporally quarantined from new-school
queer theory” (43). Hemmings notes that the recent cooptation of feminist
rhetoric by Western governments at the service of a neocolonialist agenda
has thwarted feminism’s message and emancipatory thrust, making it all
the more vulnerable to queer suspicion. Something similar, though, is now
also happening with regard to sexual minorities’ claims. Queer forms of
kinship are gaining state recognition and support in the West. New pos-
sibilities afforded by the development of various biotechnologies of procre-
ation now make the thought of queer parenting quite imaginable, lessening
in the process the proclaimed aversion toward reproductive logics and
temporalities. Meanwhile, hitherto unthinkable forms of cooptation of gay
politics by reactionary political forces with racist overtones have started to
emerge. Both feminism and queer activism risk losing their subversive edge
in the West, making it difficult for queer theory in particular to maintain
“antinormativity” as its central tenet and axis of intervention.10
d i f f e r e n c e s 17
d i f f e r e n c e s 19
Weed’s essay has many layers. She worries about the forsaking of
critical theory that she sees or thinks she sees happening in recent trends in
the humanities. Seasoned practitioners of deconstruction are turning against
it. Hermeneutical approaches that aim to decipher hidden mechanisms are
dropped in favor of “surface reading.” One doesn’t bother anymore to try
and uncover the insidious workings of ideology, presumably because these
workings are not dissimulated anymore and there’s nothing one can do about
them anyway. These reactive trends could be read again as exemplifying the
Oedipal pattern of disaffiliation with, and supersession of, previous genera-
tions I have already talked about in the light of Pollock’s and Hemmings’s
expressed concerns. But Weed is not interested in tracking the vicissitudes
of generational transmission. Rather, she is intent on figuring out what late
capitalism and its dominant feature or effect, namely, globalization, are
doing to critical thinking. Marx and Freud, the most insightful thinkers
of early capitalism, forged analytical tools and offered interpretations that
aimed at understanding the world and resisting its course in the same thrust.
By contrast, today’s thinking, according to Weed, at least in the areas she
is dealing with, tends, however unwittingly, to espouse rather than oppose
the spirit of (late) capitalism. What might be happening in the realm of the
d i f f e r e n c e s 21
d i f f e r e n c e s 23
than being a figure for the expansiveness and plurality of the world, has
become the name for its contraction under the pull of homogenizing forces
(while power imbalances remain firmly in place), she is saying something
quite similar.
True, globalization and its technologically engineered avatar,
the information-driven memeticism against which our dreams of infinite
hospitality to infinite differences might come crashing, do not threaten only
the course of feminist and queer theory or politics. But the stakes are high
for an intellectual, political, and social field whose very raison d’être has
been and continues to be the excavation of unrecognized and unwanted
differences and the promotion of plurality.
Can translation, a neohumanist practice of transnational exchange
and now perhaps an ethico-political task of resistant and transformative
reception, withstand the trend?
anne emmanuelle berger is a professor of French literature and gender studies at the
University of Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis and the founding director of legs (Laboratoire
d’études de genre et de sexualité ), a new cnrs-backed research unit. She has recently published
The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender (Fordham
University Press, 2014).
Notes 1 For an overview of the events that in the seventies, welcoming more
took place on this occasion, see students from decolonizing and
the web documentary designed by “developing” countries than any
Barbara Wolman (“Acte V”). other university in Europe at that
time. “French feminism,” on the
2 See the website of the newly other hand, was conflated with
founded Institut du genre first-world metropolitan views
(Institut). by some u.s.-based feminist and
postcolonial scholars, in spite of
3 This was sadly confirmed by the the fact that most of these same
results of the last regional elec- French feminists were no more
tions in France as well as by the (and no less) “French” than the
nationalistic and xenophobic turn u.s. scholars calling them to task
taken by almost all political par- were “(North) American,” and
ties, the center-left government they were for the most part no less
included. virulently opposed to colonialism.
4 In the decade following May 1968, 6 Recall how, in his “very short
demonstrators often chanted in the introduction” to Literary Theory,
streets: “Chaud, chaud, chaud, le Jonathan Culler mentioned self-
printemps sera chaud!” [“Hot, hot, reflexivity or “thinking about
hot, the spring’s going to be hot!”]. thinking,” that is, inquiring “into
the categories we use in mak-
5 Vincennes was committed intel-
ing sense of things” as one of the
lectually and politically to anti-
defining features of theory (14).
colonialism and “third worldism”
d i f f e r e n c e s 25
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