Made in America: 'French Feminism' in United States Academic Discourse

Australian Feminist Studies

Volumn 11, Issue 23, 1996, Pages 17-31

  Moses, Claire ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0030554050     PISSN: 08164649     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08164649.1996.9994801     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. In her commente for a panel 'Travelling through European Feminism: Cultural and Political Practices', at the Women's International Studies Europe Conference (8 October 1993), Judy Ezekiel states that the receptivity to United States and British ideas had disappeared by 1975 when she arrived in France. She traces this to the 'demonisation' of American feminism by Psych et po 'as a component in the forging of its identity' and that the 'cheap shots were at liberal feminism'. 'Psych et po even dub[bed] Rosalyn Carter a feminist in order to better criticize the capitalist nature of all US feminism'. Radical feminists were also criticised, according to Nadia Ringart: 'Antoinette Fouque explained to [her] how she was wrong to believe in sisterhood . . . an illusion imported from America' and one that prevented the 'dynamic of contradictions'. See 'Naissance d'une secte', Libération, 1 June 1977; reprinted in Chroniques d'une imposture: Du Mouvement de libération des femmes à une marque commerciale, ed. l'Association Mouvement pour les Luttes Féministes (n.p.) Paris, 1981.
2. In her commente for a panel 'Travelling through European Feminism: Cultural and Political Practices', at the Women's International Studies Europe Conference (8 October 1993), Judy Ezekiel states that the receptivity to United States and British ideas had disappeared by 1975 when she arrived in France. She traces this to the 'demonisation' of American feminism by Psych et po 'as a component in the forging of its identity' and that the 'cheap shots were at liberal feminism'. 'Psych et po even dub[bed] Rosalyn Carter a feminist in order to better criticize the capitalist nature of all US feminism'. Radical feminists were also criticised, according to Nadia Ringart: 'Antoinette Fouque explained to [her] how she was wrong to believe in sisterhood . . . an illusion imported from America' and one that prevented the 'dynamic of contradictions'. See 'Naissance d'une secte', Libération, 1 June 1977; reprinted in Chroniques d'une imposture: Du Mouvement de libération des femmes à une marque commerciale, ed. l'Association Mouvement pour les Luttes Féministes (n.p.) Paris, 1981.
3. Françoise Picq, Libération des femmes: Les Années mouvement, p. 190.
4. Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 275.
5. Judy Ezekiel, in her comments on this paper when it was originally presented at the Berkshire Conference in Women's History (June 1993), insisted on this point: 'the social movement . . . is peopled by intellectuals, disproportionately educated, and involved in research and teaching. Let there be no doubt - we do not have an activist, non-intellectual movement on the one hand and theoreticians (the infamous French Feminists) on the other'. However, Paola Bucchetti, a South Asian Indian woman who has been a French feminist activist during her many years of residency in Paris and who was in the audience at that session, talked about many feminist activities and centres for and by racial minority and immigrant women, arguing that it is not so much 'French feminism' that is narrow in its race and class focus, but rather the accounts we have of the movement, even the French accounts. Bucchetti is a founder of the ten-year-old Collectif féministe contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme.
6. Christine Delphy, Nouvelles Questions Féministes, nos. 16-18, 1991, p. 146.
7. Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 261.
8. That was even the title; the running head on subsequent pages is 'Review: French Literary Criticism'.
9. Elsewhere ('Debating the Present, Writing the Past: "Feminism" in French History and Historiography', Radical History Review, no. 52 [1992]) I have written that Beauvoir did so because, in the late 1940s, she associated herself with a view of feminism's history that had been constructed prior to the First World War by socialist women. In 1907, in Stuttgart, the first international conference of socialist women had passed a resolution that 'socialist women must not ally themselves with the feminists of the bourgeoisie, but lead the battle side by side with the socialist parties'. It was after that that socialist women began to refer to the 'bourgeois feminist' movement, and they always did so derogatorily.
10. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Harvester) New York, 1980, p. 30.
11. Françoise Picq, Libération des femmes: Les Années mouvement, pp. 217-19.
12. I thank Genevieve Fraisse for pointing this out to me, back in the summer of 1987.
13. Marks and Courtivron, New French Feminisms, p. 36.
14. Claire Moses, 'Debating the Present, Writing the Past', pp. 79-94.
15. Note that 1980 was also the year of Feminist Studies' publication of the symposium on women's culture, with articles by Ellen Dubois, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Gerda Lerner, Mari-Jo Buhle, and Temma Kaplan; the essentialist debate was embedded into the debate around a 'woman's culture' of course.
16. Ann Jones, 'Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L'Écriture Féminine', Feminist Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 1981, p. 247.
17. Irigaray's 'When Our Lips Speak Together' was published in Signs the year prior (Autumn 1980), translated by Carolyn Burke.
18. Christine Delphy, 'The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move', unpublished; Gail Pheterson, 'Group Identity and Social Relations: Divergent Theoretical Conceptions in the United States, the Netherlands and France' (Paper delivered at the Fifth Conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology, Symposium: Cross-Cultural Issues in Social Theorization, The Case of Feminism, 25-30 April 1993); Judith Ezekiel, Comments, Berkshire Conference (1993). I'd like to thank all of these people with whom I have shared my work and who have in turn shared theirs with me.
19. Christine Delphy, 'The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move', unpublished; Gail Pheterson, 'Group Identity and Social Relations: Divergent Theoretical Conceptions in the United States, the Netherlands and France' (Paper delivered at the Fifth Conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology, Symposium: Cross-Cultural Issues in Social Theorization, The Case of Feminism, 25-30 April 1993); Judith Ezekiel, Comments, Berkshire Conference (1993). I'd like to thank all of these people with whom I have shared my work and who have in turn shared theirs with me.
20. Christine Delphy, 'The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move', unpublished; Gail Pheterson, 'Group Identity and Social Relations: Divergent Theoretical Conceptions in the United States, the Netherlands and France' (Paper delivered at the Fifth Conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology, Symposium: Cross-Cultural Issues in Social Theorization, The Case of Feminism, 25-30 April 1993); Judith Ezekiel, Comments, Berkshire Conference (1993). I'd like to thank all of these people with whom I have shared my work and who have in turn shared theirs with me.
21. Jane Jenson uses the term in 'Ce n'est pas un hasard: The Varieties of French Feminism' in James F. Hollifield and George Ross (eds), Searching for The New France (Routledge) New York & London, 1991, p. 139, n. 20. Although this article is adapted from her earlier 'Representations of Difference: The Varieties of French Feminism', New Left Review, no. 180, 1990, pp. 127-60, she does not refer to 'colonisation' in the NLR article.
22. Jane Jenson uses the term in 'Ce n'est pas un hasard: The Varieties of French Feminism' in James F. Hollifield and George Ross (eds), Searching for The New France (Routledge) New York & London, 1991, p. 139, n. 20. Although this article is adapted from her earlier 'Representations of Difference: The Varieties of French Feminism', New Left Review, no. 180, 1990, pp. 127-60, she does not refer to 'colonisation' in the NLR article.
23. For Mary Louise Pratt's usage, I thank people in the audience at the Berkshire Conference for sharing with me their memory of a talk she presented at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1993. In discussing recent trends in United States intellectual thought, she evidently spoke of a 'colonisation of the United States mind' by the French and 'their' theories.
24. On the other hand, Sue Peabody, a recent PhD in History (Iowa) commented, at the Berks session, that it was when the poststructuralists like Foucault and Derrida were introduced into her graduate courses that she turned, as a feminist, to Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray - searching for a way to combine the new intellectual work with a focus on gender.
25. It is within the discipline of philosophy that a split between 'Anglo-American' and 'continental' (e.g. 'French') is perceived. In referring to feminism, however, the characterisation of an 'Anglo-American' versus 'French' dichotomy makes no sense whatsoever. There are similarities and differences among all three national movements, but certainly no dichotomy that links the United States to the British experience and divides us from the French.
26. Note in Nancy Fraser's Introduction to Revaluing French Feminism: 'This volume . . . concentrates on theoretical arguments-reflecting the disciplinary training in philosophy of most of the contributors', 'Theory Equals Philosophy' in Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (eds), Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1992, p. 5.
27. Note in Nancy Fraser's Introduction to Revaluing French Feminism: 'This volume . . . concentrates on theoretical arguments-reflecting the disciplinary training in philosophy of most of the contributors', 'Theory Equals Philosophy' in Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (eds), Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1992, p. 5.
28. An example of what I'm calling 'the hegemony of literature' is the fact that in 1990 - the year of the previous Berkshire Conference - Feminist Studies (the journal whose structure and process I know best) had four history editors and three literature editors on its collective Board; by 1993, Feminist Studies had five literature editors and only three history editors (and one of the history editors has other responsibilities and therefore does not focus so much so on history). Our intention has been - and continues to be - to maintain a multidisciplinary balance, but literature scholars are now producing more than twice the quantity of all other manuscripts submitted to us for review. Simply in order to handle the workload of reviewing these submissions, our board has expanded - but not evenly.