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SMNTY Interviews: Gina Stamm (Part 1) · Stuff Mom Never Told You

0:05
Speaker 1: Hey, this is Annie and Samantha. Welcome to Steff Will
0:07
Speaker 1: Never told you protection. iHeart radio, and today we are
0:19
Speaker 1: so thrilled to bring you yet another interview. We are
0:22
Speaker 1: so lucky we get to talk to amazing people.
0:26
Speaker 2: One of my favorite parts of this and they're.
0:28
Speaker 1: Experts in their fields or it's just amazing and I've
0:33
Speaker 1: been pretty happy We've started the year off strong with
0:36
Speaker 1: some good interviews and this one is no exception. It
0:40
Speaker 1: was an amazing conversation. Today we are bringing you an
0:44
Speaker 1: interview with doctor Gina stem who specializes in so many
0:51
Speaker 1: like she has a great cv of all the things
0:53
Speaker 1: she's written about, but a lot of intersectional feminist issues
0:57
Speaker 1: in France, and it was really difficult to pin down
1:05
Speaker 1: because there's so much to talk about there, right, So yes,
1:08
Speaker 1: the conversation became a two parter.
1:10
Speaker 2: Not my fault this time, it was not your faults.
1:14
Speaker 1: But it was such a wonderful conversation and I had
1:16
Speaker 1: so many other questions. So hopefully Gina will come back
1:20
Speaker 1: because it's just complicated, it's so complex and there is
1:23
Speaker 1: so much going on, and we asked these broad questions
1:28
Speaker 1: that were obviously.
1:32
Speaker 3: On one course condition to two episodes and she is
1:36
Speaker 3: a wealth of knowledge is obvious.
1:39
Speaker 2: This is her specialty.
1:40
Speaker 3: She's written books on it and she continues to teach
1:43
Speaker 3: and lecture on it. So everything it was so informative,
1:48
Speaker 3: and I'm like, yeah, I need to take notes. So
1:51
Speaker 3: for those of you listening and want to learn things,
1:54
Speaker 3: take your time. This might have to be a re
1:57
Speaker 3: listen because there's so much. There's so much that she
2:00
Speaker 3: provides an information and then just kind of like in
2:03
Speaker 3: comparison to what's happening in the US and just in
2:06
Speaker 3: general when it comes to the feminist movement.
2:08
Speaker 1: So it isn't a lot, it's a lot, and she
2:12
Speaker 1: broke it down so beautifully. So in this first one,
2:15
Speaker 1: this first part is much more of a foundational us like, yeah,
2:19
Speaker 1: like you said, kind of here's our context, here's how
2:22
Speaker 1: we got to where we are. The second part, we're
2:24
Speaker 1: going to talk more about a lot of the more
2:26
Speaker 1: recent issues around women and feminism in France. So that'll
2:30
Speaker 1: be out next week, so keep your ear tuned, be
2:35
Speaker 1: on the lookout for that. This is our job. We're professionals, yes, yes,
2:42
Speaker 1: but it is, it's really there there. You need to
2:47
Speaker 1: listen to both because it's fascinating to see how the
2:51
Speaker 1: history and then where we are and there's so much
2:54
Speaker 1: going on, so yes, keep an eye on for that.
2:58
Speaker 1: But in the meantime, let is let us get into
3:00
Speaker 1: our interview with Gina. And today we are so happy
3:05
Speaker 1: to be joined by friend of the show. I'm already
3:09
Speaker 1: going to call you friend of the show. Gina. Welcome, Gina,
3:13
Speaker 1: thank you for having me, well, thank you for coming on.
3:16
Speaker 1: Can you introduce yourself to our audience.
3:19
Speaker 4: So my name is ginas tom I used to shee
3:22
Speaker 4: here they and I am associate professor French at the
3:26
Speaker 4: University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. And I have to do
3:29
Speaker 4: the little disclaimer now or anything that I am about
3:32
Speaker 4: to say is purely my own opinion. It does not
3:35
Speaker 4: represent the views of my employer. And I have a
3:38
Speaker 4: PhD in French studies, which means broadly literature and culture
3:42
Speaker 4: from Emory University, with focuses on comparative literature and psychoanalytics studies,
3:48
Speaker 4: which we'll probably come up a little bit later. And
3:51
Speaker 4: my research focuses on environmental humanity, speculative literature, and feminism.
3:58
Speaker 4: And I also am a freelance litter translator.
4:01
Speaker 1: Ooh, you should come back on and talk about that.
4:04
Speaker 1: I would love to hear more about it.
4:06
Speaker 4: I would love to come and talk about that.
4:09
Speaker 1: Yes, I was looking at your CV right before this,
4:12
Speaker 1: and you've written about so many topics, and we had
4:16
Speaker 1: a hard time when we were discussing what we would
4:19
Speaker 1: talk about on this episode because there's so much. But
4:23
Speaker 1: I guess to begin, can you give us kind of
4:27
Speaker 1: the basic some context of the history of feminism in France,
4:34
Speaker 1: of women in France.
4:36
Speaker 4: Okay, So I'm going to do something really pedantic and
4:40
Speaker 4: say we have to first talk about what we mean
4:42
Speaker 4: by France and what we mean by women here. When
4:45
Speaker 4: we think about France, we think about it as European,
4:47
Speaker 4: but it's an empire, and it's been an empire for
4:50
Speaker 4: several hundred years. There are territories that are part of
4:54
Speaker 4: France that are in the Caribbean, in the Indian Ocean,
4:57
Speaker 4: and in the South Pacific, and prior to the mid
5:01
Speaker 4: twentieth century that also included large parts of Africa and
5:05
Speaker 4: Southeast Asia as well. And when you talk about women
5:12
Speaker 4: and women's rights and feminist movements, a lot of that
5:16
Speaker 4: women's rights as they were required in Europe, and then
5:20
Speaker 4: later in the Caribbean just didn't apply to those colonial territories,
5:25
Speaker 4: which were in general that was under what was known
5:28
Speaker 4: as the Indigenous Code, which meant a separate set of laws,
5:30
Speaker 4: what we would now recognize as a system of Jim
5:34
Speaker 4: Crow or apartheid. The Caribbean's always had a little bit
5:37
Speaker 4: of a separate status, and now the Caribbean territories as
5:41
Speaker 4: well as mayut In are known as departments, so they're
5:46
Speaker 4: like the status that we know is Hawaii, and then
5:48
Speaker 4: there are other more or less. And then you also
5:52
Speaker 4: have the overseas territories which have a whole other system.
5:56
Speaker 4: So what civic and civil rights you have access to varies,
6:00
Speaker 4: and what do we mean by women. A lot of
6:02
Speaker 4: the data that we have will be aggregated because you
6:05
Speaker 4: can't you cannot use public funds or as a public
6:10
Speaker 4: servant track any ethnic or racial data in France because
6:14
Speaker 4: these are not legal concepts. And the idea was sort
6:18
Speaker 4: of to say, well, race doesn't exist, therefore we're not
6:20
Speaker 4: going to recognize it. But what that means in practice
6:24
Speaker 4: is that there are inequities that don't have good data,
6:29
Speaker 4: both by ethnicity, immigration status. You've got a little bit
6:33
Speaker 4: more in terms of social class and in terms of
6:36
Speaker 4: regional differences. But in France you have the sort of
6:41
Speaker 4: informational situation that we're now finding ourselves in where the
6:44
Speaker 4: CDC data is taken down, the NIAH data is taken down,
6:47
Speaker 4: that has anything to do with diversity, although the current
6:51
Speaker 4: Interior minister just said that he's favorable to gathering ethnic
6:56
Speaker 4: statistics as long as it's not used for positive discriminate.
7:00
Speaker 4: All of that and heavy air quotes, which means what
7:03
Speaker 4: kind of discrimination is it going to be used for.
7:06
Speaker 4: It's not great, But on the other hand, it is
7:10
Speaker 4: a it is a very centralized government, which means that
7:14
Speaker 4: you don't have the different state the difference is state
7:17
Speaker 4: to state that you might have in the US. So
7:21
Speaker 4: and also when we talk about women, so there is
7:23
Speaker 4: going to be racial and ethnic disparities that I just
7:26
Speaker 4: simply don't have the data to address, although there are
7:29
Speaker 4: some smaller and like non governmental organizations that do get some.
7:34
Speaker 4: But also when you talk about women, it's like, well,
7:37
Speaker 4: we are going to talk about maternal health and things
7:40
Speaker 4: like that, and know that it's not all women, and
7:42
Speaker 4: we are going to talk about queer issues and that's
7:45
Speaker 4: not all women. But having resources for people who want
7:50
Speaker 4: to be mothers or for people who want alternative romantic relationships.
7:56
Speaker 4: That means that affects the choices that are available to everybody.
7:58
Speaker 4: Let's put it that way. I'm sure you've talked about
8:00
Speaker 4: this all the time, but I just wanted to be
8:04
Speaker 4: really clear here. We're also talking about both civic and
8:09
Speaker 4: civil rights. So civil rights in terms of access to education,
8:14
Speaker 4: access to professional lives, freedom of speech, freedom to appear
8:18
Speaker 4: in public spaces, things like that. We're also civic rights
8:21
Speaker 4: in terms of voting and in terms of being able
8:25
Speaker 4: to present yourself for elections as well, and in terms
8:30
Speaker 4: of both of those, there are a lot of parallels
8:31
Speaker 4: between in France and the US UK, so things you
8:35
Speaker 4: might be more familiar with, and just to set a
8:38
Speaker 4: sort of baseline also in terms of how we might
8:43
Speaker 4: compare material situations. General measures of women's material well being
8:51
Speaker 4: are higher in France. Their life expectancy right now is
8:56
Speaker 4: about five years higher than in the US, and they're
9:02
Speaker 4: in the twenty sixteen twenty eighteen Maternal mortality rates, for example,
9:07
Speaker 4: are twenty two in one hundred thousand in the US
9:10
Speaker 4: and eight in one hundred thousand in France, and that's
9:14
Speaker 4: gotten much worse in the US since Row has been overturned,
9:17
Speaker 4: so the comparison is even starker now. And in terms
9:22
Speaker 4: of violence against women, that's something that I want to
9:24
Speaker 4: address later on. But so I do want to be
9:27
Speaker 4: clear there are a lot of things that I'm going
9:29
Speaker 4: to say that are quite negative about the situation in France,
9:33
Speaker 4: but I will also want to recognize that, especially when
9:36
Speaker 4: it comes to access to healthcare and things like that,
9:41
Speaker 4: it's a much better, uniformly and much better situation. So
9:48
Speaker 4: in terms of history, the sort of history of women's rights,
9:52
Speaker 4: eighteenth century, you get some forerunners, same as in the
9:55
Speaker 4: US UK. You especially get a woman named Antou Gouge
9:58
Speaker 4: who wrote a doc human called the Declaration of the
10:01
Speaker 4: Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. That's around the
10:04
Speaker 4: time of the French Revolution. There are other female intellectuals
10:07
Speaker 4: around that time. She's kind of the number one, and
10:10
Speaker 4: she was also an abolitionist. Throughout the nineteenth century you
10:14
Speaker 4: get a growing women's suffrage movement and a push for
10:20
Speaker 4: more civil rights, not civic rights for women, but civil rights,
10:23
Speaker 4: especially when it comes to control of their own finances
10:27
Speaker 4: and property and abilities to divorce and have control of
10:31
Speaker 4: their or have custody of their children. And people who
10:34
Speaker 4: are really big figures in that are a women named
10:36
Speaker 4: Flora Tristan who was a Franco Peruvian woman who was
10:41
Speaker 4: sort of because of her situation, she wound up divorced,
10:44
Speaker 4: no custody of her children, disinherited, but she became a
10:50
Speaker 4: socialist activist who did a lot of data collection around
10:53
Speaker 4: the working class in France and also a lot of
10:56
Speaker 4: work for women's rights as well. And this is something
10:59
Speaker 4: that's really that is a distinction between the US and
11:02
Speaker 4: Frances that a lot of the early women's rights movement
11:06
Speaker 4: came out of the working class and was in conjunction
11:09
Speaker 4: with working class industrial activism and not as much the
11:13
Speaker 4: sort of middle class Elizabeth Katie Stanton, Susan B. Anthony
11:16
Speaker 4: kind of thing we'll see in the US. Two other
11:18
Speaker 4: big figures I just want to mention real quickly Ubertino,
11:21
Speaker 4: who was a journalist and a suffragist. She's the first
11:24
Speaker 4: person to use feminist as a that we know of,
11:27
Speaker 4: to use the word feminist as a positive thing. It
11:30
Speaker 4: was originally a medical diagnosis to say that effeminates boys,
11:38
Speaker 4: which is a bad thing in medicine at the time,
11:41
Speaker 4: they are feminists, And then it was used pejoratively by
11:47
Speaker 4: Alexander Duma the Son to talk about all these feminists
11:50
Speaker 4: who want women's rights, but Ubertinokal is the first one
11:54
Speaker 4: to say, no, really we want we are feminists and
12:00
Speaker 4: we want to be feminists. And Malan Petie who was
12:04
Speaker 4: a psychiatrist, a socialist, a suffragist, and an abortion rights
12:08
Speaker 4: activist who she was born in nineteen seventy four died
12:12
Speaker 4: in nineteen thirty nine. She was really big and integrating
12:15
Speaker 4: women into the workers' rights and socialist organizations in the
12:19
Speaker 4: early twentieth century. And she was even though she'd had
12:24
Speaker 4: a stroke and was paralyzed. She was accused of providing
12:28
Speaker 4: an abortion and wound being interned in a psychiatric hospital
12:31
Speaker 4: and dying in nineteen thirty nine. So not great, wonderful figure,
12:38
Speaker 4: not a great situation. So in the late nineteenth and
12:41
Speaker 4: early twentieth century, though, there's a lot of progress piecemeal
12:46
Speaker 4: in terms of civil rights, in terms of access ability
12:50
Speaker 4: to work without permission, access to bank accounts, being able
12:56
Speaker 4: to be in control of your own salary. That was
12:59
Speaker 4: nineteen oh seven, for example. You have certain schools that
13:04
Speaker 4: will open up to women's certain professions that you can
13:06
Speaker 4: and it's really just baby steps. Kind of Around World
13:11
Speaker 4: War One, you have the beginnings of what will become
13:14
Speaker 4: maternal leave and subsidies for mothers, and the reasoning around
13:19
Speaker 4: this is really interesting and I think it's something to
13:21
Speaker 4: point out because it does come up a lot around
13:23
Speaker 4: any kind of reproductive rights issue in France, and there's
13:27
Speaker 4: this huge anxiety about population decline. This starts in the
13:34
Speaker 4: eighteen seventies after the Franco Oppression war, and it kicks
13:37
Speaker 4: into super high gear after World War One when you
13:42
Speaker 4: have just the decimation of the adult male population. So
13:48
Speaker 4: there's this provision of subsidies and maternal leave and eventually
13:53
Speaker 4: protections for pregnant women in the workforce and things like
13:55
Speaker 4: that that are to encourage women to have as many
13:58
Speaker 4: babies as possible. And this is specifically framed as a
14:03
Speaker 4: kind of as national policy, not as personal rights or protections.
14:11
Speaker 4: This is going to come up again a couple of
14:13
Speaker 4: years ago because demographic decline, as we've seen from certain
14:18
Speaker 4: people in our own country, there's a lot of anxiety
14:21
Speaker 4: and specifically demographic decline of people of European ancestry, and
14:28
Speaker 4: the current French president will bring this up again when
14:30
Speaker 4: he talks about the need for a quote unquote demographic
14:34
Speaker 4: rearmament and will say that people that the government is
14:39
Speaker 4: going to start offering fertility tests for every twenty five
14:41
Speaker 4: year old. This is not law yet, but this was
14:47
Speaker 4: what he proposed. So this is an anxiety that goes
14:50
Speaker 4: back very far, and it's going to determine a lot
14:52
Speaker 4: of the policy that comes after. In a wait that
14:54
Speaker 4: is maybe the undertone of US policy, but not necessarily
15:01
Speaker 4: until very recently. There's a penitendency to not say that
15:04
Speaker 4: quiet part in the US. So in nineteen forty four,
15:11
Speaker 4: post World War Two, that's when women get the right
15:13
Speaker 4: to vote. So it's about it's quite a bit later
15:16
Speaker 4: than in the US, and this is specifically couched as
15:20
Speaker 4: in recognition of the part that they played in the resistance.
15:24
Speaker 4: So nineteen forty four that's when they have a referendum
15:29
Speaker 4: that sets up their next constitution, and in the Constitution
15:35
Speaker 4: of nineteen forty six, that's when the right to vote
15:38
Speaker 4: is actually sort of enshrined in law. And also that's
15:43
Speaker 4: when they get what is the equivalent of an equal
15:46
Speaker 4: rights Amendment. What that means in practice is super problematic,
15:51
Speaker 4: but in the language has been there since nineteen forty six.
15:54
Speaker 4: In nineteen sixty you get the beginning the Family Planning Association,
15:58
Speaker 4: which is the sort of planned parenthood is equivalent, and
16:02
Speaker 4: you also get the first laws around prostitution that are
16:06
Speaker 4: meant to protect sex workers. So what we would think
16:09
Speaker 4: of as human trafficking laws selling other people's sex work happen, starts.
16:15
Speaker 4: Then prostitution. Personal prostitution remains legal until I want to say,
16:22
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen, but actually I didn't write that down, but
16:25
Speaker 4: it's like it was weird it happened. I was there
16:27
Speaker 4: the week it happened, and it was a very strange.
16:31
Speaker 4: The landscape changed. So in nineteen seventy one, this is
16:37
Speaker 4: when things sort of kick into high gear in terms
16:40
Speaker 4: of addressing women's rights. As women's rights, you get a
16:43
Speaker 4: very famous open letter called the Manifesto of the three
16:45
Speaker 4: hundred and forty three, which is a manifesto signed by
16:50
Speaker 4: three hundred and forty three mostly public figures, some private citizens,
16:53
Speaker 4: but mostly public figures, saying that they have had an abortion.
16:57
Speaker 4: And it caused a lot public blowback, but it is
17:02
Speaker 4: one of the things that led in nineteen seventy four.
17:05
Speaker 4: So we just had the fiftieth anniversary of the what's
17:09
Speaker 4: called the ve Law, which is the law decriminalizing abortion,
17:14
Speaker 4: and it's named after the Health minister at the time.
17:19
Speaker 4: So the framing of this is very different than in
17:22
Speaker 4: the US because it's not framed as a right to
17:24
Speaker 4: privacy in the way it is under substantive due process
17:27
Speaker 4: in the US. It is framed as in question of
17:32
Speaker 4: social equity because rich women are always going to have
17:36
Speaker 4: access to safe abortions, they can go to Switzerland, they
17:38
Speaker 4: can go to the UK, and then poorer women, working
17:43
Speaker 4: class women are going to be forced to into very
17:46
Speaker 4: unsafe situations. So this is framed as a social equity issue,
17:52
Speaker 4: and it's also within the law. There are also a
17:56
Speaker 4: bunch of incentives to have children that are being added
17:59
Speaker 4: to sort of quiet down that anxiety of what if
18:03
Speaker 4: we allow abortion, will that cut our birth rate. There's
18:07
Speaker 4: a giant asterisk here, which is that abortion was not
18:10
Speaker 4: only legal but being forced on many people in the
18:13
Speaker 4: overseas territories, specifically in Reunion, where like we know this
18:18
Speaker 4: from US history in Canadian where forced sterilization of marginalized
18:23
Speaker 4: populations was taking place in Reunion. There's a long history
18:27
Speaker 4: of forced sterilization and abortion. Like women would come in
18:30
Speaker 4: for a separate health problem, they'd be like, oh, you
18:34
Speaker 4: need a procedure and abort and then sterilize them. There's
18:38
Speaker 4: a book on this by an authory of Councils of
18:40
Speaker 4: Algees called The Wombs of Women, Race, Capital and Feminism,
18:45
Speaker 4: which documents this really well. It came out in a
18:47
Speaker 4: court case at the time, but that book is much
18:49
Speaker 4: more recent. But since this time the abortion laws have evolved,
18:55
Speaker 4: so it went from ten weeks originally now it's at
18:58
Speaker 4: fourteen for like standard no questions asked abortion, it's covered
19:03
Speaker 4: by the National Insurance. It's illegal to impede someone from
19:07
Speaker 4: getting an abortion, and in twenty sixteen the waiting period
19:12
Speaker 4: was abolished in medical abortion, so the pill was allowed. Unfortunately,
19:17
Speaker 4: this is one of the areas where it's been the
19:21
Speaker 4: far right, which is now very close to being in government,
19:24
Speaker 4: has articulated its desire to revisit this. In nineteen seventy
19:29
Speaker 4: two you get an Equal Pay Act, but the outcome
19:32
Speaker 4: of that is not great. So in twenty twenty one,
19:35
Speaker 4: for a woman working in the private sector, annual salary
19:38
Speaker 4: is eighteen six hundred and thirty euros for minutes twenty
19:42
Speaker 4: four thousand, six hundred and forty A lot of this
19:45
Speaker 4: has to do with the fact that women get because
19:48
Speaker 4: of the uneven distribution of household tasks and childcare, often
19:53
Speaker 4: you wind up in lower paid jobs. There's also discrimination
19:58
Speaker 4: and employment which is illegal but happens obviously, and many
20:03
Speaker 4: women are forced to only work part time because of
20:06
Speaker 4: their childcare obligations. So the national institutes and I want
20:12
Speaker 4: to think it's economic and something statistics, I just blanked
20:15
Speaker 4: on the what that acronym means. It's insay, if you
20:21
Speaker 4: measure equal time, same job, same company, the disparity is
20:26
Speaker 4: four point three percent. But there are huge disparities in
20:29
Speaker 4: what you work, you do for whom, and whether it's
20:32
Speaker 4: full time or part time. Nineteen seventy five, mutual consent
20:37
Speaker 4: divorce was allowed, and in as of two weeks ago,
20:42
Speaker 4: you can no longer divorce your partner for not having
20:46
Speaker 4: sex with you. So yeah, so this was what was
20:50
Speaker 4: known legally as the conjugal duty. So it is part
20:54
Speaker 4: of your job as a I mean, in theory is
20:57
Speaker 4: not gender, but in theory, your conjugal duty spouse is
21:01
Speaker 4: to have sex with a person. But the European Court
21:05
Speaker 4: of Human Rights two weeks ago said that this is
21:08
Speaker 4: not consistent with how we understand consent because of saying
21:13
Speaker 4: I will divorce you and leave you in potentially a
21:15
Speaker 4: precarious situation if you don't have sex with me is
21:20
Speaker 4: not considered by the European Court of Human Rights to
21:22
Speaker 4: be acceptable.
21:25
Speaker 2: Two weeks ago.
21:26
Speaker 4: Wow, Yeah, that's two weeks ago, small gum. Yeah. And
21:32
Speaker 4: marital rape was outlawed in nineteen ninety two, So nineteen
21:37
Speaker 4: eighty is when rape as such became a crime separate
21:42
Speaker 4: from just assault. And you do have pretty robust laws
21:46
Speaker 4: in terms of sexual harassment, revenge porn, and online gender
21:50
Speaker 4: based harassment, but the enforcement of those is extremely patchy,
21:54
Speaker 4: and I will talk a little bit more about that later.
21:59
Speaker 4: Getting the this timeline. In two thousand, a law that
22:04
Speaker 4: insisted on parity for when you're a political party, you're
22:07
Speaker 4: supposed to present lists that have an equal number of
22:09
Speaker 4: men and women or pay a penalty. There are a
22:12
Speaker 4: couple of problems with that. One is that this recognizes
22:16
Speaker 4: that like so you're not allowed to give any kind
22:20
Speaker 4: of quota system for race, because that would be admitting
22:23
Speaker 4: that people are different. But it's okay to say that
22:26
Speaker 4: men and women are different kinds of people. Yes, it's
22:31
Speaker 4: there's some inconsistencies there that will I'm sure get me
22:36
Speaker 4: yelled at online. But also a lot of parties prefer
22:40
Speaker 4: to pay a penalty. So right now you have thirty
22:43
Speaker 4: six percent of the Chamber of Deputies, which is the
22:47
Speaker 4: main legislative chamber. That is that are women again doing
22:53
Speaker 4: better than the US twenty eight point seven percent for
22:56
Speaker 4: US Congress. In twenty eleven, Istumbul Convention on Gender Equality
23:02
Speaker 4: is adopted by France. So this is a convention in
23:06
Speaker 4: Europe which says that defines gender as socially dependent rules
23:10
Speaker 4: and norms based on sex, and it requires that all
23:14
Speaker 4: signatories adopt laws concerning gender based violence. So that's how
23:19
Speaker 4: you wind up with these robust legal protections for sexual harassment, discrimination,
23:25
Speaker 4: et cetera. But then what is actually the outcome to
23:29
Speaker 4: that law being passed. Twenty thirteen, you get a Marriage
23:36
Speaker 4: for all, so marriage that includes same sex couples. And
23:43
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty one you get what's called the Bioethics Law,
23:47
Speaker 4: which extends fertility treatment and what they call medically assisted pregnancy,
23:53
Speaker 4: so that could be anything from artificial insemination to in
23:55
Speaker 4: vitro to single women and same sex couples. The UHCY
24:02
Speaker 4: is still uniformly outwalked. We're not in a situation like
24:05
Speaker 4: Italy just did where they said we will not recognize
24:08
Speaker 4: children born of surrogacy in other countries where it's legal,
24:13
Speaker 4: So we're not there, but that has been proposed by
24:16
Speaker 4: some people on.
24:17
Speaker 2: The far right, not recognized, like they don't exist here.
24:21
Speaker 4: That's they don't exist. They don't have Italian citizenship. They're
24:24
Speaker 4: not your kids.
24:25
Speaker 2: Wow, they are illusions, they're ghosts.
24:28
Speaker 3: Okay, yes, essentially, it's a whole, a whole other thing
24:34
Speaker 3: right now, that's interesting.
24:36
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm laughing. But that probably will happen in
24:38
Speaker 2: the US too.
24:38
Speaker 4: So it's it's terrifying, I say nonchalantly. So both in
24:57
Speaker 4: terms of the marriage for all and the bioethics law.
25:02
Speaker 4: There are a couple of weird backlashes that happen. One
25:06
Speaker 4: is sort of the expected backlash from the right, and
25:10
Speaker 4: especially from the religious right, which is smaller in France
25:13
Speaker 4: than it is in the US, although it's growing, and
25:16
Speaker 4: that took the form of what was called. So they're
25:18
Speaker 4: like marriage for All, We're the March for All. We're
25:20
Speaker 4: going to make this huge demonstration full of vile, homophobic rhetoric,
25:27
Speaker 4: and they promote some really awful ideas around same sex couples.
25:35
Speaker 4: But then on the traditional left you get a kind
25:38
Speaker 4: of objection that you did not see around these issues
25:41
Speaker 4: in the US, and that is a sort of pseudoscientific
25:47
Speaker 4: objection in terms of canned children of homoparental couples be
25:58
Speaker 4: one okay and two good citizens. So I'm coming as
26:05
Speaker 4: someone who is not hostile to psychoanalysis. There are many
26:08
Speaker 4: kinds of psychoanalysis, but there is a popular perception of
26:13
Speaker 4: it that somehow takes root in a certain intellectual class
26:19
Speaker 4: where there was a proliferation, including from a Socialist deputy
26:23
Speaker 4: on the floor of the legislature saying, but how will
26:27
Speaker 4: a child resolve their Oedipus complex? And if they don't
26:32
Speaker 4: have a father and a mother. So you can google
26:38
Speaker 4: Oedipus complex resolved Marriage for All and see article article
26:43
Speaker 4: art like from very respectable publications. I am not going
26:48
Speaker 4: to say psyclonalysis debunked. The Oedipus complex has been debunked.
26:52
Speaker 4: That is a description of a specific situation that happened
26:56
Speaker 4: in a specific set of people in a specific class
26:58
Speaker 4: in Vienna. As a description, I'm not going to argue
27:01
Speaker 4: with it. I wasn't there. I don't know. I'm sure
27:04
Speaker 4: it can occurs as a group dynamic, but to prescribe
27:11
Speaker 4: that as something that needs to happen in order and
27:15
Speaker 4: because the family, the nuclear family, is the hearth of
27:19
Speaker 4: the republic is specious and as an American a bit
27:26
Speaker 4: shocking coming from the left, and that rhetoric has in
27:35
Speaker 4: many ways, there's been a toleration of homosexuality as a practice,
27:40
Speaker 4: but not as an identity that I think pervades the
27:43
Speaker 4: political discourse around homosexuality, around homo parental families, and now
27:48
Speaker 4: around transgender issues. That is absent largely from the US debate.
27:54
Speaker 4: It's on the fringes of the UK. But that's something
27:58
Speaker 4: I just want to flag as being quite particular to
28:01
Speaker 4: this situation. And then I'm going to come back to this,
28:04
Speaker 4: but in twenty twenty four, the freedom to have an
28:07
Speaker 4: abortion was added to the Constitution, and I will come
28:10
Speaker 4: back to that in sort of the current events section
28:12
Speaker 4: at the end, But that's where we are. Whoa in
28:17
Speaker 4: terms of feminism, so political or social movements, I can
28:23
Speaker 4: give you a much shorter rundown. So in nineteen forty
28:27
Speaker 4: nine you get Simone to Beauvoir publishing The Second Sex.
28:30
Speaker 4: So this is where you get the very famous quote
28:32
Speaker 4: one is not born a woman, one becomes one. So
28:35
Speaker 4: it's really showing the identity of women to be a
28:40
Speaker 4: social construction that overlays certain biological characteristics. However, that text
28:47
Speaker 4: is not perfect. There's a lot of very deeply internalized
28:50
Speaker 4: misogyny in there, including talking about how women, because they
28:53
Speaker 4: don't have access to the public sphere, have yet to
28:55
Speaker 4: write a truly great novel because they're only writing about
28:58
Speaker 4: women's issues, which seems to sort of say women's issues
29:04
Speaker 4: can't be of general interest, domestic issues cannot be of
29:08
Speaker 4: general interest. In nineteen seventy you get the foundation of
29:12
Speaker 4: the women's liberation movement, and that actually is rooted quite
29:17
Speaker 4: deeply in both in traditional Marxist socialist communist activism in France,
29:24
Speaker 4: so looking at social inequalities, looking at who has the
29:26
Speaker 4: material resources and how they exploit other people's labor and bodies,
29:33
Speaker 4: and also in the US women's movement, the Betty for
29:37
Speaker 4: Dan's feminine mystique made a big impact on French feminism
29:43
Speaker 4: as well. And in the US we have a tendency
29:47
Speaker 4: to be like first wave, second wave, third wave, third wave,
29:50
Speaker 4: plus it's a little bit different in France, it's a
29:53
Speaker 4: little bit more fragmented. So you get this women's liberation movement.
29:56
Speaker 4: They're big in terms of this is right around the
30:00
Speaker 4: time that abortion is decriminalized, and they're very instrumental in that.
30:06
Speaker 4: But you get a couple of different splits within the
30:08
Speaker 4: movement that happen. One is you get the more politically
30:14
Speaker 4: oriented almost almost all sociologists or novelists who are identify
30:22
Speaker 4: first as revolutionary feminists. And then you get a group
30:26
Speaker 4: that splits off who are very Rugian psychoanalytic practice, and
30:31
Speaker 4: these are people who become your sort of differentialist feminists
30:34
Speaker 4: who are really looking at women and men and sexual
30:37
Speaker 4: difference as being sort of a very constitutive psychological formation.
30:43
Speaker 4: The other problem with them is that they're leader. Antoinette
30:47
Speaker 4: Fook trademarked Women's Liberation movement and then started a press
30:51
Speaker 4: that so it basically kind of sucked all the air
30:53
Speaker 4: out of the room for financial reasons. Honestly, because they
30:57
Speaker 4: were getting that press, was getting a lot of the
31:00
Speaker 4: financial resources and promoting their specific strain of feminism. That
31:06
Speaker 4: press still exists, it's really broadened its scope. It's become
31:10
Speaker 4: much friendlier to a lot of different kinds of feminists.
31:14
Speaker 4: But it is rooted in that original split. And then
31:17
Speaker 4: you have a split between the materialists feminists on one side,
31:21
Speaker 4: so you get them and then the revolutionary feminists who
31:24
Speaker 4: start to describe themselves as materialists. And there's sort of
31:27
Speaker 4: three precepts in this. One that gender precedes sex, that
31:31
Speaker 4: the idea that we need to divide people into two
31:34
Speaker 4: kinds of people is it's not just that we have
31:37
Speaker 4: two biological sexes. And then gender is sort of on
31:41
Speaker 4: top of that, but the need to divide people into
31:45
Speaker 4: two groups precedes our understanding of who's in those two groups. Two,
31:52
Speaker 4: that they understand women's oppression from a material standpoint, access
31:55
Speaker 4: to resources, exploitation of bodies, and they are explicitly rough solutionary.
32:00
Speaker 4: They want to change society from the ground up. But
32:04
Speaker 4: then in nineteen eighty one they have a big sort
32:10
Speaker 4: of breakup where because there are a group within that
32:16
Speaker 4: Monique Fatigue, whom I work a lot with is. She's
32:23
Speaker 4: the author of The Straight Mind, which is one of
32:27
Speaker 4: these early texts that talks about sort of compulsory heterosexuality.
32:30
Speaker 4: It's really questioning the necessity for it and whether you're
32:34
Speaker 4: heterosexuality as an institution, whether you can have that without
32:42
Speaker 4: an exploitative relationship. And so there's this group her, but
32:50
Speaker 4: not exclusively her, that are saying, our identity as lesbians
32:56
Speaker 4: is a political identity, and we are fighting not just
32:59
Speaker 4: for women's rights but also for the right to be lesbians.
33:04
Speaker 4: And there's another group that says, no, what you're doing
33:09
Speaker 4: is too particular. It is it isn't a political identity,
33:14
Speaker 4: and this includes women who were lesbians but said, that's
33:17
Speaker 4: not a political part of my identity. That's just a
33:20
Speaker 4: thing I do. And so there's a split in the
33:26
Speaker 4: middle of the group that actually winds up with Manique
33:28
Speaker 4: Fatigue going to the US and teaching in colleges in
33:31
Speaker 4: the US because it became almost impossible for her to
33:34
Speaker 4: publish in France. Then you get this weird American creation
33:38
Speaker 4: called French feminism that is largely a university philosophical discourse
33:47
Speaker 4: made up of the triumvirate of Ellen SISU LUSA Rigarai
33:51
Speaker 4: and Julia Christeva, and there's a someone named Cape Costello
33:55
Speaker 4: who's written a pretty great thesis about how this isn't
33:59
Speaker 4: this constitution of feminism, even though those people didn't really
34:02
Speaker 4: have a political agenda. They're mostly talking about sort of
34:05
Speaker 4: what is what it is to be a woman, and
34:11
Speaker 4: this gets sort of crystallized in the American university system
34:15
Speaker 4: as French feminism while ignoring a lot of the political
34:18
Speaker 4: activity that these other people had done on the ground.
34:20
Speaker 4: There's kind of been a turnaround in the last five years,
34:22
Speaker 4: but still it's kind of like this. One last figure
34:26
Speaker 4: is woman named Fransas Dobun who's the inventor of the
34:29
Speaker 4: word ecofeminism. So she wrote a lot about how women
34:34
Speaker 4: and the non human are both sort of the objects
34:38
Speaker 4: of exploitation, like physical appropriation by the dominant patriarchal capitalist class.
34:45
Speaker 4: And also and the other side of this is that
34:47
Speaker 4: environmental degradation falls harder in many ways on people who
34:52
Speaker 4: are identified as women. When you think about climate refugees,
34:55
Speaker 4: when we think about accumulation of toxic substances in body tissue,
35:00
Speaker 4: things like that, and that was in the seventies. It
35:04
Speaker 4: kind of goes you don't see that a lot until
35:06
Speaker 4: nineteen ninety three when a bunch of English language people
35:09
Speaker 4: pick it up and run with it. And then again
35:11
Speaker 4: this is experiencing a resurgence. Sorry that was That was
35:14
Speaker 4: very long.
35:15
Speaker 3: But the whole history that we needed and please don't
35:22
Speaker 3: give us a quiz because I will, especially with the names.
35:26
Speaker 2: I'm am, was like, this is where I know French
35:27
Speaker 2: is not my language.
35:29
Speaker 3: Because I have no idea what we're saying the names of, Like, oh,
35:34
Speaker 3: I would be so bad at that, but I loved
35:38
Speaker 3: like that information is Obviously you are a professor and you're.
35:41
Speaker 2: A good one at that.
35:43
Speaker 3: So all of those things, I feel like I need
35:44
Speaker 3: to be taking notes something I'm not where am I?
35:47
Speaker 2: Okay? Yes?
35:47
Speaker 3: And this timeline because you did such an amazing job
35:51
Speaker 3: in laying that out, and it was very like that
35:54
Speaker 3: haunting familiar familiarity in it all is like.
35:57
Speaker 4: Oh God, yeah, for sure, it's so many of these
36:01
Speaker 4: things just don't go away.
36:03
Speaker 1: It's true, and we did. It was a huge ask.
36:06
Speaker 1: We knew it when we were just break down and
36:09
Speaker 1: very briefly what happened in this.
36:12
Speaker 3: France about France and women and then the marginalized too,
36:18
Speaker 3: that's at all, yes.
36:18
Speaker 1: Things, so thank you so much for that. But that
36:22
Speaker 1: brings us to today. There is a lot to talk
36:24
Speaker 1: about still and one of the things I was interested
36:27
Speaker 1: in when we were workshopping topics is you mentioned the
36:31
Speaker 1: visibility and valuation of women in public life in France.
36:36
Speaker 1: Could you break that down for us?
36:38
Speaker 4: Okay, So the biggest sort of symbolic place where you
36:42
Speaker 4: see this is in the Pantheon. So that's this big monument.
36:45
Speaker 4: It's a big mausoleum in the center of Paris, and
36:49
Speaker 4: it was designed as a church, but now it's where
36:52
Speaker 4: they bury people who are considered to have been like
36:55
Speaker 4: the great men of the nation. And there are eighty
36:58
Speaker 4: one people in it, and seven of them are women,
37:02
Speaker 4: and three of them have gone in in the last decade.
37:05
Speaker 4: So one that proportion is and also that the question
37:13
Speaker 4: of who has the right to be put in there
37:15
Speaker 4: when you're a woman, I mean at all, because that's
37:19
Speaker 4: a big question. But so the women who are in there.
37:22
Speaker 4: You've got Sophie Berto who was a chemist in the
37:26
Speaker 4: nineteenth century, but she's in there because her husband's in there,
37:29
Speaker 4: and she and her husband wanted to be buried together.
37:34
Speaker 4: There's Marie Curie. I don't think anyone's gonna argue with
37:37
Speaker 4: that one.
37:39
Speaker 2: One guess there are there.
37:42
Speaker 4: Are three significant members of the resistance, so a woman
37:48
Speaker 4: named Jean Mantillon and Mini Manuchion. There's Simond, who's the
37:57
Speaker 4: She was the health minister that proposed the law legalizing
38:00
Speaker 4: abortion and a number of other important laws. And she
38:05
Speaker 4: survived the concentration camps during World War Two. And is
38:10
Speaker 4: Josephine Baker. And Josephine Baker is really complicated because one,
38:15
Speaker 4: she's the only woman of color in there, and she
38:19
Speaker 4: did become a French citizen, and she did do a
38:24
Speaker 4: great deal of service to the nation. She was a resistant,
38:27
Speaker 4: she was a spy for the French resistance. She was
38:31
Speaker 4: a humanitarian. But a couple there are a couple of
38:35
Speaker 4: issues with that. One is that there's an overvaluation of
38:39
Speaker 4: American people of color and African Americans as compared to
38:47
Speaker 4: people of color who come from the French former colonial empire,
38:54
Speaker 4: and which means that she's there, but a bunch of
38:57
Speaker 4: other people are not. And the other issues with that
39:04
Speaker 4: are that she never criticized the French colonies in Africa,
39:12
Speaker 4: for example, So you have some people who could be there.
39:17
Speaker 4: There's a uh, there's a woman named Louise Michelle who
39:21
Speaker 4: was a revolutionary, a school teacher and all around badass
39:26
Speaker 4: if you want to look up Louise Michelle, but she
39:30
Speaker 4: was staunchly anti colonialist. You have Suzanne Sesare, who's the
39:35
Speaker 4: poet and politician, a Mesel's wife, who was a fantastic
39:39
Speaker 4: writer on her in her own right. She's been getting
39:42
Speaker 4: her flowers recently from university people, but she hasn't gotten
39:47
Speaker 4: the public or political recognition. You have the Nardal sisters
39:51
Speaker 4: who were Martiniquin women who started the the first Black
39:58
Speaker 4: salon literary salon in the early twentieth century in Paris
40:03
Speaker 4: and were writers in their own right. And specifically, you
40:07
Speaker 4: have a woman named Giselle Alimi. So she was of
40:12
Speaker 4: Tunisian Jewish origins and she is enormous in French history.
40:18
Speaker 4: So she was became known because she defended an Algerian
40:22
Speaker 4: resistant woman named Jemil Bupasha in nineteen sixty who was
40:26
Speaker 4: tortured and raped by French soldiers during the Algerian Revolution.
40:31
Speaker 4: She was one of the lawyers and in the Boobeini trial,
40:35
Speaker 4: which was a trial in nineteen seventy two of doctors
40:39
Speaker 4: who had provided abortions and they were acquitted, And this
40:43
Speaker 4: is one of the other things that led up to
40:45
Speaker 4: the legalization. She was one of the three lawyers in
40:49
Speaker 4: what's called the pe Castellano affair, which is between nineteen
40:54
Speaker 4: seventy four and nineteen seventy eight, a major case where
40:58
Speaker 4: a lesbian couple was gang right. And this is how
41:04
Speaker 4: rape became a separate legal category and punishment in France.
41:13
Speaker 4: And she was also because she was also an elected official,
41:17
Speaker 4: she was at the origin of the law that abolished.
41:20
Speaker 4: So you used to have in France where you had
41:22
Speaker 4: the age of consent and then you had the age
41:24
Speaker 4: of consent if you were gay, and you had to
41:29
Speaker 4: be an adult adult like for a while, I was
41:32
Speaker 4: twenty one in order to have gay sex, when the
41:37
Speaker 4: age of consent for heterosexual sex was fifteen.
41:40
Speaker 2: There's so many questions.
41:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I would also like to mention that a
41:45
Speaker 4: couple of the people that are currently in the cabinet
41:47
Speaker 4: in France voted to keep that distinction in the eighties.
41:52
Speaker 4: So Gisel l Ami, huge enormous critic of the French government.
41:59
Speaker 4: Is she going to get in the pantheon. I don't know,
42:01
Speaker 4: she hasn't been dead that long, but they don't seem
42:06
Speaker 4: positive to the idea. So the picking of a woman
42:10
Speaker 4: who is a woman of color, but who was not
42:11
Speaker 4: critical of the France's imperial possessions and their treatment of
42:19
Speaker 4: their subjects, versus one who did so much for French
42:26
Speaker 4: women and for equality overall in France, but who was
42:32
Speaker 4: extremely critical. So you get it. So in the opening
42:36
Speaker 4: ceremony of the of the Olympics last year, he had
42:40
Speaker 4: a little bit of a corrective and I want to
42:42
Speaker 4: absolutely say congratulations to a Maajurie, the guy who created
42:46
Speaker 4: that whole spectacle. He he did a good job in
42:50
Speaker 4: many ways. It's unfortunately, I think a lot of window dressing.
42:53
Speaker 4: But I don't want to take anything away from him
42:55
Speaker 4: or the efforts that he made. And he made these
43:00
Speaker 4: statues come out of the sene of women who had
43:02
Speaker 4: not been recognized. So Simon Veay was in there, but
43:07
Speaker 4: you also have but he had gizell Aimi, so this lawyer,
43:13
Speaker 4: he had Chris Paulette nardal So, one of the women
43:16
Speaker 4: who ran the salon, an athlete, a filmmaker, Louise Michelle,
43:20
Speaker 4: the revolutionary Christine de Pisan, who was a medieval poet
43:26
Speaker 4: who wrote a lot about women's role in society, and
43:29
Speaker 4: then unfortunately Jean Berret, who was the first woman to
43:33
Speaker 4: circumnavigate the globe, but she was also huge colonizer. So
43:52
Speaker 4: that opening ceremony also brought up the prevalence of miss
43:55
Speaker 4: Sage Noir in public spaces against the singer Ayan Nakamura
44:00
Speaker 4: who she was dressed in gold and doing the song
44:02
Speaker 4: with the with the brass band on the bridge. The
44:08
Speaker 4: reaction of the right to her being asked to sing
44:12
Speaker 4: was abject. So she is French of immigration, you know,
44:18
Speaker 4: a background that includes immigration, but she is French. She
44:21
Speaker 4: sings in French. The end, they said, well, we should
44:26
Speaker 4: have someone who really represents France, like Celine Dion or
44:29
Speaker 4: Laura Fabian. Neither of those are French, right, And then
44:32
Speaker 4: they said one of those Canadian. I think I think
44:36
Speaker 4: Lara Fabian's Belgian, but I'm not sure. Then and then
44:41
Speaker 4: they said, and I can't remember exactly which person this was,
44:47
Speaker 4: who I think it was, I'm not even to depend,
44:51
Speaker 4: but I can't be one hundred percent sure. But then
44:54
Speaker 4: she's like, well, she doesn't sing in French. And it
44:56
Speaker 4: was pointed out that yes, in fact, she sings in French.
44:58
Speaker 4: What other language do you think she sings? And she said,
45:01
Speaker 4: and this person said in foreigner and this is going
45:08
Speaker 4: to televise. And this kind of missagyir so misogyny that
45:14
Speaker 4: is accentuated and exacerbated by the fact that that a
45:20
Speaker 4: woman who is black is in public is also evident
45:24
Speaker 4: in the treatment of the most recent winner of Star Academy,
45:28
Speaker 4: which is like the American idol version, so Ebony who's
45:33
Speaker 4: from the Caribbean, and the just wave of hate that
45:36
Speaker 4: she got online, as well as against the current Miss
45:41
Speaker 4: France when she wouldn't say I am Charlie. So this
45:46
Speaker 4: is in reference to the attacks a decade ago on
45:49
Speaker 4: Charlie Hebdo. The newspaper Charlie Hebdo suffered a really terrible
45:56
Speaker 4: attack on its personnel. However, Charlie Hebdo has a tradition
46:01
Speaker 4: of running tremendously islamophobic and misogynistic content, especially editorial cartoons.
46:08
Speaker 4: In the last year they ran an editorial cartoon that
46:12
Speaker 4: showed Gizel Pelico, the victim of the mass rape trial
46:17
Speaker 4: that we'll probably talk about later. It was and it
46:22
Speaker 4: was a satire of Emmanuel Macron taking advantage of the
46:29
Speaker 4: French people by ignoring the results of the election that
46:34
Speaker 4: took place over the summer. But it was drawn as
46:39
Speaker 4: the gang rape of Jazel Pelico. It's so terrible and
46:46
Speaker 4: so for her to be like, I don't really want
46:49
Speaker 4: to say, I'm Charlie Man and but then in an
46:52
Speaker 4: interview she didn't make reverence to that exactly. But there
46:56
Speaker 4: are a lot of reasons not to say it and
47:03
Speaker 4: or not to identify oneself with that publication, and she
47:09
Speaker 4: also received a lot of online hate. There's also a
47:14
Speaker 4: huge moral panic around the Hitjab, so the veil that
47:17
Speaker 4: Muslim women wear, and this goes back a long time,
47:22
Speaker 4: but specifically in two thousand and four that's when they
47:24
Speaker 4: made a loss. And you can't wear ostentatious religious signs
47:31
Speaker 4: in a public education establishment. So in theory this is
47:36
Speaker 4: not attacking any particular religion, but the idea of what
47:40
Speaker 4: constitutes ostentatious if you have a cross or a starr David,
47:45
Speaker 4: is that ostentatious. And what this has meant come to
47:50
Speaker 4: me in practice is the exclusion gradually of more and
47:57
Speaker 4: more women wearing veils from public space. And this is
48:04
Speaker 4: a quite extreme interpretation of the way separation of church
48:09
Speaker 4: and state is written under the Constitution there. And I
48:11
Speaker 4: should also know that this doesn't apply to nuns, because
48:16
Speaker 4: that's a cultural garment.
48:18
Speaker 3: And not a I love the they like specifics.
48:24
Speaker 4: France was the only country to ban its Olympic athletes
48:27
Speaker 4: from wearing a headscarf. Every year, there's a moral panic
48:32
Speaker 4: around the berkini, so the full body swimming outfit. And
48:37
Speaker 4: then specifically in the last couple of years, there was
48:41
Speaker 4: the abaya affair. So that's a traditional long garment that's
48:46
Speaker 4: worn in a number of Middle eastern North African countries.
48:50
Speaker 4: And there was an elementary school that had an elegance day,
48:54
Speaker 4: so the students were supposed to wear their nicest clothes. Well,
48:57
Speaker 4: for a lot of those students, that means they're traditional garments.
49:02
Speaker 4: So there were young girls, you know, ten eleven showing
49:08
Speaker 4: up in a bias long, beautiful and brighter dresses. And
49:13
Speaker 4: this was seen as a sign of religious that it
49:16
Speaker 4: was a religious garment. It's not particularly a religious garment,
49:19
Speaker 4: is more ethnic than religious, or geographically distributed than religious.
49:24
Speaker 4: While it is sometimes associated with modest dressing, it's also
49:30
Speaker 4: it's a long dress, and these girls were forced to
49:36
Speaker 4: take off their a bias and just be in like
49:40
Speaker 4: their leggings, and it was super gross. And then there's
49:45
Speaker 4: this explosion of there's like, oh, the abayah is banned
49:50
Speaker 4: in school. But then it's like, where does it stop
49:52
Speaker 4: being a long dress and start being in a bayah?
49:55
Speaker 4: And there are all these examples of people being like,
49:58
Speaker 4: so is this band and they're like, oh, that's horrible.
50:00
Speaker 4: They're like, it's Gucci, like.
50:05
Speaker 2: A couple lot of money.
50:07
Speaker 4: And then and then you get like Brigitte Macron doing
50:11
Speaker 4: a state dinner and she's dressed up to hear long dress,
50:15
Speaker 4: sleeves down to here. Where's the difference there? But then
50:19
Speaker 4: you get a situation where you've had students in middle
50:25
Speaker 4: school having their skirts measured to make sure they're not
50:28
Speaker 4: too long. So but at the same time you also
50:36
Speaker 4: have a public polemic against girls wearing crap tops to school.
50:42
Speaker 4: And the amazing phrase that was I don't have the
50:47
Speaker 4: government minister who said it, but he said, all they
50:49
Speaker 4: have to do is dress in a republican manner in
50:55
Speaker 4: the American sense, but like as good citizens. And it's like,
50:59
Speaker 4: what on earth does that mean? How does how I
51:04
Speaker 4: dress and how much skin I show affect my ability
51:08
Speaker 4: to be a good citizen. And then you also get
51:13
Speaker 4: on mainstream television platforms you also get older men saying,
51:20
Speaker 4: but girls that age should be showing their shapes, and
51:24
Speaker 4: it's like for whom for whom sir.
51:29
Speaker 1: Ugh ow an actual gap?
51:33
Speaker 4: So, and there was there's a book that came out
51:36
Speaker 4: that I think is sort of instructive here, and I
51:37
Speaker 4: don't think there's an English translation yet, but the title
51:40
Speaker 4: is always too much or not enough right, And it's about, uh,
51:44
Speaker 4: you know, the public discourse around women's dress, women's clothing,
51:50
Speaker 4: but especially around young and teenage girl clothing as well.
51:56
Speaker 4: So and and there's also this really wonderful ecofeminist women
52:01
Speaker 4: with a political science background called Fatima I sc who
52:04
Speaker 4: wrote a book. She's written several books. One of them
52:06
Speaker 4: the main one, is called for a Pirate Ecology, and
52:10
Speaker 4: she's that one is being translated. I don't know who's
52:14
Speaker 4: doing it, but I know that there is a translation
52:16
Speaker 4: in English that's happening. But she has talked about how
52:20
Speaker 4: there's effectively this way in which you in which people
52:26
Speaker 4: working class people of immigration background, especially if they have
52:29
Speaker 4: any signs of belonging to to especially to the Islamic tradition,
52:36
Speaker 4: are in many ways kept out of public spaces, and
52:41
Speaker 4: especially when this comes to young people, young women in
52:44
Speaker 4: terms of them not being allowed to dress how they want,
52:46
Speaker 4: but also young men because they're perceived as a threat.
52:49
Speaker 4: And she's also talked about how like the environmental conditions
52:52
Speaker 4: and working class neighborhoods add to this idea that you're
52:55
Speaker 4: confined to your home because it's not safe or healthy
52:59
Speaker 4: to the outside. And she's talked about specifically what it
53:03
Speaker 4: feels like her to be a mother who is visibly
53:09
Speaker 4: North African and Muslim, and the ways in which she
53:14
Speaker 4: can't show up for her children without being accused of
53:19
Speaker 4: being an Islamicist. As in specifically, what this came out
53:27
Speaker 4: of the incident was that she's a vegetarian, her children
53:30
Speaker 4: are vegetarians. She's an ecologist, like background political scientist in
53:36
Speaker 4: political ecology, and she's like, I want my children to
53:39
Speaker 4: the option to eat a vegetarian meal in the public school.
53:43
Speaker 4: And she shows up and they say, what you're trying
53:47
Speaker 4: to do is to get halal into the public school.
53:54
Speaker 4: And there's this whole controversy over whether it's legitimate for
53:59
Speaker 4: her as a North African woman to ask for what
54:04
Speaker 4: other French women can ask for, because there are public
54:07
Speaker 4: schools where there is a vegetarian option, but those are
54:10
Speaker 4: predominantly white, non Muslim. So there's that kind of situation
54:18
Speaker 4: where it's like, can you advocate for yourself a as
54:26
Speaker 4: a Muslim, as a North African or Arab woman. And
54:30
Speaker 4: there's also sort of I can't give you good data
54:34
Speaker 4: about this, but there is the sort of body policing
54:38
Speaker 4: and clothing policing. It's really intense for everyone, but it
54:44
Speaker 4: affects women specifically. As women. You have a situation about
54:47
Speaker 4: a decade ago where a socialist minister she'd been criticized
54:51
Speaker 4: for wearing jeans and a blazer to an official meeting
54:54
Speaker 4: because that wasn't formal enough. So she's like, fine, I'm
54:56
Speaker 4: gonna put on a dress. And she wore this flowered
55:00
Speaker 4: like it was like a you know, Diane von Fursenberg
55:02
Speaker 4: rap dress style whatever, like something ignore, and she went
55:07
Speaker 4: to speak in the National assembling was cat called.
55:11
Speaker 3: What yeah.
55:13
Speaker 1: Oh.
55:15
Speaker 4: And there have been like there have been men who've
55:18
Speaker 4: worn you know, something a little avnant garde and gotten
55:22
Speaker 4: made fun of but not cat call, not wolf whistled.
55:26
Speaker 4: And then there's also the idea because when we think
55:29
Speaker 4: of when we think of France, we think of fashion,
55:31
Speaker 4: we think of very thin people. And there is what
55:35
Speaker 4: I don't think she came up with us. But recently
55:37
Speaker 4: the author Louise Morrell was talking about the injunction to
55:40
Speaker 4: thinness and how as Westerners we live in a you know,
55:47
Speaker 4: we live in a very fat phobic society in general,
55:50
Speaker 4: but that it isn't just even people who are in
55:53
Speaker 4: thin bodies are constantly being sort of reminded that they
55:59
Speaker 4: better know step out alone, like she for example, she
56:04
Speaker 4: was like, I've been in a thin body my entire life.
56:08
Speaker 4: I'm maybe heavier now than I was ever, but still
56:11
Speaker 4: considered within a normal range in any other country, not France.
56:15
Speaker 4: And I spent two years eating nothing but clementines as
56:17
Speaker 4: a teenager. Like that's not exclusive to France. But the
56:22
Speaker 4: sort of intensity in public spaces and the constant like
56:27
Speaker 4: advertisement of I mean, this is cranked up with social
56:31
Speaker 4: media everywhere in terms of like weight loss products. I
56:34
Speaker 4: mean I can't get on Instagram now without being advertised
56:38
Speaker 4: with zepic and everything else. But in terms of but
56:43
Speaker 4: it's it's been there for a really long time and
56:45
Speaker 4: in a much in a very very visible way.
56:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is that is a lot. That is a lot,
56:58
Speaker 1: And I know we're going to come back to some
56:59
Speaker 1: of that at the end, but I did want to
57:03
Speaker 1: ask you, just because I have taken many, many years
57:07
Speaker 1: of French. It is a gendered language. And when you
57:10
Speaker 1: mentioned that, you know this is also part of this conversation.
57:19
Speaker 1: I just want to learn more about that. Can you
57:22
Speaker 1: tell us how that it relates.
57:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, so French is a gendered language. Every noun is
57:30
Speaker 4: either a masculine or feminine, and so in the English
57:34
Speaker 4: is not a heavily gendered language, but we do have pronouns.
57:37
Speaker 4: That's that our gender that's become a hot topic recently,
57:43
Speaker 4: and in France it's not just pronouns, it's nouns and
57:46
Speaker 4: then all of the adjectives that agree with with all
57:49
Speaker 4: of those nouns. So there is some flexibility in this
57:55
Speaker 4: because like if I say I am XYS, I have
58:02
Speaker 4: to make a choice whether I'm going to gender those
58:04
Speaker 4: down the line and how I'm going to do it,
58:09
Speaker 4: and so traditionally I would make all of it. Like
58:12
Speaker 4: if I said I am a you know, happy perfectionist,
58:20
Speaker 4: like like all of those things, I'd have to tack
58:23
Speaker 4: on a feminine ending to those. And you can get
58:30
Speaker 4: around us a little bit if you say, because person
58:34
Speaker 4: as a noun is feminine, whether it's referring to a
58:37
Speaker 4: man or a woman, person is just feminine. So I
58:39
Speaker 4: could say, like I am a person who is, and
58:42
Speaker 4: then all of them would be feminine and that has
58:44
Speaker 4: no reflection on my gender. But that requires a lot
58:48
Speaker 4: of gymnastics. There's one novel that did it really well.
58:52
Speaker 4: It's a novel called Sphinx by Angretta. There's a translation
58:55
Speaker 4: in English that doesn't quite have the same oomph, but
58:59
Speaker 4: it's a novel the two protagonists you can't tell what
59:02
Speaker 4: gender they are, like they It's managed to completely sides to
59:05
Speaker 4: have this issue. But in general it's a quite a
59:07
Speaker 4: heavily gendered language, and it also has a governing body
59:10
Speaker 4: of that language called the Academy Francis. That is a
59:16
Speaker 4: so when we think about dictionaries like you have the
59:18
Speaker 4: Oxford English Dictionary, Webster's Dictionary, whatever, these are primarily descriptive
59:24
Speaker 4: linguistic bodies that say, how are people using these words?
59:28
Speaker 4: Let's put this in the dictionary and so that people
59:31
Speaker 4: know how to use how they are being used. The
59:35
Speaker 4: Academy Frances is prescriptive in that it says this is
59:39
Speaker 4: the word you should use for this situation. In this way,
59:43
Speaker 4: these are the rules of grammar. Uh, this is not
59:47
Speaker 4: legally binding, but this is what sort of directs educational
59:55
Speaker 4: policy and style guides and things like that. And they
1:00:02
Speaker 4: are very slow to change, and they are traditionally, up
1:00:07
Speaker 4: until the sixties, they were all men. They are still
1:00:11
Speaker 4: mostly men. And this comes into play for a lot
1:00:16
Speaker 4: of reasons, and one of them is when it comes
1:00:20
Speaker 4: to professional nouns that are the names of professions, because
1:00:26
Speaker 4: traditionally you there was no question like if I said
1:00:29
Speaker 4: I'm a professor, I'm a doctor. Those are like for
1:00:33
Speaker 4: a long time, only men were those things, so there
1:00:35
Speaker 4: was no question like why bother having a different form.
1:00:40
Speaker 4: But then the question comes up when women start occupying
1:00:45
Speaker 4: these positions. Are do I want to have the exact
1:00:49
Speaker 4: same title as a man, which is one argument or
1:00:56
Speaker 4: and that's what we've done in English pretty much when
1:00:59
Speaker 4: we instead of say actress, we say actor, so everybody
1:01:02
Speaker 4: gets the same one. But or do I want to
1:01:06
Speaker 4: make sure everyone knows I am a woman in that job,
1:01:10
Speaker 4: so that we can make it visible that there are
1:01:12
Speaker 4: women in that job. And so in nineteen ninety eight
1:01:18
Speaker 4: there was a parliamentary rule change that said, Okay, any
1:01:21
Speaker 4: job you have in parliament, there's a feminine form that
1:01:25
Speaker 4: we can use for that, and the Academy would occasionally
1:01:28
Speaker 4: like come out with some very dismissive statement about this.
1:01:32
Speaker 4: In twenty fourteen, they they put out a very wishy
1:01:38
Speaker 4: washy statement where they described feminized profession names as barbarisms
1:01:45
Speaker 4: because they're like, there's no way to really do this
1:01:47
Speaker 4: within the rules of French so it comes up with
1:01:49
Speaker 4: something really ugly. But they were like, well, if the
1:01:53
Speaker 4: people involved really want this, then I guess sure, fine, whatever.
1:02:00
Speaker 4: And that was also the year where you had a
1:02:03
Speaker 4: very public dispute. So the person presiding the National Assembly,
1:02:07
Speaker 4: so not the French president, but the person who was
1:02:10
Speaker 4: sort of organizationally in charge of the National Assembly was
1:02:14
Speaker 4: a woman named Sandvien Messitier, and there was a conservative
1:02:22
Speaker 4: deputy so legislator who insisted on calling her Madame lu President,
1:02:28
Speaker 4: so madam the masculine President, and she was like, no, man,
1:02:37
Speaker 4: it is Madame la President. To you and he and
1:02:42
Speaker 4: he kept going because he was like, no, the la
1:02:45
Speaker 4: president is the president's wife, because traditionally these feminine forms
1:02:51
Speaker 4: were the wife of whatever, and I'm just following the
1:02:56
Speaker 4: French Academy's rules. And he wanted to be fined because
1:03:00
Speaker 4: what he was doing was reaching parliamentary procedure, because there
1:03:03
Speaker 4: had been this circular that was like, no, in government,
1:03:05
Speaker 4: we are feminizing the professions. And then in twenty seventeen
1:03:10
Speaker 4: finally there was a government circular that mandated the official
1:03:13
Speaker 4: use of feminized professions in any official document. So author
1:03:19
Speaker 4: is one of those where it's like, are we going
1:03:21
Speaker 4: to tack on an e so it's utah or utah
1:03:26
Speaker 4: with an E, or are we going to say have
1:03:30
Speaker 4: the tour tress like an actor actress and say uta
1:03:35
Speaker 4: utris And so there's some sort of not confusion necessarily,
1:03:42
Speaker 4: but it hasn't really been settled which one is in
1:03:44
Speaker 4: uniform use. And then you also have the situation where
1:03:48
Speaker 4: in a mixed group, masculine is considered to be the neutral.
1:03:53
Speaker 4: So if I said men and women, then I would
1:03:58
Speaker 4: use masculine additives on the line to refer to the
1:04:01
Speaker 4: whole group. And the argument has often been like, well,
1:04:03
Speaker 4: that's just it's not really about gender. That's just how
1:04:06
Speaker 4: it's always been. It has not always been like that.
1:04:07
Speaker 4: It's been like that since the sixteenth century. Before that,
1:04:11
Speaker 4: you actually had a lot of flexibility. Are you going
1:04:13
Speaker 4: to use just the masculine? Are you going to use
1:04:15
Speaker 4: an adjective that agrees with the one that's closest in
1:04:18
Speaker 4: this sentence? Are you going to use the adjective that
1:04:21
Speaker 4: agree like if there are more women than men, then
1:04:23
Speaker 4: you could use a feminine adjective like it wasn't There
1:04:28
Speaker 4: wasn't until the establishment of the French Academy. There wasn't
1:04:32
Speaker 4: an established usage by which you would only use the
1:04:35
Speaker 4: masculine to represent the neutral. And a lot of times
1:04:37
Speaker 4: people get around this by saying like if instead of
1:04:40
Speaker 4: saying like welcome all, I'd be like, welcome all masculine
1:04:44
Speaker 4: and all feminine. But then you get two issues there
1:04:49
Speaker 4: where you're like, well, you're separating them and that seems weird,
1:04:52
Speaker 4: and also what about people who don't feel comfortable within
1:04:55
Speaker 4: neither of those things. So you have an effort to
1:05:00
Speaker 4: make to do what's called inclusive spelling, or that both
1:05:07
Speaker 4: covers mixed groups, but It also covers non binary individuals
1:05:11
Speaker 4: or people of indeterminate gender, like if you don't know
1:05:15
Speaker 4: whether a person is like if like the author of
1:05:18
Speaker 4: this piece, you don't know whether it's a man or
1:05:19
Speaker 4: woman or a non binary person. The French establoinisishment is
1:05:26
Speaker 4: so astonishingly hostile to this, so there are various ways
1:05:31
Speaker 4: you can do it. There's been a lot of experimentation.
1:05:33
Speaker 4: Are we going to say masculine ending period feminine ending?
1:05:36
Speaker 4: Are you just going to say masculine ending, feminine ending?
1:05:39
Speaker 4: Are you gonna say masculine ending slash feminine ending? What
1:05:42
Speaker 4: are we going to do with this? It's sort of
1:05:46
Speaker 4: come down on the masculine ending period feminine ending when
1:05:51
Speaker 4: you have a mixed group or and then there are
1:05:53
Speaker 4: also when it comes to pronouns, like all as a pronoun.
1:05:57
Speaker 4: So you have two t u s that's masculine, and
1:06:02
Speaker 4: then you have twot t o u t e s feminine,
1:06:05
Speaker 4: and then you have a combined form that is in
1:06:09
Speaker 4: more common use now among people who use the inclusive spelling,
1:06:12
Speaker 4: which is tooste t o u S t e s
1:06:18
Speaker 4: wouldn't seem like a huge problem for some people, it
1:06:22
Speaker 4: very much is. Uh, the president specific Emanuel Macon specifically
1:06:28
Speaker 4: has been very vocal about how he wants to preserve
1:06:30
Speaker 4: the traditional beauty of the French language, et cetera, et cetera.
1:06:34
Speaker 4: But then you also have really interesting things going on
1:06:38
Speaker 4: where you have people in the graphic design world who
1:06:40
Speaker 4: are working on and I can show you this. I
1:06:42
Speaker 4: know it's an audio medium, but I just wanted to
1:06:43
Speaker 4: show you this. This is non binary typography. And so
1:06:52
Speaker 4: this is from two people, one of whom I've met.
1:06:56
Speaker 4: They're very lovely, so usually Bideaux and Camis, and they're
1:07:00
Speaker 4: part of a collective called Bybi Binary and they make
1:07:04
Speaker 4: these stensils, but they also make fonts that you can
1:07:07
Speaker 4: plug into your word processor so you can type in
1:07:09
Speaker 4: gender neutral. And they are also people who are the
1:07:18
Speaker 4: first examples of people that I met who were really
1:07:21
Speaker 4: good at pronouncing it the double endings, because it is
1:07:25
Speaker 4: something you do have to get used to. It's not automatic,
1:07:28
Speaker 4: but nothing is in language. And one of the issues
1:07:32
Speaker 4: that you'll bring up with the inclusive spelling, they're like, well,
1:07:34
Speaker 4: it's going to be harder for people with dyslexia. There's
1:07:37
Speaker 4: been one study, a fairly large study, but just one study.
1:07:41
Speaker 4: So far this lead neurodiversion people and specifically people learning
1:07:44
Speaker 4: disabilities related to writing and reading and inclusive spelling, and
1:07:50
Speaker 4: with the exception of one font that was more difficult,
1:07:55
Speaker 4: with enough preparation, like exposure to it, there was no
1:08:00
Speaker 4: statistically significant difference in their ability to read the inclusive
1:08:04
Speaker 4: spelling versus the non inclusive spelling. And then there's also
1:08:09
Speaker 4: the so in terms of pronouns, there was also a
1:08:12
Speaker 4: lot of back and forth about what do we want
1:08:14
Speaker 4: our gender neutral pronoun to be. It's kind of settled
1:08:18
Speaker 4: on yell I E L, so el is masculine, I
1:08:25
Speaker 4: l L is feminine e l E and then yell
1:08:30
Speaker 4: I E L. And between the survey and I think
1:08:36
Speaker 4: it was twenty twenty three showed that about five percent
1:08:39
Speaker 4: of French people between fifteen and twenty four identify as
1:08:45
Speaker 4: non binary. So this isn't nothing. And so there's a
1:08:51
Speaker 4: lot of pushback, a lot of backlash from politicians from
1:08:55
Speaker 4: the sort of traditional language community, but they are also
1:09:00
Speaker 4: a lot of people who want to use these.
1:09:03
Speaker 1: I love that. I'm fascinated with language. So again you'll
1:09:07
Speaker 1: have to come back and we'll talk more about this.
1:09:21
Speaker 1: And that brings us to the end of part one
1:09:24
Speaker 1: of our interview with Gina. Like we said in part two,
1:09:29
Speaker 1: we're going to get into a lot more of the
1:09:32
Speaker 1: current issues and including around like terfism in France, abortion, gingerbates, violence,
1:09:40
Speaker 1: so a lot of big topics, So look for that
1:09:42
Speaker 1: one next week. Make sure to listen. Thanks again to
1:09:47
Speaker 1: Gina for doing this, breaking this down for us, these
1:09:50
Speaker 1: huge questions, and special shout out to friend of the
1:09:54
Speaker 1: show Lauren who introduced us. Who is like, you know
1:09:59
Speaker 1: who you should talk to over on Simon Tea, I've
1:10:02
Speaker 1: got just the person. Well, listeners, if you have any
1:10:06
Speaker 1: thoughts about this or anything else, you can email us
1:10:10
Speaker 1: at Hello at stuff one Never Told You dot com.
1:10:13
Speaker 1: You can find us on blue Sky at mom Stuff Podcasts,
1:10:15
Speaker 1: or on Instagram and TikTok at stuff I've Never Told You.
1:10:19
Speaker 1: We're also on YouTube. We have a tea public store,
1:10:21
Speaker 1: and we have a book you can get wherever you
1:10:22
Speaker 1: get your books. Thanks it's always to our super producer Christina,
1:10:25
Speaker 1: our executive producer Maya, and our contributor Joey. Thank you,
1:10:28
Speaker 1: Thanks to you for listening. Stuff I Never Told You
1:10:30
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