There Are Two Sexes

Essays in Feminology

Antoinette Fouque, Catherine Porter, Sylvina Boissonnas

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231538381
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Antoinette Fouque cofounded the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) in France in 1968 and spearheaded its celebrated Psychanalyse et Politique, a research group that informed the cultural and intellectual heart of French feminism. Rather than reject Freud's discoveries on the pretext of their phallocentrism, Fouque sought to enrich his thought by more clearly defining the difference between the sexes and affirming the existence of a female libido. By recognizing women's contribution to humanity, Fouque hoped "uterus envy," which she saw as the mainspring of misogyny, could finally give way to gratitude and by associating procreation with women's liberation she advanced the goal of a parity-based society in which men and women could write a new human contract.

The essays, lectures, and dialogues in this volume finally allow English-speaking readers to access the breadth of Fouque's creativity and activism. Touching on issues in history and biography, politics and psychoanalysis, Fouque recounts her experiences running the first women's publishing house in Europe; supporting women under threat, such as Aung San Suu Kyi, Taslima Nasrin, and Nawal El Saadaoui; and serving as deputy in the European Parliament. Her theoretical explorations discuss the ongoing development of feminology, a field she initiated, and, while she celebrates the progress women have made over the past four decades, she also warns against the trends of counterliberation: the feminization of poverty, the persistence of sexual violence, and the rise of religious fundamentalism.

1. Our Movement Is Irreversible

March 8,1989

Today, March 8, 1989, we meet in the Sorbonne’s great amphitheater to celebrate two events:

—March 8, International Women’s Day, now celebrated everywhere in the world;

—1989, the bicentennial of the French Revolution and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

On March 8, 1857, in New York, seamstresses went into the streets to denounce the exploitation of which they were victims. They demanded reduced working hours (from sixteen to ten hours a day!) and wages equal to those of men.

In 1910 Clara Zetkin proposed that March 8 should be International Women’s Day, in homage to the American women protestors but also so that, every year, a day would be devoted to women’s demands. The following year, the Second International Socialist Congress approved that proposal. From then on, March 8 was International Women’s Day.

On March 8, 1982, in this space, we held the first Estates General of Women Against Misogyny. Women from Egypt, Bolivia, the United States, Austria, Algeria, Iran, Corsica, the Soviet Union, Ireland, women from all social classes and all political horizons bore witness against misogynist oppression and affirmed the necessity of an independent struggle on the part of women.

We chose the Sorbonne, a definitively subversive institution, so that the conjugation of these two dates should mark, here and now, the relaunching of a dynamics of liberation and democratization that will be fruitful for the largest possible number of women.

It is, in fact, within a dynamics initiated in France twenty-one years ago, by two or three women followed by tens of thousands of others, that the initiative of the Women’s Alliance is inscribed, for all the women and men who are prepared to express themselves in today’s colloquium, from the podium or from the floor.

Some say that it takes thirty years for a system of thought to assert itself. I do not think it is going too far to suggest that at least as much time will be required for a movement like this one to overcome—if not definitively, then at least durably—the oldest oppression of all, that of women, by what is customarily called the patriarchy. In our modern times I would be more inclined to call it the filiarchy or the fratriarchy, however, for it is thanks to new brotherhoods that the monotheistic, political, and symbolic leagues continue to exclude us from the law, from the polity, and from language.

So we have another ten years, a final straight run up to the third millennium, to accomplish part of our historic task, that is, to transform the attempts we have made into definitive achievements, but also, and especially, to pass the reins on to our daughters.

While all thinkers today, historians and politicians, biologists and philosophers, may agree that the most important of all the changes affecting our civilization on the eve of the third millennium is the irreversible transformation of the relations between men and women, far fewer are loyal enough to attribute such a mutation, the most radical since decolonization and the fall of the European empire, to the women’s movement.

Indeed, if we have managed to use the technological advances of contraception as the lever for our biological independence, it is because we have accompanied these advances with awareness, thought, and political action, because we have articulated them with an authentic psychic, affective, physiological, sexual, and cultural—in a word, human—maturation. Women have transformed a simple technological step forward into a movement of civilization; they have turned a “chaotic” revolution into an ongoing, open-ended evolutionary surge. And not only will the relations between men and women be forever altered, but so will those of the human triad, woman-man-child.

What still remains masked—not to say denied—today, then, is the initial function, the dynamic role of the Women’s Movement in this transformation. The MLF,¹ so widely denigrated, disfigured, denatured, misjudged, slandered, has nevertheless been the origin, the driving force responsible for the most positive events that have transformed the human condition in our society over the last twenty-one years.

If historians of the contemporary period are honest, they will recognize that the Women’s Movement has not only reinvigorated existing institutions—for example, Planning Familial (Planned parenthood), which was involved well before 1968 in the battle over contraception—but has also nourished and influenced contemporary thought, from psychoanalysis to literature by way of philosophy. In addition, it has given rise to other movements, such as the MLAC,² a movement of men and women that has followed the MLF in taking up the struggle to decriminalize abortion, while continuing to provide information about contraception, or Choisir, an association that has taken up one of our earliest themes of reflection and forced our legal system to recognize rape as a crime.³

Political parties and the state, seeking either to take over this movement as quickly as possible, to put an end to it, or to divert it for their own benefit, have in effect legitimized it over the last fifteen years by creating and recreating an institutional feminism: from the secretary of state for the condition of women, a position introduced by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1974 and assigned to Françoise Giroud, one of Mitterrand’s supporters, to the plenary minister of women’s rights, a position assigned by François Mitterrand to the archfeminist Yvette Roudy in 1981. It has also been thanks to the Women’s Movement that many women have had access to positions in official policymaking bodies—although often, it must be said, under the auspices of a prince, a party boss, a father, a brother, or a male friend. Finally, it was also owing to the Women’s Movement and its vigilant effort to maintain women’s newly acquired right to make decisions about their own bodies, after the adoption of the 1974 Veil law,⁴ that a traditionally conservative electorate was mobilized for the first time, in 1981, on the side of the party of social progress.

If union leaders and psychoanalysts (among others) are honest, they will recognize the winds of freedom and independence—economic, professional, and political as well as libidinal, sexual, and affective—that the Women’s Movement has brought to bear on customs and mentalities. The famous “increase in solitude” about which the right, in particular, has hammered away in recent years, might reflect a much more positive attitude than the right would have us believe. Many women now deem it better to live alone than with an abusive companion. An increase in solitude is an effective response to the increase in various forms of narcissism. A voluntary solitude has in fact replaced an age-old servitude. After Virginia Woolf, every woman has sought to assert her right not only to a “room of her own” but also to a “libido of her own,” an “identity of her own,” a “language of her own,” so history will acknowledge that there are two sexes and that this heterosexuality, this heterogeneity, is the condition of humanity’s wealth, of its fertility.

Born in the wake of what I continue to call the revolution of 1968, for the events really did bring us into a new era, the MLF has always had to struggle against the current or against the reactionary or frankly fascist tendencies of that revolution. The era that discovered the notion of fraternity, after those of liberty and equality, in May ’68, actually instituted a time of brotherhoods that were fratricidal as well as fraternal, from which women were all the more excluded in that, different, they were still not, and perhaps never will be, equal. From the priapism of the May ’68 graffiti to the narcissism of male television stars, the era being inaugurated threatened to be worse for women than capitalism was for workers.

Going against the tide of new directions that were announced in 1968 for the twenty-first century and beyond, the MLF thus struck down Narcissus with a fatal blow, the fourth blow after the three announced by Freud, that is, the Copernican, Darwinian, and psychoanalytic revolutions. This is what I used to call the revolution of the symbolic, the destitution of the general equivalents that deny that there are two sexes, deny that the production of living beings is tripartite, and deny access to a heterosexed parity in history.

Starting with its very first meetings, by activating the notion of mother, by putting it to work, by trying, as we were already saying in 1968–1970, to “liberate the woman in the mother,” by asserting that the mother was “not all for the son,” or that “the father doesn’t exist,” the MLF was attacking the infantile narcissistic omnipotence on which the primacy of the phallus is founded. In this blow struck to the narcissistic omnipotence of the son lay “a difficulty in the path of the MLF,” in the sense in which Freud spoke of “a difficulty in the path of psychoanalysis,” in connection with the blow struck to the ego by the discovery of the unconscious. It was not only in theory but in practice that we attacked them, Father and Son, by refusing to continue to set ourselves up as supports for their castration—in other words, as hysterics. Just when they thought they had us confined in that space, we had ceased to be there.

The internal difficulties persisted, nevertheless. We women, excluded and interned in that civilization (according to the concept elaborated by Jacques Derrida), had to deal with our relation to our own origin and, at the same time, we had to advance, to think, and to act, to produce at every moment several contradictory gestures, to spread ourselves in several directions and on several complex, not to say paradoxical, levels. That was the time—perhaps it is still the time—of struggles for equality and/or for difference. These struggles were real headbangers, real heartbreakers. A few of us were convinced that difference without equality could produce only psychic regression and political reaction, but that equality without difference was producing only a sterilizing assimilation, a psychosexual amputation.

As the Movement gained momentum and grew over time or, on the contrary, ran out of steam or got bogged down, the tendency to foreclose its origin rather than to integrate it became more pronounced. We weren’t given enough time to understand, to build; we were intimidated or discouraged, pressed to respond, confined to a ghetto; a movement of civilization was reduced to a vulgar fashion, and the limit of equality was assigned to us as the dead end of our destiny, just as, tomorrow, the uniformity of narcissism will be imposed on us as the only path toward (under-)development.

When have women caused blood to flow in a world that is continually being torn apart? What is their alleged verbal violence in comparison with the violence expressed every day in every newspaper, violence against women in particular? Why is there so little tolerance for sororicidal struggles, when on a daily basis fratricidal struggles within a major political party are viewed as signs of democratic health? It seemed as though we were not allowed to deviate one iota. We were supposed to be paragons of perfection. We had “everything wrong.”

It will surprise no one that the Women’s Movement as a whole had trouble resisting such a strategy, a concerted strategy of marginalization, so much so that it sometimes appeared antiparliamentarian. Despoiled of all its victories, it was constantly disparaged as being a ghetto populated by hysterics. Women in movement reaped indignity, ridicule, excesses, abuses, violence; legitimate women militants, married to a political party, or noble daughters of a prince, reaped dignity, prestige, power. Today, we can see the extent to which those privileges were deceptive, those powers fragile, and the extent to which one would need, for epistemological and political reasons (as much to write the story of the recent past as to open up new ways forward), to recognize the Women’s Movement in its proliferating diversity, in its at once divided and ingathering mass, its inspiring force, its vital dynamism, and its innovating independence.

Today, on top of timeless oppression and misogyny, we are experiencing the repression unleashed by our earliest victories. In France, every day, women are degraded, exploited, excluded, raped, beaten, sometimes to death, and killed supposedly out of passion.

In the South, in the East the destabilizing evolution of countries without a democratic past, wild claims of cultural and cultic identities, competition among all differences in the name of sovereign identities (with the exception of the one that informs them all, the difference between the sexes), the exclusion of women from the zones of power, thus from visibility, sending them back to an underdevelopment of representation, the gap that is deepening every day between doing and appearing to the benefit of the latter—all these are brakes, threats to the advancement of women.

One of the symptoms of the 1968 revolution, the entrance into the “phallist” era, is now appearing in broad daylight. At the extremes, narcissistic omnipotence is expressed by a powerful rise in intolerance presaging a future in which, in this struggle to the death for power, based on pure prestige, intolerance will not be limited to religions alone. After the era of liberty and that of equality, there is talk of the era of fraternity, solidarity, and tolerance. “Hands off my buddy”⁵ is heard as a contrasting echo in “Hands off my book!” and “Hands off my Koran!” Regarding religion, in Year One of the Rights of Man, Mirabeau had already found it useful to clarify his position: “I am not here to preach tolerance. The most unlimited freedom of religion is in my eyes such a sacred right that the word tolerance, which attempts to express it, strikes me as, in a way, tyrannical in itself, since the existence of the authority that has the power to tolerate infringes on freedom of thought, by the very fact that it tolerates, and thus by implication it might not tolerate.”⁶ A century later, in 1882, Renan, speaking of laïcité (secularism), was not afraid to cite Pasteur’s peremptory assertion that the secular state is “neutral among religions, tolerant toward all denominations and [forces] the Church to obey it on this crucial point.”⁷ From fundamentalism to phallaïcité,⁸ tolerance and intolerance have sent the law into a tailspin.

Everywhere in the world the situation of women has worsened; the regressions are alarming, as they even include the abolition of laws that had been passed in women’s favor. Nevertheless, everywhere in the world women are aware, vigilant, and combative.

We want ordinary, everyday barbarianism to cease. In Thailand, working against the sale and prostitution of young girls, women are building a foundation that will take these girls in and provide training. In India women are struggling against personal laws that reduce the liberties of Muslim girls and women. In China women are setting up associations of democratic women in support of progress in human rights. In Algeria, where a repressive family code is in place,⁹ women are mobilizing against the headscarf. In the United States hundreds of thousands of women are about to gather in Washington to reaffirm the right to choose motherhood freely, thus the right to abort.¹⁰ Elsewhere, some women have even won political power. In France women are creating, assuming positions of responsibility, struggling: nurses and midwives in hospitals, childcare workers in day care centers have mobilized, seeking not just higher wages but dignity and respect for their knowledge.

Everywhere, we are continuing to fight. The movement is irreversible.

The 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women legitimizes our struggles and our actions. In associations and political parties alike, it attributes value to consciousness-raising as well as to the assumption of power when it notes that “discrimination against women violates the principles of equality of rights and respect for human dignity, is an obstacle to the participation of women, on equal terms with men, in the political, social, economic and cultural life of their countries, hampers the growth of the prosperity of society and the family and makes more difficult the full development of the potentialities of women in the service of their countries and of humanity.”¹¹

Ratified by France in 1983, this convention must be a relay point for the conquest of new rights, new freedoms.

To get rid of woman’s “derived libido,” “derived law,” and “derived identity” once and for all, we must work from now on to make sure that lawmakers dealing with language, the symbolic, and law take our vital requirements into account. It is essential to

1. inscribe, in the Constitution, the principle that “each human being, without distinction of race, religion or creed, possesses sacred and inalienable rights”;

2. draw up framework legislation on the basis of a “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Women”;

3. draw upon personal time to ensure political responsibility and presence: new duties correspond to new rights;¹²

4. recognize the specific production of women—which makes all the rest possible. Women assume virtually 100 percent of human procreation, and they find themselves penalized by the fact that this production has to remain neglected, foreclosed. This symbolic production—because women speak and ...