Queer Theory

The French Response

Bruno Perreau

• Editorial: Stanford University Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781503600461
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: LGBT Studies

In 2012 and 2013, masses of French citizens took to the streets to demonstrate against a bill on gay marriage. But demonstrators were not merely denouncing its damaging effects; they were also claiming that its origins lay in "gender theory, " an ideology imported from the United States. By "gender theory" they meant queer theory in general and, more specifically, the work of noted scholar Judith Butler. Now French opponents to gay marriage, supported by the Vatican, are attacking school curricula that explore male/female equality, which they claim is further proof of gender theory's growing empire. They fear that this pro-homosexual propaganda will not only pervert young people, but destroy the French nation itself.

What are the various facets of the French response to queer theory, from the mobilization of activists and the seminars of scholars to the emergence of queer media and the decision to translate this or that kind of book? Ironically, perceiving queer theory as a threat to France means overlooking the fact that queer theory itself has been largely inspired by French thinkers. By examining mutual influences across the Atlantic, Bruno Perreau analyzes changes in the idea of national identity in France and the United States. In the process, he offers a new theory of minority politics: an ongoing critique of norms is not only what gives rise to a feeling of belonging; it is the very thing that founds citizenship.

CHAPTER 1

WHO’S AFRAID OF “GENDER THEORY”?

RESISTANCE TO HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE in France is part of a long tradition of massive mobilization by Catholic and conservative movements.¹ The forms taken by this particular movement, however, have turned out to be new—groups opposing gay marriage in fact adopted much of the left-wing tactical repertoire: for example, slogans borrowed from the workers’ movement, zaps (direct actions), and partial nudity in public places. In this chapter I argue that this appropriation was made possible by the left-wing government’s abandonment of activism and its growing aloofness from critical intellectual reflection. The dithering of the executive branch during debate over “marriage for all” is good evidence of this situation. Indeed, socialist president François Hollande attempted to limit the scope of the reform on several occasions. For instance, he reminded the mayors of France that they enjoyed a “liberty of conscience” that would allow them to avoid officiating personally at weddings of same-sex individuals.² “Liberty of conscience” was originally a clause in the French public-health code that permitted doctors hostile to abortion to decline to perform them. Given government prevarication, many anti-gay-marriage movements pursued their strategy of occupying the public stage even after the Taubira Act was passed, subsequently focusing their attention on the teaching of so-called gender theory as well as on MAP and surrogate pregnancy.

On February 3, 2014, after several weeks of mobilizing anti-gay-marriage forces to oppose various aspects of the school curriculum that discussed sexism (in particular, a “primer on equality” [Les ABCD de l’Égalité] promoted by the minister for women’s rights, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem), the socialist government decided to withdraw its reform on family rights as a gesture of appeasement. That reform would have granted stepparents, both heterosexual and homosexual, a legal status they currently lack under French law. On June 25, the new minister of education, Benoît Hamon, announced that the primer on equality would be completely withdrawn from schools. He claimed that its introduction had been largely positive, but the initiative needed to be pursued by training teachers concerning male/female equality—the primers directly aimed at the children, meanwhile, would be dropped. On November 25, Vallaud-Belkacem, who had left the Ministry of Women’s Rights to become minister of education, announced details of her “plan of action for equality between girls and boys.” The plan consisted of the elaboration of roughly a hundred “educational tips,” the most important being discussions on the role of women throughout history and on stereotyping. Teachers were supplied with an online “pedagogical briefcase” that included fact sheets and exercises for stimulating discussion.³ No other resources were allocated, nor was time programmed into the schedule. The “briefcase” was thus another of the “kits on equality” developed over the previous fifteen years by the Ministry of Education.⁴ The term “gender” completely vanished from the material, and Vallaud-Belkacem significantly changed her tone. In arguing that “gender is a conceptual tool used by scholars working on relations between the sexes to refer to all those aspects of inequality that are social constructs,”⁵ she implied that certain inequalities are not socially constructed.⁶ A petition by academics in the field of gender studies drew attention to the minister’s retreat and called on her to clarify her position.⁷

Throughout the year 2014, the administration also reasserted its opposition to any extension of MAP to single women or lesbian couples, as well as to surrogate pregnancy. While opposition to surrogate pregnancy is nearly unanimous across the political spectrum (with the exception of a few elected officials from the ecology party, Europe Écologie–Les Verts), lifting restrictions on MAP, currently limited to heterosexual couples, had been a Hollande campaign promise in 2012. Yet very few members of the Socialist Party now defend that idea explicitly, with the exception of the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. Prime Minister Manuel Valls stressed his opposition to the extension of MAP on numerous occasions, such as during a visit to the Vatican on April 27, 2014. On May 5, the minister for family affairs, Laurence Rossignol—annoyed that the question of extending MAP had become an object of debate even though it was not included in her proposed bill on family matters—claimed that “the issue of family rights has been colonized by MAP.”⁸ Another demonstration against gay marriage was held in Paris and other major cities on October 5 of that year. The demonstration was underpinned by the rhetoric of the “slippery slope” the administration was seeking to avoid⁹—demonstrators attacked the Taubira Act as a threat to family values because it would necessarily lead to the extension of MAP to single women and lesbian couples and the legalization of surrogate pregnancies.

Opponents to gay marriage managed to influence political debate even after the Taubira Act became law,¹⁰ because they had broad access to the mainstream media. Even though they claimed to be underrepresented on television, on radio, and in the newspapers, these movements managed to generate content (images, slogans, conceptual categories) and to broadcast it widely. To this end they employed the social media and collaborative online tools, even when their religion might have made them wary of the virtual world.¹¹ The first spokesperson for Manif pour Tous (Demo for All), the leading opposition group to the Taubira Act, was a high-profile figure of Paris nightlife, Frigide Barjot. The first president of Manif pour Tous, Guillaume de Prémare, was himself a public-relations consultant and spokesperson for the Comité Urgence Pape (Pope Relief Committee), a blog that seeks to favor evangelization through the media. Both Barjot and Prémare were very familiar with the way instant information functions, so they used social media to supply the mass media with prepared content.¹² Thus, even when assertions by opponents to homosexual marriage and gender theory were publicly refuted, debate continued to employ the very terms those groups chose to stress (for example, setting “children’s rights” against a “right to have children”; accusing reproductive techniques of instrumentalizing women’s bodies; referring to the teaching of “gender theory” rather than “gender studies”). In an interview several weeks after the Taubira Act was passed, Vincent Peillon, then minister of education, stated that he was “against gender theory,”¹³ only to admit several days later that such a theory did not exist. He thereby adopted a key element of the anti-gay-marriage discourse. By playing on the fear of corrupting children, opponents of the Taubira Act were aware they were touching a sensitive political nerve—“the country’s future”—which increased their chances of being heard.

Similarly, French academics who had taken up gender studies were not always able to avoid the rhetorical traps laid by opponents of gay marriage. To prove that gender theory is a fantasy, many university forums and petitions pointed out that there is no theory of gender but rather a set of heterogeneous approaches that interrogate the role of gender in both contemporary Western society and other societies and historical periods.¹⁴ While this response reasserts incontrovertible facts, it nevertheless has the drawback of abandoning the very idea of theory. Yet theorizing gender is an integral part of research into the subject and probably constitutes one of its most dynamic branches. Gender studies do not merely describe practices but also propose other concepts, other ways of seeing and thinking. While there exists no uniform theory of gender masterminded by sexual minorities—as gay-marriage opponents apparently believe—there are many theories of gender that may be sacrificed on the altar of the struggle against the fantasy of the theory of gender.

This chapter retraces the fixation on gender theory in contemporary debate on marriage and the family, beginning with the context in which that line of argument first emerged, which occurred in the mid-1990s during the Beijing World Conference on Women, when Vatican representatives systematically began to target university research into male/female equality and sexuality. They feared that such research would relativize the natural difference between the sexes and thereby promote homosexuality and transsexuality through school and, more widely, through public policies designed to eliminate discrimination of all kinds at national and international levels. Beginning with the papacy of Benedict XVI, the Vatican pleaded for a return to what it dubbed “human ecology.” Activist French Catholics, steeped in these ideas, decided to oppose educational programs on sexism and homophobia in schools. The chapter then discusses how the movements that opposed marriage for all arose from mobilization against teaching gender theory at school. Finally, I take a look at the anti-gay-marriage demonstrations themselves—the groups involved in them; their activist tactics and slogans, links to political parties, and efforts to credit the idea of a plot to undermine “the traditional French family”; and the role of the media. These groups’ public denunciations of gay marriage and gender theory took on nationalist overtones (simultaneously racist and anti-Semitic), whose main vector was anti-Americanism. To shed light on these expressions of nationalism, I conclude with a discussion of certain French fantasies concerning upbringing, education, and the making of future citizens.

“Human Ecology” and Gender Theory

Although opposition to gender theory in France hit the media around 2010, its roots are much older.¹⁵ It can be explained by the Vatican’s attachment to the idea of “natural law,” along with that institution’s establishment of a network of information and monitoring on research into gender ever since the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995.

In 1962, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council to reconsider Church doctrine in a contemporary world marked by major social and technological changes. Vatican II (as the council was known) ended in 1965 under the new pope, Paul VI. The council promoted Christian humanism, a philosophy—inspired by secular humanism—that recognized certain inalienable human rights. These rights, however, were not the consequence of life in society but of human “nature.” Susan A. Ross has shown that this nature is simultaneously physical and spiritual in the tradition of pre–Vatican II discussion of marriage and sexuality, which focused on a woman’s “docility” and natural “receptivity” for children.¹⁶ Three years later, the encyclical Humanae Vitae condemned birth-control pills in the name of this “natural law.”¹⁷ The theology of Pope John Paul II derived straight from this natural law while placing particular stress on the complementarity of the sexes,¹⁸ as he did in his 1979 Theology of the Body and his 1995 “Letter to Women,”¹⁹ the latter published to make an impact on the Beijin...