About the Elsa Dorlin breed matrix

In March 2005, Elsa Dorlin published the manifesto “ Not in our name ! To protest against the instrumentalization of feminism by the French right. The condition of women had become a major political subject, she explained there, but at a high price: her association with immigration. By affirming that the freedom of women was threatened by populations from immigration and more specifically Muslims, politics would have racialized the cause of gender equality and sexualities. Feminism would thus serve as a pretext for a racist discourse and would hide the discrimination suffered by women and sexual minorities in France “ native ». This political recovery would have the consequence of excluding Muslim women from feminism, now defined as a movement of Western women “ released ». Against this corruption of feminism, Dorlin argued for “ A real anti-sexist and anti-racist commitment ».

A year later, she responded to this call herself by publishing The race matrix. Sexual and colonial genealogy of the French nationadaptation of his doctoral thesis. The philosopher, lecturer at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, undertakes in this book a “ Epistemology of domination “(P. 12), an analysis of” progressive anthropologization of politics (P. 15) whose aim is to trace medical construction of sexual and racial difference. In both cases, building the difference means to prioritize: from Antiquity, doctors claim that the difference between the sexes lies in the “ temperament “, But they immediately add that the feminine, cold and humid temperament is lower than the male and even pathological temperament. Likewise, doctors who look at XVIII^e A century on the difference between colonizers and slaves developed a racist ideology and postulate the natural superiority of whites. Otherness is defined by non-compliance with a standard, which is first of all that of health. Dorlin calls “ nosopolitical This instrumentalization of the categories of healthy and unhealthy.

Dorlin’s research is at the crossroads of philosophy, the history of medicine and the history of science, as well as postcolonial studies and gender studies (Gender Studies). In her method of analysis of speeches and in the attention she brings to the history of medicine and sexuality, she is mainly inspired by Michel Foucault, but also of Colette Guillaumin, author of Racist ideology (Paris, 1972). More broadly, the book is part of a tradition of history of science inaugurated by Bruno Latour, and in the history of the body of Georges Vigarello and Alain Corbin. There is also the influence of thinkers from across the Atlantic such as Thomas Lacoude, professor at the University of Berkeley and author of several books on the history of the genre, of which Sex Factorypublished by Gallimard in 1992.

Of the admission of the author, it is the Black Feminism American (represented by authors like Angela Davis, Hilary Beckles and Hazel Carby) who would have led her to formulate his thesis. “” All my work consists in doing the genealogy of modern acceptations of ‘sex’-sexual difference-and ‘race’, highlighting their genetic relationship, that is to say their reciprocal generation. Sexism and racism are not so theoretically comparable as inextricably linked from a historical point of view. »(P.12) The transposition occurs at XVIII^e century, with the implementation of natalist policies: it is then that the vision of an unhealthy female body became an obstacle to the renewal of the French nation, and it is this contradiction which would explain the re -evaluation of the status of women. Faced with frightening infant mortality, criticism of nanny and mercenary breastfeeding goes hand in hand with the valuation of breastfeeding and maternal care. The maternal body becomes a symbol of health and even symbol of the nation: “ Much more than breastfeeding, which is basically a very ancient concern of doctors, it is the figure of the mother as a whole that bears and embodies all the national features. (P. 200).

However, this revaluation of women through maternity unit served another policy of exclusion, this time turned against slaves in the colonies. According to Dorlin, “ Colonial society constitutes … one of the high places of the formation of a national ideology (P.198). This is the naturalization of the nation, its essentialization, since it is affirmed, contra Hippocrates, that it is not external factors as the climate that determine the character of men, but innate factors. A French living in a colony remains good and beautiful a French, even after several generations, because its “ temperament Has not changed. The notion of temperament which, before, was at the heart of male domination, is thus redeployed to justify slavery and give birth to the modern category of the race.

Here again, differentiation means hierarchy, since the temperament of blacks is immediately declared “ pathological By doctors. There would be diseases specific to blacks, such as the “ Pica “, Characterized by the consumption of coal, ash or earth (p. 248), and blacks would be more likely to catch tetanus than whites. But the black man could also be represented as physically superior to the whites: he would be stronger and more resistant to diseases. Another example of the same contradiction concerns sexuality, black men being both diverted and survived by the medical discourse of the time. “” Athletic or stupid, the body of slaves is always pathogenic and it is precisely this constant attribute which allows doctors to systematically conclude an inferiority of nature. The logic of this discourse is always dual and does not fear the contradiction ; The stigma always works on two contrary proposals, without the conclusion changing. (P. 254)

However, more striking than the inconsistency of medical discourse is the audacity of certain proposals, such as that of a M. Bourgeois, author of the treaty Memory on the most common diseases in Santo Domingue: their remedies ; the way to avoid them or guarantee them morally and physically (1788):

“” The work, to which we perpetually occupy the Negroes, contributes a lot, in my opinion, to rid them, by the way of perspiration, of the coarse juices that the food they use in. They do with this forced diets, which do not harm their health: because it is all the meals that we accidentrably accumulate on each other who make us so valley, disturbing our stomachs. »»

Slavery, a health regime ? In Santo Domingo, where the number of deaths among slaves exceeded 75,000 that of births between 1784 and 1791 ? Another example: the topos of the black woman as a bad mother. Dorlin recalls that the slave policy opted for a constant renewal of slaves, the cost of maintaining a young slave child far exceeding the purchase cost of a working age slave. In other words, a pregnant slave harmed the economic interests of the colonists: “ Between the sexual exploitation of slaves and the uselessness of children born in slavery, we can therefore better understand the interests that the discourse of the colonists who accuse slaves of being not only lubricate women, but also bad mothers, malicious. (P. 257)

Dorlin thus clearly takes part in the debate on the causal relationship between slavery and racist discourse. “” (C) ‘is indeed from the moment the European slave system develops in the Antilles and the Americas, when it engages a considerable number of European capital and where it upsets the balance between colonists and slaves in the colonies, that the first racist theories appear (P. 262). Economic exploitation first, therefore, theoretical justifications – even incoherent – after. The risk of such an analysis is to push functionalism too far: whatever the nature of the subject to a discriminated group, it must necessarily be a tool of domination. But Dorlin pays attention, from the start of the book, to heterodox speeches and non -productive inconsistencies. His epistemology concerns the domination less than its modalities: that of medical science naturalizing differences between human groups. The medical discourse was an instrument to justify and perpetuate a de facto domination, unconsciously or consciously – as in the case of Daniel Lescallier, former administrator of Dutch Guyana, who wrote in 1791 that, for slaves to respect their masters, “ The most infallible means was to make them believe that whites are a species superior to theirs ; that the Negro color is doomed to servitude, etc. (…) »»

Dorlin’s book raises a number of questions. What was the social status of medical discourse in pre -modern history ? The notion of “ genotechnics “, What is the author use to talk about eugenist policies, is it not an exaggeration ? And the representation of the female body “ pathogenic », She does not reappear in mainland France during the French Revolution ? However, The Matrix of the Race is an important book. It points out the opening of French social sciences to multidisciplinarity, to the theme of the construction of otherness and to American university research. The Matrix of the Race is the first book published by La Découverte Éditions in the series “ Gender & Sexuality »Directed by Eric Fassin, sociologist and professor at the École normale supérieure. The second publication in this series is a translation of a work of the late American sociologist Laud Humphreys. The French opening could well prove to be durable.