Gender: Theory and Practice

L’Critical Encyclopedia of Gender is first of all an incredibly impressive and exciting book. Impressive by its sheer volume: 740 pages, 70 entries, 8 editors, and 80 contributors from 15 disciplines. While the mere idea of ​​coordinating so many authors would already intimidate more than one, the editors’ careful choice of themes, the multiple cross-references, the in-depth bibliography, the underlying problem, and the methodological coherence are truly breathtaking. The book is also exciting because twenty years ago, such work would never have been conceivable in the French academic world. We remember, for example, Frédéric Martel’s diatribe in the late 1990s against gay and lesbian studies, which he believed were an example of the “community temptation” from the United States that was about to impose itself in French academic life. We might also recall Mona Ozouf’s warning around the same time against a “maximal” interpretation of gender, of gender as “purely a power relationship, where everything is historically and socially constructed.” She specified that this was an American definition from radical feminism, a notion that was “unlistenable, unintelligible, sometimes even untranslatable” in France. In those years, authors such as Elisabeth Badinter, Sylviane Agacinski, and Alain Finkielkraut regularly congratulated themselves on the “French exception” of happy heterosexual relationships, the commitment to diversity, seduction, and civility that, they claimed, made France impervious to the theoretical and political aggression of gender. And yet, here we are twenty years later with this Critical Encyclopedia of Gender written primarily by French researchers, most of whom are firmly attached to the largest universities and research laboratories in France. Reading and citing American and foreign sources is no longer considered an act of national treason but rather an invitation to dialogue. For this new generation, gender is no longer a marginalized or besieged concept. Crossing a large number of disciplines, it is instead at the heart of particularly politically and intellectually stimulating research – and we can only be pleased about that.

Gender as a system

L’Critical Encyclopedia of Gender was masterfully coordinated by sociologist Juliette Rennes with the help of an editorial team including two political scientists, Catherine Achin and Alexandre Jaunait; an anthropologist, Gianfranco Rebucini; a demographer, Armelle Andro; a linguist, Luca Greco, and two other sociologists, Laure Bereni and Rose-Marie Lagrave. As they explain in the introduction, the coordinators chose to organize the different thematic notices according to three axes: the body, sexuality and social relations. These are recurring themes of the book, three areas crossed by gender but also three vectors allowing to study more closely the specific operations of gender. Indeed, one of the most interesting contributions of the book is its invitation to constantly think about the object studied and the method together. This is one of the meanings that I give to the adjective “critical” of the title. Gender, like the body, sexuality, and social relations, is never a simple entity that can be grasped objectively once and for all, but rather a mode of analysis, a method, an evolving angle for reading social reality. Thus, the general message of the book is not only that gender is political (which we already know) but rather that all these other notices are. In some cases, this affirmation is obvious (for example for the cases of “filiation”, “hetero/homo”, “queer”, “race” or “trans”); less so for other cases (like “weight”, “sport”, “size”, “voice”, “dance”, “animal”).

As the various contributors make clear, gender refers less to the final product than to the process by which certain entities (certain bodies, certain behaviors, for example) are constructed and are perceived as different. In other words, there is nothing that precedes gender, no pure nature, uncorrupted, or unaffected by power. As stated in the introduction, in the section on the body: “Gender is no longer conceived as a ‘social meaning’ that would be added to natural differences that are always already there, but as the very system that shapes our perception of the body as feminine or masculine” (17). Gender is therefore not an abstract theoretical paradigm superimposed on a social reality (as many of its detractors claim) but rather a concept that emerges organically from these various empirical studies firmly anchored in the social sciences. Whether these notices are based on ethnographic material, interviews, archives or textual and visual analyses, they all adhere to this vision of criticism, of the questioning and historicization of all ideas, especially those that seem the most natural, inevitable, obvious or universal. It is therefore hardly surprising that the figure of Michel Foucault, who perfected this art of critical history and who turned to genealogy to think the “history of the present”, hovers so much over the pages of theEncyclopedia.

A political tool

The authors’ critical approach is not only evident in the specific objects studied, however; it also guides the book’s methodology, which is explicitly intersectional and multidimensional. Race and class are thus constantly in discussion with gender, but the authors also mobilize rarer analytical tools such as physical appearance, age, health, ability, sexual orientation, or religious practices (21). The aim is to show how domination functions differently when one of these variables changes. To illustrate this point, the notice “care” evolves when the author, Francesca Scrinzi, presents racism, globalization, and disability as three factors that have radically transformed the understanding of care as a feminine form of relational engagement. The premise here is that power evolves, transforms, and disguises itself in new forms. In this sense, critique, like gender, cannot be a preconceived theoretical framework but rather a form of introspection. This reminder is all the more welcome in the field of gender studies, which has long remained blind to questions of race, class, and other forms of domination, and which still too often continues to assume that women are by default white, Western, heterosexual, reproductive, and able-bodied (22). As the coordinators of theEncyclopediathe main aim of the project is to map the “flesh of social relations”. “Flesh” is not only understood here as the body, skin and sexuality but also as what is observable, empirical; and “social relations” understood as constantly moving structural asymmetries of our social world (24-25).

In the preface to his French translation of Gender Trouble (Gender Trouble) by Judith Butler in 2005, fifteen years after its publication in English, Eric Fassin commented on this French “delay” in the study of gender. As Fassin suggested, Butler’s text and her theorization of gender suddenly appeared necessary to think through the different debates that gripped France at the time, from sexual violence to homosexual unions, including medically assisted procreation (PMA) and surrogacy (GPA). Gender Troubleaccording to Fassin, was to shed light on our “sexual news”, news that is increasingly “troubled”. In this context, it is interesting to note that theCritical Encyclopedia of Gender was published three years after the violent demonstrations against marriage for all, the law that opened marriage and adoption to same-sex couples, where this gender rhetoric reappeared with vigor. According to several opponents of marriage for all, gender, or rather a nebulous “gender theory” was both the origin and the result of same-sex marriage. Thus, a slogan of the Manif pour tous declared “Marriage for all = gender theory for all”. On the one hand, opponents of the law claimed that gay marriage activists were inspired by a “gender theory” that had become established in political and educational circles. On the other hand, they warned against the consequences of gay marriage; namely, the generalization of this “gender theory” in society, the legalization of PMA and of the GPA), and ultimately the destruction of the family, society, and man. As I have developed elsewhere, these debates on gender are in reality debates on the definition of the nation and on the supervision of social reproduction. It is a debate that pits the defenders of a Catholic, white, heterosexual France against those who fight for greater equality. In this context, it is difficult not to read theCritical Encyclopedia of Gender as an activist book: not polemical but activist, in the sense that it defends the ethical and political importance of knowledge. With this fascinating book, Juliette Rennes and her team have shown us that the genre can always help us think about our present, learn and relearn constantly, and fight for more openness, more discussion, and ultimately more democracy in the academic world and more generally in the public space.