The except kilt, the skirt signals the woman: linotte head, seaman or “ feminine The one who wears it indeed belongs to a dominated genre. The historian Christine Bard analyzes the institution of a “ Skirt day “, Which would aim to relegitimize the wearing of this garment. A new release, after the release of the pants for women ?
Historically, the skirt is the symbol of a femininity built as a specific genre, like the other of the referent “ universal »Wearer of the pants – a pretty genre, but not very intelligent. She has not lost her traditional connotation, as evidenced by the words ofgr André Vingt-Trois, on Radio Notre-Dame, November 6, 2008, about the role of women in the celebration of offices: “ The most difficult is to have women who are trained. The whole thing is not to have a skirt is to have something in your head. »For this sentence, spotted by Le Canard Enchaînéthe Paris archbishop obtained the “ Macho d’Or 2008 Diggles on duty and a complaint was filed (just a few days, the time to obtain apology) at the Paris ecclesiastical court. Finally, an association was born, returning the stigma: the skirt committee. His analysis: “ If such words spring up, it is that we had forgotten to close the door of his unconscious and that they escaped, the naughty ! And here is the truth: skirt = nothing in the head ». Remains, in this symbol of the skirt, a traditional fund that one cannot evacuate as if it were only a bygone past.
When a whore skirt
The possible alternative of female pants facilitated this evolution (because it is more decent which is far from always the case), the skirt also took on the meaning of easy girl. Word of old, because today we say rather “ whore “, To the point of preventing the vast majority of college students from putting on the traditional clothing of their genre, however hypervalued by fashion. In 2006, Diam’s sang: “ In my bubble, romanticism has slapped, / X films actresses have become artists. / In my bubble, we criticize women in skirt, / but you don’t need to come from the Zup To be called a whore. / In my bubble, it speaks cash, it shares, it speaks badly, / It goes a quarter turn, it goes to the chtar, / in my bubble, love is in police custody, / no, there is no more love in the streets of my bubble. “Fadela Amara evokes in difficult districts the existence of” resistant “To femininity” aggressive », Hypermquillées. Sexist violence crystallized by clothing pace, the association “ Neither whores nor submissive “Denounces them since 2003. The equation” skirt = whore »Tenalized, everywhere and not only in the cities.
In 2006, at the private agricultural high school in Étrelles, in the canton of Vitré, 40 km from Rennes, very white and very Catholic, the association “ Freedom colors “, Specializing in the prevention of at risk behaviors, leads a workshop on sexuality. A skillfully guided by the educator-animator, first students realize what the skirt now represents: a new taboo. Documentarian Brigitte Chevet follows these debates with her camera. Adults discover a trans-class juvenile culture marked by a mixture of more or less religious puritanism, no religion having exclusivity, and an influence of “ porn And his avatars.
The skirt, symbol of what resistance ?
It is from this high school that the initiative of the “ Day of skirt and respect », Reducted from year to year. Thirty establishments in 2009 decided to make it a moment of expression and creation in the form of shows – rap, dance, photography. The immense need of young people to talk about sex, love and gender finally finds a space to be, a little, satisfied.
In 2006-2007, Ségolène Royal was surprised with an unusual clothing strategy, still in dress or in skirt. A candidate in line with “ resistant In skirt in all circles, of all ages, in all districts, while feminists ask him for pants from time to time, at least to offer enough to identify with the vast majority of women. But Ségolène Royal carries the female genre in flag, in a disturbing climate of symbolic violence. And when she goes during the campaign in Clichy-sous-Bois, for once in pants, criticisms fuse: she gave up the attires of seduction because she went to one of the “ lost territories »From the Republic ?
Then comes the film by Jean-Louis Lilienfeld and his considerable success, in March 2009. A project started in 2006, whose title contains a claim “ Certainly a little kitsch but emblematic “, According to the director. For Isabelle Adjani, the character of the teacher who takes her class hostage “ Carries his skirt as a symbol of revolution, because the pants have become an armor, a veil for the girls of the cities ». Sonia Bergerac, the French teacher embodied by Adjani, goes so far as to ask for the institution of a “ Skirt day In college, by which the State would claim that one can put a skirt without being a whore. Fiction has joined reality.
Pants under the skirt
Dressed in a tailor, the Minister of the Interior exclaims: “ And why not a thong night ? »By a kind of elementary feminist reflex, the day of the skirt disturbs: did women have taken years, centuries to conquer the right to pants ? The best informed will also know that the ordinance of the Paris police headquarters prohibiting women in 1800 from dressing as a man has never been repealed. Question of decency, insofar as panties or pants would mold too much female forms ? Rather question of principle. The principle of symbolic differentiation of sexes is sacred by religion. It is written in the Deuteronomy (XXII5): “ A woman will not wear a male costume and a man will not put a woman’s clothing. Anyone who acts is an abomination to Yahweh, your God ». The confusion of the sexes, announcing the end of the world, is one of the great fears of the West.
In different points of the world, and under the empire of the three major monotheistic religions, women are victims of violence because they transgress the clothing laws imposed on their gender. “” A young man killed his sister yesterday in Batman, a city in southeast of Turkey half Kurdish, because she had put on pants to attend a wedding. After injuring her with a gunshot, he threw her from the top of the home to make suicide believe ». Dozens of women, in Sudan (in the south, Christian region) are beaten by the police and imprisoned for a day because they wear pants “ tight ». In the ultra-Orthodox districts of Jerusalem, in June 2008, shock activists want to impose on women a clothing “ modest »: Long skirts, covered arms and closed collar. They take it in particular to a divorced woman who carries the pants, pass it to tobacco and threaten her with death. In France, the cabinet of Valérie Pécresse claims by petition that it ceases to wear only pants. The Minister of Higher Education promises to make an effort. The incident, which could pass for an April Fool, is revealing. These examples show it: the pants allow us to analyze sexuality, sexual identities and sex relationships, because it is an old symbol of power. Don’t say “ pant »» ?
Long live the men’s skirt !
That the victim “ return The stigma, it will always remain specified, alterized. Is this not the case for Ségolène Royal ? Or for the skirt teacher ? To shake the entire symbolic system of gender, the contribution of men is essential. We know well the asymmetry that the masculinized woman, although in a state of transgression, rises in the hierarchy, while the effeminate man is revised. It is this very prioritization whose clothing innovations of XXe century do not overcome. Women have conquered a (relative) freedom which should offer them the choice between closed clothing and open clothing. A form of male identification can allow them to get out of the female role. Men have no choice yet. They inherit the bourgeois, uniform, gray or black clothing model, which makes them free, equal and brothers if we go back to the original meaning of the pants for the sans-culottes of the year II. In reality, he especially does them “ men », Holders of privileges relating to their sex class.
One can wonder about what was lost in the rejection of the aristocratic dress order, which survived among the dandys of the XIXe century, and reflect on what men have to gain in the extension of their clothing freedoms. The attractive Haute Couture creations, from the famous collection of Jean-Paul Gautier in 1985, only affected a limited audience. The crazy skirt, the gay kilt, the falbalas of Drag Queens (and the cassock of the sisters of perpetual indulgence) are also in the minority. The men’s skirt is however homosexualized, as the figure of the woman in pants was in her time. The association of men in skirts, created in 2007, attempts to heterosexualize and trivialize it. The task is tough, but the argument is solid, and the multiplication of commercial sites shows that the Skirt attitude has the wind in its sails. Like those who dared the pants, a vast informal club of Marginal who have brought to art, culture, the life of ideas, decisive contributions, the pioneers of the male skirt may produce the new one, will at least avoid reproducing the old. As Bruno Lodts sums up, creator of men’s skirts, from the Gothic environment, “ I can hardly see the American soldiers attacking Iraq in a skirt. (…) The skirt does not make you want to type. It makes you soft ».
If the day of the skirt is one more cunning to lead women to “ assume their femininity », To use the consecrated expression, she will bear new constraints and will not emancipate many people. What is this femininity that should be assumed ? The model of the teenage female press ? The pornography model ? What body will we have to reveal or hide and hide subtly ? A thin, muscular, worked, valid body … The sportswoman who does not like fanfreluches, the lesbian who has never played in the doll, the asexual modest who does not see why she would show her legs, there are many, those who have no desire to pass the skirt, even for a day, in the name of “ respect ». Historical constraint to “ femininity “, Which has released since the 1960s, weighed strong enough to let young girls find their own breathing, their own inspiration today. The dress plurality is a guarantee of interior freedom: that skirts and pants live, pants under the skirt, culottes, long and short dresses, shorts, etc. And that long live the day of the skirt, provided that it is mixed, provided of bi-generate, that is to say at first to de-generate it. What we have done for the pants, we can do it for the skirt – and it will be a real revolution.