Contenu du sommaire : Les antiféminismes

In his contemporary speech, the Holy See tackles feminism as it deems dangerous and threatening. He developed a phallocentric discourse new and suitable for its time, which reuses the feminist concepts reversing their meaning. The strategy of camouflage of his own phallocentrism works in part: it managed to avoid the opposition of an audience, both Catholic and citizen, for whom the theory of social subordination of women to men is inaudible and unacceptable. In this sense, the discourse of the Holy See corresponds to an anti-feminism.

Attempts to explain the persistent resistance to French women's political rights have used various interpretive strategies. The approach in this essay centers on the anti-feminist reaction, in rhetoric and practice, to the mobilization of the French feminist and suffrage movements, on the eve of the Great War. It analyzes the nature of the “anti” positions in relation to other reactionary ideologies across the political spectrum. The diffuse, often unarticulated, nature of French anti-feminism, its embeddedness in cultural and political institutions made it hard for feminists to contest. The essay explores the renewal of older forms of patriarchy and its more contemporary pseudo-scientific rationale influenced by Social Darwinism. Resistance to democratic change of any kind, expressed as dissatisfaction with the existing electoral system, played a divisive role in recreating “la guerre des sexes.” Sources are drawn from the extensive anti-feminist literature of the period and a survey of elite male opinion published in the Parisian press in 1910.

The fact that five women successively reigned in Madagascar in the XIXth century is usually used to deny that fighting for gender equality is relevant at all in the country. However, that would be ignoring how non-noble male politicians rose to power in that period, and also how Western influences were imposed during colonization (1896-1960). Those factors had such deep impact on mentalities that it is now considered normal – and part of traditions – that men should monopolize both the actuality and appearance of power.

This papers offers an analysis of the anti-feminism expressed by central actors of the field of population policies, which became a “pro-feminist” field refocused on “health and the reproductive rights” in the 1990s. This “revolution”, accomplished during the Cairo conference on population in 1994, saw the victory of a group of feminist agents within major philanthropic foundations and other organizations and the relative banishment of former experts in “population”. This appropriation of power loosened the expression of an anti-feminism, often veiled with politically correct discourse, which structures the representations of the social space of reproductive health institutions and operates a dichotomy between correct scientific expertise and ideological and illegitimate activism.

`titreb
Today, the “crisis of masculinity” discourse is a “cliché”. But this alleged crisis occurs while men still hold more power and privileges than women. It is therefore important to critically investigate the rhetoric about the “crisis of masculinity” and assess its political meaning. In order to do so, we begin by looking at Western history and show that men have been claiming to be in crisis for the last five centuries. After discussing more specifically three historical periods (England in the seventeenth century, France during the 1789 Revolution, and the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century), we pay special attention to contemporary discourse. The analysis confirms that the rhetoric about “crisis of masculinity” carries a critique of feminism and a rejection of gender equality. This discourse also justifies the (re)affirmation of conventional masculinity.

The Ni Putes Ni Soumises movement and the Collectif féministe du Mouvement des indigènes de la République have cristalized oppositions between supporting and fighting the law that makes wearing the hijab in schools illegal. Beyond their differences, the positions of these organizations highlight modalities of conciliating fights against sexism in the battle against racism. In this article, we examine the ideological stakes that suppose, in both organizations, taking the situation of racialized men into account which articulates anti-sexism and anti-racism. Our hypothesis is that the discursive productions of the two movements contribute to the development of a central feminist question caught up in the notion of intersectionality.

Is there an “Anti-feminist Cycle of Violence”? The Effects of Anti-feminism According to Quebec Feminists`/titrebIn the context of the Anti-feminist Attacks research, conducted in partnership with the R des centres de femmes du Québec, this article documents anti-feminist actions and analyses their effects on the Quebec feminist movement. Inspired by the hypothesis of the R, according to which feminist reactions to anti-feminist violence are the same as women's reactions in a conjugal or post-conjugal violence context, the writer questions whether there is an “anti-feminist violence cycle”. Using the theory of the cycle of conjugal violence and feminist studies on male violence against women, she examines the similarities between the effects of conjugal violence and the effects of anti-feminist violence, but also the limits this analogies considering the inherently collective dimensions of the anti-feminist attacks.

This article aims to analyze the role that gender issues play in the public discourse on Muslims and Islam of several Swiss French-speaking Swiss media. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus of our research we show that gender issues go across the themes addressed in the public debate about the compatibility or incompatibility of Muslim culture with the one prevailing in Switzerland. This leads us to interpret these results in the perspective of the political use of gender and the political constitution of the subject.