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Policing the French Language How does “gender” translate into French? Linguistically, the answer seems simple enough: the word genre is a common term, thanks to the central role devoted to grammar in primary education since the Third Republic. Every child schooled in France knows about genre, not so much as a binary opposition between male and female, i.e., a polite way to avoid the word sexe, but rather as an arbitrary grammatical distinction without natural foundations between, say, sun and moon (le soleil et la lune) that includes (in addition to masculine and feminine) a third, unmarked option (neutre). However, the state committee in charge of terminology published an official recommendation in the summer of 2005 against what was labelled an “abusive use of the term” (un usage abusif du mot genre) in the media, in administrative documents, and specifically in sociological writings.1 According to this statement, even in English, “gender” is a neologism, more precisely an extension of the original, grammatical meaning to address issues of equality between men and women, for example in UNESCO’s insistence on “gender mainstreaming.” In practice, “the term is often used to refer exclusively to women or as a reference to a purely biological difference.” Thus, for these wise men (and women, for three out of nineteen members of the commission were women), “replacing ‘sex’ by ‘gender’ does not correspond to a linguistic need, nor is the extension of meaning of the word ‘gender’ justified”—at least in French (no recommendation is issued for the English language). The commission suggests that “the word ‘sex’ (sexe) and derivatives CHAPTER SIX A Double-Edged Sword Sexual Democracy,Gender Norms,and Racialized Rhetoric ÉRIC FASSIN 144 | ÉRIC FASSIN such as ‘sexist’ (sexiste) and ‘sexual’ (sexuel) are perfectly adapted, in most cases, to express the difference between men and women, including in its cultural dimension.” Genre (the noun), or worse the adjective “gendered” (et a fortiori l’adjectif genré), are not advisable (sont à déconseiller). The recommendation is to adopt case by case solutions, depending on the context, based on existing resources in the French vocabulary. Gender equality does translate very well as equality between men and women, or between the sexes (égalité entre hommes et femmes, égalité entre les sexes). However, one might ask: if indeed “gender” is often used to mean “sex,” and if indeed that word is sufficient in most cases, what about other occurrences, when “gender” does not mean “sex,” and when “sex” just won’t do? When is the use of “gender” not abusive? That this short note makes no mention of the term sexué, even to translate “gendered ,” no reference even to “masculinity” or “femininity,” but only to men and women, is revealing: by focusing on equality between the sexes, the committee leaves out gender norms, as if these norms were not both the cause and the consequence of such inequalities. The linguistic recommendation not only substitutes one term for another; it replaces one question by another, thus obscuring that they are intricately and intimately related. What the committee performs is the replacement of gender by sex—the concept along with the word: genre is left outside of the French language, along with the issues it could raise. From Gender to Genre The story may sound all too familiar to those of us who have regularly been confronted with the resistance to gender in France, in particular through the conflation of anti-Americanism and anti-feminism in the 1990s. The virulent hostility against American feminism along with the politicization of sexuality expressed at the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings, and thus more broadly the horrified fascination for so-called American “sexual correctness,” extended beyond issues of sexuality to include the very notion of gender. Rejecting the concept along with the word made it possible to “nationalize” antifeminism : this appears clearly in Mona Ozouf’s mid-1990s argument about the singularity of the French culture of femininity, which offered an updated version of French exceptionalism.2 That today’s language committee is presided over by conservative literary scholar Marc Fumaroli, whose vindication of Old Regime salon conversation provides historical background for Ozouf’s essay, can only confirm the impression that there is nothing new under the French sun. Once again, in 2005 just as in 1995, gender is rejected as alien to French culture. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). [3.144.202.167] Project...

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