The Turning Point of Feminism

Abstract

In France today women are in the process of taking feminism to a turning point. By demanding, with parité, the de facto sharing of political responsibilities, they are clearly rejecting the nondifferentialist ideology that, despite equal rights, preserves the ever-persistent male monopoly of power. Parité is not a way of letting nature “dictate law” (we know full well that nature itself never “dictates”); rather, it is a way of giving meaning to human existence characterized by sexual difference (sexué). Nature has never founded anything: neither the past hierarchy of the sexes, nor the present demand for their equality All this is political through and through. Nevertheless, the fact that human beings are characterized by their sex (sexué), that they are born boys or girls, that they can become fathers or mothers (but not both at the same time: such is the constraint of the dichotomy of the sexes) is not political—despite what Judith Butler and some others have said.¹