Why French Feminists Are Fighting Gay Marriage
By David A Bell
The only thing clear right now about the U.S. Supreme Court’s pending
decision on the Defense of Marriage Act -- the law that bars the
federal government’s recognition of same-sex marriages -- is that
Americans will read the verdict as the latest salvo in a long-running
culture war. But it is worth remembering that this is a culture war that
is increasingly being fought internationally -- and often in terms that
do not line up with the debate in the United States. Americans have
become accustomed to thinking of the argument against gay marriage as
being motivated by religious conservatism. But that is not necessarily
true elsewhere.
France offers an instructive example. Although 60 percent of the
public supports gay marriage, the country has been beset by vitriolic
protests since the National Assembly narrowly passed a marriage equality
law last spring. From a distance, the hundreds of thousands of people
who took to the streets may have seemed little different from the
evangelical activists often seen at similar demonstrations in the United
States. But Americans would be surprised to discover how different
their motivations often are.
To be sure, religion is not irrelevant to the French protests. The
most prominent protest leader, a comedian who adopted the nom de guerre
Frigide Barjot, a snarky nod to the 1960s actress and sex symbol
Brigitte Bardot, embraced a fervent Catholicism during a pilgrimage to
Lourdes. (She now calls herself “Jesus’ press secretary.”) Catholic
clergy have denounced the marriage legislation, and several religious
associations have helped organize the protests.
But opponents of marriage equality in France’s mainstream parties
have mostly kept their distance from religious groups. Relatively few of
the street protesters interviewed by reporters talk of God, wave the
Bible, or have verses from Leviticus tattooed on their arms. (Which
should come as no surprise, given that France is a largely secular
place, where barely half the population even still identifies itself as
Catholic and regular religious attendance does not even reach ten
percent.) Indeed, the most prominent opposition has come from the ranks
of professional groups such as law professors and psychoanalysts, whose
U.S. counterparts generally favor marriage equality by large margins. A
considerable number of public intellectuals have also expressed loud
opposition to the law, including the essayist Alain Finkielkraut, the
novelist Jean d’Ormesson, and the philosopher Sylviane Agacinski (the
wife of former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin).
Commentators have generally explained the protests by positing, as Jocelyne Cesari did recently in The National Interest,
that “French collective values remain unconsciously connected to a
traditional vision of society.” But in truth, the extent of opposition
to marriage equality has at least as much to do with the vexed and
tortuous story of a quintessentially modern phenomenon: French feminism.
Americans often think of France as a country well disposed to
feminism, thanks to the pioneering writings of Simone de Beauvoir and
others. And the reputation is not without reason. Abortion has been
legal in France since 1975, and French women enjoy paid maternity leave
and subsidized child care. In June 2000, the French Parliament passed a
law without parallel in the United States (although quickly watered it
down) mandating that political parties designate women as half of all
their candidates for elected office.
Feminist issues have also divided the French intellectual world,
however, and the disputes have strongly influenced how the marriage
equality issue has played out. An important current of French thought,
which has no real American equivalent, has maintained that while women
deserve equal rights, these rights must not entail the supposed erasure
of sexual difference. Historians and philosophers such as Mona Ozouf and
Philippe Raynaud have seen a particular threat in American-style
protections against sexual harassment, which they have labeled “sexual
Stalinism.” The sociologist Irène Théry has called for a féminisme à la française
that acknowledges the “asymmetrical pleasures of seduction.” The
philosopher Sylviane Agacinski goes so far as to call sexual difference
the true basis for sexual equality in law. The “parity” in elections
demanded by the 2000 law, in her view, reflected the natural division of
the human race into complementary male and female halves. Other
feminists countered that the law should pay no attention to gender
beyond guaranteeing equal rights for all (the American historian Joan
Scott, herself a frequent target of French criticism, has keenly
analyzed all of this).
Though abstruse by U.S. standards, the debates reflect deep anxieties
felt by French elites. Not only has France’s geopolitical position
slipped and its previous cultural eminence sharply declined -- this May,
the National Assembly even approved a measure allowing university
courses to be taught (quelle horreur!) in English -- but the
ideological causes that once mobilized large portions of the French
population have largely evaporated. (French Marxism is not even a shadow
of its former self, and little daylight shines between President
François Hollande’s Socialists and the neo-Gaullist Union for a Popular
Movement, or UMP, party.)
Many influential French figures, including a good number of former
Marxists, have taken refuge in a sort of cult of French national
identity. One pillar of the cult is the Republic, with a capital R,
which they associate with strict civic equality, even stricter
secularism in public life, and educational institutions capable of
molding a single, cohesive citizenry. But another pillar is the idea of
France as the homeland of sophisticated habits, taste, and culture,
which in turn depends, as many intellectuals explain, on the romance,
beauty, and mystery generated by the play of sexual difference. In 2011,
this position initially, and embarrassingly, led a good number of
intellectuals to defend Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the International
Monetary Fund chief and presidential hopeful, as a gallant “seducer,”
rather than a sexual predator, after a New York hotel employee accused
him of rape.
This strong emphasis on the complementary roles of men and women has
had a remarkable effect on the French marriage debate. Unlike in the
United States, most opponents of marriage equality have had relatively
little to say about the morality of homosexual sex acts, or about
threats to the “institution of marriage” in general. Instead, they speak
above all about children, insisting that a psychologically healthy
family life rests on the union of a man and woman. Back in 1999, when
the French Parliament approved a form of civil union, much of the
opposition centered on this issue.
This spring, precisely the same concerns have dominated the
manifestos against “marriage for all” issued by groups of law professors
and psychologists. And interviews with ordinary protesters have shown
just how effectively the arguments of philosophers have filtered down to
street level, with one figure after another explaining their opposition
to the reform in the same way. To quote a popular protest banner: “Un père et une mère c’est élémentaire”
(“A father and a mother is elementary”). And the 60 percent support for
same-sex marriage has not changed the fact that a majority still favors
banning child adoption by homosexual couples. In short, although
religion and homophobia obviously fed into the recent protests, the
rhetoric employed by the opposition has trickled down from the
intellectuals (as one might, indeed, expect in France).
The question is whether this opposition will continue to influence
French politics now that equality is the law of the land and gay
marriages have started to take place. My own guess is no. Despite the
surprising extent of the protests, support for marriage equality has
nonetheless increased steadily over the years, as in most other Western
countries, and the pattern is likely to continue. So while the leaders
of the UMP, France’s main center-right party, mostly opposed the reform,
they are unlikely to risk reversing it if and when they come back into
power. Those men and women who oppose marriage equality out of religious
conviction or prejudice will gravitate to the extreme right National
Front, if they have not already done so. The more mainstream opponents,
in contrast, will probably acknowledge that phenomenon for which the
French language has the perfect phrase: un fait accompli.
No comments:
Post a Comment