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feminism in transnational times, a conversation with Christine Delphy: an edited transcription of Christine Delphy and Sylvie Tissot’s public talk at the LSE

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Notes

  1. Sylvie Tissot is a Professor of Political Science at Paris 8 University. She is the author of Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End (Tissot, 2015) and the co-founder of the online blog Les Mots Sont Importants (http://lmsi.net). Florence Tissot is Deputy Curator at the Cinémathèque Française. In addition to the documentary I’m not a feminist, but …, Sylvie Tissot and Florence Tissot also directed Christine Delphy From A to Z (2015), a three-hour-and-forty-minutes long interview between Sylvie Tissot and Christine Delphy.

  2. The full transcription of the talk has been edited and some questions and comments removed in order to adapt it to the format of a journal article. My gratitude goes to Nadia-Rei Erlam for transcribing the conversation. A full recording of the talk is available online: ‘Feminism in transnational times: a conversation with Christine Delphy’, podcast, http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=3372 [last accessed 10 September 2017]. A podcast of the Q&A session with Delphy and Tissot, chaired by Ilana Eloit, which followed the screening of the documentary Je ne suis pas féministe, mais … (2015), is also available online: ‘Je ne suis pas féministe mais … 52 min on the life of Christine Delphy’, podcast, http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=3365 [last accessed 10 September 2017].

  3. Cathy Bernheim, Monique Bourroux, Julie Dassin, Emmanuèle de Lesseps, Christiane Rochefort, Janine Sert, Margaret Stephenson (Namascar Shaktini), Monique Wittig and Anne Zelensky. See Shaktini (2005, p. 4).

  4. The Main Enemy was the first French materialist feminist text translated into English. It was circulated in the UK in 1974 (Leonard, 1984, p. 7). The book Familiar Exploitation. A New Analysis of Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies (Delphy and Leonard, 1992) is a testament to Delphy’s long collaboration with Diana Leonard, whom she met at the International Sociological Association Conference in 1974. Diana Leonard has translated most of Delphy’s articles into English. Because of the editorial difficulties involved in publishing feminist books in France, Delphy’s early books were first published in English (Delphy, 1977, 1984a). It was only in 1998 that a collection of Delphy’s articles was published in French (Delphy, 1998; Chaperon, 2017).

  5. Questions Féministes was founded by Christine Delphy, Colette Capitan Peter, Emmanuèle de Lesseps, Nicole-Claude Mathieu and Monique Plaza. The director of publication was Simone de Beauvoir. Monique Wittig, Colette Guillaumin and Claude Hennequin rapidly joined the collective. After the scission of the editorial board in 1980 on the issue of lesbianism, Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Delphy, Claude Hennequin and Emmanuèle de Lesseps founded Nouvelles Questions Féministes in 1981.

  6. Collectif des Féministes pour l'Égalité, http://www.cfpe2004.fr/ [last accessed 10 September 2017].

  7. In September 2001, Delphy founded with other leftist intellectuals the International Coalition Against War (Coalition Internationale Contre la Guerre) to denounce the West’s ‘imperial crusade’ in Afghanistan. The group called for ‘the organisation of solidarity between social movements of the global North and the global South, an alliance of anti-war movements and resistance to market globalisation’ (Coalition Internationale Contre la Guerre, 2001); see also Delphy (2015a [2002]).

  8. In response to the intensification of French military strikes in Syria after the Paris attacks on 13 November 2015 and the declaration of a state of emergency, a large number of French and international intellectuals, including Delphy and Tissot, signed a tribune in the daily Libération against the French ‘war on terror’, entitled ‘A qui sert leur guerre?’ (‘To whom does their war benefit?’); it is available online: ‘A qui sert leur guerre?’ [‘To whom does their war benefit?’], tribune, http://www.liberation.fr/planete/2015/11/24/a-qui-sert-leur-guerre_1415808 [last accessed 10 September 2017]. Following this tribune, an anti-war meeting was held in Paris on 15 January 2016, during which Delphy (2016) gave a keynote address entitled ‘Against war’.

  9. Delphy (2015a [2002], p. 92) wrote in Separate and Dominate: ‘I would like to suggest a simple rule of international moral conduct that could also apply to relations among individuals: we have no right to make decisions, above all heroic ones, when people other than us have to bear the consequences. The only population who can decide whether a war is worth the cost are the people who will have to pay this price’.

  10. In 2004, the French Parliament passed legislation banning ‘conspicuous religious symbols’ in primary and secondary state schools. The law was attacked as targeting Muslim women wearing Islamic headscarves. In 2010, a law prohibiting face-covering in public space was passed, targeting women wearing niqabs in particular. In 2012, Minister of Education Luc Chatel issued a circulaire—a text intended for the members of a service or administration—banning mothers wearing an Islamic headscarf from participating in school field trips. See also Scott (2007).

  11. First published in French as ‘Penser le genre: quels problèmes?’ (‘Thinking gender: what problems?’) in the edited volume Sexe et Genre: De la hiérarchie entre les sexes (Sex and Gender: Of the Hierarchy between the Sexes) (Hurtig, Kail and Rouch, 1991), Delphy’s article was published in English for the first time under the title ‘Rethinking sex and gender’ in Women’s Studies International Forum (Delphy, 1993 [1991]).

  12. Delphy (1984a, p. 24) uses a similar example in the introduction to Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, writing that gender is ‘set on anatomical sex like the beret on the head of the legendary Frenchman’.

  13. Delphy (1995b) wrote a sharp critique of how French feminism has been reduced to its essentialist branch by ways of its reception in the US (see also Moses, 1996). On the French materialist feminists’ critique of neo-femininity and naturalist ideology, see, for example, Questions Féministes Collective (1980 [1977]) and Dephy (2013b).

  14. See Footnote 10.

  15. Reference to the screening of Je ne suis pas féministe, mais … (2015) followed by a Q&A session with Delphy and Tissot on Monday 8 February 2016 at the LSE, chaired by Eloit.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LSE Department of Gender Studies, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Christine Delphy & Clare Hemmings

  2. Department of Political Science, Paris 8 University, 2 rue de la Liberté, 93526, Saint-Denis, France

    Ilana Eloit

  3. Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), 3 rue Michel-Ange, 75016 , Paris, France

    Sylvie Tissot

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  1. Christine Delphy
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  2. Ilana Eloit
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  3. Clare Hemmings
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  4. Sylvie Tissot
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Correspondence to Ilana Eloit.

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This article is an edited transcription of Christine Delphy’s public conversation with Sylvie Tissot, held at the LSE on 10 February 2016, and organised by the LSE Department of Gender Studies and Feminist Review. Christine Delphy first addresses, by way of a critique of French universalism, her more recent engagement with the anti-war movement and against the prohibition of the Islamic headscarf in France. She then discusses her lifelong theoretical work, from the conceptualisation of gender as denaturalising sex and the ‘principle of partition’ in the 1980s and 1990s to the invention of materialist feminism in the 1970s. The article opens with an introduction to the life and work of Christine Delphy and closes with a transcript of the Q&As.

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Delphy, C., Eloit, I., Hemmings, C. et al. feminism in transnational times, a conversation with Christine Delphy: an edited transcription of Christine Delphy and Sylvie Tissot’s public talk at the LSE. Fem Rev 117, 148–162 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0093-4

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