Feminism

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches feminism through the distinction between femininity and feminism. Femininity is as old as the species. Feminism is a more recent movement, whose embryonic forms he locates in Molière, followed by the struggles of the nineteenth century and the Commune1. He separates male and female, which are biological determinations, from man and woman, which are roles assigned by history. In his view, millennia of prescription have nevertheless produced a real femininity, which the "feminism of the privileged" would like to erase. He concludes that femininity and feminism are different but compatible1. On several occasions he criticizes a bourgeois feminism that sets man against woman without speaking of classes2. Against this feminism he sets the condition of Malian women and the figure of Susanna in Mozart3, or else the sacrifice of the Red Army4. Following Clouscard, he links this feminism to the "societal" agenda that blocks social progress, and prefers a class feminism to it5. He also draws on Wagner, for whom the "true feminine" brings liberation, and on Hegel's formula that makes femininity the "eternal irony of the community"64.

1. 1The feminism of the privileged, puritanical censorship of femininity: Molière, Clouscard, Wagner6 Feb 2022
2. 2#11 Return to the logics of the subject21 Jun 2020
3. 3#13 Mozart restored2 Feb 2021
4. 4#10.1 The eternal irony of the community22 Sept 2021
5. 5Everything is allowed but nothing is possible: Michel Clouscard (2)29 Jan 2012
6. 6#9.19 Twilight of the Gods, or from repetition to liberation (part 2)14 Apr 2021

Introduction produced automatically from the 6 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.