Femininity

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches femininity through the sexual division of labour. With Marx, he sees it as the first social division: woman is assigned to the tasks of nature. In his view, this explains why the challenge to the law of the city comes from Antigone. Speaking of Xanthippe, he describes the wife of traditional society, set apart from love and linked to the impure1. In Hegel, whose Antigone he reads in "Féminité et communauté chez Hegel"2, piety is the law of woman and of the underworld gods, opposed to the manifest law of the State. This opposition repeats itself on several levels: family and city, private and public, night and day. He links it to the present-day question of the border between public and private3. He distinguishes male and female, which are given by nature, from man and woman, which are roles assigned by culture. Yet in his view, millennia of prescription have produced a real femininity, which the media feminism of privileged circles would like to erase. He draws on Wagner, who sees in Elsa the liberating "true feminine", and on Clouscard. He concludes that femininity and feminism are different but compatible: a woman has the right to be feminine without being obliged to be4.

1. 1X comme Xanthippe7 Jan 2015
2. 2Présentation des ateliers 2021/2022 - Adhésions à l'association20 Sept 2021
3. 310#5 La figure d'Antigone, telle qu'en elle-même enfin...24 Nov 2021
4. 4Le féminisme des privilégiés, censure puritaine de la féminité - Molière, Clouscard, Wagner6 Feb 2022

Introduction produced automatically from the 4 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.