Professor Darren Rosenblum will recount how feminist theorists and activists managed to write their ideals into the fabric of French law and culture, and how non-feminists began to appropriate those ideals. Parité, the 2000 law that requires half of all candidates for public office be women, saw French feminists first engineer a change in French universalism to respect sex difference; although not wholly successful, Parité advanced women’s political inclusion. Then, like a drop of water in a pond, these feminist ideas disappeared in plain sight: they became intrinsic to French state norms and public values. As they became woven into state norms, however, politicians began to use them to promote exclusions: first excluding Muslims from full participation in the Republic with veil and burqa bans; then supporting exclusions of sex and class with a corporate board quota (CBQ); most recently feminist ideas have been called upon to exclude French Muslims with proposed burkini bans.

Brown Bag Lunch Series