To celebrate International Women’s Day, we would like to highlight French publications related to Gender studies and Feminism. In France, they developed in the 1960s and 1970s and were grounded on Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 Le Deuxième Sexe. The Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) which followed the May 1968 uprisings included socially and politically engaged women such as the lawyer Gisèle Halimi or writers and literary theorists such as Marguerite Duras (“féministe malgré elle”), Monique Wittig or Hélène Cixous. Key social and political measures included the late introduction of French female suffrage in 1944 or the legalisation of contraception and abortion in 1975. From the 1990s to the 2010s, new French legislation in favour of women was passed, such as the Gender Parity Law of 2000, which mandates an equal number of male and female candidates on parliamentary, local and European elections lists. The “théorie du genre” (sometimes considered as a suspicious American imported concept threatening traditional family values) remained a controversial topic in the 2010s, with the “Manif pour tous” movement and its opposition to same sax marriage and adoption, eventually legalised through the 2013 Taubira law. The #MeToo movement (see previous blogpost), which gained traction from 2017 onwards, led to a revitalisation of the feminist movement and a renewal of interest in this question from a theoretical and critical perspective. Below you will find a list of recent French-language publications focusing on women and feminism in various fields of studies, ranging from art to literature, history, politics, sociology, philosophy or archaeology.

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