As there were no assigned readings during the spring vacation, I started looking further into my final project and had the opportunity to dive deeper into some works on the subject of the second wave of feminism of the 1970s in a transnational perspective.
For this week’s blog I thought I would explore an article that I stumbled upon almost two years ago for a gender study class and which was one of the starting points for my final project. In American lesbians are not French women: heterosexual French feminism and the Americanisation of lesbianism in the 1970s, Eloit offers an insightful study of the relations between French and American feminists and highlights how the French movement was shaped in connection with but most importantly against the American example in some cases. Indeed, she argues that the American multiculturalist society was viewed as producing separatism between communities, and American feminists and the “sex war” were used as a boogeyman by French feminists. French feminists were largely influenced by universalist ideals in which, contrary to their perception and representations of the American society, differences had to be erased in order to come together. Those different contexts were both largely influenced by national trajectories and histories. Eloit then argues that French universalism as well as the myth of a French singularity, defined by its natural harmony and coming together of men and women under the the banner of “love” which French feminists also mobilized in their discourse, was threatened by the figure of lesbian women and thus lesbian identities were erased from the french feminist movement in the name of unity under the common identity of women. She highlights how the issue of lesbianism in French feminist movements and representations of lesbian women were directly linked to representations of the American movements but also became intertwined with racial representations.
I found Eloit’s work particularly interesting as some previous readings which were assigned for this class had highlighted how transnational or global history often emphasize exchanges and the circulation of ideas rather than also focus on the limits to this circulation and how actors sometimes act against those exchanges. Eloit’s article highlights how although feminist ideas circulated during the Second wave of the 1970’s those were also sometimes stopped and limited by national or local contexts and how similar movements at first could also be built against each other. Thus, Eloit’s article shaped my desire to not only explore exchanges and circulations during the Second wave of feminism but also how and why some ideas did not circulate. In this blog I focused on French and American movements but I also aim at decentralizing this western perspective for my final project.