Christine Delphy

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Christine Delphy (2016)

Christine Delphy (born December 9, 1941 in Paris ) is a French sociologist and theorist of feminism . She is considered one of the most prominent activists of the French women's movement since the 1968s.

life and work

Career

Christine Delphy was born into a liberal, medium-sized milieu in the 14th arrondissement (Paris) . After her parents, who were both pharmacists , bought a pharmacy in Ménilmontant whose apartment was poorly equipped, Christine Delphy and her sister Françoise, who was three years younger than her, were given to her maternal grandparents, where she grew up until her grandmother's death. After graduating from high school in 1958, she studied sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris and received her diploma in 1961. With an admission to the doctorate, she continued her studies in the USA at the universities of Chicago and Berkeley . In 1964 she left university to join the American civil rights movement. With a grant from the Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation , she worked in Washington for the National Urban League . In 1965 she returned to Paris. In 1966 she found a job as a sociologist at the state research center Center national de la recherche scientifique . She completed her doctorate in 1998 at the Université du Québec à Montréal .

Political activity

In the USA it became clear to her that in the currently discussed social utopias the inequality between men and women was not considered, which also prevailed in the emerging Paris movement of 1968 , and she began to get involved in women's politics in France. In 1968 she was one of the first activists of the “Mouvement de libération des femmes” (MLF, German: Movement for the Liberation of Women), which became the starting point for a broad movement. In August 1970 she was one of the organizers of a feminist solidarity demonstration for striking women in the USA, to which she called on "all women". She took a leading role in the movement to reform abortion legislation.

Christine Delphy is an openly lesbian . According to Robin Morgan's slogan “Sisterhood is powerful”, the new form of relationship between women in the feminist movement should be “sonorité” (Eng .: sisterhood). Lesbians were barely visible in the early 1970s. With Monique Wittig and others, Delphy joined forces in 1971 in the group "Gouines rouges" (Red Lesbians), with which lesbians organized for the first time in the French women's movement. The group disbanded in 1973, but their radicalism was still present in discussions and publications.

Together with Simone de Beauvoir and others, Delphy founded the first magazine in France in 1977 to deal scientifically with feminism under the title "Questions Féministes". The question of the right strategy for women's liberation led to a break and dissolution three years later. The publication was continued from 1981 with the title “Nouvelles Questions féministes”. Christine Delphy has headed the editorial team with Patricia Roux, gender researcher at the University of Lausanne , since 2001 .

Delphy is one of the most important thinkers against racism and xenophobia in France. In December 2003 her article “Un voile sur les discriminations” appeared in Le Monde with a petition , in which she protested against the ban on veiling in schools and argued that feminism was being instrumentalized for racist purposes. With this she initiated the group “Collectif féministes pour l'égalité” (collective feminists for equality), founded in 2004.

theory

With her first studies Christine Delphy undertook a criticism of the Marxist view of the family. Under a pseudonym, she published the article L'ennemi principal (Eng .: The main enemy ) in 1970 . According to Ute Gerhard, it contains "in line with the strong intellectual character of French feminists and their revolutionary rhetoric, an astute reckoning with the anti-capitalist left". According to Delphy's analysis, housework, by which she means all domestic activities, is not a by-product of capitalism , but a separate mode of production based on the exploitation of women in the house. Marx and Engels naturalized the gender division of labor and made the special disempowerment of women invisible by equating their status with the husband's class. Delphy suggested that women should constitute themselves as a class defined by domestic work rather than work for the market. Delphy appropriated the categories of Marxist social analysis for feminist purposes. She developed her thesis, drafted in 1970, into a theory of the political economy of patriarchy in over twenty years. With Annette Kuhn in Germany and Anne-Marie Wolpe in Great Britain, she was one of the theorists who coined the term “materialistic feminism” instead of “ Marxist feminism ”.

Delphy turned against an essentialist concept of gender, as it was thought in difference feminism by the group Psychanalyse et Politique (psychoanalysis and politics) founded by Antoinette Fouque . In the successor to Simone de Beauvoir, Delphy is assigned to socially scientifically based equality feminism. Her materialistic perspective contributed to the debates about domestic and family work , patriarchy, and sexual identity in the women's movement as well as in academic feminism .

Documentary about Christine Delphy

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Sylvie Chaperon: Christine Delphy , in: Christine Bard (lead), Sylvie Chaperon (collaboration): Dictionnaire des féministes. France - XVIIIe-XXIe siècle , Presses universitaires de France, Paris 2017, ISBN 978-2-13-078720-4 (the Kindle edition without page numbers was used)
  2. ↑ a b Kristina Schulz : The long breath of provocation. The women's movement in Germany and France (1968-1976) , Campus, Frankfurt 2002, ISBN 3-593-37110-3 . P. 26 ff.
  3. ↑ Catalog UQAM (accessed on July 21, 2017)
  4. ^ Christine Bard: Lesbianism as Political Construction in the French Feminist Context . In: Kristina Schulz (Ed.): The Women's Liberation Movement. Impacts and Outcomes , Berghahn Books, New York / Oxford 2017, ISBN 978-1-78533-586-0 , pp. 160, 163.
  5. ↑ Nouvelles Questions Féministes , L'Institut du Genre (2017)
  6. ↑ Cecilia Baeza, Christelle Hamel: L'expérience inédite et dérangeante du Collectif des Féministes pour l'Égalité , Nouvelles Questions Féministes, Vol. 25, No. 3, Sexisme, racisme, et postcolonialisme (2006), pp. 150-123
  7. ↑ Dominic McGoldrick: Extreme religious dress , in: Ivan Hare, James Weinstein (Eds.): Extreme Speech and Democracy , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-954878-1 , p. 423.
  8. ↑ Translated from the French in: Alice Schwarzer (Ed.): Lohn: Liebe. On the value of housework. Edition Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 978-3-518-11225-0 , pp. 149-171
  9. ↑ Ute Gerhard: For another justice. Dimensions of feminist legal criticism , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-593-50836-8 , p. 329
  10. ↑ a b Christine Delphy, - 1941 , in: Robert Benewick, Philip Green (Ed.): The Routledge Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Political Thinkers , Routledge , 1998 (2nd edition), ISBN 978-0-415-09623-2 , P. 52.
  11. ↑ A Materialist Feminism Is Possible , Christine Delphy with Diana Leonard, in: Feminist Review, Volume 4, Issue 1, March 1980, pp. 79-105 ( Springer Link )
  12. ^ Ingrid Galster : French Feminism , in: Ruth Becker, Beate Kortendiek (ed.): Handbook women and gender research. Theory, methods, empiricism , Springer VS, 2010, ISBN 978-3-531-17170-8 , p. 45 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Delphy, Christine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dupont, Christine (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris