Jean Monnet Lecture Series and Global Digital Citizenship Lab Speaker
Series jointly present
Dorit Geva (Central European University)
"No to the Ideology of Gender!":
French Mobilization Against Same-Sex Marriage
and Bourgeois Politics of Distinction
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
11:00am–1:00pm
Department of Sociology Common Room (2101 Vari Hall)
York University
The “Manif Pour Tous” (MPT) is a French social movement that mobilized during the spring of 2013 against legalization of same-sex marriage. Drawing from ethnographic observation of MPT events, supplemented by interviews with founding members, the paper analyzes the complex moral claims of MPT activists. It seeks to understand why they mobilized against “gender,” at the same time that they claimed that they were not homophobic, and even self-identified as feminist. The paper argues that MPT members viewed their own ideational complexity as standing against the “ideology of gender” propagated by “bobos,” or bourgeois-bohemian secular elites who putatively dominate French universities and the French state. The politics of gender and sexuality have therefore become a stage upon which intrabourgeois class struggles are being played out in contemporary France.
Dorit Geva is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Central European University (Budapest), and is currently a EURIAS fellow at the Collegium de Lyon. After completing her Ph.D. in Sociology at New York University, she was the Vincent Wright Fellow in Comparative Politics at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, and spent four years as a Harper Schmidt Fellow teaching social theory at the University of Chicago before joining the Central European University in 2011. She has published a comparative book on the gender politics of military service in France and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2013) as well as articles in the American Journal of Sociology, Polity, Politics and Society, and Social Politics. With the support of a European Commission Marie Curie Grant, she has been gathering data on the gender politics of right-wing movements and parties in France. She remains a Torontonian at heart.
Sponsored by the York Research Chair in Global Digital Citizenship (Fuyuki Kurasawa) and the Jean Monnet Chair at York University (Heather MacRae)
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