GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN FRENCH MEDIA SINCE 1970

Week 10: Gendering Coverage of the Political Sphere

French Newspaper Circulation 1988 and 1998 (in thousands)

1998 1988Le Parisien/Aujourd’hui[= national version] 471 384Le Figaro 346 432Le Monde 341 387Le Nouvel Observateur ? 370*Libération 160 195France-soir 149 255La Croix 83 104L’Humanité 51 109Les Echos 111 96La Tribune 81 N/A

See J.-C. Sergeant, ‘From Press Barons to Digital TV’ (2000) (extra reading), p.231.

* Sourced from http://www.publicitas.com/fileadmin/uploads/common/Promotions/2013-11_Rep_List_MAGAZINES.pdf

The Significance of the DSK Affair

Cf. ‘The political theorist , Uma Narayan (1997) warns that there are no such things as the “facts” of a case.’

Interest not in the affair itself but in the debates it mobilised e.g. feminists taking up the case to speak out against sexual discrimination and the tolerance for sexual compliments as a form of power play – giving rise to protests and the public disclosure of stories about sexual harassment at work.

Kathy Davis, ‘“Stand by your Man” or: How Feminism Was Framed in the DSK affair,’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 19:3 (2012).

N.B. In 1983 the number of cases of sexual harassment at work reported in France was 33% higher than the European average.

Louis, M.-V. 1999. ‘Harcèlement sexuel et domination masculin.’ In C. Bard (ed.), Un siècle d’antiféminisme. Paris: Fayard, pp.401-416.

Muriel Rouyer, ‘The Strauss-Kahn Affair and the Culture of Privacy: Mistreating and Misrepresenting Women in the French Public Sphere.’ Women’s Studies International Forum

41 (2013), pp. 187-96.

‘The “malestream discourse” that swept through the French media shortly [after DSK’s arrest] revealed a stubborn tolerance for sexual violence rooted in French history and public philosophy. A culture of privacy and privilege, inherited from the monarchy, incompletely challenged by the revolution, has left the republic with a public philosophy glorifying a masculine form of virile citizenship confining women to the private sphere.’ p. 187.

Widespread support for DSK in the French media tapping into three narrative frames:

- Conspiracy- Seduction- Indignation – around the sacrosanct principle of the presumption of innocence, including

by self-proclaimed philosopher Bernard Henry-Lévy on his blog; Robert Badinter, respected criminal attorney, former Minister or Justice, on a national radio news program; Jack Lang, former socialist minister of culture; and even well-known feminist Elisabeth Badinter, who has long been known for scolding French feminists for aligning themselves with a ‘victimizing’ American feminism.

Rouyer concludes:

‘In this article I shifted the focus from France to America and back again to reveal the unequal configurations of power that underlie both the public and private realms in France. While the latter has long remained the black box of a system that discriminates against women, the DSK Affair has abruptly put “the genuine equality for women (which had been deferred since the French Revolution… ) back on the table”. The private realm, once the restricted area of (DSK’S) male fantasies, has turned into the public theatre of his disgrace. Obviously the internationalization of the “public sphere” played a role in his fall, and this also illustrates the changing meaning and function of the private realm, and of gender relations within it.’ p. 195.

Cf. Davis

‘Information is always filtered through the historical and sociopolitical contexts in which it is produced. When issues are constructed as feminist […], these issues are always affected not only by the national context but by their border-crossings across national boundaries.’ p.4.

BUT also

‘[…] feminist critique is embedded in national contexts, which may generate in their turn a host of problematic assumptions requiring deconstruction […] we need to be wary of mobilizing discourses of cultural superiority when we examine issues around sexual violence or gender injustice’ p. 5.

N.B. Patrick Williams on recent UK ‘French bashing,’ Marianne, 6012 juin 2014, p. 66-9.