Mick Hartley

As we've heard, the gender wars are spreading to France. Naturally the French are blaming Anglo-Saxons for this unfortunate development. Kathleen Stock thinks that's a bit rich:

French philosophers can hardly be let off the hook for the currently popular belief in the near-total malleability of the human body through choice. Arguably, they are up to their chic black polonecks in the matter. Descartes was a big fan of cleaving inner minds from “divisible” corporeal bodies. Four centuries after that, Jean-Paul Sartre gave us the slogan that “existence precedes essence” — the idea (roughly) that the meaning of being human is not fixed by membership of a shared animal species, but rather forged through conscious choice. Admittedly he probably didn’t have a choice of body parts in mind when he wrote that, but it’s not clear on what grounds he could object.

Simone de Beauvoir, meanwhile, viewed female biology as inherently an “obstacle” to women and something that it would be better to be able to transcend. Then came Michel Foucault, arguing that distinguishing between types of humans could only ever be a means of covertly exercising power over them. Foucault thought the idea that human concepts captured some pre-existent natural reality was moot. Radical feminists such as Monique Wittig took up this cause in the Eighties, claiming there was no “natural grouping” of women at all, but only a perniciously politically motivated one designed to oppress… women. (No, me neither.)

All of this sexy-sounding stuff about the power of humans to build big things with their words was too much for passing Americans to resist. Judith Butler took Foucault and Wittig’s ideas and translated them for US audiences in her books Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, sometimes in sentences lasting an entire page. Graduate students swooned. Et tout le monde connaît la suite.

Since – to cut a long story short – we owe post-modernism to post-war French philosophy, and since the gender wars have developed from American applications of post-modernism in Queer Theory and the like, this is an unhappy return of the grown-up child to the scene of its infancy. It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.