Pratique du pouvoir et idée de nature

Article | France

English title: Power relationship and belief in Nature : (1) The appropriation of women; (2) The Discourse of Nature
Source: Questions féministes
Keyword(s): sexage (sexation) | appropriation | naturalism
Languages(s): French
Manifest: view document
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Summary:
The author denounces the so-called “natural” justification of men’s domination over women and develops the concept of “sexation” (after the concept of slavery) to show that women, considered as a class on the basis of their sex-gender, are all subjected if not appropriated by male power. Power relations are understood – either in a theory or in a doctrine (natural sciences, politics, medicine, religions, part of social sciences) or even more casually in daily conceptions and in so-called “common sense” – as relations rooted in instinct or ruled by genetic determinisms. Sexism and racism are both “naturalisms” insofar as they hinge their beliefs on a preformed origin of human conducts that would be written in nature. Indeed, “being natural” implies that human groups are caught up in unequal relations, meaning the appropriation of a human group by another human group, as in “sexation” and slavery.