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Dossier. Le genre des controverses

Controversies and Gender: Feminist and Queer Approaches

Maxime Cervulle et Virginie Julliard
Traduction de Saskia Brown
Cet article est une traduction de :
Le genre des controverses : approches féministes et queer [fr]

Texte intégral

1Over the last twenty years in France, arenas of conflict have arisen from contoversies over the definition and political uses of the notion of “sexual difference”. Hegemonic definitions of gender identity and their social determinants came up for scrutiny in the controversies generated by French legislation on parity, the civil union contract [the Pacs], the wearing of the Islamic headscarf [“le voile”] or the burqa in public, gay marriage rights [“le mariage pour tous”], and the government’s action plans for schools on equality between girls and boys. The instrumentalisation of “gender theory”, starting in 2011, was a sign that positions were polarising, accompanying a wave of moral panic concerning the disappearance of sexual alterity and its associated social roles. The normativity of the public realm, with its prescriptive distribution of social roles, appears particularly vividly in controversies, since these generate public debate mobilising a large number of differently positioned social actors. At the same time, controversies lay bare the mechanisms whereby not only public space, but gender relations themselves are transformed and reproduced.

2When epistemology and feminist philosophy of science began to examine sex as a scientific object from a historical perspective, it became clear that the definition of sex was unstable, and that it was difficult, if not impossible, to provide a scientific basis for the notion of two different sexes (Kraus, 2000). It also emerged that theoretical discourses on sex were in constant flux (Dorlin, 2005): the history of biological and medical research showed that new criteria were constantly being added and revised to determine the sex of individuals, (for example, the so-called “hormonal”, “chromosomal”, “gonadal”, “phenotypic” or even “genetic” sex) such that in reality the theory of the division between two sexes was constantly in crisis. The epistemic flimsiness of the criteria, and the convoluted theoretical revisions required to accommodate empirical cases that continued to undermine the theory, suggest that “crisis [as a theoretical regime] is the expression of the historicity of a relation of domination, which must change, mutate, and constantly redefine its system of categories in order to ensure its continued reproduction” (ibid.: 134). When we apply this idea that crisis is in fact a way to ensure the perennity of a system of social representation and of the order it helps found to the many recent controversies relating to gender and sexuality, these can be understood not as a sign that the order of gender is disintegrating, but that it is in a period of reconfiguration with a view to its self-perpetuation. In this light, the focus on controversies around gender can reveal the roles played by political deliberation and media coverage in the reproduction of gender relations and identities. This is no simple reproduction, however, in that it operates according to a principle of iterability (Derrida, 1989; Butler, 1993), whereby each mark of gender is altered in its repetition. The political malleability of gender in the space of the media, like the epistemological instability of sex in the biomedical field, thus contribute both to their possible public contestation, and to their ongoing power.

  • 1 As demonstrated by the number of thematic sections of ICS journals devoted to gender since 2003: “(...)

3Thirteen years after the publication of the Thematic Section Espaces politiques au féminin [Political arenas in the feminine] in the seventh issue of Questions de communication (Fleury, Walter, 2005), today’s Section, Controversies and gender: feminist and queer approaches, addresses once again the ongoing thinking in ICS on the links between gender, the media and public space. Research into gender in this discipline, which increased following the public debates in France on the Pacs and on parity, is now well established.1 Problems broached included the production of gender in press discourses (Tavernier, 2004; Julliard, 2012; Olivesi, 2012; Dalibert, 2013; Cervulle, Julliard, 2013); the digital social media (for example, debates on Twitter [Cervulle, Pailler, 2014; Julliard, 2016]); the effect of gender relations on how journalism is organised (Damian-Gaillard, Saïtta, 2011; Chauvel, Le Renard, 2013); the institutional definition of gender (Hernández Orellana, Kunert, 2014); media representations as a site of recompositions of gender identity (Coulomb-Gully, Méadel, 2012; Quemener, 2014; Damian-Gaillard, Montañola, Olivesi, 2014; Lécossais, 2014; Quemener, 2014; Damian-Gaillard, Montañola, Olivesi, 2014; Lécossais, 2014; Espineira, 2015); the social regulation of sexuality, as visible in the media (Fred Pailler [2011]; the sexualisation of digital devices, and Florian Vörös [2015] on the gendered uses of online pornography).

  • 2 For a materialist version of the idea that, far from translating sex, gender actually produces it, (...)

4The many works in ICS that problematise gender show the slipperiness of this concept. Two meanings can be seen to coexist in the term (a fact which is not specific to the information and communication sciences, but applies to all the human and social sciences; Marignier, 2016: 37–40). Gender refers to 1) a social relation in which economic and other differences are introduced between men and women, and 2) the identities that this social relation gives rise to, that is, the multiple forms of expression of the masculine and the feminine in which an idealised normative version is embodied. This research is underpinned by different conceptions of the relationship between sex and gender, reflecting different degrees of constructivism. Gender is conceived as the cultural form given to the biological substratum of sex, or else as the way in which the category of sex itself is socially constructed through the continuous discursive reproduction of gender (see in particular Butler, 1990; De Lauretis, 1987).2 This second position opens up particularly interesting perspectives for ICS. Its decisive emphasis on the performativity of gender, on effects of meaning and on the politics of representation endows the media, public discourse and public deliberation with particular relevance for our understanding of the historical transformations of “the difference between the sexes”, the social divisions they correspond to, and their political and economic uses.

5Our Thematic Section contributes to the ongoing thinking on the relationships between gender, media and politics by applying the critical tools developed at the juncture between ICS, gender studies and queer studies to the phenomenon of controversies and “controversial issues”. Whereas the influence of gender studies is legible in much current research work in ICS, queer studies have been little applied to date. This field grew out of two currents, in the United States, namely post-structuralist feminism, and historical research on the emergence and circulation of sexual identities. It continues the work of feminist theories in further denaturalising sex, gender and sexuality. More precisely, queer studies involves examining the forms and functions of sexuality’s regulation in public space, combined with a feminist critique of the androcentrism of public space and the theories that conceptualise it.

Creating and disbanding the audiences of controversies

6One of the key steps in an analysis of controversies is to identify the audiences around whom and for whom they are organised. As Cyril Lemieux (2007: 195) points out, controversies “always have a tripartite structure: [they] refer to situations in which a sharp conflict between two parties is staged for a public qua third party placed in the position of judge.” In Cyril Lemieux’s ideal-typical definition of the controversy—which, as such, only imperfectly accounts for empirical cases—the distinguishing feature of a controversy is that the three parties are of equal competence:

The more the public positioned as judge of a dispute is made up of peers, that is, of individuals whom each party in disagreement can recognise as having the same distinctive competence for judging as that which it attributes to itself, the more we seem prepared to speak of a “controversy” (ibid.: 196).

7Although many controversies spread beyond the field where they are initially relevant, Cyril Lemieux restricts the term to a disagreement that breaks out in a specialised and relatively self-contained field. When considering controversies more generally, he notes that each has a different range (confined to a specific field, at one extreme, and receiving broad media attention, at the other). Similarly, the audience created by a controversy will have different degrees of specialisation, the two extremes here being a public of peers and a public with no specialised knowledge. Lastly, when considering the instituting dimension of a controversy, that is, its capacity to transform the institutions and actors involved, Cyril Lemieux stresses the need to take as a starting point “the institutional space or social milieu in which it originated rather than […] the media scene where it became visible to the greatest number” (ibid.: 201).

  • 3 On the question of values, see the debates in earlier issues of Questions de communication (Heinic (...)

8The controversies addressed in this Thematic Section have all received much media attention, except where conflicts took place within the space of the media itself, as was the case when journalists disagreed strongly on the status to be attributed to the book Pour en finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, and on its overall media treatment, as explored here by Marion Dalibert. Cyril Lemieux’s methodological recommendation of starting from the institutional spaces in which the controversies originate is not followed by the contributors, who begin precisely at the opposite end, with the issue of mediation. For these authors are not attempting to trace the growth and circulation of the controversies, but rather to grasp the ideological transformations they imply, in which the new discursive tensions created reconfigure political lines of conflict depending on the type of mediation employed: the televised debate and its reception, on digital platforms and in the online press (Florian Vörös); the press, radio and television (Marion Dalibert); and festivals (Konstantinos Eleftheriadis). From a slightly different perspective, Fatima Khemilat examines how Islam’s visibility in public space through women’s dress is now predominantly handled through the interface of the law; and Nelly Quemener’s contribution explores the methodological questions raised in research on the “affective intensities” characterising the media coverage of controversies. All authors are interested in the instituting and therefore performative function of controversies (rather than considering them to be the mechanical expression of an underlying social structure), not with a view to institutional reorganisation, but as catalysts for new ways of capturing an audience’s attention, new relationships to the world and new regimes of sensibility. This last point is central to Nelly Quemener’s contribution. The affective dimension of controversies, she argues, reflects their function as “self-fulfiling social processes”. Their “dichotomising force” redistributes values and emotions, and implicitly issues an injunction to “choose what side you’re on” within this binary framework. Quemener goes on to show that controversies produce specific modes of subjectivation, namely the possibility, for both actors and audiences in a controversy, to prove their “respectability” and affiliation to a group by responding to media demands formulated in terms of values and emotions.3

  • 4 The disqualification of one of the two parties sometimes has the effect of reterritorialising thei (...)

9So controversies can construct and dissolve audiences, especially as the latter are both the concrete entities that receive the message, and also figures evoked more or less explicitly in the discourse (Warner, 2005: 67). The type of audience that a controversy constructs as a third party, the discursive registers in which it is addressed and the function assigned to it can all be used to assess the nature and the range of the conflictual processes. The particularity of controversies that attract intense media attention is that they can tailor their address to different audiences, depending on the medium of communication and their own imagined audiences, which implies different framings of the conflict. These controversies are sustained less by the equal competence of the parties in conflict than by disqualification of one of the positions, which is then marked as incompetent or illegitimate, generally the one considered to rally fewer people around it, or to be farthest removed from the imagined public (Cervulle, 2017). As such, Cyril Lemieux’s characterisation of a controversy as a triadic structure in which the three actors are symbolically endowed with equal competence can be viewed as a form of ideal deliberation that is rarely encountered empirically, especially when the controversy challenges or seeks to preserve certain social relations pertaining to gender, race, class or the distribution and hierarchisation of sexualities. Controversies covered by the media paradoxically thrive on disqualifying one of the parties, depending on the imagined audience of the particular medium.4 Thus, while staging the confrontation between the parties, the media process makes them appear to be not quite on an equal footing. The same can be said of the imagined audience occupying the role of “judge” of the controversy. Controversies are moments of discursive reorganisation of audiences, where the issue is probably as much about resolving the conflict through deliberation as it is about the unequal distribution between publics of competence, expertise, and capacity (to say or do). As queer theorist Michael Warner (2005) points out, the type of audience that a controversy creates as a third instance, the discursive registers through which it is addressed, and the role it is assigned, are all instruments with which to examine the conflictual process.

Feminist and queer critiques of public space

  • 5 Carole Pateman argued that since citizenship is encoded as masculine, the social contract is in re (...)
  • 6 On the subject of the legal framework of private life, see also the work of Anita Allen (1988) on (...)
  • 7 Participatory parity differs from “French parity” as the author understands it: 1) because it is q (...)

10The feminist critique of Habermas’s theory of public space shows how profoundly it is structured by gender, particularly in the form of unequal conditions for political participation and the dividing line drawn between “public” and “private”. Nancy Fraser (1985: 56) has shown that “the institutional structure of [public space] is achieved through gendered social roles”. Male domination is expressed in the material inequalities that skew the conditions for equal participation, in the impossibility of establishing a dialogue between equals, in the disqualification of women’s voices and the encoding of citizenship as male.5 As a result, the conditions for democratic communication are not met. In order to combat gender injustices, Nancy Fraser recommends examining inequalities in distribution (theories of distributive justice are applied to the poverty that results from the gendered division of labour, for example); and inequalities in recognition (the legal construction of privacy6 and the cultural imperialism produced by the institutionalisation of androcentric models in law and medicine are addressed through philosophies of recognition [see Taylor, 1994; Honneth, 1992]). The just distribution of material resources between men and women, which guarantees independence of mind, together with the institutionalisation of alternative models, which ensures respect between individuals, enable all to interact as equals. This is what Nancy Fraser (2010) calls “participatory parity”.7 Influenced by the Frankfurt School (Fraser, 1992: 144–145), she exposes the terms “public” and “private” as “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels [which,] when used in political discourse, […] frequently serve to delegitimate certain interests, viewpoints and subjects in order to promote others” (with the consequence of perpetuating, beyond official restrictions on political participation, “handicaps of gender and class”). On this issue, Fraser criticises the ideological uses of a rhetoric of p’srivacy that removes “economic” and “family” problems from the field of social protest. Audrey Benoît (2014: 126) argues for a constructivist investment of this position:

  • 8 Author’s underlining.

“The rhetoric of domestic privacy” is the form by which, but also in which, objective thematic contents […] are excluded from public debate. Such an observation calls for a constructivist analysis: how do these formal discursive modes produce their own objects? How does this “rhetoric” create the very conditions for the distinction between the “public” and the ’private’?8

11This is why Audrey Benoît argues that, to deconstruct ’the public sphere’, it is necessary to identify how power effects are materialised in discourse. Similarly, Fatima Khemilat’s contribution, which centres on women in France wearing Islamic headwear in public, and on the principles underlying the legislation that was passed as a result of the controversies this gave rise to, shows that the “rules of general interest” which motivated the banning of the “full veil” in public only make sense in the light of the private/public divide. For the “Republic’s regime of visibility” prescribes that conspicuous religious signs be relegated to the private sphere, and that a person’s face should always be visible in public, in the name of “public morality” and “human dignity”.

  • 9 The political scientist Iris Marion Young develops a different critique of inclusion. For her, for (...)
  • 10 From a different angle, Chantal Mouffe (1999) argues for an agonistic conception of democracy, bas (...)

12Queer theorists criticised Nancy Fraser’s proposals on three accounts: how inclusion is conceived, the effects of the rhetorical use of the concepts of public and private and the failure to address the norms that organise participation in public life. From a queer perspective, inclusion through participatory parity does not wholly solve the problems caused by the way public space is already structured in a gendered way. “Newcomers” are supposed to be spokespeople for the group they represent, and this risks reifying identities (whereas each individual has multiple, shifting and sometimes contradictory identities).9 When parity was introduced in France, for instance, gender roles were again (re)produced, this time in politics, since women were expected to invest in certain issues and promote certain so-called “feminine“ values (Dulong, Matonti, 2005; Achin et al., 2007; Julliard, 2012). Additionally, political participation and access to public space remain conditional upon accepting normative gender identities and the division of sexualities (Clarke, 2000; Dalibert, Quemener, 2016; Cervulle, 2014; Espineira, 2014).10 So queer theory was invaluable for going deeper into the effects of the privatisation of gender and the sexualisation of the human person, these two themes being first addressed by Jürgen Habermas (1962) and Michel Foucault (1976), as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998) remind us. The latter authors argued that conceiving sexuality as a subjective property was central to the binary homo/heterosexuality division, insofar as it “prevents discussion of the social arrangements based on this binarism” (Cervulle, 2014: 147). The authors understand heterosexuality as a culture that fashions a hegemonic public, as they argue in their famous 1998 article “Sex in Public,” reproduced in translation here.

13Judith Butler (1997: 179) criticised Nancy Fraser’s arguments more directly. She accused Fraser of turning a blind eye to ’the exclusions necessary to define and naturalise the sphere of reproduction.’ Indeed, in assuming that queer politics is a struggle for the recognition of sexual minorities, Nancy Fraser (1997; 2010) interprets it as a purely cultural struggle, implicitly denying the material element in the social regulation of sexuality. She thus excludes sexuality from the field of political economy, and in so doing repeats society’s division and hierarchisation of oppressions, according to whether the latter belong to the realm of political economy wholly (class and race), only partially (gender) or not at all (sexuality). Judith Butler (1997: 178) considers that

“if struggles to transform the social field of sexuality are not seen as central to the political economy, it is not because they [are not] directly related to questions of labour, but rather because they cannot be understood if the economic sphere itself is not extended to include both the reproduction of goods and the social reproduction of people.”

14Production is first and foremost, as Karl Marx (1846) and Friedrich Engels (1884) pointed out, the production of human beings. The struggles to transform the field of sexuality show that the distinction between the cultural and the economic does not hold: sexual exchange has material as well as cultural effects. By examining how feminist, gay, lesbian and transgender counterpublics are constituted, we can analyse how the limits of what are designated as public space and public interest are renegotiated, and also the strategies used to reprivatise sexuality (Floyd, 2009). In France, the controversy around extending marriage rights to same-sex couples demonstrated both this permeability between the different spheres (the bill was defended in terms of equality of rights, particularly property rights), and the refusal by some actors to give a public forum to “private” sexual arrangements (the family, procreation and filiation being assumed here to be “natural”). It also demonstrated a traditional hierarchisation of struggles (there are “more important problems to solve” than equal rights for heterosexual and homosexual couples in France ; Cervulle, Julliard, 2013).

15Lastly, queer theory addresses getting one’s voice heard in the public arena. Michael Warner (2005: 118–119) criticises Nancy Fraser’s emphasis on the plurality of publics and the conflicts between them (1992) by drawing attention to her reliance in this argument on Habermas’s principle of “rational-critical” publics. She fails to identify how publics introduce new styles of language and registers of communication, and even a new aesthetics of contestation. Konstantinos Eleftheriadis’s contribution on activist practices in the organisation of European queer festivals dwells on this aspect in particular. Certain feminist theorists have advocated alternative ways of getting heard in public space, for example through narration (Mansbridge, 1999) personal narrative (Young, 1996), sit-ins, boycotts, or singing (Butler, Spivak, 2007), and indeed any type of public gathering that destabilises standard political forms, with their constitutive exclusions (Young, 2011; Butler, 2015). The renewed popularity of direct action derives from the fact that, in the eyes of these theorists, it is the only way to expose the false consensus generated by the hegemonic discourses on which deliberative procedures are based —consensus in the form of prejudices or beliefs in the unalterable quality of a particular social reality (Young, 2011).

  • 11 Concerning the communication-oriented approach when applied to the power relations that fashion me (...)
  • 12 As Laurence Monnoyer-Smith (2013: 25) notes, “some people refuse to participate because of the fra (...)

16On this point in particular, the communication-oriented approach provides valuable concepts and tools for exposing the normativity—denounced by feminist and queer theorists of public space—of the openings for participation in the public debate. This is essentially due to the ICS focus on how power relations work on the mechanisms [dispositifs] of mediation (Julliard, 2009).11 The rereadings of Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the dispositif, in particular with a view to understanding digital writing systems (see, for example, Bonaccorsi, Julliard, 2010; Monnoyer-Smith, 2013; Badouard, Mabi, Monnoyer-Smith, 2016), provide a helpful framework for analysing modes of participation in debates,12 authorised discursive formations, the reproduction of relations of domination, and the sites of particular visibility for certain subjectivations (Julliard, 2016). Florian Vörös’ contribution to the Section likewise takes Gilles Deleuze’s re-reading of Foucault’s dispositif as its starting point, going on to show how the arrangements for televised debates that stage a confrontation between different definitions of racism (and anti-racism) are themselves structured by power relations. The meshing of a communication studies approach with that of gender studies is by no means only heuristic, but on the contrary, it resituates social conflict as central, whereas the frequent use of the concept of dispositif in ICS has sometimes led to its depoliticisation (Gavillet, 2010).

Conclusion

  • 13 The question of the uses of the concept of intersectionality in field surveys was a major theme of (...)
  • 14 On gender as an operator of racialisation, see for example the work of Marion Dalibert (2014) on t (...)

17Although queer and feminist theories (including those which draw on the Frankfurt school) differ in their evaluation of the deliberative process and its limitations, they agree on one point, which is the need to address the co-constitution and interactions between the different dimensions of social differentiation. The queer political project has been particularly vigilant on this aspect, refusing to be assimilated as a sexual minority, because that would be to legitmate and strengthen inequalities linked to class and/or the racialisation of the social (Warner, 1993; Duggan, 2003; Bassichis, Spade, 2014). Within feminist theories, many analytical tools have been produced from modelling the relationships between gender, sexuality, class and race, although over the last two decades the debates have mainly focused on the concept of intersectionality forged by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991)—its heuristic dimension, its epistemological base, and its limits when applied empirically13 (Bilge, 2009; Hill Collins, Bilge, 2016; Fassa, Lépinard, Roca i Escoda, 2016). Most of the contributors to this Thematic Section thus attempt to link the media coverage of controversies to the different dimensions of social differentiation. This applies most clearly to Marion Dalibert’s article, which shows how the media reception of Édouard Louis’s novel Pour en finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, particularly in the national press, constructs a discourse in which the protagonist’s gender expression and sexuality is transformed into a figure of otherness that can be called ’the white working classes of northern France’. As the authors show, the relations between the different vectors of social differentiation are extremely complex, in media discourse. Difference is marked in diverse ways, depending on whether the issue is the construction of gender, racialisation, the division of sexualities or the production of a symbolic class order. It is not uncommon for gender or sexuality to operate as a vehicle for racialisation,14 or for a social class to be assigned a stereotypical gender identity. In other words, the main lines of differentiation underlying social relations are interwoven in a complex way in media representations and public debate. So if we want to show how they are interlinked, we need to pay attention to the unspoken aspects of the discourses, to the silent principles of division that underlie them, to the affective charge that runs through them, and even to the way in which one process of social segmentation may be expressed in the terms of another.

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Notes

1 As demonstrated by the number of thematic sections of ICS journals devoted to gender since 2003: “Une communication sexuée?” (Bonnafous, Jouët, Rieffel, 2003); “Sexe & Communication” (Bouchard, Froissart, 2004); “Espaces politiques au féminin” (Fleury, Walter, 2005); “Usages politiques du genre” (Desmarchelier, Rennes, 2005); “Femmes et médias: le 8 mars à la Une” (Coulomb-Gully, Bonnafous, 2007); “Penser le genre en sciences de l’information et de la communication et au-delà” and “Penser le genre en sciences de l’information et de la communication et au-delà (2)” (Fleury, Walter, 2009a; 2009b); “Médias: The Gender Factory” (Coulomb-Gully, 2011); “The Languages of Gender: Semiotics and Communication” (Berthelot-Guiet, Kunert, 2013); “Gender in Communication and Media” (Julliard, Quemener, 2014); “Sexualities” (Amato, Pailler, Schafer, 2014); “Pornography and its Discourses” (Paveau, Perea, 2014); and “Writing Gender” (Constantin de Chanay, Chevalier, Gardelle, 2017).

2 For a materialist version of the idea that, far from translating sex, gender actually produces it, see the work of Christine Delphy (2001).

3 On the question of values, see the debates in earlier issues of Questions de communication (Heinich, 2017; Fleury, Walter, 2017; Kaufmann, Gonzalez, 2017; Quéré, 2017; Martuccelli, 2017).

4 The disqualification of one of the two parties sometimes has the effect of reterritorialising their specific discursive formations in other, more receptive, public arenas. For example, opponents of “gender therory” have tended to abandon the “traditional media” in favour of the Web and digital platforms (Julliard, 2017).

5 Carole Pateman argued that since citizenship is encoded as masculine, the social contract is in reality a “sexual contract” (1988). Some years before Pateman’s and Fraser’s work, Jean Elshtain (1981) had denied the neutrality of citizenship, and advocated replacing the participatory and republican vision of citizenship by the maternal values of care. Many more works on the gendered dimension of public space followed those of Fraser (Lunt, Livingstone, 1994; Göle, 1997; Rendall, 1999), opening up a field which explores the relationships between social inequalities, gender identities and citizenship.

6 On the subject of the legal framework of private life, see also the work of Anita Allen (1988) on the gendered structuring of private life and the restrictions imposed, historically, on women’s personal (and particularly bodily) autonomy.

7 Participatory parity differs from “French parity” as the author understands it: 1) because it is qualitative, rather than quantitative; 2) because it embraces both dimensions of social justice, rather than just the dimension of recognition; 3) because it goes beyond the realm of politics alone; 4) because dimensions of social differentiation other than gender can be addressed through it; and 5) because it ensures the possibility of parity, rather than aiming at actual parity.

8 Author’s underlining.

9 The political scientist Iris Marion Young develops a different critique of inclusion. For her, formal inclusion is not enough because structural inequalities are carried over into deliberative procedures. To participate in these is therefore to “confer undeserved legitimacy on them and contribute to the censorship of outsiders” (Young, 2001: 145). So Young advocates a differentiated citizenship and the representation of oppressed social groups (1990), inseparably linked to the right to propose policies based on the specific interests of these groups and to veto general policies that undermine them.

10 From a different angle, Chantal Mouffe (1999) argues for an agonistic conception of democracy, based on the recognition that the conflict of identities is irreducible. For her, it is a question of constituting an “us”, in a context of diversity and conflict, in its difference from a “them” (the opponents who want to be part of the agonistic space, but whose ideas are to be contested). “Inclusion” has no meaning where an us/them distinction compatible with pluralism prevails.

11 Concerning the communication-oriented approach when applied to the power relations that fashion mediation devices, see, for example, the work carried out at the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM, University of Lorraine) on the notions of “(mechanisms [dispositifs]) of mediation” (in particular Aghababaie et al., 2010; Appel, Boulanger, Massou, 2010).

12 As Laurence Monnoyer-Smith (2013: 25) notes, “some people refuse to participate because of the framing mechanisms that endorse a form of procedural legitimacy to which they do not adhere (Mouffe, 1999)”.

13 The question of the uses of the concept of intersectionality in field surveys was a major theme of the Study Day organised by the Île-de-France region’s Major Interest Area “Gender, Inequalities, Discriminations: Intersectionality in Practice: disciplines, methods and surveys,” which was held at the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED) on 14 November 2014 (http://www.gid-idf.org/fr/activites/view/29/l-intersectionnalite-en-pratiques-disciplines-methodes-et-enquetes).

14 On gender as an operator of racialisation, see for example the work of Marion Dalibert (2014) on the media coverage of Romani people and their neighbours in city suburbs.

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Maxime Cervulle et Virginie Julliard, « Controversies and Gender: Feminist and Queer Approaches », Questions de communication [En ligne], 33 | 2018, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2023, consulté le 18 octobre 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/questionsdecommunication/32593 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/questionsdecommunication.32593

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Maxime Cervulle

University Paris 8 Vincennes—Saint-Denis, Centre for Media, Technologies, and Internationalisation Studies, F-93526 Saint-Denis, France

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Virginie Julliard

Compiègne University of Technology, Knowledge, Organisation and Technical Systems, F-60203 Compiègne, France

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Saskia Brown

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