What are single-sex meetings for?

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20 minutes

In #MotsPourMaux today we talk about single-sex, a debate that has picked up the hair of the animal since the assistant to the City of Paris, Audrey Pulvar, estimated on BFMTV on March 28 that it did not shock her not "that discriminated people feel the need to meet among themselves to discuss it" and that white people could be asked to "be silent" during these meetings.

In reality the debate is not new, and resurfaces almost every year.

In 2016, it was a decolonial camp in Reims that caused controversy, because it is displayed as non-mixed.

The same year, the “Feminisms” commission of the Nuit Debout movement was accused of excluding men.

The following year, it is the Nyansapo Festival, organized by the Afro-feminist collective Mwasi, which reacts, because of certain workshops "reserved for black women".

The following year, there are workshops reserved for minorities in the University of Tolbiac.

And so on.

MLF and Black Panthers

However, it has been over forty years since women and minorities have organized themselves into single-sex groups.

The debate on single sex appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, because many anti-racist and feminist movements of the time chose single sex.

This is the case with the anti-racist movement of the Black Panthers in the United States.

And in France, the Women's Liberation Movement, which explained in an issue of the journal Partisans "having to take charge of their own liberation".

The reasons for the chosen single sex

So why do some anti-racist and feminist movements feel the need to organize single-sex meetings?

It should be noted that the MLF activists came for many completely mixed associations, but that the meetings in the presence of men were not always obvious, as the sociologist Alban Jacquemart recounts in his book

Men in feminist movements.

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  • In single-sex meetings, women and minorities feel more free to talk about intimate experiences that are difficult to tell.

    Non-mixing makes it possible to break the wall of silence.

  • These people also realize that the problems they experience on a daily basis are shared by many other women.

    Non-mixing allows the emergence of a group conscience, for example the “class of women”, according to an analogy widely used at the time by the MLF.

  • Single-sex meetings also allow you to move faster, because women do not need to re-explain to men things they have been through and know perfectly well.

  • Single sex allows you to express your anger, which would be more difficult to do in front of men.

  • Finally, as men have been socially educated to speak more easily than women, single-sex meetings are also a guarantee that women will be able to express themselves, without the word being confiscated by men familiar with expression. public.

Men urged to keep creches during MLF events

In short, as feminist philosopher Christine Delphy explains, single sex is a guarantee of self-emancipation.

It was, for example, during a single-sex meeting that the rapes and sexual assaults that occurred during Night Standing were first mentioned.

And it is because the word emerged at that time that action could be taken.

This does not mean that the men were totally excluded from the actions of the MLF: they were welcome in the demonstrations, provided that they did not occupy the front of the procession, which was not always respected.

And they were accepted during days of action organized in 1972 at the Mutualité Française, on condition that they did not speak.

The men were then invited to keep the crib.

"Racists", the anti-racist movements?

Despite all these reasons, which anti-racist and feminist movements have always explained in detail, the principle of temporary single-sex has always aroused a lot of criticism.

In 1976, for example, an International Tribunal for Crimes Against Women was held in Brussels.

Nearly a thousand women came from many countries to testify about the violence suffered.

But what was the media insisting on at the time?

On the fact that the event was single-sex, as recalled by the former figure of the Women's Liberation Movement, Martine Storti.

Audrey Pulvar's words have been qualified as "racist", "separatist" and "discriminatory" by many elected right and far right, from LREM to RN.

Even part of the left is not comfortable with this idea of ​​single-sex meetings.

In 2016, the former Minister of National Education Najat Vallaud Belkacem considered that these meetings expressed a “racist vision of society”, leading to “withdrawal into oneself, community division and everyone at home”.

A step, not an end in itself

Let us note all the same that today, single-sex people are much more upset when it comes to racialized people than women, or other minorities.

Likewise, it would not occur to anyone to dispute that employees can meet among themselves, without the bosses.

And the same people who take offense at meetings reserved for non-white people usually never proclaim their outrage when there are only men or only whites in the meetings of elected officials, in the photos of companies or among the winners of the award ceremonies.

This endured non-mixing is very far from the chosen and temporary single-sex.

The first is the result of mechanisms of invisibilization and cooptation, on which we do not wonder, which promote an inter-self.

The second is a political tool for emancipation, but which is only a step.

By no means an end in itself.

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