Male Domination and Feminism in the Social Movements

Abstract

By comparing four mobilizations of “without” (unemployed persons and undocumented people) in France, we investigate the interactions between the feminism and the processes of deepening democratization in the years 1990-2000. Through an immersion based on participating observations and interviews since 1998 until 2016, this article shows that the experience of democratic deepening which establish the "progressive" social movements are not exempt to reproduce and to produce –through the militating division of labour– relations of domination between agents and dynamics of resistance of the latter. First, we identify the extent to which the male domination structures every studied mixed struggle. Second, we explain how, thanks to the organization of the militant work, some men impose themselves and lock the other participants into dominated modes –active or passive– of participation. Third, if the feminism as a political movement seems relegated, even rejected, it does not mean that feminist practices do not succeed in spreading. It is about a "practical feminism" which alternates between the direct denunciation of the male domination and the more indirect confrontation with the latter through the organization of the militant labour.