Published in France in October 2023 by Les éditions du Seuil, #MeToo, le combat continue is a collective work by Mediapart journalists and contributors that charts the feminist revolution across the globe that followed the eruption in 2017 of the MeToo hashtag and movement. Over the more than six years since, debates, controversies and new awareness of the issues behind that movement have shaken many societies and to different degrees.
Included in #MeToo, le combat continue are the analyses and observations of various academic experts whose opinions Mediapart sought in order to better understand what has, or hasn’t, changed since 2017, and which are republished online on Mediapart in a series of seven interviews. Below is that with Christelle Taraud a historian specialising in gender questions and also the history of women, sexuality and sexual crimes in the context of colonialisation.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
She is a member of a joint unit of research into 19th-century history run by the Paris-1 and Sorbonne universities, and teaches courses at the Paris annexes of both Columbia University and New York University. In 2022 she edited Féminicides, une histoire mondiale (Femicides, a worldwide story), a compilation tracing the history, from prehistoric times to today, of violence against women.
In the interview below, she tells Mediapart why, as she puts it, “there is a correlation between the #MeToo and post-#MeToo movement and the pandemic of femicides currently happening everywhere in the world”.
---------------
Mediapart: Despite the announcement of new legislation to come, and despite the government’s “Grenelle” consultations with those involved in tackling the issue of domestic violence, the numbers of recorded femicides in France have fallen very little. How do you explain that?
Christelle Taraud: Firstly, pockets [of the population] still escape from the policies for the prevention of femicides, such as rural areas. Women there are too often abandoned. Access to information is lacking. But the essential problem resides in the fact that the only horizon is the logic of repression. Whereas femicides are the result of a very old story – they are simply a paroxysmal manifestation of the system of crushing women which was forged at the dawn of humanity.
Today, femicides occur often in situations where couples break up. Ghada Hatem, who runs the Maison des femmes de Saint-Denis [editor’s note, a shelter and help structure for women victims of violence, situated in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis), also observes peaks of violence during periods of pregnancy – in those moments, men are supplanted, in the universe of women, by the baby to come or the newly born baby.
Moreover, murders often occur during the moment a woman says ‘no’, leaves, and where the man has the feeling of losing control, linked to the placing in question of his virile identity. The aim of such violence is the restating of the hierarchy of genders. It’s a manner of saying ‘I represent the strong gender and you the weak gender’, and so ‘you must obey me’, ‘you are my object’, ‘you exist only for me and through me’. Femicide is the crime of a proprietor.
So, violence is really what articulates all our social relationships that are situated at the heart of hegemonic masculinity, of the system of crushing women, and therefore femicides. To eradicate it, a society must be put in place which is based on radically different values and which massively turns its back on violence.
Mediapart: What link do you make between femicides, sexual violence and incest? Is it about the same relationship of domination which you speak of?
C.T.: For me, it’s all about the same thing. Which is why I created the concept of a ‘femicide continuum’. To split up and box-off violence, to analyse it in a distinct manner – treating rape as if it could be disassociated with harassment, incest, crimes of femicide – participates in the strategy of the perpetrator. It avoids shining light on their common systemic aspect.
Moreover, when one questions women they themselves very often don’t make a link between the episodes of violence they’ve suffered during their lives. Whereas they constitute a flow that crosses over the life of women, from birth until death – polymorphous violence that includes controlling bodies, misogynous speech, insults in the street, humiliation at home or at work. To kill a woman appears more serious than calling her a “bitch”, yet it comes from the same structuring logic of hegemonic masculinity.
Mediapart: Does the #MeToo movement give rise to increased violence against women?
C.T.: Yes. The movement can be regarded as a case of possible rupture, at a local and international level; the owners can fear losing their toy. It is observed that during periods when women’s rights are relayed by powerful feminist movements, complaints for incest, sexual crimes, paedophilia, and physical, psychological or sexual violence within a couple, increase significantly. On the opposite, when women bend and lower the knee, they’re killed less. There is therefore a correlation between the #MeToo and post-#MeToo movement and the pandemic of femicides currently happening everywhere in the world.
Other reasons explain the rise in violence. They are recorded more, and they are talked about more. So we see them more. It should also be noted that a number of the murders of cis or transgender women went below the radar – today we discover that some cold cases were femicides. It’s the same for certain cases of suicide, with the notion that has developed in recent years of assisted or mercy killing. Finally, little by little one understands that some women are overexposed to violence, those who are handicapped, racialised or are sex workers. All of that is blowing up in our face. We accept that the values of hegemonic masculinity structure our common world whereas they damage us, as much individually as collectively.
Mediapart: The failures of the justice system and the police are often cited, quite rightly. But are we expecting too much of the justice system? Can it alone absorb this problem of violence? Or is it also, itself tainted by the culture of rape, one of the causes of the violence?
C.T.: The state is patriarchal, its institutions are as well. The police and the justice system are aggressive fraternities which are based on virile-like connivances. Even the presence of people from ethnic minorities or women solves nothing because we live in a world that is structured by hegemonic masculinity. If we transpose the problem of femicides, which concern us here, to racial issues we can understand what it means to belong to a masculinist corps. Think of Tyre Nichols, the black family father who was killed in the United States in January 2023 at the hands of Memphis police officers who were themselves black.
In France, despite everything, some magistrates want to change things, they have energy, intelligence and will. There is progress, and symbolic convictions that are more and more heavy. But all the important posts remain in the hands of men, with some prosecutors who continue to believe – and to put about in court – the idea that femicide is a feminist invention.
I’ve said it before, it’s the whole of society which must move into action. To send men to prison won’t be enough. The wish to train the actors within the [police and justice] chain is also interesting but who will train them? The degree of adopted radicality will be important. If the training consists of saying ‘to hit is bad’, ‘to kill is bad’, that won’t suffice. French society must be engaged in a vast process of deconstruction. A blaze can’t be put out with a glass of water.
I feel, however, that there is a collective astonishment within society today. Women are becoming aware of the gravity of the situation. But yet we still, in a certain sense, only go about ‘managing misery’. That of women, the poor, children born to immigrants, we don’t sort out any of the problems. We don’t live together, we live, at best, the ones and others beside each other, and at worst, against each other, accepting that the values of hegemonic masculinity structure our common world whereas they damage us, at very profound levels, as much individually as collectively.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this interview can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse