Please join us as we welcome Laure Bereni, Bruno Perreau, Camille Robcis, and Anne Verjus for a panel discussion on La Théorie du genre: A French Controversy, moderated by Emmanuelle Saada.

“Gender theory” has become central to several important public controversies in France, including the 2012 and 2013 demonstrations against gay marriage and attacks on new French school curricula that explore male/female equality. In this context, American-style gender theory has been criticized as incompatible with the French “Republican model.” The panel will discuss the multiple tensions between Republican discourse and the category — and theory– of gender.
Laure Bereni is a sociologist and researcher with the CNRS at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs. She is a specialist of gender studies and her books include Le genre, théories et controverses (2014, with co-author Mathieu Trachman) and La bataille de la parité: Mobilisations pour la féminisation du pouvoir (Economica, 2015). Bruno Perreau is the Cynthia L. Reed Professor and Associate Professor of French Studies at MIT and the author of Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford UP, 2016). Anne Verjus is a CNRS Research Professor at the CIRHUS (NYU) and the author of Le bon mari: Une histoire politique des hommes et des femmes à l’époque révolutionnaire (Fayard, 2010). Camille Robcis is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University and the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in Twentieth-Century France. Emmanuelle Saada is Associate Professor of French and History at Columbia University. Her first book, Les enfants de la colonie: les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté, was published in France in 2007 and translated in 2012 under the title Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation and Citizenship in the French Colonies (University of Chicago Press).