Granted one wish, she asked the genie for gender equality, an unattainable wish according to the genie who asked her to choose again. Here, French colonialism and the treatment of Islam become central categories in Delphy’s thought-provoking critique.īarbara Karatsioli (BK): There’s an anecdote about a woman who found a magic lantern.

Her work includes Close to Home: a materialist analysis of women's oppression, Separate and dominate: feminism and racism after the War on Terror.īarbara Karatsioli met with Delphy to talk about the two strands of her activist life, feminism and gender equality in France, and a feminist response to issues of war and peace. She was central in unveiling the structural importance of the family in women's oppression and more recently the mechanisms behind the war on terror, extending and reinforcing that very oppression. I aim not only to give Delphy's work the benefit of a sympathetic reading but also to demonstrate how such a reading participates in contesting two of the narratives that Clare Hemmings has identified as reducing the “feminist seventies” to “seventies feminism.” Delphy's constructivist materialist conceptualization of gender belies efforts to contrast the (essentialist) seventies with the (constructivist) nineties-efforts that mark the latter as theoretically and politically superior.Christine Delphy is a French sociologist and a central figure in French and international feminism since the 1970s.

This essay undertakes a close reading of Delphy's writings on gender together with her earlier work on women as social class to elaborate what I term her constructivist materialism: a materialist analysis of gender hierarchy premised on the conviction that sex difference is not the foundation of gender but is, rather, its effect. This essay revisits the work of Christine Delphy, a leading activist in the women's liberation movement in France and a leading materialist feminist theorist whom many US feminist scholars have written off as a “seventies feminist”: she not only published one of her most-read pieces in the 1970s but is also judged to typify that period by virtue of her (in)famous conceptualization of women as a class.

Christine delphy close to home