Macé Éric, 2015, L’Après-patriarcat , Paris, Seuil, La couleur des idées, 180 p.

Abstract

Mace Eric, 2015, L'Apres-patriarcat [Post-patriarchy], Paris, Seuil, La couleur des idees, 180 p.Eric Mace's latest book begins with observation that though European countries support principle of sexual equality, and though women's and men's statuses and practices have come to resemble each other more closely in several areas, inequalities and discriminations persist. To explain this inegalitarian egalitarianism author puts forward a historical analysis of gendered social relations in Europe and elsewhere. It is not his aim to demonstrate continuity but rather to study different modes of production over time. The historical perspective is a means of highlighting specificity of contemporary relations, which Mace describes as post-patriarchal.In first chapter, he presents his main conceptual tool, a term borrowed from Erving Goffman: between sexes, or in author's version, gender arrangement. He defines it as the way each type of society culturally relates question of sexual difference to those of sexuality and masculine and feminine identity, and how it fits this together with social organization of work, family, politics, etc.. This notion enables him to point up historical, contingent nature of gender: there is nothing necessary, or necessarily permanent, about sexual inequality. The book therefore stands opposed to interpretations of relations that associate contemporary inequalities with those found in traditional societies. In direct contrast to Pierre Bourdieu's Masculine Domination, cited as a counter-example for its claim that relations in modern Europe are anthropologically continuous with relations in traditional Kabyle society, LApres patriarcat insists on historicity of social relations (in broadest sense of that term) between sexes.Specifically, book draws attention to major historical break in continuity represented by arrival of Western modernity in late fifteenth century. This event divided world into a before and after. Before, there was traditional patriarchy; after, there was modern and modernized patriarchy; last came post-patriarchal period - present time of Western societies. He defines patriarchy as the move to establish a necessary and legitimate asymmetry between men and women. In its traditional form, this asymmetry was based on cosmological or theological principles. While this constituted a particular arrangement (occurring as it did in history), it was also universal in that it characterized all traditional societies. That model was radically changed by Western modernity, which brought about shift from one world to another. Traditional patriarchy was not abandoned at that time but rather reconfigured, modernized: asymmetry of feminine and masculine was no longer legitimated by religion but by science, which naturalized sexual difference and inequality. However, modernity also introduced conflict, for at same moment as all men were declared free and equal, feminism emerged as a demand for sexual equality. Gradually, convergence between different developments worked to erode legal, scientific and economic foundations of women's subordination, with result that conditions for maintaining patriarchy were no longer in place: no longer appeared necessary (sexual division was no longer constitutive of social organization) or legitimate (feminist struggles had successfully imposed principle of sexual equality). In post-patriarchal society characteristic of contemporary Western European countries, it is now the equality and autonomy of individuals that appear necessary and legitimate, not only from perspective of institutions but from that of individuals as well. And yet sexual inequality persists. Mace reviews several types of it in book's longest chapter, which draws on a number of social science studies of inequality in different spheres of social life: family, work, school, media, and others. …