Princesses, Tomboys and ‘gender theory’: film, family and school as symbolic battlegrounds in the culture wars of twenty-first-century France

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ABSTRACT Superficially, two French-language films—Alain Berliner’s Ma vie en Rose (1997) and Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy (2011)—mobilise the same subject matter: a gender-transgressive child exploring gender performativity. Yet in a counterintuitive turn, only the latter film generated serious post-release controversy, including petitions against its scholastic distribution. This article aims to explain that distinction and examine why Tomboy alone became such a cultural-political lightning rod. To that end, it details the shifting cultural and political circumstances that, in 2010s France, saw Tomboy as the embodiment of threats to French institutions including, above all, the family. By digging into the tenets of French republicanism imagined to be menaced—especially the education system, where Tomboy had in 2012 been conscripted into a film-based curricular programme—this article homes in on just how Tomboy became such a flashpoint. Furthermore, this article looks not just to context but also to these films’ forms and plots themselves to clarify how each one reinforces or challenges the philosophical buttresses of ‘Frenchness’. With the assistance of existing scholarship on Céline Sciamma alongside political (Robcis), queer (Perreau) and postcolonial (Tévanian) theories, this article understands films like Tomboy and Ma vie en Rose as rich texts with symbolic importance far beyond their fictional scopes.