Monday, November 16th, 2015 Beauty and the Bourse: Marine Le Pen, Class Grievances, and the Gendered Political Field

Description

** Please note that this event has been rescheduled to begin at 3 p.m.**

This paper explains how gendered political symbolism answers class grievances in contemporary France. It draws from ethnographic observation and interviews of petty bourgeois adherents of the radical right wing Front National (FN) party, especially focusing on the love and admiration party members express for Marine Le Pen, the party’s leader. Petty bourgeois FN supporters view the French political class as a bourgeois liberal class. Their critique of mainstream politics is a critique of class, and vice versa. Furthermore, this bourgeois class is implicitly seen as a male class of professional politicians. Therefore, a symbolically potent woman is seen as the appropriate corrective to France’s political-economic woes. Marine Le Pen is adored as the political daughter intimately known from childhood, and unlike professional male politicians, supporters see her as literally born for politics, incarnating a familiar and impassioned corrective to male bourgeois elites. The paper also briefly consider some feminist dilemmas in considering how Marine Le Pen’s political success is premised, in part, on her self-presentation as an impassioned, embodied, maternal, and filial political figure.

Dorit Geva is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. She completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at New York University, was then the Vincent Wright Fellow in Comparative Politics at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, and spent four years as a Harper Schmidt Fellow teaching social theory at the University of Chicago. She joined the Central European University in Autumn 2011. Her expertise is in political sociology, qualitative methods, gender politics, and comparative and historical sociology. She wrote a comparative book on the politics of military service in France and the United States, published by Cambridge University Press in 2013, and related journal articles published in the American Journal of Sociology, Polity, Politics and Society, and various other journals. Her current research, supported by a European Commission Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, follows the gender politics of right-wing parties and movements in France.