The University of Paris 8 had long been marked by feminist politics. But it was also a home for what can only be called left patriarchy , whose malign effects had created the very need for feminist intervention. Who watches the children while they go to political meetings?
In these early years, the institution was not yet called Paris 8, but rather the Experimental University Center at Vincennes. This feminist protest at Vincennes was a major break from the male-dominated far-left politics that had emerged in the aftermath of May Clearly at this point, it has to be thought intersectionally and historically.
Given the relations between patriarchal domination and other modes of power, violence and classification, a general theory of contemporary patriarchy would have to become a theory of the world at large, seen from many angles across uneven geographies. As Marxist feminists have long insisted, the relations of production and the relations of reproduction have to be read in concert. That analytical problem will come up again in Part II of this book.
Here, I simply wish to emphasize the historical point: that second wave feminism emerged in this site precisely when left-wing masculine domination seemed so very total. In the context of French radical philosophy, patriarchy assumes a particular form that we can call, with Tania Toffanin , left-wing patriarchy or left patriarchy for short. Left patriarchy involves a specific contradiction: the contradiction that patriarchal power and masculine violence endure in academic spaces nominally dedicated to liberation and radical social critique.
At the Philosophy Department, this contradiction was all too durable. Feminists at Vincennes endured a great deal. After their first action in May , the assembled men were invited to follow the women organizers into a lecture hall for a discussion. The plan was to explain the protest and then ask them to leave, stating that women would only be able to meet among themselves. In the end, the crowd was only calmed by an analogy from Black radicalism.
