ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how gender and sexual orientation may inflect the structures of French society and culture. The importance of politicizing gender becomes even more apparent when examining more central areas of French people’s experience. French people’s experience of their national culture is closely bound up with their gender. As in other countries, men and women’s tastes and consumer habits in France diverge rather obviously in the domain of leisure. Apart from the scale of under-representation in politics, the gender inequalities are hardly peculiar to France. However, there is a cultural specificity about the French ’take’ on gender inequalities. The culture inspired by the French women’s movement from the early 1970s, as distinct from that of the fashion world and the classic women’s magazines, which remain both popular and very gender-specific, was at least for a while both eclectic in range and highly visible.
