ABSTRACT
This chapter opens the first part of the book which focuses on hybridization, by observing texts about “gender” and “intersectionality”. Ever since the UN’s Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, the translation between English and French of terms concerning gender-related issues has shown discrepancies that reflect profound differences in political positioning. The first part of the chapter (Sections 2.1–2.3) deals with the French reluctance to accept the calque “genre” from the time it began to spread internationally in UN documents. The second part of the chapter (Sections 2.4–2.5) explores the case of the commodification of women and the hegemonic neoliberal discourse, focusing on two paradigms of the EU’s gender discourse: first, the debate on prostitution and the body as a commodity, which pits the adherents of regulation against abolitionists and leads to a critique of patriarchy (Section 2.4), and second, the framing of women and policies against intersectional discrimination in purely economic terms which reduce women to the status of workers (Section 2.5).
