Laure Bereni
Post doctoral scholar
Address until August 2009:
Institut des Sciences sociales du Politique – ISP/CNRS
ENS Cachan, Bât. Laplace, 61 avenue du Président Wilson,
F-94235 Cachan Cedex
email: Laure.Bereni@ens.fr
Homepage
Address from September 2009 on:
New York University / Institute of French Studies
15 Washington Mews
New York, NY 10012, United States
Primary research interests
Women’s movements and feminism; Identity politics; Anti-discrimination policies.
I completed my Ph.D thesis on the campaigns for gender parity in political representation in France (entitled « From Claim to Law. The campaigns for gender parity in France, 1992-2000 ») at the Department of Political Science of the University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (December 2007). In my dissertation, I explored the origins and evolution of the 1999 and 2000 so called “gender parity laws”, introducing a gender quotas on electoral lists in order to reach an equal representation of women and men (“parity”) in elected assemblies. My dissertation accounts for how parity has shifted from a marginal claim to a consensual reform in less than ten years. This research has yielded three central findings. First, I have shown that one of the most crucial aspects of parity’s success was the cross-sectional dimension of the parity campaigns, based on alliances between women’s actors located in different social arenas. These actors include members of women’s autonomous organizations, feminists working within the state’s bureaucracy (“femocrats”), members of women’s groups within political parties and intellectuals specialized in gender studies. I coined a specific concept, the “field of women’s advocacy” (“espace de la cause des femmes”, in French), to designate the cross-sectional configuration of women’s collective struggles in contemporary France more generally. Secondly, using history as an important dimension of my work, I have shown that the campaigns for gender parity emerged as a product of the gradual institutionalization of the radical French second wave women’s movement. Finally, my work examines the discursive dimension of the campaigns. I have analyzed how parity advocates have shaped their claims in order to fit into the dominant discourses of “republican universalism” and the so-called “crisis” of democracy.
The research I am currently conducting explores the recent emergence of corporation level policies against discrimination and promoting “diversity” in the workplace in France. Since the beginning of the 2000s, under the pressure of a more authoritative antidiscrimination legal framework, some corporate actors – mainly experts in human resources and corporate social responsibility specialists – have advanced arguments and programs to promote diversity in the marketplace thereby embedding anti-discrimination ideas into managerial rhetoric. This ongoing research will allow me to examine the changing roles of public and private actors regarding social issues. It will also allow me to explore the ways in which diversity disrupts the dominant discourse of difference-blind republican universalism as much as it is defined by it.