Colette Guillaumin
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Colette Guillaumin (28 January 1934 – 10 May 2017), was a sociologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and a French feminist.[1] Guillaumin is an important theorist of the mechanisms of racism and sexism, and relations of domination.[2] She is also an important figure in materialist feminism.[3]
She participated in the founding of the journal Questions féministes, alongside other French academics (such as Simone de Beauvoir) and is also one of the co-founders of the journal Le Genre Humain.
Guillaumin was influential in the early academic field of the social construction of gender. Her theories overlap with those of radical feminists and lay the groundwork for gender criticism.
Colette Guillaumin was born on 28 January 1934 in Thiers.[4][5] She studied ethnology and psychology in Paris. She taught sporadically in France and Canada. She joined the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1959, initially as a technician and then from 1962 onwards as a researcher. In 1969, she defended her thesis Un aspect de l'altérité sociale. L'idéologie raciste, which was supervised by Roger Bastide.[4] Guillaumin became a doctor in sociology at the centre in 1969.
Between 1969 and 1972, she participated in the Laboratoire de sociologie de la dominance with Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Colette Capitan and Jacques Jenny.[4]
She first did research on racism: following Frantz Fanon, she emphasized the inferiorization of non-whites and the hierarchization of people according to their biological characteristics. She was one of the first in the study of racism to argue that the notion of "race" has no scientific value, does not refer to any natural reality and is an arbitrary mode of classification.[4] She worked in particular to dismantle the naturalizing and essentialist discourses that legitimize discrimination.
In 1972, the results of her thesis were published by Mouton under the title L'Idéologie raciste, genèse et langage actuel (Racist ideology, genesis and current language), a work that was reissued in 2002 by Gallimard.[5] In it, Guillaumin analyzes racism as a social fact, and develops the concept of racization as mentioned in previous studies.[6] According to Naudier and Soriano, this book (her only work, but which also represents the heart of her thinking) should have marked the history of the emergence of studies on the social relations of race in France, but this turning point did not take place.[5]
By the end of the 1960s, Guillaumin was already interested in feminism. In 1972, analogies between the notions of race and sex were found in L'idéologie raciste.[5] Guillaumin was part of the group of feminists who had been working on the issue for many years. As part of this, herself and others founded the journal Questions féministes in 1977 (although she was not on the editorial board that inaugurated the journal), which was the source and publication organ of materialist feminism.[5] During this time, she worked with Christine Delphy, Monique Wittig, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Paola Tabet, Monique Plaza and Emmanuèle de Lesseps. In 1978, she published Pratique du pouvoir et idée de nature (in two parts), which theorized the appropriation of women through material social relations and naturalist ideology.[7][8] She draws parallels between racism and sexism, and gives the name "sexing" to the appropriation of one gender class by another.[4] In this field, Guillaumin wrote several texts for the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peuples (MRAP) and was involved in feminist groups following on from the May 1968 civil unrest.[5]
In 1992, Sexe, Race et Pratique du pouvoir (Sex, Race and the Practice of Power) was published, which included articles published in the journals Sociologie et sociétés (University of Montreal) and Le Genre humain, which Guillaumin co-founded in 1981.[5][9] She also wrote in the journal Sexe et race (University of Paris).[7] The term "sexage" that she created was taken up by Michèle Causse, Danielle Juteau and Nicole Laurin, as well as by Jules Falquet.[10][11]
She died on 10 May 2017 in Lyon.[8]
