Description
In recent years, a growing number of states with a Feminist Foreign Policy have turned the gaze to their national sphere to assess gender equality and have included an internal dimension in their feminist foreign policy strategy (see for instance, Sweden’s, France’s and Canada’s). Looking at gender relations introspectively also speaks to postcolonial/decolonial criticisms that the FFP imagines feminism to travel from the Global North to the Global South, West to East and that it is something to do ‘over there’ (Anstrop et al. 2021, p. 206; see also Achilleos-Sarl 2018). In an effort to (re)brand themselves through the application of feminist foreign policy, states in the Global North are produced as feminist agents of change and bastions of gender equality (Jezierska and Towns 2018). This paper illustrates the political purchase of re-entangling the domestic realm with foreign policy to trouble this story. I focus on three significant aspects of French gender politics that reveals France’s fragile relationship with gender: the ‘model Republicain’ and universalism in French society; the notion of ‘sexual democracy’ and the racialisation of gender equality; and the rise of (state-sponsored) anti-genderism since the 2000s.
