Disruptive Bodies ? Gender and Coloniality in French Parliaments (1793-1958)

The aim of this project could be described in several ways. It is to extend what I have done in my previous work, an investigation of the material, social and gendered ways of acting and behaving of and in the French Parliaments between 1793 and 1970, in order to introduce other "disruptive bodies": colonial, "colored" subjects, eventually "colonized" women. It is to bring complexity and depth to the narrative by adding to the women question the colonial and racial ones, to characterize the gender and coloniality of legislative bodies. The interest is historical: the objective is to carry out intersectional analyses, to do prosopographical work, etc. It is also theoretical: introducing women or men "of color" does not raise the same questions – a century and a half was needed, for example, between the admission of the first black legislator (1793) and the election of the first female deputies (1945). But the project also aims at trying and focus on the material conditions of parliamentary work, from dress codes and the partitions of space, to the racialization and gender division processes, the way they interact or not. In short, through a study on the French case, the goal is to advance a symmetrical anthropology of western and contemporary institutions, the reintegration of the racial and gendered dimension at the heart of the metropolitan institutions that centrally contribute to the definition of republicanism and universalism.