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Francine Descarries
The Hegemony of the English
Language in the Academy:
The Damaging Impact of the
Sociocultural and Linguistic Barriers
on the Development of Feminist
Sociological Knowledge, Theories
and Strategies
As a francophone sociologist and activist feminist living in a bilingual
country, I intend in this article to address questions that arise from my
analysis of current feminist debates and practices in the academy. More
specifically, my article deals with the issue of the hegemony of English-
speaking scholarship over the definition of feminist sociological knowledge
and feminism itself as well as the danger of dilution, homogenization and
theoretical and strategic misrepresentation and silencing (Winter, 1997) that
are likely to occur when one cultural and linguistic voice is given as
dominant, and all other voices end up being identified, if they are indeed
identified or recognized at all, as ‘others’.
The issue of language in feminist studies or more globally in sociology
raises the question of the relations between centre and peripheries in a
context where the preoccupations, theoretical and methodological frame-
works and solutions considered at the centre have a greater chance of being
judged important and universal than those that emerge at the margins, which
are, more often than not, considered as particular, culturally related and
secondary.
But before going on with this discussion, I think it would be helpful to
put my thoughts into perspective, to present briefly some information con-
cerning important factors that have contributed to the evolution of feminist
Current Sociology, November 2003, Vol. 51(6): 625–636 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com
[0011–3921(200311)51:6;625–636;036274]
studies in Québec and given its particular traits to the sociointellectual milieu
in which I have evolved as a francophone feminist sociologist.
Women’s studies timidly appeared on the academic scene in francophone
Québec in the early 1970s and have, since then, increasingly succeeded in
imposing themselves as a pluridisciplinary academic field. In Québec uni-
versities, as elsewhere in Canada, the relationship that has developed over the
years between sociology and feminist studies still has some ambiguities. My
personal assessment is that Québec feminist scholars do indeed enjoy name
recognition and, though certain forms of indifference towards their
epistemological and political preoccupations have not totally disappeared, it
is possible to say that feminist studies now represent a recognized field and
have indeed contributed to a substantial transformation of research
approaches and models of interpretation in many academic disciplines or
fields of research., including sociology.
For the sake of the present discussion, it is important to realize that the
evolution of Québec feminist studies and research, like other fields of soci-
ology, has taken advantage of their unique position at the crossroads of
French and Canado-American feminist and sociological cultures and has
been largely tied to the sociopolitical environment in which they have
emerged and expanded. This specific situation, in a social context where
women’s groups played an important part in the modernization and national-
ist dynamic of Québec society, has indeed given Québec feminist studies
their distinct orientation, which has produced a modèle québécois that rep-
resents an original synthesis between the pragmatic approach of the
American and the more theoretically oriented options of French feminists
scholars; whereas from the Anglo-Canadian experience, we have retained the
notion of political agenda.
This situation has helped francophone feminist scholars to realize the
theoretical and strategic power of concepts and schools of thought and
adhere, at the same time, to a conception of feminist research oriented
towards action as an integral part of the women’s movement (Lamoureux,
1986; Dagenais, 1996, 1999; Descarries, 1998). For example, the two most
important francophone women’s teaching and research centres in Québec,
l’Institut de recherches et d’études féministes de l’UQAM (IREF) and le
Groupe de recherches et d’études multidisciplinaires féministes (GREMF)
have chosen for strategic and semantic reasons to list their programmes under
the heading ‘feminist studies’ rather than women’s studies. In so doing, they
wanted to make the political label more explicit and work in a more inclusive
transformative perspective or problématique applicable to all subject areas
and social processes, rather than limited to a specific subject area: women.
At the same time, the particular context in which Québec feminist
scholars have evolved has prompted them to stay in touch with women’s
groups’ preoccupations and practices, thus reducing the cleavage that often
626 Current Sociology Vol. 51 No. 6
exists between scholars and militants. It has also made them conscious of the
necessity to explore different research approaches and methodologies in
order to reduce tensions between theory and practice and adequately respond
to women’s demands and needs. Moreover, it has led them to keep closer
links with other social movements and to diversify the scope of their obser-
vations and interventions to take into account the different practices and
points of view expressed, as well as the complexity of the historical and
cultural mediations that determine the interrelation of les rapports de sexe
(gender relations) with other systems of identification and social division.
But this unique situation at the crossroads of francophone and anglo-
phone sociologist feminist cultures has not only influenced the nature of
research and teaching practices, it has also given Québec scholars the unique
opportunity of being in constant contact with two major schools of thought.
Personally, it has put me and some of my colleagues (Dagenais, 1999) in a
position to see how few contacts there were between the two academic
worlds. In particular, how little many English-speaking feminists knew about
feminist literature written in French and how they have ignored its major
intellectual contributions since the 1970s on important issues such as la
reproduction sociale, le mode de production domestique, la division sexuelle
du travail, le système patriarcal, la transversalité des rapports de sexe, la con-
substantialité des rapports.
Over the years, this observation has made me wonder how one specific,
narrow – and I would not hesitate to add – erroneous definition of French
feminism could prevail to the almost total exclusion of others. What can
explain such a selective appropriation and questionable re-elaboration by
certain American scholars of French feminist theories? For example, and
apart from a few notable exceptions, how could important works of French
materialist feminists such as Colette Guillaumin, Christine Delphy, Nicole-
Claude Mathieu, Danièle Kergoat, to name but a few, be ignored? How could
their innovative approach in exposing the economic and social dynamic of
sexual domination and women’s social limitations be wrongly confused by
some with essentialism, when their intellectual contribution, while giving
way to different scientific interpretations, has been, on the contrary, to
inscribe a different vision, ‘une vision autre’, of social relations at the very
heart of feminist theories, a vision that is of a divided and hierarchical society
between men and women, one that refuses the illusion of ‘le neutre’ (Varikas,
1993)? How easily, thereafter, has French feminism been equated in most of
the anglophone literature with a marginal literary and philosophical venture
that has, at the very least, lost contact with the political realities of women
and the transformative objectives of feminism?
Finally, how has anglophone literature almost entirely limited its scope
of investigation over the last decades to the work of a few academics, namely
Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, whose connection with
Descarries: Hegemony of the English Language in the Academy 627
feminism, with the exception of the first named, is, as Bronwyn Winter
observes, ‘at best highly questionable’ and ‘whose compatibility of
approaches needs, at the very least, to be shown’ (Varikas, 1993: 64)?1On
that issue, I totally agree with Eleni Varikas (1993: 63)2when she rightfully
points out in an article titled ‘Féminisme, modernité, postmodernisme: pour
un dialogue des deux côtés de l’océan’, ‘that to reduce French feminism to
certain theoretical positions is not only to obscure the fact that the major part
of feminist debates took place outside and sometimes against these positions;
it is also to conceal the theoretical contributions most influential in feminist
thought in France and in other francophone countries; it consequently
prevents a productive dialogue on the conditions under which these multiple
problématiques emerged’ and, I would add, on their heuristic, strategic and
subversive potential in developing feminist theories grounded in women’s
multiple and diverse experiences.
This having been said, let us go back to my initial question: how uni-
versal or culturally determined are the feminist notions, categories or
concepts we use? In reflecting on this question, I want to illustrate how the
use or abuse of anglophone literature as the main – if not the only – refer-
ence in women’s studies can result in the imposition of concepts, topics,
methodologies and practices that belong to the sociocultural context and
environment of the western English-speaking academy. Apart from my frus-
tration with what English-speaking feminists have done with French
feminism, I raise this question because I strongly believe that one neglected
problem that is seriously threatening the epistemological and strategic
development of feminist studies and networking is both the hierarchical
relationship and the cleavage that exist among different national feminisms
in the construction of theoretical frameworks and practices. I am specifically
referring to the damaging impact of the sociocultural and linguistic barriers
that generate theoretical and strategic blindness or misappropriation as a
result of not knowing about the plural and diversified nature and level of
development of feminist perspectives in non-English-speaking countries.3
Strangely enough, no matter how many international meetings I attend or
papers I read, I have seldom seen the question of the development of know-
ledge or communication discussed in this light. Yet, every sociologist can
relate to the idea that the language of communication necessarily imposes
restrictions and constraints on our ways of saying and seeing things.
Communication, as we all know, largely consists in understanding each
other’s language, but understanding each other’s language is by no means suf-
ficient to establish real lines of communication or exchanges between intel-
lectuals and academics. The notions we use are strongly linked with specific
cultural, historical and political environments. Concepts and paradigms used
in one language do not necessarily refer to the same problématique or reality
in another language or might not even be part of the ‘other’s’ intellectual and
628 Current Sociology Vol. 51 No. 6
social horizons. Don’t we all know, at least since the Fourth World Con-
ference on Women (Beijing) in 1995 or the World March of Women in 2000,
that feminist issues relating to le droit des femmes à l’autodétermination sur
leur corps or to the basic goal of equality do not necessarily refer to com-
parable experiences or call for similar strategies in the minds and lives of
African, Asian, Arabic or Occidental women?
The resulting omnipresence of the concept of gender in feminist studies,
without sufficient theoretical justifications as to its interest and strategic
significance in different linguistic settings, is yet another example of the
drawback that results from the predominance given by western English-
speaking academics to one specific set of concepts and approaches. This
question led Paola Melchiori (2000), president of the Women’s Free Uni-
versity of Milan, to assert, and I quote in a free translation: ‘Now that the
concept of gender has succeeded in imposing itself everywhere in the
American academy and in developing agencies of the Third World, we can
start measuring the extent of the high cost of analytical richness lost. Didn’t
we realize that through this homogenization of approaches, of language, we
were losing explanatory power and giving up certain radical political prac-
tices that were implied in the notion of les rapports de sexe.’ A statement that
I make mine and that I would like to elaborate on by saying that, contrary
to the notion of gender, the concept ‘rapports de sexe’ has a more radical
origin and transformative potential since it puts emphasis on the relation of
power, as well as on the division and hierarchy reconstructed by patriarchy
in its interdependence with neo-capitalism.
Such a shift, one can assume, explains why in many universities theor-
etical feminism is reduced to an intellectual project of understanding women
in their individuality or specificity, rather than as a group or as a socio-
political class. Such a shift in perspective can only accentuate fragmentation
and cleavage among women and put women’s studies ‘increasingly at risk of
losing touch with the movement to which it owes its existence’ (Winter, 1997:
211). It is, as a matter of fact, easy to see how such a shift runs the risk of
isolating, even more than in the past, the experiences and theories developed
by feminists in the South, by Afro-Americans, by lesbians or by women
doubly or triply discriminated. It is also easy to see that this actual trend in
feminist studies, or should I say post-feminist studies, tends to leave room
only for the will of ‘empowerment’ of white middle-class women in an era
where post-patriarchy has not yet occurred and where it would be totally
irresponsible to let go of Christine Delphy’s (1998) or bell hooks’ (2000)
definition of feminism as a social movement to end sexist exploitation and
oppression.
That is why I feel so strongly the need to advocate that concepts too
rarely encountered today in mainstream English-speaking feminist discus-
sions be brought back into feminist discourse so as to take into account the
Descarries: Hegemony of the English Language in the Academy 629
absence of resources and powers, let alone liberty, that still characterizes the
situation of so many women around the world. It is my belief that the
concept of ‘equality’, which was at the origin of second wave feminists’ prise
de conscience and activism, and that of ‘identity’, which is at the centre of
current differentialist feminism, are, though necessary, in no way sufficient
to comprehend women’s diverse oppressive situations. The evocation of
events in ex-Yugoslavia, or the violence and restrictions that have been
imposed on Algerian or Afghan women in recent years, or the evocation of
the capitalist exploitation of the women’s labour force in the maquiladoras
of Mexico, dramatically emphasize the fact that many women have yet to
gain access to freedom, respect and a minimum of economic resources. I
borrow Geneviève Fraisse’s (1995: 391) words to say that ‘la menace sur la
liberté [des femmes] devient pour l’heure plus grave que les manquements à
l’égalité’. Accordingly, it seems to me that concentrating on women’s identity
and words inadvertently encourages conservative statements and political
approaches. Not only does it return to women the entire responsibility of
their liberation, depriving them of the necessary benefits of solidarity and
collective actions, but it also denies the relevance of reconsidering women’s
experience of sexual differentiation and division of labour in their inter-
dependence with the power relations embedded in the instrumental and
constantly reconstructed interaction between patriarchy and capitalism. In
line with these first reflections, I keep wondering if we can foresee ways of
establishing a better interlinguistic communication in feminist studies in
order to encompass our historical, cultural, spatial and linguistic ways of
being feminists and thinking feminism, alleviate the tensions of a privileged
linguistic hegemony and leave room for the absence of consensus while
remaining in complete solidarity.
I do not believe that I have to say much more to make my point. It is a
basic sociological fact that a large part of communication, either between
schools of thought or between scholars, is hampered by misunderstandings
of a political, historical and cultural nature. As a matter of fact, true com-
munication can only be established if a person is willing to open a dialogue
with others and is ready to challenge her or his own interpretation from their
political, historical and cultural experiences and references. It is thus impera-
tive that we ask ourselves not only the traditional question: ‘Where does the
other speak from?’ but also and more importantly ‘Where do I – or where
do we – speak from?’
In the daily life of a feminist sociologist working from the periphery,
what are the immediate consequences of the privileged situation of the
English language? From my experience and analysis, I had to come to the
unfortunate conclusion that among well-intentioned feminists, even those
living in a bilingual country like Canada, we have not succeeded in develop-
ing a real intellectual network where we could have learned from each other’s
630 Current Sociology Vol. 51 No. 6
experiences and built an integrated body of knowledge inclusive of each
other’s intellectual perspectives and understandings. And may I add, repli-
cating here the words spoken by former International Sociological Associ-
ation president Immanuel Wallerstein (1998), ‘that unfortunately some of our
American colleagues, as well as many of our British, Canadian and Australian
colleagues, are often victims of their privileged linguistic situation, because
they are unable to or become uninterested in knowing and understanding
different cultural traditions and perspectives’. It is my personal assumption
that paradigms and conceptualizations developed in feminist sociology are,
implicitly or explicitly, undermined by this ethnocentric approach.
In daily academic life, this cleavage means that whenever I consult a
feminist article or a book written in French and whenever I read, through
translations, works written in languages other than English, it strikes me that
these works often not only contain references to texts written in English, but
also take into account the contributions of theories developed outside the
English-speaking circle. In contrast, I seldom come across the same overture
or preoccupations in anglophone literature. The absence of bibliographical
references to materials produced or translated into languages other than
English is clear evidence to this effect. Let me give you but just one signifi-
cant example. In the bibliography of a book called Feminist Organizing for
Change: The Contemporary Canadian Women’s Movement (Adamson et al.,
1988) published by Oxford University Press, out of the 429 titles carefully
selected by the authors to cover: (1) ‘The Contemporary Canadian Women’s
Movement’, (2) ‘The First Wave’, (3) ‘The Women’s Movement in Western
Europe and the United States’ and (4) ‘Other’ sources cited, only six titles
were in French, barely more than 1 percent, and none in any other language,
even though one section covered Western Europe’s women’s movement.4
One very immediate effect of this type of exclusion is the difficulty that
one encounters in getting libraries, even university libraries, to stock publi-
cations that provide access to alternative sociolinguistic voices, and, in doing
so, to alternative analytical and methodological models and ‘other’ realities.
This given pre-eminence constantly reduces the necessity for English-
speaking people to learn other languages and thus to open themselves to
other cultures and frameworks of interpretation. More globally, it also means
that English-speaking journals that are already dominant in the scientific
community are given additional visibility and recognition through the
citation analysis or abstracting processes. The situation is well documented.
Not only does it reinforce their already strong control over dissemination of
ideas and results, it also enables a concentration of evaluation and gate-
keeping activities in the English-speaking countries which, in turn, gives their
researchers additional power over the content and type of articles acceptable
for publication (Durand, 2001).
Finally, it is common knowledge that when a person has to use a language
Descarries: Hegemony of the English Language in the Academy 631
that is not her or his first language to communicate with a larger audience or
wants to engage in an intellectual dialogue, in most cases it probably means
that she or he does not control the second language with the same subtlety
and precision, or may not speak it in the same fluent and dynamic manner.
This situation disadvantages many of us and does not allow us to participate
in intellectual matches or scientific debates on equal terms with the person
or persons we are speaking to.
All of us, of course, recognize the power structures and relations that are
at work in such practices. Not only are books or papers published in English
more widely read and quoted than others, as well as being too rapidly
identified as feminist productions, but also the absence of interaction with
the rest of the world is a clear obstacle to the production of better and more
original scientific knowledge as well as being an obstacle for feminists or soci-
ologists, let alone societies, to understand each other. Some analysts of the
scientific world have observed, however, and I would tend to agree with
them, that even if translations were readily available,5notwithstanding the
distortions and conceptual transformations this can induce (de Lotbinière-
Harwood, 1991), or even if all texts were written in English, it would not de
facto eliminate the power structures that are embedded in centre–periphery
relations. Neither would it eliminate the distortion brought about by the
omission of preoccupations formulated at the margins since the early 1960s
by dissident feminists, lesbians, Afro-Americans, aboriginal women or
activists from Africa and Latin America, to name but a few of the more active
alternative voices that did not wait for the reprimands of the ‘postmoderns’
before speaking loudly of their differences, their everyday experiences and
their need to inscribe ‘their claims in a local, national and international
strategy, while insisting on the particular impact of social factors such as race,
class, caste or international division of work, and their different weight on
the individuals’ (Sow, 1999: 433).6
I am inclined to say that such disparity, or intellectual blindness,
probably exists because the English-speaking feminist field is l’Un (the One),
to paraphrase the expression put forward by Simone de Beauvoir, and that
the other feminist fields are l’Autre (or rather here, les Autres or the Others).
As we know, l’Un, being the One, does not have to define himself or question
himself, whereas l’Autre (the Other) is always defined or questioned in
relation to l’Un (the One). It is l’Autre (the Other) that is both trying to keep
in touch with its own specificity and historical dynamic, and to catch up with
l’Un, the One. This leads the peripheral feminist fields to model their experi-
ences on that of the centre. They remain captives of a hierarchical dichot-
omous relation, even though their own historicity, political representations
and feminist struggles carry their own weight and direction and call for other
channels of communication.
In line with these reflections, I keep wondering how could we break the
632 Current Sociology Vol. 51 No. 6
feeling of isolation or alienation that, notwithstanding everyone’s good faith,
often results from being from the periphery, from a different sociolinguistic
background? How could we benefit from each other’s analytical traditions
and learn from our respective ways of asking questions, putting problems
forward, constructing conceptual choices and methodological frameworks,
choosing domains of research, discussing contradictions, conceptualizing
feminism, and so forth? I hope it is clear that I am not situating this discussion
in the context of the linguistic dispute (contentieux) between Québec and
Canada, nor reducing the problem of communication and collaboration
among scholars to a linguistic problem or a visibility problem. As a matter
of fact, I do not, in principle, have serious problems with English as an instru-
ment of communication. On the contrary, it is obvious to me that we need a
lingua franca. In some circumstances, using English may be the only possi-
bility to be heard and read by most people. But my aim is to find ways in
which knowledge and practices produced in non-English-speaking literature
could be taken into consideration, integrated into the mainstream approaches
and theories.
I strongly advocate that we put our sociological imagination to work to
find ways to prevent the production and reproduction of a univocal and one-
dimensional approach to theories and strategies as well as the exclusion of
important contributions on the mere basis of their lieu d’origine. It is clear
to me that we must get to work and collectively develop an action plan so
that linguistic barriers and unilateral bilinguism will no longer be a motive
for ignorance, exclusion or, worse, compromise and the artificial hom-
ogenization or reproduction of partial and fragmented knowledge. Multi-
linguism must be promoted, particularly among English-speaking academics
who are constantly comforted in their monolinguism by the current prac-
tices of scientific journals and international meetings as well as by the willing-
ness of ‘the others’ to concede to the hegemony and standardization of the
English language in the Academy in order to obtain more visibility and
recognition.
En terminant, on me permettra de réitérer les quelques principes soci-
ologiques qui sont à l’origine de la réflexion proposée ici, à savoir:
• Il n’est pas de pensées qui ne soient soudées à une langue. Il n’est pas de
structures de pensée ou de modèles théoriques qui ne soient associés à une
culture linguistique donné;
• Et il n’est pas de cultures linguistiques qui ne soient tributaires d’un espace
géo-politique et de son historicité;
• Il n’est pas, non plus, de représentations idéologiques, sociales et politiques
du mouvement des femmes qui ne soient liées à leurs conditions partic-
ulières de développement;
• Il n’est pas de choix de thèmes de recherche, de concepts ou de pratiques
Descarries: Hegemony of the English Language in the Academy 633
militantes qui ne soient fortement dépendants d’un environnement socio-
culturel donné et de l’interrelation des expériences singulières et collec-
tives des femmes dans cet environnement.
Bref, la langue d’usage en sciences n’est pas neutre. En études féministes,
comme dans les autres domaines de la sociologie, elle est porteuse de manières
spécifiques de penser et de s’interroger; elle s’inspire d’expériences historiques
et quotidiennes particulières.
In summary, there is no thought or frame of reference that is not linked
to a language. Language is not neutral. Scientific language in women’s studies,
as well as in other fields of sociology, carries social representations, specific
meanings and questions as well as historical experiences. As sociologists we
need to take this dynamic into account and find ways to deal with it, but
most importantly to overcome its perverse effects and limitations. It is my
conviction as a feminist sociologist that scholars not only need to find ways
to acquire better knowledge and understanding of discourses, perspectives
and strategies developed in different national and linguistic settings, but that
they must also challenge their own approaches and interpretations from these
standpoints in order to break away from, or at least minimize, the patriar-
chal mainstream notions and practices of centre and peripheries. We need to
find new ways of dialogue and collaboration among ourselves in order to
bring about new strategies for change and take a clear stand against all types
of inequalities and injustices.
Notes
1 Free translation by the author.
2 Free translation by the author.
3 Relating to the Australian situation, it is Bronwyn Winter again who observes that
‘feminist historians, know infinitely more about Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindica-
tion of Women’s Right (1792) than about Olympe de Gouges’ declaration of the
same made one year earlier, that is 1791’ (Winter, 1997: 213). And this, she adds,
in spite of readily available translations.
4 To give the full picture, I must add that about 10 additional titles were English
translations of papers written by feminist Québecers. A reference to the trans-
lation of Simone de Beauvoir Le Deuxième Sexe was also present.
5 Simultaneous translation, as we all know, is too expensive for most feminist
conferences, which undermines the possibility of real and productive exchanges.
6 Free translation by the author.
634 Current Sociology Vol. 51 No. 6
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