Antoinette Fouque

Antoinette Fouque (born Grugnardi; October 1, 1936 – February 20, 2014) was a psychoanalyst and a historical figure of the French women's liberation movement (MLF). Alongside other activists, she founded the "Éditions des femmes" (Women's Editions) as well as the very first collection of audio-books in France, "Bibliothèque des voix" (Library of voices). Her position in feminist theory was primarily essentialist, and heavily based in psychoanalysis.

Her father, Alexis Grugnardi, is a Corsican syndicalist, communist and libertarian. Her mother, of Italian origin, emigrated from Calabria to France for economic reasons and settled in a popular district of Marseille.

After studying literature in Aix-en-Provence, Antoinette Fouque married René Fouque. She moves to Paris to study literature at the Sorbonne. In the 1960s, she enrolled at the EPHE for a thesis on literary avant-gardes, which she abandoned preferring her activism alongside women, but passed a "DEA with Roland Barthes”. It was during a seminar of Barthes, in January 1968, that she met Monique Wittig.

She gave birth to a daughter, Vincente, in 1964. This event contributed to make her realise the difficulties that women face when they are mothers and married, especially in the intellectual environment. Above all, her pregnancy made her aware of the irreducibility of gender differences and of women's specific competence of gestation.

Antoinette Fouque is appalled by the sexism surrounding the intellectual and activist environments at the time of May 1968, which motivates her to create a Movement for the Liberation of Women (MLF). In 1968, she initiated with the writer Monique Wittig and Josiane Chanel, the first independent and non-mixed meeting of women, whose first public demonstration took place in 1970.

The MLF is neither an organization nor an association (no membership card, no elected office, no representatives), but a place for discussions and speeches by women, the collective being non-mixed.

Within the MLF, from 1968, she drives the "Psychoanalysis and Politics" trend, a place of meeting and of discussions fighting for the liberation of women from a perspective both psychoanalytic and revolutionary. This articulation of the unconscious and of history - psychoanalysis and politics - has made the specificity of a part of the French movement.

In April 1971, she signed the Manifesto of the 343 for the right of abortion.

Antoinette Fouque asserts that "there are two sexes", the title of her first book, and affirms that "the women's liberation movement is a movement that attacks the omnipotence of a phallocentric culture, that is to say that it was necessary to deconstruct”.

...
Wikipedia