The World of Women by Alain Touraine

When sociology and philosophy converge towards psychoanalysis. This could be the subtitle of Alain Touraine’s latest work “The World of Women”. A return to the psychology of depths, all the more anticipated since this necessarily intelligent study “concludes”, the publisher tells us, a “cycle of analysis of the contemporary world” initiated by the author fifteen years ago. A return after a long detour then. And even if Alain Touraine wants to convince us that it is not on the side of psychoanalysis, surprisingly assimilated to “feelings”, that he “sought his path”, the thread of his book proves us wrong: it is indeed in the “field of sexuality” that women intend to succeed in their construction as women. We will not grudge our pleasure. The author refutes theories of femininity as “social construction”. He goes beyond, without completely rejecting them, “Queer” studies and at the same time settles accounts with the defenders of “feminist nationalism” and those of the victimization of women trapped in the unequal dimension of relations with men. For him too, “Wrong direction” as Elizabeth Badinter wrote. The women met and questioned by the author, contrary to those who “often speak for themselves”, carry the desire to live an existence “transformed by themselves”. Priority is given, according to him, to the relationship with oneself and not with man. The “psychologists” consulted for cosmetic surgery operations could confirm this to him: contrary to men whose physical transformations aim to improve their seduction capacity over the opposite sex, candidates for plastic surgery do not involve men in their approach. The latter remains definitively and exclusively a woman’s affair.

The fundamental place given by the author to sexuality leads him to evoke the “desiring body”, marked more according to the testimonies collected, by pregnancy than by the experience of motherhood. This self-construction through sexuality, women seek to “experience” it with the other, but with the ultimate goal of returning to themselves. Makeup and exercise are in this regard only aids to a “femininity-masquerade”, evoked in its time by psychoanalyst Joan Rivière. All these feminine attitudes and behaviors “vigorously rejected”, according to the author, by women who consider them as obstacles to their search for “interiority”. “Share of strangeness” that men do not know as well, concludes Alain Touraine. We could not better describe the borrowing of “The World of Women” from psychoanalysis: Freud’s “dark continent” of femininity translated by Lacan as the “more enjoyment” specific to the feminine.

But where should we look for this missing share of sexuality claimed by women? In an “eroticized environment” which allows, or rather forces the subject freed from his sexual problematic, to devote himself to tasks deemed “useful for society”. Finally, the author devotes an important chapter to Muslim women marked, according to him, by double ambivalence: between the culture of their place of origin and that of their place of arrival, these women say they are attached to their religion while rejecting communal confinement. The paths to “self-construction through sexuality” pass for them through an initial “emancipation” as well as through a mutation of the relationship to religious dogma into a more open spirituality. On all these subjects, Alain Touraine’s work opens new perspectives and reverses others, largely against the grain of accepted ideas and common sense. In this respect, his courage is matched only by his lucidity.

Alain Touraine, “The World of Women”, Fayard, 236p., 19 euros.

Jean-Luc Vannier
Psychoanalyst

Jlvannier@free.fr Tel: 06 16 52 55 20