Troubling French Feminist Diplomacy with the National Context

Feminist foreign policy (FFP) is increasingly a strategic tool for states to (re)brand themselves as ‘feminist’ actors and norm-setters on the international stage. In the FFP story, states claim the intellectual foundation of feminism and construct themselves as bastions of gender equality. Yet, by imagining feminism and gender equality to be ‘homed’ in these states, FFP obscures real and potential gendered tensions that occur at the domestic level. This chapter illustrates this problem with ‘French feminist diplomacy’, a priority in Macron’s presidency since 2018, and draws on a narrative conceptual framework to trouble the narrative that France is entirely and unequivocally a feminist state. I focus on four domestic issues which reveal France’s internal struggles with gender and feminism: the ‘modèle Républicain’, the democratisation of sexual politics, the racialisation of gender equality, and the rise of (state-sponsored) anti-genderism since the 2000s. By shedding light on a complex politics of gender in the French national context, this chapter constitutes a contribution to postcolonial scholarship on FFP, a growing body of literature that challenges the idea that feminism and gender equality belongs to the Global North.