Familles : nouvelles réalités, nouveaux regards

What is really at issue when we speak about sexual equality? In her latest book, Irène Théry questions the “substantialist and identity-bound” approach, distantly inherited from Locke and Freud, which conceives of gender as a personal attribute. Drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim, and from the holistic approach of Marcel Mauss, Théry asks that we shift our attention away from the notion that gender constitutes a central element of personal identity and consider instead the way that distinctions of sex organize the social contexts in which the status and actions of individuals unfold and acquire meaning. In proposing that we replace the canonic model of the bounded individual with that of the relational person, situated in social contexts that are themselves traversed by distinctions of gender, Irène Théry challenges us to adopt a new, more anthropologically-informed understanding of the wellsprings of human action.

Domestic chores and paid work are unequally distributed between men and women. Elena Stancanelli shows that the taxation system has an impact on the allocation of chores between spouses. Joint taxation system discourages wives who earn much less than their husbands from working. Moving to a separate taxation system would tend to equalize the time devoted to professional activities and domestic work between spouses.