Non au gender: Moral epistemics and French conservative strategies of distinction

Abstract

Catholic bourgeois contestations against ‘le gender’, and against ‘bourgeois-bohemians’, characterised ‘La Manif Pour Tous’ and ‘Les Veilleurs’, French social movements which mobilised intensely in 2013 against legalisation of same-sex marriage. Drawing from primary field observations of movement events, and from interviews, I argue that moral epistemics–knowledge politics oriented around moral issues – were central to the movements. Additionally, these moral epistemics were structured by the class positioning of conservative bourgeois Catholics. I trace how contestations against ‘le gender’ were framed as critiques of how moral knowledge is produced and irresponsibly disseminated by rival bourgeois actors, and how conservative activists contrasted themselves as educated and thoughtful subjects whose ideas emerged autonomously and outside the Church hierarchy. Studies of conservatism should thus not only analyse the theological content of religiously-grounded conservative movements, but should also examine how conservatives criticise the circuits of knowledge-production and dissemination of relationally antagonistic groups.