Feminism:

In the mid-nineteenth century, the expression used to describe a male individual with certain feminine characteristics. In 1872, the writer Alexandre Dumas fils gave it its modern meaning, but the word was not widely adopted until 1882 to designate a doctrine advocating gender equality. Does the emancipation of women lead to a merging of the two genders? Does it threaten heterosexual codes of seduction? Are genders doomed to disappear or is the inversion of roles, with women dominating men, to be feared? The journalist Rebecca West states, “I’ve never been able to define feminism. All I know is that people call me a feminist whenever my behaviour no longer allows me to be mistaken for a doormat” (1913).

Gender:

Social and cultural construction of masculine and feminine. In Western culture, gender is confused with biological sex, and non-conformity is considered a pathology. Over the last twenty years or so, feminist critics have used this concept to account for the historicity of perceptions of sexual identities and the roles assigned to men and women. This exhibition shows how a major aspect of gender, appearances, evolved between 1800 and 1930 in France.

Maculinisation:

Masculinisation is an individual or collective process which brings the female sex closer to the male sex, often synonymous with “virilisation” in the absence of a distinction between masculinity (corporeal, real) and virility (psychic, mythical).

Sex:

History has shown the evolutions in perceptions of biological sex. According to Thomas Laqueur, the strong differentiation between the two sexes is a recent invention, barely two centuries old. The rise of biological anthropology and psychiatry in the 19^th century firmly entrenched the notion of female nature, thereby reinforcing the oppression of women. In Western culture, sex, defined by anatomical evidence, must correspond to gender. This is the ultimate justification for the clothing regulations presented in the exhibition.

Virilisation :

Virilisation is a process, whether individual or collective, which modifies or denatures the feminine gender by incorporating elements deemed masculine, such as playing sport, practising certain professions, wearing trousers, using slang, political activism, etc... The meaning is almost always pejorative, except for a few radical feminists, including Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939), who established herself as the highly controversial theorist of the “virilisation of women”.