From Ni putes ni soumises to #metoo in the French press: Between the hegemony of Whiteness and the Otherness of Muslims

Abstract

By questioning the media coverage of the seven feminist movements that have received most publicity in the French mainstream media since the 2000s, this article shows that the media narrative regarding feminism perpetuates the national metanarrative produced in generalist newspapers. This metanarrative reinforces the power of majority groups by portraying them as inherently egalitarian, while those with the least economic, social, political and cultural power, such as Muslim men, are portrayed as the most sexist. It also highlights that racialised collectives are still socially invisible or limited to a visibility that is framed by representations rooted in a (post) colonial imaginary. Non-white women are in fact presented as fundamentally submissive, while (upper)-middle-class white women are the only ones associated with emancipation, which is significant of white and bourgeois hegemony at work in the French news media.