Colette Guillaumin

Colette Guillaumin (28 January 1934 – 10 May 2017), was a sociologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and a French feminist. Guillaumin is an important theorist of the mechanisms of racism and sexism, and relations of domination. She is also an important figure in materialist feminism.

She participated in the founding of the journal Questions féministes, alongside other French academics (such as Simone de Beauvoir) and is also one of the co-founders of the journal Le Genre Humain.

Guillaumin was influential in the early academic field of the social construction of gender. Her theories overlap with those of radical feminists and lay the groundwork for gender criticism.

Biography Colette Guillaumin was born on 28 January 1934 in Thiers. She studied ethnology and psychology in Paris. She taught sporadically in France and Canada. She joined the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1959, initially as a technician and then from 1962 onwards as a researcher. In 1969, she defended her thesis Un aspect de l'altérité sociale. L'idéologie raciste, which was supervised by Roger Bastide. According to Naudier and Soriano, this book (her only work, but which also represents the heart of her thinking) should have marked the history of the emergence of studies on the social relations of race in France, but this turning point did not take place. She draws parallels between racism and sexism, and gives the name "sexing" to the appropriation of one gender class by another. She also wrote in the journal Sexe et race (University of Paris).

She died on 10 May 2017 in Lyon.

When we retrace Guillaumin's steps, while she was studying psychology and ethnography at the Sorbonne in the 1950s, we understand her approach better. A few years after studying at the Sorbonne, she met Nicole-Claude Mathieu and Noelle Bisseret and contributed with them to the collective work entitled: La femme dans sa société. Son image dans différents milieux sociaux.

The most particular expressions of the sexed relationship are: the appropriation of time, the appropriation of the products of the body, sexual obligation, the physical burden of the disabled members of the group (children, the elderly, the sick, the infirm) and the able-bodied members of the male sex.