11 - ‘Les hommes et les femmes, c'est vraiment pas pareil’ (‘Men and women just aren’t the same’): Nancy Huston's Passions d'Annie Leclerc

Summary

Nancy Huston's 2007 Passions d’Annie Leclerc represents an unusual literary project and – like Hélène Cixous’ 2010 return to her groundbreaking 1975 ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ (Chapter 10) or Catel Muller’s twenty-first-century take on Benoîte Groult (Chapter 12) – an interesting case of women writing across the ‘waves’ of feminism. Written soon after the death of Huston's friend, the philosopher and feminist Annie Leclerc (1940–2006), it is at once a tribute, a literary biography, a meditation on friendship and an affirmation of the ideas that the two writers shared. Leclerc was an important and controversial voice within second wave French feminism, initially a member of Beauvoir's circle and a contributor to Les Temps modernes but (as Huston puts it) ‘violently ejected from the Beauvoir set’ (2007, 156) after the 1974 publication of her essay Parole de femme. Huston – 13 years younger, but also active in 1970s feminism – is a novelist and essayist who remains an eloquent contributor to ongoing debates on gender and has also provoked controversy within the feminist movement, particularly with her 2012 essay Reflets dans un oeil d’homme, in which she defends the notion of an ‘innate, inalienable, timeless’ and biologically based difference between the sexes (Huston,2012, 57–8), albeit while also fully acknowledging the crucial effects of culture. Passions d’Annie Leclerc thus arches across the agenda of our book. In this chapter I want to ask what Huston's project is in Passions, and how the book's unusual form works to articulate the model of feminism that underpins the affinity between these two women writers. A second question also runs through this analysis: what is the value of Leclerc and Huston's particular philosophy of feminism, as the feminist movement reaches what is variously defined as its third or fourth wave?

What Huston's book celebrates in Leclerc can be indicated by the term ‘difference feminism’, and it was Leclerc's passionate assertion of women's salutary difference from men in Parole de femme that caused the rift between herself and Beauvoir.