How to name the groups of sisters formed by Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Serena and Venus Williams, Simone and Hélène de Beauvoir or Jane and Paulette Nardal? The French language, as rich as it is, lacks a word to designate clans of girls and women of the same blood. Starting from this terminological gap, Blanche Leridon, a teacher at Sciences Po, delivers, through My Sisters’ Castle. From the Brontës to the Kardashians, an investigation into female siblingsa thought-provoking essay that details how the multiple “prejudices attached to femininity and sisters” endorsed the idea that naming siblings in the feminine would be a trivial undertaking.
One of the main reasons for this missing word is “aversion to the feminine plural” whose author begins by recalling the historical foundations. Since the establishment of patrilineality as the preferred system of filiation, that is, since the end of the 14th centurye century at least, “Girls are seen as unproductive burdens, destined to live in another home and burdened with the heavy weight of their dowry.”.
Using figures and studies, Blanche Leridon analyses the survival of male preference in certain countries including China, India and Armenia, where giving birth to girls remains seen as a failure.
Perfect sisters, rivals or evil
In our Western societies, the sisterly experience is conditioned by “a perpetuation of clichés” widely relayed in popular culture. THE Little Girls Models of the Countess of Ségur, witches of the series Charmedsisters straight out of Chekhov’s theater or the Kardashian reality TV show, among others, are intelligently examined with a critical and sourced analysis. Perfect sisters, rivals or evil: the author uncovers these three archetypes and tells how these representations proved limiting for her and her elders, once they reached adulthood.
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Opposing the social injunction that sister groups should dissolve when they leave adolescence to form a family in a different way, Blanche Leridon encourages us to explore all the “creative, and even subversive, possibilities of sisterhood”. As the Women’s Liberation Movement was already demanding in the 1970s, it demonstrates that “to make a sister” is a political act. According to her, “By holding up sisters as a model, we are not consenting to the system [patriarcal] : we atomize it from the inside »The essayist also analyses how, often discredited on the grounds of a rivalry supposedly consubstantial with the feminine gender, feminine solidarity has once again imposed itself on society with the #metoo movement, in unison with multiple ” Me too “.
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