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Illegitimate affairs: The sex of politics and the politics of sex in French contemporary politics

Lucie Bargel Université de Nice, France

Eric Fassin Université Paris 8, France

Stéphane Latté Université de Haute Alsace, France

Abstract Is it necessary to draw on details from a person’s ‘private life’ to describe his (or her) ‘public life’? During fieldwork conducted on the politics of a medium-sized French city, the authors garnered a good amount of information – real or alleged – about the sexuality of local elected officials (most often women). Rather than keeping sexuality out of the scope of their research, as is common in social sciences, the authors examine how it is used locally to interpret political life. They look at two elected municipal officials with atypical career paths whose rapid rise to power defied the common rules of political selection, and who were rumoured to engage in romantic relationships with men who benefitted from a greater political capital. The study addresses two dimensions: social explanation by sexuality, which requires analysing the social functions of rumours; and the sociological explanation of sexuality, which implies examining the political role of sexuality. For both of these dimensions, the authors draw from analyses of the political context: the use of these sexual explanations does not make sense per se, but can only be understood within the context local politics in France during the 2000s, shaped by the application of the parity law. Finally, the demonstration leads the authors to plead in favour of normalizing the analysis of intimate relationships.

Corresponding author: Lucie Bargel, Université de Nice, Faculté de Droit et de Science Politique, Campus Trotabas, 06000 Nice, France. Email: [email protected]

486659CSI615-610.1177/0011392113486659Current SociologyBargel et al. 2013

Article

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Keywords Elections, France, gender, politics, race, sexuality

To what extent should we use details from a person’s ‘private’ life when discussing his (or her) ‘public’ life? The question is not purely theoretical, nor simply methodological; it also has an ethical dimension. Indeed, it refers to the uneasiness we felt throughout our fieldwork. During our ethnographic research into the consequences of the French 2000 law on ‘gender parity’ in politics, conducted in a medium-sized city, people made ‘rev- elations’ – both in interviews and informal conversations – about the (alleged) affairs of local political figures. These could be conveyed as rumours, shared like insider informa- tion, or just slipped in as interesting anecdotes or ironic innuendo. At least once, this went beyond gossip as an affair was conspicuously exhibited before our very eyes.

Our study was part of a national research programme called ‘Inventing Female Elected Officials’, which began in 2001 under the auspices of the French Political Science Association. The goal was to understand how the law on gender parity, adopted in 2000, affects the political arena in France. It requires political parties to run an equal number of men and women on their lists, whether for municipal, regional or European elections; in parliamentary elections, it gives them financial incentives to run an equal number of male and female individual candidates. The law was supposed to break with a ‘French cultural exception’ long justified in the name of a universalist conception of the Republic and an ‘indifference to differences’ (Scott, 2005): the relegation of women to the outskirts of the political sphere and their exclusion from both suffrage (opened to women only in 1944) and representation in parliament (fewer than 10% of deputies until the early 2000s). The pro- gramme’s methodology involved six research teams in eight different local sites chosen based on their varying size, sociological make-up and political leaning. The findings were regularly compared; this collaboration led to a collective publication (Achin et al., 2007).

The research presented here focused on the city council of a medium-sized city (35,000 inhabitants), the prefecture of a semi-rural department in northeast France, that we monitored through an entire mandate, from 2001 to 2008. This group (50 elected councillors) was thoroughly studied using qualitative methods. Our research began in 2001 with two ethnographic observation periods (two weeks each) conducted by an ini- tial team of 10 researchers (most doctoral students). The three of us pursued the investi- gation during annual visits to the field that allowed interviews to be repeated at different points of the councillors’ mandate (N = 70). Our intermittent but regular and long-term presence resulted notably in the forging of fieldwork relationships that were strong enough to result in the sharing of the sexual details addressed here. Since we usually conducted our research together, it has proven impossible to single out the effect of the investigators’ gender on the data collected.

We are not the only ones who feel uneasy with with references to intimacy in schol- arly studies of politics. Should such details be discussed or ignored? The spirited reac- tions encountered during a conference on gender parity were proof of the concern many felt about privacy. Indeed, there is a tension between ethical and academic imperatives – privacy and intelligibility. And yet, while biographical material requires ethical precau- tions (starting with anonymization1), such information struck us as essential for under- standing what gender parity does to politics and, in return, what politics does to gender.

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While the law on gender parity introduced numerical equality between the sexes in some elections, it did not impose an egalitarian mindset in the political sphere. Both men and women wielded sexual rumours to explain the careers of some female politicians, as if only this ‘hidden spring’ could explain their success. In politics, sexuality has both a sex (rumours target women more often than men) and a gender (focusing on the feminin- ity of female politicians rather than their political positions). Finally, during our field- work at least, the (alleged) affairs were exclusively heterosexual – perhaps reflecting the heterosexual if not heterosexist reasoning upon which gender parity is often based (Agacinski, 2001). In short, talking about sexuality in the era of gender parity is yet another means of reiterating power relations between the sexes.

In the sexual rumours we heard, race compounded gender: the women whose sexual- ity was openly discussed in our fieldwork belonged to (so-called) ‘visible minorities’.2 The improbable political success of women with a double or even triple ‘handicap’ (their gender and background, both in terms of social class and ‘ethnicity’) was often explained by their sexual rather than political merit by ascribing them an over-sexualized nature. The sexual rumours were thus both gendered and racialized.

Third, details about the sexuality of elected officials shed light on the types of socia- bility that shape local political spheres. We are thus adding our voices to Javier Auyero’s recent call to rehabilitate ‘political ethnography’. Auyero urges scholars to explore the ‘gray zones of politics’, to look beyond official political interactions to better understand informal political relationships, be they illicit (in his work, the ties between political representatives and criminal organizations) or merely illegitimate (here, affairs). Sexual relationships (both adulterous and official) are part of the many interpersonal ties (like family, camaraderie and friendship) that frame political competition. Whether examining how political ties turn into sexual relationships, or how affairs signify political loyalty, we propose to normalize the analysis of intimate bonds in politics: while specific, they are also comparable to many others.

Should we abstain from reporting what we hear in the field to ensure that sexuality is kept out of academic research, thus hiding behind a veil of chastity? Or conversely, should we use sexuality to explain the career paths of female politicians, at the risk of reinforcing familiar stereotypes? Our article attempts to sidestep this alternative. In the first section, we upend standard terms by examining the social, political as well as academic conditions that shape the strict division between the public and private spheres in France and thus exclude sexuality from political sociology: why are we so reluctant to talk about it? We then confront the theoretical challenges underpinning this dilemma by identifying two distinct sides of the problem: the social explanation via sexuality, which involves analysing the social function of rumours; and the socio- logical explanation of sexuality, which requires examining the political role of inti- macy. Based on an in-depth analysis of the political careers of two female politicians, the second section addresses sexuality from the native’s point of view that needs to be understood as such, while in the third section, we examine how political closeness can be tied to sexual intimacy. Finally, we show how sexuality is the product as well as a revealer of sex-based social relationships as they exist in France today: although it reduces the (numerical) differences between the sexes, parity law continues to natu- ralize ‘gender difference’ (Bargel et al., 2007).

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Sexuality: From political and academic invisibility to public display

The embarrassment caused among political sociologists by any talk of the sexuality of research subjects – regardless of their gender – is due in part to the French history of the boundary separating private from public life. In this country, political scientists have always colluded with electoral candidates and political pundits to keep the sexu- ality of politicians (very predominantly male) out of official political discourse. The topic is not used as a weapon in electoral wars, or as a means to explain partisan infighting, or as a topic for sociological analysis; stories like the extramarital affairs of one president and the illegitimate child of another have always been kept off the record.3 While the ‘Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal’4 provided an opportunity for the culture of secrecy to be challenged, it is telling that it was in the United States and not in France that the story broke.

This general discomfort is only reinforced by the ‘emotionless politics’ of the sociol- ogy of the political sphere and the theory of collective action (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006). Under the influence of rational choice theory, the academic relegation of feelings and sexuality helped turn political space into a sphere shaped solely by calculation and strategy. The reasons behind such academic short-sightedness lie in the gendered nature of research topics and methods: universities – predominantly male spaces – have avoided addressing supposedly feminine issues; in the normative construction of politics as a sphere exclusively reserved for level-headed debate and rational dialogue; and in the influence of positivist epistemology which sees affection and sexuality as irrelevant information that can be ignored (Aminzade and McAdam, 2001).

Many justifications are invoked for this neglect. The first is an empirical precaution: sexuality and intimate relations are supposed to be beyond scientific reach (Bozon, 1999). While undoubtedly founded, such methodological caution is less common in other fields, despite the fact that sociological research is often based on other non- observable data (e.g. values, opinions, strategies).

Ethics is the second reason behind the academic de-sexualization of politics and it is just as partial. We applaud sociological curiosity when it comes to revealing influence networks or hidden friendships between elected officials and their clients (Joseph et al., 2008), but such research is deemed prying as soon as it involves sexuality. And yet the desire to protect the private life of research subjects is unequally applied. It is adhered to less strictly when the research subject is in a faraway region and the focus is on ‘exotic’ actors (the invocation of sexuality can in such contexts shed light on the ethnographic relationship; Kulick, 1995); greater caution is exerted for the central figures of conven- tional politics than for peripheral actors in to the social movement sphere (Goodwin, 1997); and it protects subjects from the elites much more so than rural or working-class actors (Bourdieu, 2002).

These social and academic reasons for desexualizing politics are powerful enough that political sociologists still avoid the subject of politics in sexuality even as they have started working on the politics of sexuality. And yet, given the lack of empirical research on the subject, this often leads to moralizing discourse in lieu of scientific reasoning (Roux, 2009).

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However, there are good reasons for research to focus now on political sexuality. First, let us recall that sexual issues have risen up the political agenda in France. On the one hand, sexuality has been thrust into debate in the public sphere since the 1990s, notably around topics such as ‘gay marriage’, prostitution, pornography and sexual abuse (Fassin, 2009). On the other hand, gender has also come into play with the adop- tion of the law on political parity. Thus, the politicization of sexuality has paralleled the sexualization of politics in the 2000s – both in terms of gender and sexuality. In politics, the boundaries between public and private are extremely porous: Le Grignou and Neveu (1993) even talk about ‘public intimacy’ to describe the new norms of political excellence that encourage political representatives to publicly reveal details from their private lives – especially since the 2007 presidential election campaign which, for the first time, involved a male and female candidate in the second round (Achin and Dorlin, 2008).

Like their gender or race, the sexuality of male and female politicians can be analysed like the uncertain outcome of political ‘identity work’ (Fassin, 2008). We can study a person’s sex, sexual orientation and colour not as natural categories but as political ones (Achin et al., 2008). More precisely, we shall look here at how those interviewed used sexuality as a framework for understanding local political life, as a means to disqualify opponents or as a resource in the context of electoral competition.

This piece focuses on the political career of two female town councillors – chosen from the 50 political actors interviewed not for their representativeness (in the statistical sense), but for what they signify. They embody two of the major changes in political recruitment that accompanied gender parity at the national and local levels (Achin et al., 2007). It is no coincidence that these two recruits, both female, young and from working- class backgrounds, are also of recent immigrant origin. Indeed, around the time of the parity law, the phrase ‘visible minorities’ (originally from Canada) entered public con- versation in France, and it was in the 2000s that the lexicon of ‘diversity’ (a euphemism for race) was imported from the United States (Fassin, 2010). Gender parity, does not have a racial equivalent: not only is ‘diversity’ not written into law, but colour-blind rhetoric which makes skin colour and structural racism invisible still justifies the French state’s radical rejection of any racial categorization. But, as historian Joan W. Scott has noted, the same is true for women and for ‘visible minorities’: their arrival on the scene is part of an attempt to remedy the ‘crisis of representation’ and make political represen- tation look more like society. Thus, when required to renew almost half of all elected officials in 2001, French political parties jumped on the obligation for parity to diversify the palette of candidates. These women, not infrequently from ‘visible minorities’, were supposedly ‘close to the people’, all the more so if ‘resembling the population’ – in a word, more ‘representative’ of the electorate.

Gender parity thus allowed for quick and atypical career advancement that seemed to defy the rigid rules of social selection among politicians. Although they compounded factors (gender, social or ethnic origin) that would previously have made it impossible to build a political career, in the course of one mandate one of the two women discussed here became deputy mayor, while the other plays a part in a major political party at the national level. Both have seen this political success publicly linked to their alleged affairs with powerful men.

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Despite the similarities, fieldwork revealed important differences. While one never confirmed rumours about her affairs, the other’s private relationship with the mayor was quite public: their romantic involvement was displayed, including in our presence. These two situations thus beg two different analyses: concerning the former, sexuality as a social explanation and, for the latter, the sociological explanation of sexuality. We shall begin by examining how those interviewed used sex to explain intrigues of the political game that they otherwise had trouble understanding. Then we will show how intimate relationships between male and female elected officials are part of a context of gendered social relations that have reshaped the local political arena following the law on gender parity.

An explanation for unlikely female careers

‘Revealing’ affairs is not a simple jab given as part of bitter political rivalry; it also pro- vides insight into the long-term process of political identity construction that made rumours plausible and acceptable for some of the people we met. We analyse how one protagonist crafted her identity to make an impression in the political arena and how the mayor, the woman’s opponents and the media all played on sexual and racial stereotypes. To do so, we compare biographical material collected over eight years: portrayal in the local media, the content of interviews and the woman’s published autobiography.

When Samira Foé entered politics at the age of 32, during the municipal election of 2001, she was the perfect parity candidate. While male candidates were recruited for the importance of their political capital (e.g. their experience, electoral titles, partisan labels and ideological positioning within their party), the newly recruited women were for the most part uninitiated; instead of political experience, they had the biographical back- ground that list leaders wanted to display on the electoral stage (Latté, 2002).

Like many of her peers, Samira Foé had never held a mandate or any position within the party. Rather, the Socialist leader that sought her out (she had just recently joined the party) saw her as an ‘incarnation of civil society’ capable of making the team look like ‘a reflection of the city’: the public persona she was assigned largely played on her gender and ethnic background. Samira was born in Africa and moved to France because of her husband’s career at the age of 20. The local press mentioned her ‘sweet little face’ while her teammates characterized her as an ‘attractive icon’ or ‘charming asset’. Further, this candidate had a ‘name’ – her husband’s, a professional athlete who helped lead the city’s football club to national glory. Her marital status provided her with a capital of notoriety that the Socialist candidate wanted to use to rally the working-class districts. Lastly, her high ranking on the list was meant to attract the attention of voters of African descent.

The new mayor gave us the reasons that drove him to recruit her onto the list, and then offer her the position of deputy in charge of ‘underprivileged districts’ (quartiers): ‘I turned to Samira because she represented something through who she was, her personal- ity, she is quite surprising: she’s a bundle of energy, as they say, her background … , her youthfulness, her feminine side, it all suited me perfectly. … People can identify with Samira. … Personally, I was seduced by that, and so I said to her: “I want you, you inter- est me” ’ (interview 2001). The woman lucidly embraced her role as an icon of Republican diversity, or ‘Marianne of minorities’: ‘I was the right person at the right time. … As a

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woman, as a member of the Socialist Party, as a black woman of African origin. … Rather than having several people, they got it all in a single person; it cost them only one place on the list’ (interview 2001).

When assigned biographical details become individual resources

Very quickly, Samira’s political identity broke with the stereotypes she was meant to incarnate. As she now had her own set of resources, her political career took off on its own, free from her protector. There was a telling change in the location of our meeting places. While our first interview during the 2001 campaign was conducted in a dilapi- dated office at the municipal branch of the Socialist Party, she met with us 12 months later in her office at City Hall. A portrait of her with the national leader of the Socialist Party set the tone for the context of our third meeting, in 2005, at the party’s national headquarters in Paris. In 2001, she was merely a candidate on a list in an average-size city; but in the space of three years, Samira Foé took on leading positions in regional politics (she was elected vice-president of the Regional Council in 2004 and re-elected in 2010). Moreover, she became the sole actor from the city’s political sphere to assidu- ously hobnob on the national political scene. She joined the Socialist Party’s National Committee in 2005, was a member of the party’s presidential campaign team in 2007 and 2012 when she received the party’s endorsement for the legislative elections.

The woman’s political ascent was not without effect on the construction of her public persona, which was the focus of a veritable work of self-definition showcased in the publication of her autobiography in 2006 – an opportunity to appear on national talk shows and news reports. She strategically crafted her biographical narrative to make it comply with her new political roles (Collovald, 1988). She started going by her first name (locally, everyone now called her ‘Samira’) and changed her last name following her divorce.

Such name games more generally reflected a desire to depart from her marital begin- nings and instead promote her roots. With her rising national visibility, she was able to break away from her husband’s declining local notoriety and the publication of her auto- biography provided an opportunity to pepper her political career with a dose of atypical social storytelling. The biographical details upon which her life story focused were reset to create a true Republican myth. In our 2001 interview, she was the adoptive daughter of a French expatriate and a member of the African student elite; in 2005, she put her biological parents in the spotlight. She thus became the daughter of a poor refugee family all the better to show how she escaped from her destiny (her sisters were all forced into wedlock or exploited as domestic workers) and made it all the way to becoming an elected official of the French Republic. The religious angle, absent when she was first elected, also surfaced – despite, but also because of the post-9/11 context: reinforcing the impact of her newly reclaimed last name (Mahmud), she revealed that she was a practis- ing Muslim and that she followed Islamic dietary law, while wearing a headscarf on the book cover, in sharp contrast with her sartorial habits.

Her official portrait was enriched with previously ignored biographical details to rein- force her legitimacy at the local (representative of working-class minorities), as well as regional and national (in charge of cooperation, development, North–South relations and

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discrimination) levels. ‘With this book, you no longer need to justify yourself and people no longer say, “look, she got to where she is through gender parity”. It’s a different per- spective. I at least have the opportunity to talk about where I come from. The same is not true for all of the women who benefited from parity. Personally, I have another form of legitimacy’ (interview, 2005).

The ‘price of success’: When resources become stigmatizing

Celebrated during the 2001 election campaign, still the target of a few condescending smiles in 2002, by 2004, Samira introduced a difference in the local political arena that led to trouble on the City Council. As the mayor worried that his deputy’s political ascent might threaten his local leadership position, he loudly demoted her from her position as deputy mayor on grounds of ‘incompetence’. The other councillors could not understand her any longer: while they once said she came ‘from another planet’ (African culture), she now lived in ‘a different world’ (the Parisian milieu), her ‘other- ness’ turned negative. The characteristics of her public persona (woman, black, young and attractive) – treated as electoral assets in 2001 – were reinterpreted in 2004 as violations of local political values.

Her social background became the symbol of a calculated undertaking (in City Hall, some talked about outstanding payments and even whispered about her personal use of public funds): ‘Samira is unruly, uncontrollable. … She is full of rage and has a way of clinging like a limpet to its rock. She is like poor people who don’t want to fall back to where they came from’ (interview, deputy mayor, 2005). Similarly, while her skin colour once justified her status as the ‘minority working-class district’ representative, people now claimed that she became too close to their inhabitants: the mayor’s office com- mented on the ‘company she keeps’ and talked of an entourage full of ‘offenders’. The local media no longer admired her ‘spontaneity, generosity, natural side and refreshing nature’; instead, it criticized her ‘inconsiderate, excessive and aggressive behaviour’. Finally, the modern and energetic woman that embodied the qualities of parity became a woman who sacrificed her maternal duties for political ambition: ‘I won’t even mention the fact that she is not raising her children’ (interview, Socialist leader, 2004).

The key to success: From ‘sweet face’ to ‘whore of the Republic’

This reversal in biographical discourse helps understand the final register used to dis- qualify this elected official. The woman whose charm was admired in 2001 was accused, starting in 2004, of ‘using her looks’ and having affairs with male politicians (whose names differed depending on who was talking) to whom she supposedly owed her suc- cessive promotions.

Sexual rumours also took different forms. ‘She is not politically correct when it comes to her behaviour as a woman’, suggested an official, while another playfully quipped: ‘I have never gone to dinner with Samira. That could be dangerous, you know … .’ Scepticism did not stop the spreading of rumours: ‘It is now such a legend that she sleeps with everyone!’ Indeed, the intention was not always slanderous: ‘I feel badly for her’, said one councillor, who nevertheless went on about a national scandal: ‘I always think

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of Deviers-Joncour, the so-called “whore of the Republic” ’.5 Even the local media began sarcastically talking about ‘Lady Foé’ who ‘was able to charm’ or ‘Lovely Samira’ who ‘puts her body on the line’: maybe these journalists could not stomach her sudden national fame any more than the mayor.

Why did those we interviewed feel the need to allude to specific or vague ‘revelations’ (‘you know what I mean’)? Sexual rumours had the advantage of explaining the inexpli- cable: they provided a key to understanding an unlikely political career. Promotion based on the woman’s minority status and parity legal constraints were not enough to explain her spectacular rise. On the contrary, such rapid success seemed impossible – especially for a black, Muslim woman. They concluded that her secret had to be sexual: was she not only a woman, but also black?

Such rumours impel us to reflect on the native categories and gender-based descrip- tions that hierarchically structure political resources. ‘Magical’ explanations are of course part of the ordinary analytical tools of political life. And yet, people are much more likely to attribute ‘charisma’ to a man while they would refer to a woman’s physical ‘attractiveness’: one can admire a male politician’s ‘seductive appeal’ while condescend- ingly sexualizing a woman as a ‘seductress’. There is similar gender dissymmetry in the fact that people never question the nature of male politicians’ networks – political, friendly or sexual. And yet those of women are immediately presumed to be sexual in nature and thus illegitimate. While men’s sexuality is sometimes mentioned, it is always as a characteristic of their authority and never as an explanation for their status: they ‘sleep around’ not in order to succeed but rather because of their success – do we not talk of a man’s ‘conquests’?

Finally, it is worth focusing on the identity of those spreading the rumours. Our regu- lar visits to the city gave us access to the ‘black market of political information’ (Aldrin, 2003): we were recognized as familiar faces in the backstage area of local political life. The nature of the details revealed varied depending on the position of those interviewed in the local political arena. Newly elected female politicians discussed the private life of other women more often than men well established in power did. The latter more happily acted as experts on electoral scoops, hidden pacts, tactical reversals and partisan treason. Conversely, female politicians who had just entered politics frequently had trouble breaking men’s monopoly on strategic information. To assert themselves as a local politi- cal ‘somebody’, they could only spread second-rate, unofficial information: hence the propensity for sexual rumours. Of course, there was also a degree of competition between newly elected women. Sexual rumours about other women’s success thus provided insight into the gendered nature of local political sociability.

The public display of an illegitimate affair

The case of Malika Setbi, a newly elected woman of North African descent, is an exam- ple of the relationship between an established political leader and a woman new to poli- tics. Far from breaking away from the local spheres of influence, her affair with the mayor was supposed to secure her political good fortune within the majority. Yet although illegitimate (both parties were married), the relationship was publicly flaunted. Indeed, the parity context worked to blur the boundaries between public and private life both

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because the ‘private life’ of elected officials became more publicly exposed, but also because the onslaught of women in the political arena raised the issue of marital relations and of inequality within couples more generally.

We learned about this relationship during a fieldwork visit in 2008 directly from the parties involved. While we were making an appointment with Malika Setbi, number four on the outgoing municipal list, as the mayor himself arrived, they embraced in front of us. When a double interview then took place in the mayor’s office, the atmosphere evoked a new couple: she made coffee while he went and bought the papers, and they kept teasing each other. The young woman displayed not only her affair but also her seductive body:6 despite the cool if not cold weather, she wore a light, very low-cut top with bare arms. This relaxed attitude was perhaps due to our familiarity with the protago- nists, whom we had already interviewed on several occasions. Their display, however, was an extension of their public appearances in the city: the mayor did nothing to hide the extramarital affair he was having with one of his deputies.

A couple with unequal resources

This relationship involved two political figures with very different experience. The mayor, a former administrative official elected in 2001, was well placed in the 2008 campaign after rallying part of the local right wing to his list; he was re-elected in the first round of voting. A vice-president of the Regional Council, he seemed destined to become a a representative in the National Assembly. Malika Setbi’s relationship with the mayor was concomitant with her move towards the centre of local power: a simple city councillor in 2001, she was put in charge of education in 2008 and rumoured to become first deputy. During her first mandate, Malika Setbi’s affinity with Samira Foé was rooted in their identity-based political roles: ‘People chuckled, saying: “oh, there’s a beur woman in addition to the black one!” ’7 (interview 2008). Malika Setbi indeed compounded the qualities necessary to represent the city’s immigrant population. She was born to Moroccan parents in a nearby small town. She moved to the city in the early 1980s and became the director of a company focused on women’s integration. She was also the leader of a few associations devoted to community life and defending immigrant wom- en’s rights and had strong ties with working-class districts. A fluent Arabic speaker, she was quickly in charge at City Hall of dealing with the city’s immigrant population: ‘People came to me, it was a natural reflex, they said: “yes, because you can understand me”. They believed that because I was dark-skinned, I could understand them; even though I was educated in France, my physical appearance reassures them in some ways.’ For a time eclipsed by the political rise of Samira Foé, once the latter was evicted, Malika Setbi took on the role of the executive’s ‘minority working-class district’ woman: she was first charged with managing family reunification and the foreigners’ rights dossier, before being put in charge of ‘integration’.

Local commentators did not, however, attribute her promotion to her work with the local immigrant population, but rather to her close ties with the outgoing mayor. Their affair was meant to explain her access to spheres that should have been off-limits to her. That was the bitter conclusion drawn by the leader of the opposition, heiress of an impor- tant family from the local bourgeoisie:

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– Malika Setbi is very well placed [on the list] …

– Yes, well, right, I’m going to stop there because. … Malika Setbi fourth on the list is just. … I’ll say it because it annoys me. I’ll tell you why she’s there. She’s Hugues Letur’s girlfriend and that’s it. That’s all.

– Is that public information?

– Oh yes, everyone knows about it. Frankly, not only does everyone know about it, but there is a display of it which I find. … There’s no other way to explain things. (interview 2008)

From matrimonial relationship to political recruitment, from political recruitment to chosen lover

It is worth taking seriously the entanglement of our protagonist’s conjugal and political life for it is certainly not unique: several women elected in 2001 resigned over the course of their mandate or decided not to run for a second mandate due to marital problems. Malika Setbi happened to be in an unusual situation which actually made possible her entry into politics in 2001. She explained to us that she and her husband had ‘reversed roles’: he was not employed following a work accident that had made him disabled 20 years earlier. A marital agreement placed Malika Setbi in the public sphere, profession- ally then politically, while her husband stayed in the domestic sphere to raise their three children: ‘My husband really supported me, he said: I will look after the children and you will be able to thrive doing what you love. That’s what I call equality’ (interview 2008). Yet another inequality proves quite unusual: born in France, she attended college, whereas her Moroccan husband only migrated to France after marriage as an agricultural worker. In 2008, while the mayor had left his wife when the affair became public, Malika Setbi’s conjugal arrangement allowed her to remain married. In interviews, she insisted on the importance she still placed on keeping a balance in her marriage and family life, both as a sign of loyalty towards her husband and in compliance with an ‘acceptable’ wifely and motherly role.

If the affair could become public knowledge, it was also because it had to do with gender relations in politics after 2001. Paradoxically, the obligation to place women on electoral lists reinforced the leadership of male leaders (Latté, 2002). First, limiting the number of spots available for men was a means of evicting numerous rivals. Further, the women recruited to lists were mostly drawn from outside the political sphere to recon- nect with ‘civil society’ (Achin et al., 2007). Without any political resources, they were as such bound by relationships of personal loyalty to their mentors.

This asymmetrical relationship was reflected in the way the mayor described his dis- cretionary recruitment process that did not omit seduction:

Malika was different [from Samira]. I saw her come to my office one day, and she said: ‘Mr Letur, can I speak with you?’ I said: ‘Come’. She knew me, but I didn’t know her. I said: ‘Listen, I’m interested in you’. I had no idea how good she was. … I said to myself: ‘I’m looking for a woman who’s a beur, who’s physically quite attractive, who’s well integrated, who works hard and who wants to get involved.’ She fit these criteria well. … So it was really just chance, because the parameters that I had set in my mind, she met them all. … Just as I was

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about to go hunting, if you will, for the person I was looking for, she stumbled into my life. (interview 2001)

Rereading this interview with the hindsight of the affair points up the entanglement of political seduction and personal relations (‘she stumbled into my life’, ‘I’m looking for a woman who’s physically quite attractive’, ‘just as I was about to go hunting’). The may- or’s role as a leader under parity law thus opened the door to one of its later variations: the extramarital affair. While the mayor used an identical expression – ‘I’m interested in you’ – to describe his encounter with both women, he pointed out that ‘Malika was dif- ferent’ from Samira. While the former continued to fully depend on his good will and thus remained loyal, the latter was disloyal and escaped his local control to gain attention at the national level (rumours attributed more powerful lovers to Samira).

These two women are not solely victims of domination, however. Indeed, neither woman was oblivious to the instrumental logic displayed by the mayor. Like her lover, Malika Setbi also used marital metaphors to describe her political future:

I don’t know, I’m 50 years old, in six years I’ll be 56. Hugues Letur might say to me: ‘you’re too old for a third mandate’. That is also possible. When you’re on a list, you’re not the leader of the list. The candidates on the list depend on the list leader. If tomorrow he says: ‘you’re punished’ or ‘you’re fired’, you can’t do much. I’m aware of that too! (laughs)

Such insistence on the mayor’s authority could be interpreted as a way of saving face. But her ‘awareness’, stated alongside her desire to remain in politics, offers insight into the fact that the contrived nature of their relationship could be two-sided and that in any case the ever-increasing entanglement of personal and political logic was patent. Given this, and while rumours are an opportunity for others to describe the unlikely political careers of women, particularly when they are of foreign origin, the latter can also adapt their personal lives to the objective constraints they face – going so far as to engage in romantic affairs that others will inevitably disqualify as self-interested, despite the fact that the overlap between feelings and interests is of course not limited to such political affairs (Zelizer, 2007).

In this article, we hope to have demonstrated the utility of normalizing research into intimate relationships by viewing them as one kind of political tie that needs to be ana- lysed as both product and sign of a specific political and social configuration – here, local French politics after the law on gender parity.

Sexual rumours also encourage us to reflect on the gendered and racial descriptions that hierarchically structure political resources; they provide insight into the perpetuation of the gendered nature of local political sociability. However, the massive entry of women into political life was not without effect: it contributed to the blurring of bounda- ries between public and private life, notably by making visible marital and domestic conflicts and negotiations, as well as – albeit more rarely – affairs. These were only one end of the continuum of personal relations of loyalty that newly elected women had with their political initiator – the mayor. Sexuality is thus intricately involved in the relation- ships that shape the political sphere.

The major academic reason for addressing sexuality in politics is that this is now the language of politics. Sexuality is comparable to gender, which, according to historian Joan W. Scott, is ‘a primary way of signifying relationships of power’. Like gender,

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sexuality is a political language that, parity and ‘diversity’ notwithstanding, continues to signify power between the sexes while also becoming an instrument to racialize newly elected women.

Funding

This research received financial support from two research centers : LSS (EHESS-ENS) and IRIS (EHESS-CNRS).

Notes

1. Names have been changed and details about the city are left out. The publication of this article in English also minimizes the risk of identification.

2. This is nothing exceptional – as confirmed at the national level by the public exposure of the ‘private life’ of Rachida Dati, the former Justice Minister, whose quick promotion under President Sarkozy was frequently attributed to extramarital affairs even before the paternity of her baby became an issue for tabloids and courts.

3. François Mitterrand, President from 1981 to 1995, was the father of an illegitimate child born in 1974 but whose existence was publicly acknowledged only in 1994, despite the fact that in the political world – including among journalists – it had been known for at least 10 years.

4. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former French minister and director of the International Monetary Fund, was accused of rape by a chambermaid in New York in May 2011 (criminal charges were dropped in August 2011, and the civil suit was settled in December 2011). Debate ensued in France, where political journalists were under fire for never talking about the man’s sexual reputation, now deemed a very telling detail.

5. ‘Whore of the Republic’ (Putain de la République) is the title of the autobiography written in 1999 by Christine Deviers-Joncour, allegedly addressed in those terms by a judge for being the acknowledged lover of a former minister of foreign affairs involved in a financial scandal.

6. The sociology of marriage markets has indeed confirmed that they rely on a gendered exchange: while women depend on their physical assets, men rely on their social and profes- sional status (see de Singly, 1984).

7. Initially a slang word used by youths in working-class districts, the term beur is synonymous with Arab and has made its way into everyday speech as it euphemizes the racial nature of the category.

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Author biographies

Lucie Bargel is a lecturer in political science at Nice University and affiliated with the research centre CESSP (Paris 1, EHESS/CNRS). Her work focuses on political parties, socialization and political professionalization with a gender perspective. Her PhD thesis, defended at the University of Paris 1 under the supervision of Frédérique Matonti, was published in 2009: Jeunes UMP/ Jeunes socialistes. Lieux et processus de socialisation politique (Paris: Dalloz). She recently coor- dinated an issue of the Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée devoted to fieldwork within political parties (2010, 17(4)).

Éric Fassin is a professor of sociology in the Political Science Department and the Gender Studies programme at Paris 8 University (after 18 years at École Normale Supérieure and five at New York University), and currently affiliated with the research centre IRIS (CNRS/EHESS). His work focuses on contemporary sexual and racial politics in France and the United States and their inter- sections (in particular concerning immigration in Europe). He is frequently involved in French public debates on issues his work addresses – from gay marriage and gender parity to the politics of immigration and race. He is the author of Le Sexe politique (2009), and co-author (with the col- lective Cette France-là) of four volumes on French immigration policies (2008–2012).

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He co-edited De la question sociale à la question raciale? (2006). His latest book is Démocratie précaire. Chroniques de la déraison d’État (2012). He is currently working on Actualité d’Aimé Césaire (La Découverte) and The Empire of Sexual Democracy (Zone Books).

Stéphane Latté is a lecturer in political science at the Haute-Alsace University, affiliated with the research centre PRISM-GSPE. His PhD thesis (AFSP Price/Mattei Dogan, 2009) has led to articles dealing with the history of victim associations (‘Victim movements’, in Snow DA, Della Porta D, Klandermans B and McAdam D (eds) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), the sociology of emotions and political uses of mourning (‘ “Vous ne respectez pas les morts d’AZF”. Ordonner les émotions en situation com- mémorative’, in Lefranc S and Mathieu L (eds) Mobilisations de victimes. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009) and the militant uses of psychology (‘Enquête sur les usages sociaux du traumatisme’, Politix, 2006, 73: 159–184). Meanwhile, he has also investigated local political recruitment (‘Cuisine et dépendance. Les logiques pratiques du recrutement politique, Politix, 2003, 60: 55–81), parity and the construction of gendered identities in municipal politics (with Catherine Achin et al., Sexes, genre et politique. Paris: Economica, 2007).

Résumé

Est-il nécessaire de s’intéresser à la vie privée des personnes pour décrire leur vie pub- lique? Au cours d’un enquête de terrain consacrée au personnel politique d’une ville française de taille moyenne, nous avons réuni une grande quantité d’informations — réelles ou présumées — sur la sexualité d’élus locaux (le plus souvent des femmes). Plutôt que d’exclure la sexualité du cadre de notre recherche, comme souvent dans les sciences sociales, nous examinons comment elle est utilisée pour interpréter la vie poli- tique locale. Nous examinons le cas de deux élus municipaux dont le parcours profes- sionnel et l’accession rapide au pouvoir défient les règles communes de la sélection politique et à qui ont été publiquement attribuées de présumées relations sexuelles avec des acteurs au capital politique plus important. Nous en examinons deux dimensions : l’explication sociale par la sexualité qui nécessite une analyse des fonctions sociales des rumeurs et l’explication sociologique de la sexualité qui implique l’examen du rôle poli- tique de la sexualité. Pour chacune de ces dimensions, nous nous appuyons sur l’analyse du contexte politique : le recours à des raisons sexuelles ne va pas de soi et ne peut être compris qu’en prenant en compte les politiques locales existantes en France dans les années 2000, qui ont été façonnées par l’application de la loi sur la parité en politique. Au terme de notre démonstration, nous plaidons en faveur d’une normalisation de l’analyse des relations intimes.

Mots-clés

Élections, France, genre, politiques, race, sexualité

Resumen

¿Es necesario recurrir a detalles de la “vida privada” de una persona para describir su “vida pública”? Durante el trabajo de campo llevado a cabo sobre la política en una ciudad francesa de tamaño mediano, reunimos una buena cantidad de información –real o supuesta– acerca de la sexualidad de funcionarios electos (muy a menudo mujeres). En vez de dejar la sexualidad fuera del alcance de nuestra investigación, como

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se acostumbra en ciencias sociales, examinamos cómo es utilizada localmente para interpretar la vida política. Observamos a dos funcionarias municipales electas con car- reras atípicas, cuyos rápidos ascensos al poder desafiaron las leyes habituales de selec- ción política, y han sido públicamente asociadas con supuestas relaciones románticas con hombres que gozan de un capital político mayor. Abordamos dos dimensiones: la explicación social por la sexualidad, que requiere analizar las funciones sociales de los rumores; y la explicación sociológica de la sexualidad, que supone examinar el rol político de la sexualidad. Para ambas dimensiones, recurrimos a análisis del contexto político: el uso de estas explicaciones sexuales no tiene sentido por sí mismo, sino que solo puede ser entendido dentro de la política local tal como existe en Francia durante los años 2000, moldeada por la aplicación de la ley de paridad. Finalmente, la dem- ostración nos lleva a abogar por la normalización de los análisis de las relaciones íntimas.

Palabras clave

Elecciones, Francia, género, política, raza, sexualidad