Avant le gender mainstreaming. Relire les débats sur le ‘féminisme global’ (1975-1995)

This paper considers the scholarship related to the four world conferences on women organized by the UN between 1975 and 1995, which are generally understood as steps of a linear process that led to the structuring of a “global movement for women’s rights” or “global feminism”. Or, three of those events took place in context, when the framing of gender politics was disputed between East and West, according to the logic of Cold-War competition. In order to question this paradox, the article begins with reviewing mainstream works that describe feminist successes in institutional settings as well as women’s transnational mobilizations in UN venues by silencing the ideological conflict. It then concentrates on a few studies which restitute the mainsprings of a specific kind of women’s rights internationalism promoted by the Soviet bloc and by its allies in the Global South, which undergirded counter-hegemonic stances and was largely ignored by scholars of “global feminism” until recently. In the second and last part, the article advances a few methodological proposals for analyzing the referential of « global feminism » in the light of the circumstances of its emergence and of the actors who promoted it. The sociological perspective reveals that this phenomenon was permeated by the geopolitics of the late Cold War years and the practical logics of Western cultural diplomacy