Book presentation “Le multiculturalisme à l’épreuve du féminisme, Vrin, 2025”

Multiculturalism is regularly accused of harming women. Whether it takes the form of legal exemptions or simple tolerance of foreign customs, the right to cultural difference is often perceived as a threat to women’s rights because it seems to favour the preservation of sexist traditions. Yet does not equal respect for all people, regardless of their culture or gender, reflect the same requirement for democratic inclusion? And is it not suspicious that conservative nationalists are exploiting the cause of women to rehabilitate authoritarian forms of political assimilation? Therefore, rather than opposing multiculturalism and feminism, should we not be thinking about how to reconcile them? If feminism challenges multiculturalism, it is not because it seeks to undo it, but because it offers a unique opportunity to revise it. By seeking to untangle the debates that multiculturalist philosophies have sparked among feminist theorists, Sophie Guérard de Latour has two objectives in this book: to establish the reasons why feminism must be multicultural and to assess the different ways in which it can be so.

Sophie GUÉRARD DE LATOUR is a professor of political philosophy at ENS Lyon.