Critical Race Theory and Scholarly Analyses of Race in France

Policing Commercial Sex in 1970s France: Regulating the Racialized Sexual Order

“…The legislative framework enabled the authorities to regulate the racialized, class-based, and gendered sexual order because it allowed for the police's selective tolerance, even though this was not formulated in law. Mainsant (2013a) argues that law is made ‘from below’ in the regulation of sex work, which means that ‘law in the book’ differs from ‘law in action’. Police action gives meaning to the legislation through discretionary surveillance and discretionary tolerance (Mainsant, 2012).…”

“…However, recently, interest in critical race studies and a so-called colonial turn in France have been gaining ground (Mack, 2021;Saada, 2014;Fassin and Fassin, 2013). Critical researchers on race in France have argued that French republican universalism has always coexisted with colonialism: the ideal of republican universalism was made possible through geographical particularism that renders the explicit mentioning of race invisible (Stovall and Van den Abbeele, 2003;Cooper, 2009;Zevounou, 2021b).…”

“…In so doing, this paper also speaks to critical race feminist scholarship on commercial sex. Researchers have argued that the regulation of commercial sex can reveal underlying concerns about the social order (Mainsant, 2013a; Phoenix, 2009). More specifically, scholars have used a critical race (feminist) perspective to show how the regulation of the social order is dependent on the intersections of race, gender, class and migration-status of people selling sex (McClintock, 1992; Benoit et al, 2019b; Benoit et al, 2019a; Butler, 2015).…”