DE LA DIFFÉRENCE À LA RESSEMBLANCE DES SEXES
FROM THE DIFFERENCE TO THE RESEMBLANCE OF THE SEXES

Summary/Abstract: The phrase “sex difference” has raised many questions. The psychoanalyst Sabine Prokhoris (2002) amalgamated all the words to form a single syntagm speaking of “the difference between the sexes”. The anthropologist Françoise Héritier (1996) sees, for her part, the “sex difference” concept as the “ultimate barrier of thought”. Others have denounced in this formula a political concept which would instead be replaced by that of “sex resemblance” or “resemblance of the sexes”. Monique Wittig, for her part, observed in The Straight mind (2007) that the very term “difference” did not go without raising formidable questions: “The concept of ‘difference of the sexes’ […] ontologically constitutes women as different others. Men are not different. (Neither are the whites, nor the masters, but the Blacks are and the slaves too.). » We will endeavor, in this paper, to identify what is problematic in the “difference of the sexes”: its insistence on difference rather than resemblance; the division of the species into two parts whose relationship must still be clarified (opposition? complementarity?); the vagueness attached to the very concept of “difference”.

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