Feminist Interventions in Political Representation in the United States and Canada: Training Programs and Legal Quotas

While many countries have adopted quota laws to regulate the election of women to political office, the United States and Canada seem unaffected by this trend. In this article, I seek an explanation for this and examine the role of women's movements and some of the initiatives launched over the last 25 years to counter the problem of low numbers of elected women in Canadian and American parliaments. I examine features common to the approaches of American and Canadian women's movements, both of which are characterized by a strong emphasis on training for political office and an absence of mobilization in favor of legal quotas. Women's groups involved in the promotion of women in politics in the U.S. and Canada do not support the strategy of legal quota implementation; rather, one type of intervention is favored over all others: training programs. I conclude that the absence of campaigns for legal quotas in Canada and the United States can be linked to the lack of mobilization for quotas on the part of women's organizations. However, from a feminist perspective, training programs for women who want to run for office are grounded in problematic assumptions

Réception de la théorie postcoloniale dans le féminisme québécois

Ce texte propose d’utiliser le féminisme postcolonial comme point d’appui pour explorer les discours identitaires à l’oeuvre dans le féminisme québécois. La première partie du texte aborde la génèse du féminisme postcolonial à partir des écrits de Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty et Uma Narayan. Dans la seconde partie, l’auteure discute de la figure centrale à l’oeuvre dans le féminisme québécois, marqué au cours des années 60 par le récit politique de l’oppression nationale. Selon son analyse, cet héritage a permis au féminisme québécois d’occulter le difficile exercice d’identifier les rapports de pouvoir entre les femmes de la majorité et les autres femmes.In this text, postcolonial feminism is the starting point of an exploration of identity discourses operating within Quebec feminism. The first part of the text is devoted to the origins of postcolonial feminism through the works of Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Uma Narayan. In the second part of the text, we discuss the leading representations in Quebec feminism, shaped by the political narration of national oppression. According to our analysis, this heritage has made it possible for Quebec feminism to escape from the difficult exercise of identifying power relations between majority-culture women and other women