Pensées du corps et différences des sexes à l'époque moderne

There are two competing models for thinking about the difference between the sexes in the seventeenth century: one that presents itself as a modern reconfiguration of humoristic medicine and another that proposes a mechanistic view of the body; these are the models proposed by Cureau de la Chambre and that of Descartes, respectively. "Woman", "the feminine", and "the weaker sex" are redefined by these two authors in opposite ways. Cureau develops an extreme differentialism, which is not without tension as it is a question of the same species. Descartes, for his part, posits gender neutrality in terms of general human capacity, physical as well as intellectual. This allows him to ask a question that is still relevant: is the erasure of difference between the sexes the basis of equality? Poulain de la Barre and Malebranche both inherit Descartes' new anthropological model but use it differently in their analyses of the female sex. Poulain's egalitarian feminism is thus in contradiction to Malebranche's inegalitarian differentialism, although both authors claim to follow Descartes in their anthropological analyses. This modern debate on the difference between the sexes is important because it leads to reflections on gender as separate from biological sex, notably through the notion of the effeminate. The sexuation of the body, whether partial or complete, also has important moral and intellectual consequences. What these four authors show is that most of our thoughts depend on the body. There is a philosophical debate among them about the difference between the sexes, a debate that profoundly alters modern human science. Through the lens of this question, the entire anthropology of each of these authors is analysed, starting with medicine and psychophysiology and moving on to the intellectual, moral and even political consequences of these conceptions of the feminine as compared to the masculine. Identifying this key moment in the debates on sex and gender allows us to trace the theoretical lineage up to the contemporary era.