A REPRESENTATION AS WOMEN - SOME CRITICAL CONSIDERATIONS ON THE DEMAND FOR PARITY BETWEEN THE SEXES

The demand for parity between the sexes, proposed as a response to the political exclusion of women and as a point of departure for the refo unding of democracy, seems problematical in several respects. To begin with, it derives from the principle of group representation which red uces the exercise of citizenship to the expression of a single social identity and obscures the constitutive diversity of the women's group. It then substitutes, for the political responsibility of the elected women, the confidence placed in her, from the outset, as a woman and w eakens her legitimacy as representative of the population as a whole. Last but not least, by sanctioning the division of the City into two s exes, a sharing of the power as it exists would perpetuate rather than undermine the differentiation constitutive of the domination of women , unsolvable by technical means, like any social relations issue.