To browse Academia. Returning to the origin of Lefebvre's thought on the right to the city, this paper reflects on how it intersects with French constructions of the banlieue and offers an overview of the gender-specific forms of engagement with the city of young inhabitants of the banlieue, banlieusard. It argues that an essential background to the current situation of banlieues at present is the implementation of territorialized policies which target areas within the framework of the Politique de la Ville, with specific gendered dimensions.
In a context of neo-colonial state feminism, the ways in which women are being promoted and included in the assessment and improvement of their neighbourhood environments operates as an exclusion of men from these processes. The last section of this paper examines how some women's collectives are challenging this and the types of discourse and the spatial claims they stake, for both a city that "belongs to them" and everyday citizenship for all banlieusard.
This article explores the constructions of urban space, national identity and gender mediated by an important genre of contemporary French cinema, the film de banlieue. Over the last 20 years, films by both French and French-Maghrebi filmmakers determined to show the reality of life on the outskirts of France's major cities have paradoxically helped reinforce notions of the grands ensembles as places outside the mainstream of culture and identity.
Although the film recognizes the incarcerative nature of these modernist neighbourhoods for women, it does not mediate a simplistic rejection of the banlieu. The young women's project of 'framing modernity' also works within the film as a mise en abyme, recuperating high modernist theories of mediated vision as a primary link between cities and their hinterlands.
These groups espouse both feminis Recent discussions about violence against women have shifted their attention to specific forms of violence in relation to migration and Islam. These representations relate to the French feminist movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises neither whore nor submissive , a movement that in the early s deplored both the sustained degradation of certain banlieue neighborhoods and also the charges and restrictions that this entails, particularly for young women.
