Professor Laurent Bibard (E85) explores why much of the Russian justification for the war in Ukraine draws on references to gender and sexuality, and analyses the deeper ideological and metaphysical outcomes of the conflict, beyond its geo-political and economic concerns. Interview. 

ESSEC Alumni: Your analysis of the underlying motivations for the war in Ukraine takes two speeches as the starting point: one by Patriarch Kirill on 6 March 2022 and the other by Vladimir Putin on 30 September 2023. What was the subject of the first speech? 

Laurent Bibard: At the end of the liturgy, Kirill stated the following: "For 8 years, there have been efforts to destroy what exists in Donbas. And in Donbas, there is a rejection, a fundamental rejection of the so-called values which are currently being put forward by those who claim world power. At present, there is a test of loyalty towards this power, a sort of pass card to this ‘happy’ world, a world of excessive consumption and of apparent ‘freedom’. Do you know what this test is? It is both very simple and terrifying; it is the gay pride parade. The requests by numerous countries to organise a gay pride are a test of loyalty towards this highly powerful world and we know that if people or countries refuse these requests, they are not part of this world, they become strangers to it."  

EA: What about the second speech? 

L. Bibard: Following the annexation of four regions in Ukraine, the Russian Head of State declared: “Do we want Russia to have Parent 1 and Parent 2; have we become completely crazy? Do we want our children to be indoctrinated to the fact that there are other genders than the two sexual genders?"  

EA: How do you interpret the insistence on sexuality in these speeches?

L. Bibard: These claims are unequivocal; the idea is that we can assimilate ‘the West’ with the defence of homosexuality, symbol of the decadence of civilisation, which is itself expressed through ‘traditional values’. In the eyes of Putin, it is ‘madness’ to tolerate the variety of sexual preferences represented in abundance by LGBTQIA+ movements. In this context, Russia symbolises the ‘counter’ to the West, i.e., the ‘East’, saviour of good sense, reason and traditions. Traditions which inevitably revolve around heterosexuality. The war in Ukraine is not a ‘physical’ war, according to Kirill, but a ‘metaphysical’ one.

EA: You say that the Russian rhetoric thus indicates two ways of being: feminine and masculine. What do you mean by that? 

L. Bibard: It must be underlined first that ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ do not overlap with ‘woman’ and ‘man’. It’s a great deal more complex than that. In this Russian-Ukrainian conflict, it can be said the ‘feminine’ evokes freedom, and ‘masculine’ a need for order and security. The freedom in particular to choose one’s sexual preference on one hand, and the need for order and security, and thus the protection of a territory, on the other. To understand this, you simply need to take Putin’s claim that the invasion of Ukraine forms part of Russian territorial defence and does not constitute an offensive attack but a defensive military operation. In this context, it is ‘feminine’ against ‘masculine’ and reciprocally, which is meaningless, because it is word against word. In this epiphenomenon, however, it must be said that freedom on one side and security on the other are by definition contradictory. There is no real freedom without risk-taking.  

EA: Are you not playing the rhetorical game you criticise by maintaining the idea of a world that sees itself in only two ways? And is it not limiting to do so through the very particular prism of gender, which is increasingly perceived as a spectrum? In deliberately ‘sharp’ terms, does the world really have a gender?

L. Bibard: That is a very good question to ask from a radical approach. It is by exploring questions fully that we can begin to answer them seriously. Firstly, speaking in terms of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ does not imply that reality is strictly, and more especially exclusively, made up of these two ways of ‘being’, and that this would lend a ‘gender’ to the world to the detriment of another or several other genders. On the other hand, it is undeniable that up to now, we humans have had to combine male and female sexualities to happen, to be conceived. In biological terms, either naturally or with medical assistance, we need male and female gametes to exist. Except in exceptional medical cases, these gametes belong to male men (spermatozoa) and female women (ova).

EA: What are your conclusions?

L. Bibard: I draw on traditions such as Taoism, which believes that as all humans are the fruit of a male and a female, they inevitably harbour both sexualities. That is how I arrive at the ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ in all of us, regardless of our anatomical sex. Whether we are a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’, each and every one of us carries both sexualities, feminine from our female progenitor and masculine from our male progenitor. Once ‘internalised’, i.e., making up each and every one of us, the female and male possibilities are no longer to be taken on a biological level (ova and spermatozoa), but as two complementary components of any human being. This is what Taoists call the ‘yin’ and the ‘yang’, which we could translate as ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ in the present context.

EA: With which consequences?

L. Bibard: The dynamics at play between these two aspects of the same reality that is each individual in their irreducible particularity open an infinite spectrum of possibilities in terms of sexual life, because as each of us is composed of female and male, absolutely nothing prevents the spread of preferences of any kind and in all directions. Seen from this angle, far from fostering a reduced understanding of the world, ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ dynamics open our understanding to infinite possibilities. This does not deny, however, the initial heterosexual reality which has irreducibly shaped us up to now.

EA: This could change in time, given the possibilities that the explosion in science and contemporary techniques offer us...

L. Bibard: True, but nothing guarantees that we will achieve this, nor that it is desirable. We must be attentive to the fact that we do not need science and techniques to be an individual with a totally original and unique view point of the world, as Taoists believe. On this topic, I’d recommend the work Shen, ou l’Instant Créateur by Dr Jean-Marc Eyssalet (Trédaniel, 1990). There are around eight billion humans on Earth, and regardless of any characteristic such as sex or age, etc., that means eight billion views of the world which are totally irreducible from each other. 

EA: Could we go as far as to say that this is what is really at stake in the war in Ukraine, rather than the historical, geo-political or economic aspects that are generally invoked? 

L. Bibard: This is also a key question. The real stakes behind the war in Ukraine do not lie here. This can, however, be linked with one of the real political stakes, bearing in mind that the conflict is a tension between freedom, through democratic regimes for example, and giving priority to order and security, through authoritarian regimes. We thus realise that the ‘feminine’ (freedom) and masculine (secure safeguarding of a territory) would appear to be a factor in the political tension radicalised by the war. This is why it is essential to pay attention to both the ideological discourse of the Russian side and the physical violence of the war itself, with the fighting and deterioration of economic and social life.

EA: You point out that the Russian rhetoric on sexualities is echoed in certain Western views. Are you speaking of a direct influence, an ideological ‘invasion’, or a certain zeitgeist that transcends borders?

L. Bibard: We simply need to consider the violence of some recent controversies, such as the opposition between Sandrine Rousseau and Julien Bayou in France, or the regression of the right to abortion in the USA, to see that the tensions we are talking about here with the war in Ukraine are far from exclusive to the Russian ideology. That said, I would not go as far as to affirm that the Russian rhetoric has the potential to ‘invade’ Western ideology, strictly speaking. In fact, regardless of the Russian rhetoric, it really is in our interest to stand by the objective affirmation of human rights in terms of the sexualities expressed through LGBTQIA+ movements, if we are truly to serve the cause of the freedom we claim to be ours. One issue on this level plays into the hands of Russia’s advocates or their counterparts elsewhere in the world right now: the LGBTQIA+ movements and all movements fighting against dominations, including colonial domination, regardless of their necessity, are often unaware of their origins.

EA: What do you mean by that?

L. Bibard: In short, these movements would be impossible without Western history. Regardless of its ambivalences and its unfortunate moral and political collapse during the two world wars in particular, there would be no culture, and thus no awareness, of the very possibility of freedom and the universal dignity of people without the history of the Western world. A history which sadly involves colonisation and domination. In other words, in trying to clean the slate of the past by ridding ourselves definitively of any form of domination, without drawing on the past which made this project possible, we weaken it. We weaken it in the face of the armed resistance of those who do not want this, who do not understand or respect it as we respect and desire it. This is why I perceive ‘cancel culture’ as problematic and even dangerous, above all for its goal to overcome all forms of domination. We must not forget the past to overcome it or render it obsolete, because if you try to neglect the past, it comes back to slap you in the face. We have to take it on in order to overcome it, take it as the starting point to head for the future of a truly shared and meaningful life.

EA: Given these risks and attitudes, what stance and actions do you recommend? 

L. Bibard: A more distanced and adjusted consideration of the question. What we are discussing right now, thanks to your questions. You will find a short version of this in my essay Dé-coïncider d’avec les études de genres [De-coincide with Gender Studies] published last November, or a more in-depth exploration in my Phénoménologie des sexualités [Phenomenology of Sexualities] published in 2021. 

EA: Are there other resources you can recommend to ESSEC members wishing to learn more about this subject?

L. Bibard: I suggest the works of Emmanuel Todd in particular, in addition to some fundamental studies for a rigorous account of the relations between sexuality and politics, such as L’Histoire des femmes en Occident [A History of Women in the West] by Michelle Perrot, the works of Françoise Héritier, or the deconstruction works undertaken by Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault’s philosophy of sexuality, which goes hand in hand with his study on the history of madness in relation to our modernity.

Interview by Louis Armengaud Wurmser (E10), Content Manager at ESSEC Alumni 

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