Réjane Sénac

Sénac has written about the problematic implications of the French republican ethos expressed by the motto Liberté, égalité, fraternité. In her 2015 work l'Egalité sous conditions (Conditional equality), Sénac argues that women were included in the republican pact (via parity in particular) by virtue only of their differences from men, and were viewed as complementary but dissimilar entities to the default of men. Sénac's 2017 work Non-Frères au pays de l’égalité (Non-brothers in the country of equality) develops a notion of Republican "non-brothers": those who were excluded from the French Republic's original definition of citizenship, including women, people who are not white, people who are not heterosexual, intersex people, and gender nonbinary people. Arguing that the political citizenship that was defined and enforced by the French Revolution was established by excluding certain categories of people from the social contract, Sénac traces the progressive acceptance of non-brothers through the norm of their complementarity to enfranchised citizens, rather than their similarity to them or in recognition of any inherent rights. Sénac argues that the framing of the famous statement of liberty and equality for all actually constructed Republican France to be a deeply unequal society.

Sénac graduated from Sciences Po Paris in 2004 with a doctorate in political science. Her dissertation was entitled Identités sexuées et altérité démocratique: les représentations des différences hommes-femmes dans la société française aujourd'hui. Sénac also holds a post-graduate diploma in law, and a master's degree in philosophy from The University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.

Réjane Sénac (born 1975) is a French political scientist. She specialises in gender equality in recent French history and politics, as well as the politics of discrimination and diversity. She is the Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in the Centre de recherches politiques (fr) of Sciences Po. She was president of the parity commission of the French High Council for Equality between Women and Men (fr), which was an independent national advisory body under the Prime Minister of France from January 2013 to January 2019.