Background
Fouque was born in a poor neighbourhood of Marseille to Alexis Grugnardi, a Corsican syndicalist.
politician Psychoanalyst publisher
Fouque was born in a poor neighbourhood of Marseille to Alexis Grugnardi, a Corsican syndicalist.
She was the leader of one of the groups that originally formed the French Women"s Liberation (MLF), and she later registered the trademark MLF specifically under her name. Her position in feminist theory was primarily essentialist, and heavily based in psychoanalysis. Early in life, Fouque listened to the speeches of communist leader Maurice Thorez.
With René Fouque, Antoinette Fouque participated in the literary journal Cahiers du Sud.
Between 1965 and 1969, she read Italian manuscripts for Éditions du Seuil. Fouque read Jacques Lacan before reading Sigmund Freud.
With the French writer and feminist Monique Wittig, Josiane Chanel and many others, Fouque was active since 1968 in one of the early women"s groups which gathered together in 1970 to form the French Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF), a movement consisting of multiple groups throughout France without any formal leadership. Her group was called Psychanalyse et Politique.
Conflicts developed within the movement between Fouque and Wittig, since the former was influenced by Lacan and the latter by Herbert Marcuse.
In 1974, she helped found the publishing body Éditions Des femmes, funded by Sylvina Boissonnas "an heiress of the Schlumberger family", which printed works for the feminist movement. In October 1979, Fouque registered the name MLF as the property of her group, creating a controversy still ongoing. French philosopher, writer and feminist Beauvoir wrote against this appropriation of the MLF by one group.
She practiced as a psychoanalyst starting in 1971, but her credentials were not clearly established.
Between 1969 and 1975, Fouque underwent psychoanalysis with Lacan. She said that this helped her "not to yield to the feminist illusion.
He made me avoid the idea that a woman can only be a failed manitoba He allowed me to criticize Sartre and Beauvoir." During that same period, Fouque also underwent psychoanalysis with Luce Irigaray.
In 1974, Fouque met Serge Leclaire and discussed undergoing analysis with him, but the analysis did not take place.
Between 1978 and 1982, Fouque underwent psychoanalysis with Bela Grunberger. Fouque stated that she found Grunberger misogynistic. She has appeared on French television with the actress Catherine Deneuve.
Fouque herself denied being feminist, and rejected Simone de Beauvoir"s existentialism in favour of structuralism and libertarian Marxism.