19세기 프랑스 여성 노동자의 지적 실천 : 미디네트를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper analyzes the figure of the midinette—young female workers in late nineteenth-century Paris—as a critical site where urban visibility, labor practices, and gendered subjectivity converged. Although midinettes were widely circulated in visual culture as fashionable, lively, and charming icons of urban modernity, their actual labor, practical expertise, and capacity for public speech were systematically marginalized or rendered invisible. Focusing on urban visibility, embodied practices of clothing and work, and modes of intellectual and collective expression, the study investigates how these women negotiated the politics of appearance and speech within intersecting social and gender hierarchies. Drawing on Rancière’s concept of the partition of the sensible, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, Butler’s notion of gender performativity, and Hayat’s framework of intellectual practices, the paper argues that midinettes were not passive objects of representation but active agents who shaped urban sensibilities, knowledge production, and forms of public presence. Their work-based expertise, informal networks of skill exchange, and participation in strikes, publications, and public performances reveal how agency was exercised within constrained social and gendered structures. By foregrounding the interplay between visual representation, embodied practice, gender norms, and political expression, this study contributes to the historiography of women’s labor and urban modernity, and reconsiders the formation of modern female subjectivity from the perspective of everyday practices and performative acts.