| Title | 2. French Opera |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | A Professional World Haunted by Gender-Based Violence |
| Contributor | Marie Buscatto (author) |
| Soline Helbert (author) | |
| Ionela Roharik (author) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0436.02 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0436/chapters/10.11647/obp.0436.02 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Marie Buscatto; Soline Helbert; Ionela Roharik; |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2025-06-23 |
| Long abstract | In the years following the 2017 #MeToo movement, the French classical music world has experienced a huge social media increase of testimonies and discussions related to gender-based violence. In August 2020, a storm broke over the professional world of opera: French soprano Chloé Briot announced in La Lettre du Musicien that she had lodged a complaint against a fellow singer, whom she accused of sexually assaulting her on stage during a performance of The Flood, declaring that she wanted to ‘put an end to the law of silence’. The information was immediately relayed and discussed in various media outlets, as evidenced by Clément Buzalka’s lengthy column on the France Musique radio website dated August 21, 2020. At the time no other victim had publicly denounced any wrongdoing, but in private conversations it was a hot topic. Although the complaint was dismissed on September 19, 2022, it did raise a number of questions. Are sexual assaults commonplace in the opera world? Are they symptomatic of a wider sexist pattern in this profession? Can we really speak of a “law of silence”? If so, what are the risks for those who report sexual violence and/or sexist acts? Is the world of opera one that is conducive to gender-based violence against female opera singers? Those questions were at the basis of a study conducted in France in 2020 by means of questionnaires and qualitative interviews. This chapter examines the social conditions that produced the different forms of gender-based violence reported by the study’s research participants and identifies the structural foundations underpinning both the ubiquitous nature of gender-based violence and the underreporting of these acts in the French operatic world. |
| Page range | pp. 27–48 |
| Print length | 22 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Marie Buscatto is a Full Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a researcher at IDHE.S (Paris 1—CNRS). She is a sociologist of work, gender and the arts, and a specialist in qualitative methods. Her current work focuses on gender inequalities in art worlds and prestigious professions, gender-based violence in the arts and the paradoxes of artistic work in Europe, North America and Japan. Her most recent publications in English include Women in Jazz. Musicality, Femininity, Marginalization (Routledge, 2021) and ‘Getting Old in Art. Revisiting the Trajectories of ‘Modest’ Artists’ (Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques, 2019). To find out more about her (more than) 160 publications, go to https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marie-Buscatto
Soline Helbert is a French lyric singer. A graduate of the universities
Paris 1 and Paris 2, she is interested in the place of women in the world
of opera.
Ionela Roharik is a sociologist and research engineer at the research
center CESPRA, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales—CNRS
(France). She has worked on the evolution of temporary artistic labour
market sectors, on gender inequalities in the arts, and together with
Janine Rannou, has published a book on the profession and careers
of dancers: Les Danseurs: Un métier d’engagement (La Documentation
Française, 2006).