BETRAYING BELLEAU, OR IS THERE A FEMALE INTELLECTUAL IN THE ROOM?

The work of Andre Belleau gives us the figure of an intellectual who thinks of himself, implicitly, in the masculine mode. Although he denies reproducing an exclusion based on gender difference, his thinking about Quebec's intellectual life and its debates makes very little room for women who express their view of culture and the social conditions by which it is determined. Many female scholars have documented how little space was given to women or feminism in Quebecois journals of ideas during the 1960s and 1970s. The article studies, in some of Belleau's writings and in Liberte collective editorials, the ways in which female intellectuals were assigned a minor role-one that coincided with their uncertain status in Quebec's social discourse at the time. The article also examines the idea that the figure of the intellectual as conceived and embodied by Belleau may nonetheless be useful in building a feminist intellectual practice.