Juliette Rennes

Juliette Rennes is a French sociologist. Since 2021, she has been the director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris. Most relevant here, Prof. Rennes has attempted to "unpack", or deconstruct, the natural/ordinariness of the category of "age" itself. Rennes uses Michel Foucault's thought to discuss its use as a biopolotical tool of governance and social control.

Similar to historian Nicholas Syrett, Rennes shows how people in past societies held less stringently to norms based on their precise age. Rennes argues that the introduction of birth registries and baptisms, the latter instituted primarily "for families to control the marriage of their underage children," transformed people's relationship to age. In France, Rennes explains, "A 1579 ruling considered unions involving a minor (at the time a woman under twenty-five and/or a man under thirty), as "abduction" when the marriage was concluded without parental consent." Age, Rennes argues, has not always been associated with chronological age.

Selected Publications

• Rennes, J., Bozon, M. (2015). 'The History of Sexual Norms: The Hold of Age and Gender'. Histoire des normes sexuelles: l'emprise de l'âge et du genre, 42, pp. 7-23.

What is possible, allowed, or forbidden in the way of sexual behaviour, depending on one’s age and sex, and that of one’s partner? At what age is one still too young, or already too old, to be considered as a sexual subject? And to what extent are these questions political issues? The articles in this collection explore different historical forms of the articulation between the way age is experienced, the structuring of gender relations, and the regulation of sexuality.

• Rennes, J., Translated by Throssell, K. (2019). 'Unpacking Age as a Category: Chronological Age, Life Stage, And Bodily Aging in Age-Based Prejudice'. Revue française de sociologie, 60(2), 257-284.

Excerpt:

Although the hegemonic association of “age” with chronological age seems obvious now, it is not systematically involved in age-based discrimination and has not always existed. [... I]t was at the end of the eighteenth century, when registering newborns at birth became more systematic, that the use of the date of birth became one of the main tools for managing, recording, controlling, and protecting members of the nation according to a logic of “biopolitical” government analyzed by Michel Foucault (2004). Progressively acquiring a central place in social life, the administrative use of age also became controversial. For more than a century, public debates had focused on “the right age” for compulsory schooling and retirement, political, legal, or sexual majority, and access to a number of social assistance or preventative medicine programs.