OF FEMINISMS A DISCUSSION ON BLACK AND POSTCOLONIAL

"OF FEMINISMS: A DISCUSSION ON BLACK AND POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISMS AND THE LAW" SEMAINE DOCTORALE INTENSIVE – SCIENCE PO PARIS – 17 JUIN 2015

BLACK FEMINISMS

BLACK FEMINISMS Patricia Hill Collins: “Rather than developing definitions and arguing over naming practices – for example, whether this thought should be called Black feminism, womanism, Afrocentric feminism, Africana womanism, and the like – a more useful approach lies in revisiting the reasons why Black feminist thought may provide the common ground that is so sorely needed both among Afro-American women, and between African-American women and all others whose collective knowledge or thought has a similar purpose. Black feminist thought’s distinguishing features need not be unique and may share much with other bodies of knowledge. Rather, it is the convergence of these distinguishing features that gives US Black feminist thought its distinctive contours. ”* • • • 6 features: US context of intersecting oppression and racialized segregation Existing tension between experience and ideas Dialogical relationship between collective experience and group knowledge Contribution of African-American women intellectuals resulting from the merger of action and theory The necessity for a dynamic and change-related black feminist activism and thought Black feminism as part of the wider humanity/social justice project *Black Feminist Thought, New York and London: Routledge, 2000, p. 25.

THE POSSIBILITY OF A TRANSNATIONAL BLACK FEMINISM? Patricia Hill Collins: “In the context of an “intercontinental Back women’s consciousness movement” (Mc. Laughlin 1995, 73), women of African descent are dispersed globally, yet the issues we face may be similar. Transnationally, women encounter recurring social issues such as poverty, violence, reproductive concerns, lack of education, sex work, and susceptibility to disease (Rights of Women 1998). Placing African-American women’s experiences, thought and practice in a transnational, Black diasporic context reveals these and other commonalities of women of African descent while specifying what is particular to African-American women. ”* *Black Feminist Thought, New York and London: Routledge, 2000, p. 25. Mentions: Andree Nicola Mc. Laughlin, “The Impact of the Black Consciousness and Women’s Movements on Black Women’s Identity: Intercontinental Empowerment”, in Connecting Across Cultures and Continents: Black Women Speak Out on Identity, Race and Development, ed. Achola O. Pala: New York: UN Development Fund for Women, 1995, pp. 71 -84

CLIPS Audre Lorde (1934 -1992) ² Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) ² Sister Outsider (1984) ² Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (1992) Audre Lorde. The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 (Dagmar Schultz, 2012) bell hooks (1952 - …) ² Ain't I a Woman? : Black Women and Feminism (1981) ² Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) ² Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) ² Black Looks: Race and Representation (2014) Melissa Harris-Perry (1973 - …) ² Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (2011) Black Female Voices: Who is Listening - A public dialogue between bell hooks + Melissa Harris. Perry The New School, NYC, 8 November 2013 (Youtube)

INTERSECTIONALITY

DEFINITIONS Kimberle Crenshaw: “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. ”* *"Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, pp. 140.

Kimberle Crenshaw: “It seems that I have to say that Black women are the same and harmed by being treated differently, or that they are different and harmed by being treated the same. But I cannot say both. This apparent contradiction is but another manifestation of the conceptual limitations of the single-issue analyses that intersectionality challenges. The point is that Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradiction arises from our assumptions that their claims of exclusion must be unidirectional. (…) I am suggesting that Black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men. Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences: sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double -discrimination – the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women – not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women’s experiences are much broader than the general categories that discrimination discourse provides. Yet the continued insistence that Black women’s demands and needs be filtered through categorical analyses that completely obscure they experiences guarantees that their needs will seldomly be addressed. ” *"Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, pp. 148.

CROSSROADS OF INTERSECTING FORMS OF OPPRESSIONS

3 MOST COMMON APPROACHES TO INTERSECTIONALITY Antecategorical Intercategorical Intracategorical Leslie Mc. Call, "The Complexity of Intersectionality. " Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 30, No. 3, Spring 2005, pp. 1771– 1800.

INTERSECTIONALITY AND THE LAW Kimberle Crenshaw (interview, 2014): “It’s important to clarify that the term was used to capture the applicability of black feminism to anti-discrimination law. ” Discrimination categories as shaped by dominant standpoint – “Underlying this conception of discrimination is a view that the wrong which antidiscrimination law addresses is the use of race or gender factors to interfere with decisions that would otherwise be fair or neutral. This process-based definition is not grounded in a bottom-up commitment to improve the substantive conditions for those who are victimized by the interplay of numerous factors. Instead, the dominant message of antidiscrimination law is that it will regulate only the limited extent to which race or sex interfere with the process of determining outcomes. This narrow objective is facilitated by the topdown strategy of using a singular “but for” analysis to ascertain the effects of race or sex. Because the scope of antidiscrimination law is so limited, sex and race discrimination have come to be defined in terms of the experiences of those who are privileged but for their racial or sexual characteristics. Put differently, the paradigm of sex discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of white women; the model of race discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of the most privileged Blacks. ” ("Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, pp. 148. ) T h e C E I L I N G m e t a p h o r a A n i t a H I L L

POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISM: FRENCH PERSPECTIVES

CRITICISMS AGAINST THE “FRENCH REPUBLICAN FEMINISM” CRITIQUES DU FEMINISME REPUBLICAIN FRANÇAIS Marie-Hélène Bourcier : « La République se construit comme blanche, mais comme elle a honte de cette caractéristique, elle propose de blanchir les colonisés pour en faire des citoyens. Et comme elle a en horreur les différences culturelles, elle ne sait pas quoi faire d’individus qui ont des croyances, des manières de vivre et de faire qui ne sont pas européennes mais métissées. Ces individus vont donc devoir passer sous les fourches caudines de la pédagogie républicaine (…). De minorités, ils devront disparaitre dans la majorité ; de visibles, on rêve de les rendre invisibles » *. *Sexpolitiques : Queer Zones, La Fabrique, Paris, 2005, 301 p.

THE VEILED WOMAN AS AN OBJECT OF FRENCH POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISM LA FEMME VOILÉE COMME SUPPORT DE RÉFLEXION DU FÉMINISME POSTCOLONIAL FRANÇAIS Pierre Lénel, Virginie Martin : « La femme voilée constitue (…) le cas d’école parfait qui permet d’articuler une lecture à la fois genrée, racisée et postcoloniale. En effet, nous entrons ici dans une approche relationnelle et de pouvoir entre hommes et femmes ; le voile, quant à lui, induit bien évidemment une lecture religieuse – et par extension racisée – de cette question. C’est in fine le paradigme postcolonial qui va nous permettre d’interroger la lecture républicaine laïque de la fille voilée dans l’espace public » *. * « La contribution des études postcoloniales et des féminismes du « Sud » à la constitution d’un féminisme renouvelé. Vers la fin de l’occidentalisme ? » , Revue Tiers Monde, 2012/1

INTERSECTIONALITY IN FRENCH FEMINIST LEGAL STUDIES L’INTERSECTIONNALITÉ DANS LES ÉTUDES FÉMINISTES DU DROIT EN FRANCE Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez : « L’hypothèse, c’est que la «Nouvelle Laïcité » est inégalitaire non seulement parce qu’elle tend à distinguer l’Islam des autres religions, mais encore parce qu’elle pèse de manière toute particulière sur les femmes musulmanes d’une manière non comparable à celle dont elle pèse sur les hommes musulmans, ou sur les femmes non-musulmanes. On pourrait alors considérer, pour reprendre le vocabulaire forgé Outre-Atlantique par Kimberle Crenshaw, que les femmes musulmanes, en tant qu’elles sont la cible (intentionnelle ou factuelle) des redéfinitions contemporaines de la laïcité, sont placées dans une situation intersectionnelle » *. Mathias Möschel : « la question des femmes musulmanes portant le voile (au travail) pourrait être qualifiée par excellence de question intersectionnelle à la française. En effet, on observe une laïcisation du travail privé où les interdictions du port du voile, qui seraient autrement directement discriminatoires sur la base de la religion ou indirectement discriminatoires car frappant quasi exclusivement des femmes (musulmanes), se justifient soit par le principe de laïcité, soit par d’autres motifs facilement acceptés par les juges » **. * « Genre et religion : le genre de la Nouvelle Laïcité » , La loi et le genre – études critiques de droit français, sous la direction de Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez, Marc Pichard et Diane Roman, coordinateurs scientifiques de REGINE, CNRS Editions, Paris, 2014, pp. 715 -731 ** « L’intersectionnalité dans le contentieux de la non-discrimination relatif au domaine de l’emploi en France » , La loi et le genre – études critiques de droit français, sous la direction de Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez, Marc Pichard et Diane Roman, coordinateurs scientifiques de REGINE, CNRS Editions, Paris, 2014, pp. 697 -714

POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISM: AFRICAN PERSPECTIVES

AFRICAN FEMINISM : THE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE DOMINATION OF OCCIDENTAL FEMINISM LE FÉMINISME AFRICAIN : LA LUTTE CONTRE LA DOMINATION DU FÉMINISME OCCIDENTAL Shirin Edwin : “African feminism first defined itself as markedly different from Euro-American feminism and accused the latter of ethnocentrism, racism, and a blind transfer of western notions of emancipation and liberation to Africa”*. Grace O. Sokoya : “African feminism neither abandons motherhood nor dismisses maternal politics as non-feminist. Motherhood is perceived as the fulfilment of womanhood in Africa. While exclusion of men from women's issues is one of the strategies employed in the liberation struggles of Western feminists, African feminists perceive their men as partners in progress and thus find it unreasonable to exclude them from women's issues. Western feminism is characterized by features and language perceived by the African feminists as foreign and radicalism, stridence against motherhood, liberalism, and socialism, to mention a few. Radical feminism for example, advocates an altogether elimination of patriarchy and an organisation of a gender-free society. The major reasons of opposition by African feminists lie in the preference for traditional gender relations and family definitions. African feminists argue that African feminism is what Western feminism is not”**. * “We belong here, too”, Frontiers, 2006, vol. 27, n° 3, pp. 140 -156 ** “ Self-reflexivity in Gender research: the dilemma of an african feminist scholar”, Gender and Behaviour, Volume 4 #2, pp. 867 -880

WOMANISM VS FEMINISM Bagele Chilisa, Gabo Ntseane : "Some African feminists, for instance, prefer the term womanism to feminism, arguing that the term feminism is associated with Western ideologies. From this womanism perspective arose the term Africana womanism to describe the particular experiences of people of African origin, both diasporic and indigenous”*. * “Resisting dominant discourses: implications of indigenous, African feminist theory and methods for gender and education research", Gender and Education, vol. 22, n° 6, november 2010, pp. 617 -632

POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISM AT THE GLOBAL LEVEL PROF. RATNA KAPUR

Merci – Thank you