Political/Decolonial Feminism
Lecture
“Upon confronting our lives as women and black women, we realized that the history of struggles in our countries and in immigration is a history in which we are negated, falsified,” Black Women’s Coordination, 1978.
In this presentation, Françoise Vergès builds from a historical analysis of the role of poor and black women in social reproduction and in care and cleaning work to offer a basis for political and decolonial feminism today.
She analyses how feminist groups – Afro-feminists, Muslim feminists – of the last decades questioned the white bourgeois feminism that has become dominant due to a series of elements: the hard-headed refusal of European feminists to consider the role that slavery and colonialism played in constituting their society or to analyse the means, discourses, representations and laws that conceived the “white woman” and gave her privileges; their choice of ignoring the coloniality of gender; the role of the United Nations that chose to promote “women’s rights” instead of “women’s liberation”; the reinforcement of liberalism; transformations of capitalism and the development of the care industry that calls for a racially stereotypical female work force; the manifestation of corporate feminism; the rise of xenophobic political parties in Europe and of convergence points between their anti-immigrant, racist and Islamophobic positions and the positions of left-wing or liberal, so-called “historical” feminists; armed imperialistic interventions that took over the discourse in defence of “women’s rights,” “saving brown women from brown men,” if we borrow the ever so true formulation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
To write the history of white feminism is to write the history of blind spots, denegations, stubborn disavowals of the difference imposed by the West between white and all other women in legislation, representations, images, arts, literature, politics, and economy.
// in English //
Free entrance.
Production and organisation: City of Women.
With the support from French Institute.
