A Decolonial Feminism
| Author | Françoise Vergés |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | |
| Country | United Kingdom and United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | History |
| Published | 2021 (Pluto Press) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 109 pp |
A Decolonial Feminism was published in 2021 by Pluto Press and is the English translation of the book Un féminisme décolonial by Françoise Vergés published by La Fabrique Éditions in 2019. The book received financial support from English PEN as part of the "PEN Translates!" programme. The book was translated by Ashley J. Bohrer with the author. [1]
A Decolonial Feminism is an attempt to "reclaim feminism" from "civilizational feminism" that has become the mainstream, which is complicit in the subjugation and exploitation of "racialized women." A decolonial feminism opposes not only gender inequality but also racism, imperialism, and capitalism. The book reflects how the mainstream feminism or "civilizational feminism" has been appropriated by right-wing nationalism, neoliberalism, and militarization as well as interrogates how "civilizational feminism" is rooted in racism.[1]
About the author
Growing up surrounded by feminists and anti-colonial activists, Vergés inherited a worldview that was about resisting the unjust global order. However, Vergés did not call herself a feminist but identified as being part of the women's liberation movement in an anti-colonial context and knew "the joy and happiness of collective struggle" from a young age. [1]
She reflects:
It was not when I arrived in France or went to university that I discovered that capitalism, racism, sexism, and imperialism are fellow travelers, and I did not first encounter anti-colonial or anti-racist feminism by reading Simone de Beauvoir; I have been surrounded by it since early childhood.[1]
Summary
North-South division and Civilizational Feminism
A Decolonial Feminism centers the question of "who cleans the world?" starting by referencing the 45-day strike of Gare du Nord workers, mainly Black and Brown women against their employer Onet, a cleaning company, in January 2018. Vergés starts by highlighting this strike because these Black and Brown women exactly embody the decolonized feminism she upholds: "radically antiracist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist, hence anti-patriarchal."[2]
Furthermore, Vergés reveals the complicity and "false innocence" of white, French women who claim to be their "sisters," and explains how civilizational feminism that has become the mainstream is drastically different from a decolonized one in its characteristics.
She states:
The comfortable life of bourgeois women around the world is possible because millions of exploited and racialized women maintain this comfort by making their clothes, cleaning their homes and their offices where they work, taking care of their children, and by taking care of the sexual needs of their husbands, brothers, and partners. They thus have all the time in the world to sit around discussing the merits (and lack thereof) of being "bothered" in the metro or of aspiring to become a CEO.[1]
French feminism keeps its colonial and slave heritage at a distance. We are supposed to believe that since women are victims of masculine domination they have no responsibility for the racist policies deployed by the French state... European women do not see that their desire for equality with European men was based on the exclusion of racialized people.[1]
Vergés calls what has become the mainstream feminism "civilizational feminism" as it shares the same savior and racist characteristics as colonialism by deploying the rhetoric of helping the colonized become civilized, which is usually synonymous with adopting the Western tradition.
She notes:
Civilizational feminism borrows from the colonial vocabulary of the civilizing mission or white man’s burden. The civilizing mission was the colonial rhetoric that informed colonial policies: It was racist. European powers had a duty: to civilize non-European peoples. European art, philosophy, laws, social mores, and technology were superior, they had a natural disposition for human rights and progress. That duty had to be enforced upon colonized peoples, even by force, because it was ‘for their good’. My argument is that, in the late 1990s-early 2000s, white, bourgeois western feminists turned to that rhetoric and were able to make women’s rights the criteria to judge if a country was civilized enough. It was a smart move because being against women’s rights was automatically associated with backwardness, uncivilized. It became the duty of white, bourgeois western feminists to educate non-white women, and teach them what their rights are (rights defined within their tradition). It represented a counteroffensive against feminisms in the Global South, black and indigenous feminisms. It was a way to re-establish their hegemony, weakened by the struggles of black, indigenous feminisms and feminisms in the Global South.[2]
Decolonial politics developed in the Global South
In contrast to civilizational feminism which is rooted in racism, capitalism, and imperialism and justifies military intervention -- Vergés points to the US invasion of Afghanistan which had the pretext of saving the Afghan women -- as well as Islamophobia in the West -- Vergés refers to the law against the veil in France[2], a decolonial feminism is rooted in the dismantling of these systems of oppression.
Vergés highlights the work of decolonial feminism that can resist violence created and sustained by racism, capitalism, and imperialism.
Racial capitalism has built global interconnections that link an oppression here to another there; I want to bring them to light. These entanglements mean that we can lead global fights and that local fights contribute to the weakening of the chains of extraction/production. How do we block these chains? When the Ever Given ship blocked the Suez Canal, it reminded me of that old tactic of producers: stopping one step in the chain could stop the entire chain. True, this was not this kind of act, but it brought this to memory... I put much effort in bringing to light in very clear ways the interconnections of capitalism and the ways in which decolonial feminist struggles can interrupt its violence. The long history of anti-racist struggles demonstrate the capacity to build other interconnections than capitalist ones.[3]
Thus, Vergés emphasizes that:
Decolonial feminism is a feminism that offers a multidimensional analysis of oppression and refuses to divide race, sexuality, and class into mutually exclusive categories. Multidimensionality, a concept proposed by Darren Lenard Hutchinson, responds to the limits of the notion of intersectionality in order to better understand how "racist and heteronormative power not only creates precise exclusions at the intersection of domination, but shapes all social proposals and subjectivities," including among those who are privileged. This notion echoes the 'feminism of totality,' a methodology that aims to take into account the totality of social relationships.[1]
In short, a decolonial feminism is "starting from one element to uncover a political, economic, cultural, and social ecosystem in order to avoid the segmentation that the Western social-science method has imposed."[1]
"Who cleans the world?"
Vergés comes back to this question of "who cleans the world?"
In an interview with English PEN, she answers:
Women of colour, black, brown, indigenous women, everywhere [clean the world]. Women who wake up at dawn and travel for hours on public transport to clean hospitals, universities, commercial malls, airports, railway stations, but also white bourgeois bodies, elderly bodies, children. They perform the daily work of cleaning and caring that keeps society functioning. They are made invisible. Their struggles raise a fundamental question, and this is not about sharing domestic work. It is wider, more radical. They say, If we aspire to a just society, who will clean the world?" [3]
Vergés further asks:
How can we understand the relationship between capitalism as material and toxic waste producer, and its production of human beings seen as disposable? How is the outsourcing of waste invisibilized? How do we put our solidarity with care workers and cleaning workers into practice?[1]
Vergés contends that the racialized women's "fight for dignity, against racism, and against exploitation ought to be at the heart of feminist struggles"[1] and that "[f]or decolonial feminists, the analysis of cleaning and care work in the contemporary configuration of racial capitalism and civilizational feminism is the most urgent task"[1]
In sum, the book A Decolonial Feminism aims "to suggest that the work of cleaning could be analysed as a site that brought together, gender, race, class, environmental justice, public health, the struggle against sexual violence, and also... that question: how would we organize post-racist, post-patriarchal, and post-capitalist cleaning?”[2]
Reviews
According to reviews, Françoise Vergès offers a compelling critique of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy in her book, 'Decolonial Feminism: Unearthing Revolutionary Struggles.'[4] Advocating for a decolonial feminist approach, she challenges the coloniality of power and calls for maroon political disobedience. The book delves into the depatriarchalization of revolutionary struggles and questions the privilege of whiteness in civilizational feminism, which dismisses the experiences of racialized bodies. Vergès argues for rewriting feminism's history from the standpoint of the colony and condemns the complicity of white feminism in perpetuating racial, neoliberal, and capitalist structures. With a multidimensional approach, she advocates for justice in various aspects, emphasizing epistemic justice and the dismantlement of Western-patriarchal ideology. The book urges the revival of feminism's transformative power and calls for a society that values all voices and experiences.[4]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 Vergés, Françoise (2021). A Decolonial Feminism. Pluto Press. Search this book on
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 {{Cite journal|last=Karmakar|first=Goutam|date=2023-01-29|title=Towards a decolonial feminist intervention: ethics and perspectives of Françoise Vergès|journal=Journal of Gender Studies|language=en|doi=10.1080/09589236.2023.2169259}
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Decolonial Feminisms: An Interview with Françoise Vergès". pentransmissions. 30 April 2021.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Nony, A. (2020). Un féminisme décolonial par françoise vergès (review). The French Review, 94(2), 252-253. doi:https://doi-org.proxy.uba.uva.nl/10.1353/tfr.2020.0309
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