De l'importance de l'intersectionnalité.
Ok premier article et il va être méga long pardon :/
Ma troisième année m’aura réellement fait réfléchir sur moi-même et sur mon féminisme, et en particulier sur ma blancheur. Si je connaissais l’intersectionnalité auparavant, je l’appréhende désormais différemment. Ci-dessous des extraits d’un essais que j’avais dû réaliser pour mon cours de Genre et Politique à Lima (c’est en anglais). Le thème est de démontrer l’importance de l’intersection lorsqu’on considère le genre et la politique à travers d’un exemple.. Je tente donc ici de souligner à quel point il est primordiale d’avoir un point de vue intersectionnel dans les mouvements féministes. Je n’ai pas réécrit l’article, il est donc assez universitaire. Je définis premièrement l’intersectionnalité, puis son évolution au sein du féminisme. De son inexistence totale dans les premier mouvements féministes blancs à son développement dans les milieux militants et universitaires malgré une persistance des invisibilisations et oppressions dans les milieux féministes.
[…] Intersectionality is a term believed to be first coined in 1989 by Kimberly Crenshaw. It refers as the belief that several cultural and social categories resulting in discriminations and oppressive processes interacts in a simultaneal ways in a multidimensional system. Those categories do include gender, but also race, class, religion, sexual orientation, age, nationality, geographical context, ability and others axis relevant according to cultural and social specificities such as casts for example. Taking into account intersectionality is essential when considering gender and politic and is one of the major –if controversial- claim of the feminist of the third wave.
The reproduction of exclusion and invisibilization through early feminist movements.
In The Social Contractarians and Contemporary Feminist Philosophy, Richardson challenges what she calls the “False universal”. She claims that the gender inequality is not only a practical issue but also “historically contingent ways in which the relationship between individuals and others have been conceptualized”. And for Richardson, those have been conceptualized within a frame where the neutral, the universal is the men, or more precisely, the white men. The problem is that thinking that we can just add up women in the framework would probably make it false. As a consequence, for Richardson it is more interesting to “challenge the presumptions of the framework” in order to include women.
For a very long period of time, feminism itself tended to do just the same inside the “women category” like First wave feminism. […].More generally, feminism of the first wave, and the most of the second wave as well, was led by fairly privileged women. They were white, middle or upper class and mainly well-educated. Good examples of this statement would include […] Simone de Beauvoir, her key work in the shaping of modern feminism is considered for many as quite “paternalist” or maybe more “maternalist” toward non-white women. . Her views on maternity and independence are seen as white-centric for many. Through this, early feminist movements tended to reproduce not only the “false universal” identified by Richardson, but also mechanism from which women tried to free themselves when they came from men such as infantilization. […]. Those processes can be seen as a result of three interacting reasons: ignorance, bigotry and a self-preservation of the movements. […] Feminists tended to exclude the more controversial issues out of their claims in order to gain an easiest approval of press and politicians. But the consequences were to exclude huge facets of womanhood.
The development of intersectional point of view in feminism:
In the end of second wave feminism, which was mainly centered on reproductive and sexual rights, more and more women of different cultural background starts to spread distinctive demands. Those demands starts from the practical discourse and quickly spread to the academic discourse (Maria Banchs) […]
In the practical discourse: More and more women, often starting in discussion groups, starts to express specific claims which were until then quite ignored by feminism. The first two main aspects are probably sexuality and racial issues, but later include much more diverse subjects as validism, classism etc. In the USA, black women, who often feel rejected from both white feminism and a very sexist civil right movement, starts their own groups and discourses. In a similar way, non-heterosexual women starts to make claim of their double oppression as both women and lesbian/bisexual etc. Apart from groups of discussions, political movement are created, as the Daughter of Bilitis. Other forms of expression also emerged in the form of magazines, poetry etc.
The academic discourse, directly born from the practical discourse, explore more and more the intersectional issues. The theories describing the importance of intersectionality and denouncing the “white middle-class bias” (West and Zimmerman 1995) are surging in the academic sphere in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Another author that denounced occidental ethnocentrism is Gayarti Chakravorty Spivak, an Indian theorist, has made an important work about the definition of the “Other” of the Occident. She centered her studies in a feminist and post-colonialist way. The work of Angela Davis in Women, Race and Class integrate three intersectional issues in one, and is maybe even more important because it condensed years of research with the goal of making it accessible to a lambda reader.
Persistence of oppressive processes and integration into broader public space:
Whereas today’s feminist movement are in a majority of cases recognizing the importance of intersectionality, some oppressive behaviors persist. Lgbti+ discrimination are still present in many feminists movement: the exclusion of transwomen form non-mixt reunions for example is a frequent issue. In the same way, class is still an issue in feminist movements. There is often a gap between feminism theory and the reality of feminist activism. The work of feminism was also to incorporate the intersectionality into a broader public and politic than just feminist groups and marches. It’s quite impossible to make a general worldwide conclusion about it but it would be safe to say that the results are moderates. Some progress are made, for example some universities in the USA, in Sweden or in Finland have made mandatory various forms of workshops at the entry of the university that include a wide intersectional point of view. On the other side of the coin, social and political movement often fail at implementing at a large scale intersectional policies. [Another… ] example would be the huge gap between men and women in term of possession of an ID in the Peruvian Amazonian regions for the Indigenous communities. It is estimated that nearly 60% of Peruvian Indigenous Women do not possess an ID. It is a result of geographical, racial and political segregation as well as sexism in the way that it is not determined essential for the women to be registered as they are thought not to have the need for one.
Conclusion:
Whereas some oppressive discourse are still found in some feminist movements, mainly in essentialist movement who tends to be more easily ethnocentric or cis-sexist for example. We must recognize the differences of all individuals and maybe even more importantly, each individual should recognize its privilege(s) in society and learn how not to speak in the name of others. This question us about the theme of “allies” in political and social movements.
Biblio:
Banchs, María. Representaciones Sociales Del Género En El Discurso Político, El Discurso Práctico y el Discurso Académico
Richardson J. The Classic Social Contractarians Critical Perspectives from Contemporary Feminist Philosophy and Law. “The Anomalous Position of Women within Traditional Political Theory: The “False Universal” and Problems of Abstraction”. Pp. 11-14
Christine Bard, Les féministes de la première vague, PUR, 2015
Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, tome 1 &2, Paris, 1949.
Salomón, Leticia: Movimientos políticos. Biblioteca Católica Digital
http://www.mercaba.org/FICHAS/Capel/movimientos_pol%C3%ADticos.htm
Katja von Garnier, Iron Jawed Angels, 2004 (Movie)Baruch, Elaine Hoffman, Women in Men’s Utopias, in Rohrlich, Ruby, & Elaine Hoffman Baruch, eds., Women in Search of Utopia, op. cit., p. 209
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