Feminist Trouble

Feminist Trouble Feminist Trouble Intersectional Politics in Postsecular Times ÉLÉONORE LÉPINARD 1 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Names: Lépinard, Éléonore, author. Title: Feminist trouble : intersectional politics in post-secular times / Éléonore Lépinard. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019034419 (print) | LCCN 2019034420 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190077150 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190077167 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190077181 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism. Classification: LCC HQ1155 .L466 2020 (print) | LCC HQ1155 (ebook) | DDC 305.42—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2019034419 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2019034420 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Theorizing Feminism: Politics, Morals, and Emotions 23 3 Race, Religion, and Gender: Feminist Intersectional Politics in “Postsecular” Times 45 4 Feminist Whiteness 81 5 Resisting Whiteness, Claiming Feminism: Racialized Feminists’ Moral Addresses 127 6 Toward a Feminist Ethic of Responsibility 179 7 Conclusion: Revisiting the “We” of Feminism 234 Appendix on Methodology 251 Notes 257 Bibliography 295 Index 317 Acknowledgments This book is dedicated to all the feminists who gave some of their time to an- swer my questions, who shared their thoughts, analyses, despairs, and hopes, and enabled me, not to adopt their perspectives and standpoints, but to enter in relation, to understand what is important for them, and for us. For many reasons writing this book has been an experience in the strong sense of something that gave me a voice, shared with many of my interviewees, an encounter with the unpredictable, and a descent into myself to understand my own attachment to feminism. I hope this book conveys to readers the pleasure of giving some intelligibility to one’s own experiences of feminism. It certainly provided me with the pleasure of deploying my own thoughts with freedom— a rare chance, and an addictive experience. I want to thank especially my editor at Oxford University Press, James Cook, who believed in this book and in its unusual interdisciplinarity and style. This experience has been made possible by various institutional supports; the grant I received from the Fond Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture, which allowed me to conduct the fieldwork; and the support of the two universities I was a faculty member of during the time of research and then writing, the Université de Montréal and the Université de Lausanne. In both those places I found among my colleagues good friends, with the dose of humor that is necessary to sail through academic life with pleasure. I am very grateful for their friendship. At the Université de Lausanne I have been lucky to join a Center on Gender Studies that has allowed me to focus on feminist theory and provided me with fantastic doctoral students with whom to exchange ideas on feminism and feminist theory. Support also came in the form of assistance from Marie Laperrière, for interviews in the fieldwork; from Muriel Bruttin, for formatting the manuscript and dealing with soft- ware bugs; and from Madeleine Arenivar, for copy-editing. The three did a wonderful job, and I thank them deeply for their skillful work. During the course of writing, I was lucky to receive feedback on this project and invitations to present my work from several colleagues, whom I thank here for their generosity and their insights: Amélie Barras, Pascale Dufour, Elizabeth Evans, Delphine Gardey, Matteo Gianni, Leslie McCall, Noémi viii Acknowledgments Michel, Marylène Lieber, Sabrina Marchetti, Sarah Mazouz, Bruno Perreau, Anne Phillips, and Gloria Wekker. I am also very grateful to Pascale Molinier, who introduced me years ago to the work of Teresa de Lauretis and of care theorists. It took me a while to act upon this invitation to explore beyond the boundaries of my discipline, sociology, but the journey has been enlivening. Finally, the title of this book is indebted of course to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, a book that starts by looking directly into the trouble within feminism and that profoundly marked my own political subjectivation when I read it and discussed it with young fellow French feminists in search of new political and feminist horizons two decades ago. More than support, my partner in life and parenting, Grégoire Mallard, read the whole manuscript, encouraged me to break disciplinary shackles, and never doubted that this manuscript would see the light of day. His kind- ness, generosity, and humor compose the music of our life together. 1 Introduction Feminism is in trouble. Antagonisms, conflicts, and disputes abound in many liberal democratic countries around pop culture, neoliberalism, and postfeminism, around sex work and pornography (yes, still), around trans* politics, around race and postcolonialism. They seem to concentrate, with an ever- escalating force, around religion, in particular Islam. In many corners of Europe and North America, it has been not a small irony of history that women’s rights have been presented by right-wing movements as a new national treasure against which to judge immigrants’ claims to be included in the political community, and claims by Muslim citizens to equal treatment in the face of the perpetuation of racial exclusion and discrimination in Western postcolonial societies. Even if voices rising from within feminist movements have denounced hegemonic whiteness,1 racism, colonial aphasia,2 and Islamophobia when they are associated with feminist claims, they have remained, in many contexts, marginal and marginalized. For many, the col- lusion of feminist ideals with right-wing populism and xenophobic political agendas puts in peril the future of feminism as a political utopia. The feminist collective project thus seems to be once again fragmented and disintegrated and in urgent need of reinventing itself. The increasingly heated disputes about the place of Islam in liberal democracies may not be surprising, considering the broader geopolitical landscape that the liberal democracies in Europe and North America have inherited since the terrorist attacks of 9/ 11. Nationwide debates questioning the compatibility of Islam with European or “Western” culture and its con- ception of secularism have focused on gender relations,3 and have there- fore moved to the center of the feminist agenda. Veils, niqabs, forced and arranged marriages, polygamy and sharia rules concerning women have all been the object of intense public scrutiny and legal regulations in many Western countries since the 1990s, and these policy debates have split the women’s movements into various positions with regard to the status of gen- dered symbols and gender relations associated with the practice of Islam.4 With a particular intensity in Europe, the feminist concern about gender Feminist Trouble: Intersectional Politics in Postsecular Times. Éléonore Lépinard, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780190077150.001.0001 2 Feminist Trouble inequalities in “minority cultures” has become closely intertwined with national anxieties about the boundaries of the political community, its het- erogeneity, and the necessity to integrate groups perceived as embodying different cultural and religious values.5 Few European states have been left untouched by these political dynamics, which have led to the imposition of more restrictions on Islamic practices. Between 2003 and 2019, bans on forms of Islamic veiling (in public service, public schools, or public space) have been adopted in France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Austria,

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