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The French sociologist came out as working class. THE term “intersectionality” was coined in 1983 by UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, in a paper she wrote examining women of color in Los Angeles who had suffered domestic violence and rape. The term encapsulated Crenshaw’s argument: the experiences of these women could not be under- stood solely through the lens of sexism, nor solely through the lens of racism. Instead, they had be un- derstood through the intersection of these two forms of oppression. Crenshaw’s paper posed an implicit challenge to mainstream feminism, dominated as it was by middle- and upper-class white women who frequently misunderstood or ignored the experienc- , 2012 Skin es of women of color. (Thirty years later, little has changed in this regard.) In response to this challenge, mainstream feminism balked, dithered, and generally embarrassed itself: as the concept of intersectionality Marinos David MICHAEL ANDREWS 5 was eagerly taken up by feminists of color and radical came out again, not this time as gay, but as a son of scholars, many mainstream feminists decried it as di- the working class.” Eribon had never publicly dis- visive or overly academic. cussed his working-class origins—a personal detail While initially developed in a feminist context, that would’ve caused him to be shunned by the thor- the concept of intersectionality has since been broad- oughly bourgeois French intelligentsia. In Returning ened to stand for the idea that there is no central form to Riems, Eribon seeks to understand why he avoid- of oppression. Domination should rather be under- ed talking about his class background for so long. In stood as operating through multiple interlocking sys- the process, he provides an absorbing account of how tems—racism, sexism, class exploitation, and so forth. this background, despite his considerable efforts to This has become a basic principle of many radical cur- escape it, shaped his adult self. rents in recent years, especially Black feminism—and Riems is a mid-sized city in northeast France unsurprisingly, it has also provoked a backlash from where Eribon was born in 1953. After hardly visit- the old-guard left. Some orthodox Marxists who hold ing for decades, Eribon returned to Reims a few years that class supersedes all other forms of oppression ago. What prompted this visit was his father’s grave have denounced intersectional politics as a distrac- illness—although Eribon didn’t go there to see his tion from the one real struggle—the class struggle. father, whom Eribon had long despised for his ho- But placing class above (instead of alongside) other mophobia. He went instead to comfort his grieving forms of oppression creates serious pitfalls for radi- mother and to ask her about his childhood. In the cal politics—pitfalls that are thoroughly explored in course of several conversations, Eribon confronts the a new memoir by Didier Eribon, a prominent French boy he once was and the world he fled. The “return” intellectual celebrated for his work on Michel Fou- of the book’s title is thus also, as Eribon explains, a cault. Eribon grew up gay in a working-class family return to an earlier self: “It was a rediscovery of that that extolled class struggle, but maligned homosex- ‘region of myself,’ as Genet would have said, from uality. In Returning to Reims, he blends moving per- which I had worked so hard to escape: a social space sonal reflection with arresting social analysis to show I had kept at distance, a mental space in opposition how a failure to recognize the interrelation of differ- to which I had constructed the person I had become, ent forms of oppression not only produces individual and yet which remained an essential part of my be- trauma, but also cripples radical social movements. ing.” When Returning to Reims was initially published This “social space” that Eribon yearned to flee in France in 2009, it shocked the French literati. was marked by the deprivations and frustrations Eribon had previously garnered high praise for his of working class life in postwar France. His father books on the formation of gay male subjectivity, so worked long hours in a factory and his mother cleaned it wasn’t the passages about his boyhood dallianc- houses. The family lived in a series of cramped gov- , 2012 es with his rowing club teammates that scandalized ernment-provided apartments where he and his three Skin readers. Rather, as George Chauncey explains in his brothers shared a single bed, and where each floor in introduction to the Semiotext(e) edition of the book the apartment building had only a single communal (superbly translated by Michael Lucey): “In its pages bathroom. One of the few bright spots in Eribon’s David Marinos David the distinguished public intellectual Didier Eribon bleak upbringing were the neighborhood dances and 6 RETURN TO SENDER festivals organized by the local branch of the French A project like this—to write a “return”—could only suc- Communist Party. Eribon’s parents were staunch sup- ceed if it was mediated by, or perhaps filtered through, a wide set of cultural references: literary, theoretical, politi- porters of the Party, which provided them and their cal, and so on. Such references…permit you to neutralize fellow workers with a sense of collective identity and the emotional charge that might otherwise be too strong if you had to confront the “real” without the help of an hope for the future. “The Communist Party,” as Eri- intervening screen. bon explains, “was the organizing principle and the uncontested horizon of our relation to politics.” It’s this use of theory by Eribon—to under- Eribon began to chafe against this communi- stand, for example, how the working-class habitus he ty at a young age. He liked to read books instead of carried with him into the classroom slowed his aca- play sports, which put him at odds with his father, his demic progress—that most distinguishes Returning brothers, and virtually every other boy in his work- to Riems from the navel-gazing memoirs that dom- ing class neighborhood. He was the first person in his inate the bestseller list. Eribon uses theory to con- family to attend high school (doing so wasn’t manda- nect his personal experiences to larger processes of tory in France at the time), and this produced the first oppression and historical change. He thus interprets of many ruptures with his family: “The educational the homophobia he faced in high school as partly process succeeded in creating within me, as one of its an attempt by disempowered working-class boys to very conditions of possibility, a break—even a kind assert some shred of power over others.