A Decolonial Feminism
‘The term “feminist” is not always easy to claim. The betrayals of Western feminism are its own deterrent, as are its heartless desire to integrate into the capitalist world and take its place in the world of predatory men and its obsession with the sexuality of racialized men and the victimization of racialized women.’
Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism
Who cleans the world? This urgent question which Françoise Vergès poses at the outset of A Decolonial Feminism sets the tone and trajectory of this powerful book. The question encourages readers to wrestle with their preconceived notions of care work and the reproductive labour that women – in particular, working class racialised women – engage in. Vergès draws the reader’s attention to the experiences of the women engaged in the grueling, backbreaking drudgery central to the maintenance of capitalism itself.
Vergès’s intervention was ‘triggered’ by a recent strike of the Black and Brown women cleaning the Gare du Nord train station in Paris – a dispute which shone light on the ‘feminization of underpaid and undervalued cleaning and care work [and] the role of social reproduction in capitalism’. As in the UK, the French Republic carried out its post-war economic reconstruction by shifting a portion of its colonial subjects to the imperial core to better serve the domestic white population. This racialised and feminised labour has often been made invisible through the process of ‘housewifization’, as posited by Maria Mies in Patriarchy and Accumulation on A World Scale. Women from the former colonial ‘departments’ now living in the French metropole serve capital as a cheap and exploitable labour force, cleaning homes and infrastructure for the benefit of its white citizens, whilst neo-imperial extractivism abroad ‘means the production of waste, of dilapidated lands rivers, seas and oceans, animals, plants and peoples’. As was particularly demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic, ‘the production [of] group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ is still a constant of this global system.
Vergès not only emphasises the material reality of working class racialised women, but also forces us to think about the historical canon of different feminist traditions: where do they begin, and what were the demands of these radical women scattered across the Earth throughout space and time? Meticulously analysing this history, Vergès shows how capital is reliant upon periodically transforming itself to maintain its stranglehold over humanity. To do this successfully, it must co-opt the language of liberation struggles, including feminism, in order to preserve itself. Part of this process has entailed suppressing the history of Black and Brown women’s organised resistance to state and capitalist oppression.
Focusing on the co-optation of feminist struggle, Vergès looks at the hostility of the French Republic towards Islam and in particular Muslim women. A contemporary unveiling is upon us, and not only is this central to white supremacist hegemony but it also marks a further descent into racist authoritarianism. The banning of the burqa and niqab reflects the Republic’s positioning of Islam as incompatible with the secular values of France. Vergès discusses the unveiling as having deep roots in propaganda produced by the French colonial army, where it became a symbol of imperial control and dominance. The attack on Muslim women in Europe today demonstrates the limitations of a feminism that is captured by the colonialist state, such that we see the uncomfortably close relation between fascistic right-wing reactionaries and so-called women’s rights activists in the imperial core.
White ‘civilisational feminism’, as Vergès describes it, has long historical roots in the women’s suffrage movement. While the demand of decolonial feminists was the destruction of empire, slavery, and the machinations of capital, bourgeois civilisational feminists organised the demands of white women within the racist colour line. Using the example of the French suffragist Hubertine Auclert, Vergès demonstrates how civilisational feminists coupled the language of women’s rights to notions of white supremacy. Auclert used racist arguments of European superiority to contest the vote being extended to Black men before it was given to white women: ‘the step given to savage negroes, over the cultured white women of the metropole, is an insult to the white race … if negroes vote, why don’t white women?’. The obfuscation of the history of the Euro-American women’s suffrage movement aims to mystify how white feminists have upheld racial hierarchies to share the privileges granted to white men.
Vergès takes us through the genealogy of civilisational feminism, one that is closely linked to colonial notions of ‘development’ in relation to the Global South. Civilisational feminism adopted the gendered logic of the colonial civilising mission, summarised by Frantz Fanon as: ‘Let’s win over the women, and the rest will follow’. While the French Movement for Women’s Liberation took its name from movements for decolonisation, core elements quickly became complicit in the colonial project. Following the Algerian national liberation struggle, campaigns such as the French Movement for Family Planning published texts that described the veil as an archaic ‘religious symbol’ of sexist submission. The veil became an ideological weapon that forces of empire could now position as an enemy of ‘European values’. Often, these values (as amorphous and shifting as they are) are levied against the ‘intruder’ or foreigner.
Vergès shows that it was not solely the right that provided the ideological scaffolding for such an assault on Muslim women, but also white women on the left. Women who had been involved in liberation movements in Europe had provided the discourse for reactionary forces to weaponise against Muslim women. As Vergès explains, ‘Patriarchy was no longer a term associated with a global (and thus also European) form of masculine domination; it became consubstantial with Islam … European feminists saw themselves not only as the vanguard of the movement for women’s rights but also as their protectors’. Rampant Islamophobia within France – and more broadly in Europe and North America – could not have been as successful as an ideological rhetoric without the complicity of white feminists.
Instead of rejecting Euro-hegemony, French feminists have now been fully co-opted into the project of racial domination drenched in paternalism, presenting themselves as the last defence of European values in the form of a moral crusade. ‘[T]he civilizing feminist missions is clear: European women are crusading against sexist discrimination and symbols of submission that persist outside of Western European societies; they present themselves as an army that protects their continent from the invasion of ideas, practices and men and women threatening their gains’.
The language of emancipation has been debased to fit the narrative of Euro-American domination. Emancipatory struggles have become completely liberalised and replaced with a language of assimilation into the capitalist order, while the destruction of radical histories of collective resistance has enabled the state to integrate ‘some carefully selected figures’ into the ‘official’ feminist canon. The liberal project aims to rewrite the history of the likes of Rosa Parks, divorcing her from her organisational roots and opposition to the racist structure of the USA, and presenting her as ‘a wise old woman, as a shy seamstress with her little bag, who faces the bad guys’. In order for feminism to be compatible with the imperialist state, all evidence of radical feminism must be expunged, its histories mystified, and its figures neutered; only then can the likes of Rosa Parks be part of the nation’s history. When depoliticisation is not possible, the Claudia Jones’s of the world must be removed from the feminist canon, as ‘they are described as viragos, unassimilable extremists, women who are unworthy of their husbands, or they are simply doomed to disappear’. Vergès urges us to resist this erasure by reclaiming the stories and language of decolonial feminists.
Vergès’s text has a somber tone that runs through it. The left is in crisis: its language has been stolen and revolutionary figures have either been destroyed by the state, or worse perhaps, their ideas grafted onto imperial projects. What can we do to reclaim feminist language? This isn’t a direct question posed by Vergès, however what we can take from her book is that a decolonial feminism – one that centers the cleaners and carers of the world – de-couples feminism from capital. Re-grounding our understanding of liberation struggles that have come before us enables us to understand the purpose of empire and the state: to preserve, maintain and enrich the interests of racial capitalist patriarchy.
Vergès manifesto is concise yet manages to tease out very important and critical questions. How has the ‘girlbossification’ of feminist traditions been used as an ideological battering ram? Why has the hegemonic account of women’s liberation struggles sought to erase the fact that bourgeoisie white women owned slaves, and that their demand for enhanced social participation reinforced the notion of white supremacy? Why is the invisibilisation of care work so integral to the maintenance of capital, and how are racialised women forced into the process of ‘housewifization’? These are the questions that must be grappled with, and Vergès does this delicately while continually reinforcing the agency and importance of ‘those who clean the world’.
A Decolonial Feminism
Françoise Vergès (trans. by Ashley J. Bohrer)
Pluto Press, 2021
9780745341125