A Decolonial Feminism by Vergès Françoise; Bohrer Ashley J.;

Author:Vergès, Françoise; Bohrer, Ashley J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

Liberal Inclusion

Capitalism has no hesitation in taking up corporate feminism (which demands integration into its world) or the discourse of women’s rights as long as inequalities between women and men remain a question of mindset or lack of education rather than of oppressive structures. Not that the transformation of mindsets or anti-sexist and anti-racist education are unimportant—far from it—but we must denounce the obstinacy of not admitting that it is about structures, that without racism, racial capitalism collapses, and with it, a whole world built on invisibilization, exploitation, and dispossession. This idea that we change the world by changing our minds, by learning to accept difference, is based on an idealist conception of social relations. But this idea is seductive because it exempts us from acting on these structures. This is why Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists (translated into French as Nous somme tous des féministes) has been such a global success.26 The book proposes an inclusive feminism for the twenty-first century by demonstrating that the gender division of women/men also impacts men. The norms of heteronormative masculinity are indeed constraining, and becoming a man often means being subjected to a series of contradictory and repressive injunctions with respect to feelings, desires, and bodies. Critique of the virile, militarized, hard body, which shows no sign of femininity (associated with weakness) reaches a larger audience today, and often intersects with critique of white supremacy and capitalism. The white man (another invention of colonialism) constitutes a powerful tool of racial control, and an analysis of the coloniality of gender cannot afford to lose sight of various masculinities. But there are structural obstacles preventing equality, among women and among men. The inclusive feminism supported by We Should All Be Feminists will remain unrealizable as long as all women are not equal, and as long as all men are not equal. So, to which men should women aspire to be equal? Racism and class division, and the two combined, oppose equality. In other words, the argument of We Should All Be Feminists is misleading for two reasons. On the one hand, it proposes an idea of inclusive feminism that obscures the entire critique of Black and decolonial feminisms. These latter are precisely tasking themselves with the goal of liberating all of society and not ‘separating’ themselves from men. On the other, such an argument reduces feminism to a simple shift in mindset valid for all women and men, in all places and all times. In her magnificent book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe revisits this thoughtless argument several times, because white, bourgeois feminism has never achieved its own decolonization. Sharpe cites Saidiya Hartman who, in conversation with Frank Wilderson, speaks of “a structural prohibition (rather than merely a willful refusal) against whites being the allies of Blacks due to this species division between what it means to be a subject and what it means to be an object: a structural antagonism.”27

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