Race, Religion, and Gender

This chapter retraces the Islamic veiling debates in France and Quebec, and how feminist organizations engaged in them in both contexts. It explains why intersectional coalitions in the context of heated debates over secularism and the hijab proved possible in Quebec, while they vastly failed in France. In particular, it underlines the specificity of intersectional politics over Islam that uses feminist discourses on female autonomy and emancipation to exclude “improper” subjects from the feminist project. Documenting the feminist debates over Islamic veiling in France and Quebec, the chapter shows that the strength of racialized women’s self-organizing plays a crucial role in the possibility of forging and sustaining coalitions that remain inclusive and critical of femonationalist discourses. Feminist coalitions’ previous history with antiracism also matters when it comes to their capacity to resist femonationalist discourses.

Feminist Whiteness

This chapter focuses on feminist whiteness, a concept it introduces and defines as the product of a process of political subjectivation as a white feminist. The concept captures the various repertoires that white feminists elaborate to talk about—or rather actively ignore—race relations of power and their own privileged positions in this racial order. The chapter traces how white feminists are constituted as political subjects through their relationship to nonwhite feminists, and to those whom they perceive and label as “bad” feminist subjects. It shows that debates on Islamic veiling have operated a shift in feminist whiteness, from feminist whiteness as ignorance to feminist whiteness as an active participation in national identity and femonationalist discourses. It also shows that feminist whiteness is multiple and varies across contexts. In France and Quebec, white feminists use different repertoires to address race issues. Some work around or evade race, while others recognize its political salience. These different forms of feminist whiteness are articulated with specific moral dispositions and emotions.

Theorizing Feminism

This chapter develops the implications of considering feminism as a moral and political project and articulates this conception with intersectionality. It argues that to capture both the political and moral dimensions of feminism we must explore feminists’ political subjectivations. Such an approach places at the center of its inquiry the moral dispositions that feminists cultivate toward other feminists, taking into account the power inequalities—particularly, but not only, along axes of race and religion—that shape these relations between feminists. This perspective is indebted to specific genealogies of intersectional feminist theory that have insisted on how social locations and hierarchies of power shape feminist subjectivities through emotions and moral sentiments. Theorizing feminism in this way also offers important insights on intersectionality theory when it comes to analyzing feminist movements and how they address power hierarchies of race and religion.

Conclusion

The conclusion first shows that the dynamics of femonationalism should be explained while taking into account feminists’ political subjectivations, and the link between feminist whiteness and nationalism. It also explores how a feminist ethic of responsibility enables us to go beyond the critical question of the foundation of feminism—that is, who the “we” is in the name of which feminists make their claims. A feminist ethics of responsibility implies redefining the subject of feminism as relations among feminists rather than a “we women,” and defining the feminist project as a project of treating other feminists equally. Finally, the conclusion revisits the question of agency and emancipation. It argues that a feminist ethic of responsibility can help define emancipation outside of the liberal vocabulary of agency.

Introduction

The introductory chapter first identifies the trouble with feminism in post-secular times. It explains that the current crisis is different than previous ones because at its center is the question of feminist and religious agency. The chapter argues that we need to go beyond this debate which has been framed by the work of Saba Mahmood on religious agency, and limited to a critical analysis. To do so, drawing on critical feminist theories and on theories of care, it posits that we must consider feminism as both a political and a moral project. It details what such a conception of feminism entails, and what it brings to the analysis of current feminist conflicts. It then provides an outline of the subsequent chapters.

Toward a Feminist Ethic of Responsibility

The chapter first reviews normative proposals centered on coalitions as a “remedy” to intersectionality and the challenges it raises for feminism. Then the chapter turns to feminist theorists Iris Young and Linda Zerilli, who have attempted to define an ethics of inclusion that could be appropriate for the feminist project. Using the empirical material analyzed in previous chapters, this chapter argues that the demand for inclusion that is voiced by nonwhite feminists is not only a call for political inclusion: it is also a claim for recognition of common ground with white feminists, a project of creating moral relations among feminists. Drawing on an ethic of care, the chapter proposes a feminist ethics of responsibility that aims at making space for the other within the feminist project, responding to others—which often means finding compromise and translating demands—in a way that recognizes hierarchies of power and privilege.

Resisting Whiteness, Claiming Feminism

This chapter analyzes how racialized feminists have forged specific political vocabularies to name and politicize their relationships with white feminists in the context of the headscarf debates. Their discourses are articulated with a set of emotions and moral dispositions. This chapter captures the formation of (collectively produced) moral, political, and ethical dispositions that are intimately linked to and shaped by the context of postcolonialism and postsecularism in France and Quebec. This chapter argues that by calling themselves feminists, racialized feminists in both contexts enter—among other processes—in relation with white feminists, a relation that they attempt to fashion with their own vocabulary, concepts, and discourses. Racialized feminists seek to create a new language from within a dominant discourse. The chapter explores the political emotions, such as indignation, frustration, pain, unease, anger, or lassitude, that sustain racialized feminists’ relationship to white feminists, and the forms of moral address they convey to white feminists through both resistance and resentment.