Intersectionality: Discrimination from One Woman to Another? The Case of CSO’s in France

Starting with legislative proposals in 1999, the EU has created a body of legislation aimed at combating discrimination on the grounds of ethnic and racial origin, religion and belief, sexual orientation, disability and age. This body of law can be considered as an additional layer of EU non-discrimination law, complementing the existing body of gender equality law as well as rules outlawing discrimination on grounds of nationality. In 2006, the European Commission commissioned a study on multiple discrimination. Indeed, in the past two decades a distinctive nexus articulating immigration, ethnicity, religion, and class has been forming in many EU countries that can shed new light on the concept and the politics of intersectionality. The racialization of Muslim identities, which overlaps with the racialization of migrants and their children, has occurred in part through a series of public debates on Muslim and immigrant women: veiling, arranged and forced marriages, and female genital mutilations have been discussed in the public sphere, often with policy outcomes detrimental to migrant/Muslim women’s rights and concrete lives. From 2000’s onwards debates on identity politics have been changing widely and gradually all around the world. In Continental Europe, multiple identities, recognition of differences, gender equality, racialization and otherness are some of the questioning concepts. Considering those debates through underlining multiple discrimination by the EU acquis, my research is to examine the perception of civil society organizations (CSOs ) in France on the concept of “intersectionality” by asking the questions related to the incidents from 2000’s onwards on 3 themes (gender, race, religion). It aims to analyse how CSOs advocating women's rights react to the situations of people directly or indirectly been affected by relevant incidents. The methodology is based on “applied research” within the scope of comparative fieldwork. Under the qualitative approach, semi-structured interviews enable research participants to talk about a set of questions which are bounded to some crucial incidents through identity politics from 2000's onwards in France. During the fieldwork, 53 CSOs (out of 89) have been made in-depth (face to face) interview. Interviewed CSOs are relevant to at least one of the gender/identity issues as emancipation of women, fighting violence against women or sexual orientation. The evaluation of data would be based on discourse analysis. As republican, laic, immigrant country, France is the perfect intersectional case. And this single-country case study would be a critique of recent debates on “whiteness” of French feminism and would be a pioneer of comparative studies’ analysis of the emergency of Feminism as well. Expected findings would be that to what extent if the situation is an exclusion of “other women” by another group of women, or on the contrary an inclusion of them with a framework of ‘French values’. However, either the way multiple discrimination might be coming from one woman to another one.