Whiteness in the feminist self-help movement – France, Switzerland, Belgium.

Contemporary feminist self-help activism, that develops practices concerning health, the body and sexuality, is divided into two tendencies. While one of them is composed exclusively of heterosexual white women and holds a very strict definition of femininity, another tendency develops a discourse based on the politics of inclusivity. However, the call of the latter tendency for inclusivity is only partly enacted in the social composition of the movement. Indeed, if a high proportion of them identify as lesbian, bisexual or queer, the movement is almost entirely white. This paper will try to make sense of the social participation of the movement. A part of the paper will focus on the conflicts emerging from the division of the movement. Intersectionality is at the center of this division, since it shapes both the composition of the two parts of the movement and the discourses that try to account for the conflict between them. This paper will more particularly focus on the part of the movement that develops a discourse based on inclusivity. How to account for the fact that the movement enables the participation of only a part of the socially marginalized populations it is supposed to include? What are the conditions that may explain why a racially diverse movement is impossible while the participation of LGBTQI is largely enacted? I will develop some hypothesis to account for the whiteness of the contemporary self-help movement. I assume that the history of the self-help movement, the discourses on femininity and sexuality it develops, and the links of each group with these notions, play a critical role in the impossibility of inclusion of socially racialized people. I also suppose that the way I framed my research must be taken into consideration.