Whiteness and resistance to intersectionality in feminist movements in France and Québec

Debates on Islamic veiling have profoundly challenged and transformed feminist movements in the many countries where they have erupted. Intense disagreements over women’s emancipation, religious agency, racism and islamophobia have introduced new divisions, and revived older ones, producing new politics of intersectionality in feminist movements. While the whiteness of ‘mainstream’ Western feminist movements and its lack of an intersectional perspective has long been criticized, debates over the regulation of Islamic religious dress have reconfigured what whiteness means in contemporary women’s movement. In this presentation, I document how in some contexts white feminists constitute themselves through discourses as political subjects via their relationship to non-white feminists, and to those whom they mark as ‘other’ and ‘bad’ feminist subject – such as veiled Muslim women – who are to be excluded from the feminist collective project. I explore the different ways in which white French and Québécois feminists understand and politicize race and whiteness. Investigating how whiteness is attached to specific moral dispositions and emotions, this paper contributes to explain resistance to intersectionality in white-dominated feminist movements. What is more, the comparison between France and Québec shows that some repertoires of whiteness are conducive to self-critique and possibilities of coalition building with non-white women, while others, predominant in the French context, present intersectional practices and discourses.