“I Feel I’d Just Be Adding to the Stereotype:” Intersectional Solidarity and Apprehension of Reproducing Racialized Stigmas in French Street Harassment Activism

Online and offline platforms where victims could share their experiences were instrumental to putting street harassment on the political agenda around the world, and in France in particular. However, one question in particular sparked debates and uneasiness among French activists: how to deal with stories that, in their view, reproduced stigmas about Black or Muslim men or disadvantaged areas? Based on a content analysis of 532 stories, ethnography, and interviews, this paper analyzes how victims structured their stories not solely based on what they sought to share, but also on the stigmas they wanted to avoid. The paper shows how intersectional solidarity was a priority for many French feminist organizations working on street harassment. Concern about reproducing stigmas was strengthened by the fact that these activists’ raised awareness on street harassment in a media and political landscape that often linked the issue to migration and disadvantaged neighborhoods. Organizations sought to collaborate with anti-racist organizations and received statements of support from organizations working with women in disadvantaged areas of Paris. The paper traces the tensions and conflicts involved in attempts at intersectional solidarity, particularly with respect to how activism addressed and represented men as potential perpetrators. Scholarship on covert racism, colorblindness, and white fragility sheds light on the discomfort surrounding the subject of race, and how this may lead people to avoid referencing it. These concepts focus on how uneasiness surrounding race leads people to strategically reinvent racism and marginalize those who challenge it. Consequently, the moral and emotional dimensions of people’s concerns about wanting to avoid reproducing racialized stigmas remain understudied and undertheorized. To fill this gap, this paper elaborates a theory on the apprehension of reproducing stigmas. I conceptualize this moral emotion as an anxiety about reinforcing the stigmatization of categories of people whom an individual considers to be already stigmatized. Comprehending the effects of this apprehension enables an evenhanded evaluation of whether it leads to desirable consequences for these actors’ work, or whether there may be ways of dealing with this uneasiness that are more beneficial to feminist and anti-racist politics.