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Anthropology and sociology
11 September 2017

Feminist Whiteness: Race, religion, nationalism and the political subjectivation of white feminists in France and Québec

Room S1
Maison de la Paix, Geneva

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.

While the whiteness of ‘mainstream’ Western feminist movements 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 whiteness informs white feminists’ political subjectivation as feminists, and how it has changed in the context of Islamic veils debates in France and Québec. I detail how feminist whiteness changed from whiteness as ignorance to an active participation in national identity and femonationalist projects. To do so, I analyze how 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, and the range of emotions and moral dispositions which are attached to their political subjectivities as white feminists. 

About the speaker

Eléonore Lépinard holds a PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Since 2013, she is Associate Professor in gender studies at the Institute of Social Sciences at the Université de Lausanne. Her main areas of research are in the fields of feminist movements and theory, gender and law, intersectionality and gender and political representation. She was the recipient in 2012 of the best paper award from the American Political Science Association’s women and politics section, as well as of the Frank L. Wilson best paper award of APSA French politics group. Her first book retraced the constitutional revision and debate over gender quotas in political representation in France (L’égalité introuvable, la parité, les féministes et la République Paris: Presses de Sciences po, 2007). In recent years, she has published articles in Politics, Politics, Groups & Identities, Gender & Society, and Politics & Gender. She is the co-editor with Ruth Rubio-Marin of a comparative volume on gender quotas in Europe, forthcoming at Cambridge University Press in 2018, and is currently working on a monograph on intersectional politics in feminist movements tentatively titled Feminist Trouble.
 

Room S1
Maison de la Paix, Geneva

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.

While the whiteness of ‘mainstream’ Western feminist movements 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 whiteness informs white feminists’ political subjectivation as feminists, and how it has changed in the context of Islamic veils debates in France and Québec. I detail how feminist whiteness changed from whiteness as ignorance to an active participation in national identity and femonationalist projects. To do so, I analyze how 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, and the range of emotions and moral dispositions which are attached to their political subjectivities as white feminists. 

About the speaker

Eléonore Lépinard holds a PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Since 2013, she is Associate Professor in gender studies at the Institute of Social Sciences at the Université de Lausanne. Her main areas of research are in the fields of feminist movements and theory, gender and law, intersectionality and gender and political representation. She was the recipient in 2012 of the best paper award from the American Political Science Association’s women and politics section, as well as of the Frank L. Wilson best paper award of APSA French politics group. Her first book retraced the constitutional revision and debate over gender quotas in political representation in France (L’égalité introuvable, la parité, les féministes et la République Paris: Presses de Sciences po, 2007). In recent years, she has published articles in Politics, Politics, Groups & Identities, Gender & Society, and Politics & Gender. She is the co-editor with Ruth Rubio-Marin of a comparative volume on gender quotas in Europe, forthcoming at Cambridge University Press in 2018, and is currently working on a monograph on intersectional politics in feminist movements tentatively titled Feminist Trouble.