Riesgos operativos y de valoración

Reflecting on the formation of political subjects, Judith Butler has insisted that there is no such thing as a pregiven identity, a “pregiven point of depar-ture for politics,” and that we must “remember that subjects are constituted through exclusion, that is through the creation of a domain of deauthorized subjects, presubjects, figures of abjection, populations erased from view.”¹ It is therefore theoretically and politically necessary to trace the operations that have led to both the construction of the subject as seemingly pregiven, and the erasure of the deauthorized subjects it is based on.² In this chapter, I attempt such a task by investigating the political subjectivations of white feminists, and the operations of construction and erasure they rely on.

I argue in this chapter that debates on Islamic veiling not only reveal white-ness as the privileged social location occupied by white feminists, but also produce contextualized forms of what I call feminist whiteness, the outcome of a process of political subjectivation as a white feminist. Feminist white-ness is a location of privilege to articulate and enforce the moral and political boundaries of the legitimate feminist subject, a location based on ignorance of its own constitution and on the creation of “deauthorized subjects.”

Feminists of color, from Audre Lorde to Sara Ahmed, have conceptualized whiteness as an invisible and unmarked category— for those who inhabit it, not for those marked as nonwhite— as a position of privilege and ignorance,³ as an effect of racialization processes that mark some bodies as others, and as an orientation toward the world that shapes subjectivities.⁴ Whiteness as a critical concept must be understood as a process of subjectivation that results from racism and racialization,⁵ rather than as a given identity. Whiteness is a material, cultural, and subjective location of privilege; it cannot be reified to a skin color.⁶ It changes over time and, as Ruth Frankenberg notes, “It is a com-plexly constructed product of local, regional, national, and global relations, past and present. . . . It is also a relational category, one that is co- constructed with a range of other racial and cultural categories, with class and with gender.”⁷ As Ahmed has underscored, whiteness reveals how racial privilege assigns race to others and impacts those bodies recognized as nonwhite.⁸ In

these ways, the process of whiteness/ whitening is premised upon the active effects of racism in marking others as others.

In this chapter I  argue that whiteness shapes white feminists’ political subjectivation, their relationships to feminism and to other feminists, and, by doing so, deeply affects feminism as a political project. In studying the for-mation of white feminists’ whiteness in this chapter I thus wish to document how whiteness informs white feminists’ political subjectivation as feminists, and how it changes over time and depending on the context. My interest here is not to give an account of white feminists’ subjectivities,⁹ but rather to inves-tigate how this location, which is both political and subjective, is constructed in the context of white feminists’ activism, and how it is premised on a set of discourses and rhetorical devices that universalizes white feminists’

experiences while marking other feminist subjects as nonwhite— as well as on a set of memories and legacies, and on political hegemonic discourses.

I am interested in particular in how white feminists are constituted as polit-ical subjects through their relationships to nonwhite feminists, and to those whom they perceive as “bad” feminist subjects. Indeed, I argue that feminism is made white through a set of discourses that label nonwhite feminists as bad and improper subjects, to be cast away or educated in order to be reclaimed by feminism. By focusing on whiteness, I do not want to suggest that other axes of inequalities and power within feminism and between feminists do not matter. Certainly, class and sexuality have produced important conflicts over who is a good or bad feminist and what feminist emancipation should look like,¹⁰ and they have shaped forms of feminist political subjectivation—

in interaction with race. However, I do argue that in order to understand the Islamic veil debates and the ways in which they have shattered, disrupted, and fragmented feminist organizations and the feminist project, we must focus on whiteness, as a location of privilege and ignorance. While there are many different instances of feminist whiteness, not all fueling femonationalism, I argue that some hegemonic forms of feminist whiteness are instrumental in doing so, and they are the focus of this chapter.

Many critical race scholars have noted that whiteness is partly discur-sively produced, through a specific set of discourses and, mostly, through an absence- presence of race.¹¹ Hence, tracing the construction of feminist whiteness means documenting how feminism is discursively made white, how white feminists’ desire to ignore realities of racism preserves their “in-nocence,”¹² and how they contribute to mark nonwhite feminist subjects as others, racialized and improper subjects to be excluded from the feminist

Feminist Whiteness 83 collective project.¹³ In this chapter, I first reconstruct whiteness, its contents and markers, through an analysis of how white feminists talk about their ac-tivism, their organizational practices with respect to cultural or religious dif-ference, and how they describe migrant women or Muslim women as good or bad feminist subjects. I identify a variety of discourses that contribute to construct and position white feminists as white feminists: that is, discourses that denote feminist whiteness as a process of political subjectivation. These discourses vary greatly, and this variation is as important as the common whiteness shared by these interviewees. In fact, in describing feminist com-mitment and practice, white feminists also share many discursive repertoires with nonwhite feminists. This approach allows for a dynamic exploration of variations and contradictions, and understands whiteness as a historical and contextual social process.¹⁴ I show how in two contexts, France and Quebec, white feminists use different repertoires to address race issues. Some work around or evade race, while others recognize its political salience. These dif-ferent repertoires therefore point to difdif-ferent ways in which (and extents to which) feminism is made white and the location of white feminist privilege made invisible or acknowledged.

Exploring further how whiteness shapes white feminists’ political subjectivations, I  then investigate how specific moral dispositions and emotions displayed by white feminists effectively draw boundaries that close the feminist subject and produce “deauthorized” subjects. In her study of white innocence as it is present in the Dutch cultural archive, Gloria Wekker notes that whiteness is saturated by affects and moral dispositions— such as entitlement— and that postcolonial melancholia also feeds anger and vio-lence.¹⁵ Similarly, I document the contours of affective responses to race dis-played by white feminists. I argue that women marked as “others” by white feminists— the woman migrant, the veiled woman, the non- white woman—

elicit two types of moral, political, and emotional dispositions on the part of white feminists.

A first orientation of white feminists toward “othered” women, and in par-ticular toward migrant woman, is animated by a conception of feminism and feminist practice as a social project— that of responding to the need of vul-nerable women. In this conception, which characterizes in particular, but not only, white feminists working in service- providing organizations, feminist whiteness translates into specific feminist moral dispositions such as the sus-pension of judgment, self- improvement, benevolence, and the ignorance of white privilege. It also gives rise to specific emotions such as satisfaction, but

also ambivalence. In the second case, which entails an understanding of fem-inism as a historical political collective project of transformation that bonds women together, feminism fuels a different process of political subjectivation as white feminist. Here religious and racial differences are highly politicized and define improper feminist subjects. This process of political subjectivation as white feminist entails moral dispositions such as disapproval, indignation, and self- righteousness, and emotions such as melancholy, fear, and anger.

In the last section in this chapter I argue that debates on Islamic veiling have, in particular, operated a shift in feminist whiteness, from feminist whiteness as ignorance to feminist whiteness as an active participation in national identity, or what Sarah Farris has called “femonationalism.”¹⁶ Characterizing feminist whiteness as a form of ignorance does not mean that it is not actively socially produced. Following feminist epistemologies and epistemologies of ignorance’s tenets, what we know and what we ignore are shaped by our social location, and privilege entails the ability to actively ignore relationality with those situated across power lines.¹⁷ I  argue that feminist whiteness in the context of femonationalism is not only based on ignorance: the shift I describe emphasizes the more overt and active embrace of republican and nationalist discourses by white feminists in the wake of the laws banning Islamic veiling in France.

Because whiteness is not the product of a preexisting identity, but a polit-ical and social construction, the analysis of feminist whiteness I propose is an inductive one; it is reconstructed from the empirical material collected, tracing discourses that retrace processes of political subjectivation.¹⁸ The feminist activists that I interviewed and categorized as white feminists self- identified as members of the ethnic majority group.¹⁹ Or, more precisely, they did not identify racially, thereby adhering to the idea typical of whiteness that they are not marked, even when some might have some parents with a migrant background. They were also officers or volunteers in organizations that did not self- identify as representing a specific ethnic or national group.

These organizations— shelters, community centers, and advocacy groups—

identified as feminist or women’s organizations²⁰ and, often in Quebec, as multicultural as well.²¹ In both France and Quebec race and racism have been publicly problematized in recent history (since the 1980s) in conjunc-tion with issues of immigraconjunc-tion and, more recently, religion— meaning in fact Islam, the religion of the formerly colonized, persons who became the immi-grant, and then have become, in public debates since the 1990s in France and the 2000s in Quebec, the Muslim man/ woman.²² Hence, my focus here is on

Feminist Whiteness 85 how feminist whiteness has been produced in the last decade in relation to women and feminists who are marked as others through the racialization of religion and immigration. Evidently, other historical repertoires, such as colonialism, immigrant integration, secularism, leftist internationalism, republicanism, multiculturalism, and intersectionality, also constitute the discursive field of race and racism in both contexts and contribute to shape different forms of feminist whiteness beyond the focus on Islam.

In France, interviews were realized after the 2010 law prohibiting full veiling in public spaces— less controversial within feminist circles than the 2004 law prohibiting religious symbols in public schools but still a topic that demanded feminists take a position— and while new femi-nist forces emerged to counter pinkwashing, colonialist discourses and Islamophobia.²³ In Quebec those were also active times. The debate over the Quebecois “charter of values” that unfolded during my fieldwork forced many feminist organizations to take a stand and to articulate their position vis- à- vis Quebecois nationalism and its Islamophobic undertones. A lot has happened since then as well. New feminist organizations have formed and others have disbanded, new feminist voices have emerged and claimed new public identities, while others may have turned away from activism. This means that new white and nonwhite feminist political subjectivities are in the making, subjectivities that this book has not captured.²⁴ This sample thus does not exhaust the variation of feminist whiteness in both contexts.

It is not representative of the diversity of white feminists in France and Quebec. What is more, I selected excerpts that display more obviously fem-inist whiteness, especially in France, and which may seem to reflect extreme positions, easy to ignore as nonrepresentative of the broader movement (be-cause of their racist overtones or their association of Islam with extremism).

However, while they may be overrepresented in the quotations illustrating my argument in this chapter, these discourses are not marginal, especially in France at the time of my fieldwork. The tendency to universalize gender and to associate Islam with women’s subordination was well represented in my sample of feminist volunteers, activists, and NGO officers. Hence, while this chapter overrepresents certain forms of feminist whiteness, concentrating on the effects of privilege and ignorance rather than on what Frankenberg has termed “race cognizant” whiteness, this strategy allows for identifying common repertoires and identifying the effects of whiteness on feminist subjectivation, an important step, I argue, in the direction of understanding the current feminist trouble.