Intersectionality has been adopted as the preferred term to refer to and to analyze multiple axes of oppression in feminist theory. However, less research examines if this term, and the political ...analyses it carries, has been adopted by women's rights organizations in various contexts and to what effect. Drawing on interviews with activists working in a variety of women's rights organizations in France and Canada, I show that intersectionality is only one of the repertoires that a women's rights organization might use to analyze the social experience and the political interests of women situated at the intersection of several axes of domination. I propose a typology of four repertoires that activists use to reflect on intersectionality and inclusiveness. Drawing on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interview data, I show that hegemonic repertoires about racial or religious identity in one national context shape the way activists and organizations understand intersectionality and its challenges. The identity of organizations, as well as their main function (advocacy or providing service), also shape their understanding of intersectional issues.
Examining the ways in which feminist and queer activists confront privilege through the use of intersectionality, this edited collection presents empirical case studies from around the world to ...consider how intersectionality has been taken up (or indeed contested) by activists in order to expose and resist privilege.The volume sets out three key ways in which intersectionality operates within feminist and queer movements: it is used as a collective identity, as a strategy for forming coalitions, and as a repertoire for inclusivity. The case studies presented in this book then evaluate the extent to which some, or all, of these types of intersectional activism are used to confront manifestations of privilege. Drawing upon a wide range of cases from across time and space, this volume explores the difficulties with which activists often grapple when it comes to translating the desire for intersectionality into a praxis which confronts privilege. Addressing inter-related and politically relevant questions concerning how we apply and theorise intersectionality in our studies of feminist and queer movements, this timely edited collection will be of interest to students and scholars from across the social sciences and humanities with an interest in gender and feminism, LGBT+ and queer studies, and social movement studies.
This article proposes an Internal perspective on judicial traditions to explain judicial decisions in favor of accommodating or prohibiting minority religious practices such as wearing religious ...dress in two liberal states with opposing judicial traditions: France and Canada. By comparing the two styles of legal writing and judicial traditions, I show how the Canadian judge, thanks to legal techniques such as contextual analysis, tends to include the minority point of view in its decisions, leading to greater accommodation, while the French judge tends to privilege the majority point of view, leading to the exclusion of the religious minority perspective from its decisions and to subsequent prohibitions of religious dress. Adapted from the source document.
Religion in general, and Islam in particular, has become one of the main focal points of policy-making and constitutional politics in many Western liberal states. This article proposes to examine the ...legal and political dynamics behind new regulations targeting individual religious practices of Muslims. Although one could presuppose that churchstate relations or the understanding of secularism is the main factor accounting for either accommodation or prohibition of Muslim religious practices, I make the case that the policy frame used to conceptualize the integration of immigrants in each national context is a more significant influence on how a liberal state approaches the legal regulation of individual practices such as veiling. However, this influence must be assessed carefully since it may have different effects on the different institutional actors in charge of regulating religion, such as the Courts and the legislature. To assess these hypotheses I compare two countries, France and Canada, which are solid examples of two contrasting national policy frames for the integration of immigrants.
As a social movement strategy, intersectionality is used to foster the inclusion and representation of minority groups. In this article, we examine how Québécois women’s organizations use ...intersectionality as a tool to include immigrant and Native women. We argue that intersectionality can entail different practices with potentially conflicting goals. We conclude that social movement scholars would benefit from paying attention to intersectionality and to how it is practised by activists and organizations. Indeed, a focus on intersectionality sheds light on the tensions inherent in the processes by which organizations construct collective identities, formulate political demands, manage internal conflicts and build alliances.
For more than two decades Islamic veils, niqabs, burkinis, forced and arranged marriages, polygamy and Sharia rules concerning women have been the object of intense public scrutiny and legal ...regulations in many Western countries, especially in Europe, and feminists have been actively engaged on both sides of the debates. In Feminist Trouble, Eléonore Lépinard draws on extended fieldwork with numerous women’s organizations in France and Quebec. Giving voice to women of color, Lépinard dissects hierarchies of privilege in feminist politics, grappling with Islam and Islamic veiling debates to understand how these changes have transformed contemporary feminist movements, intersectional politics, and the feminist collective subject. A critical look at feminism, its divisions, and its future, Feminist Trouble argues that feminism should not be centered around an identity—women—but should instead focus on a feminist ethic of responsibility that requires women to prioritize their ethical responsibility to the feminist project
Black feminist theory and theorizations by feminists of colour have identified and explored emotions linked to race and racism in feminist movements, especially in the US context. Building on this ...literature, this article explores the changes in feminist emotional dynamics linked to race which have been brought up by the relatively recent adoption of intersectionality in feminist movements’ discourses in two European countries, France and Switzerland, which are both often described as ‘colour-blind’ contexts. Drawing on Hochschild’s concept of feeling rules, we argue that intersectionality has changed the ways feminists are legitimately expected to feel about race and racism within feminist movements in both contexts. As feeling rules vary according to the members’ positions within the movement, we contend that these changes in emotional dynamics contribute to redefine feminists’ relations and feminist membership along racial lines. Based on interviews with young feminist activists in France and Switzerland during mobilization processes characterized by a prominent use of intersectionality, we observe how intersectionality discourses bring about new feeling rules in relation to race and racism. These feeling rules differ for white and non-white feminists: while intersectionality has led young white feminists to self-education and self-critique, racialized feminists often expressed mixed feelings about intersectionality and its use, in particular by white feminists. Importantly, these changes in feeling rules have allowed racialized feminists to renegotiate their relations with white feminists and their emotional content, as well as their position within the movement.
The now well-developed literature on gender quotas focuses mainly on two areas: the causal mechanisms that can be advanced to explain the adoption, diffusion, and effectiveness of political gender ...quotas worldwide (Baldez 2004; Dahlerup 2006; Krook 2006; 2009; Krook, Lovenduski, and Squires 2009; Krook and O'Brien 2010; Lovenduski 2005; Meier 2012); and the benefits, as well as the dangers, that this “fast track” to gender equality can have for women's substantive representation and for politics in general (Celis and Childs 2012; Celis et al. 2008; Childs and Krook 2009; Dahlerup 1988; Franseschet, Krook, and Piscopo 2012; Franseschet and Piscopo 2008; Kittilson 2005; Phillips 1995; Squires 2001). Most studies on gender quotas approach “women” as a group defined by a single axis of oppression and the quotas' consequences for gender equality broadly. The growing literature on intersectionality, however, calls attention to the internal heterogeneity of the category “women” and the fact that gender relations are embedded in race or class relations, forming a “matrix of domination” rather than a single axis of oppression (Collins 1990). But the question of how gender quotas relate to intersectionality has remained, until now, much less investigated.
Once a country allergic to any type of preferential treatment or quota measure for women, France has become a country that applies gender quotas to regulate women's presence and representation in ...politics, the business sector, public bodies, public administration, and even some civil society organizations. While research has concentrated on the adoption of electoral gender quotas in many countries and their international diffusion, few studies focus on explaining the successful diffusion of gender quotas from politics to other domains in the same country. This paper proposes to fill this gap by studying the particularly puzzling case of a country that at one point strongly opposed the adoption of gender quotas in politics, but, in less than a decade, transformed into one of the few countries applying gender quotas across several policy domains. This paper argues that the legal entrenchment of the parity principle, the institutionalization of parity in several successive women's policy agencies, and key players in these newly created agencies are mainly responsible for this unexpected development. The diffusion of gender quotas in France thus offers an illuminating example of under which conditions women's policy agencies can act autonomously to diffuse and impose a new tool for gender equality.
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