Separate and Dominate: Feminism and Racism after the War on Terror

Separate and Dominate: Feminism and Racism after the War on Terror

David Broder

Language: English

Pages: 192

ISBN: 178168880X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


An examination of how mainstream feminism has been mobilized in support of racist measures

Feminist Christine Delphy co-founded the journal Nouvelles questions féministes with Simone de Beauvoir in the 1970s and became one of the most influential figures in French feminism. Today, Delphy remains a prominent and controversial feminist thinker, a rare public voice denouncing the racist motivations of the government’s 2011 ban of the Muslim veil. Castigating humanitarian liberals for demanding the cultural assimilation of the women they are purporting to “save,” Delphy shows how criminalizing Islam in the name of feminism is fundamentally paradoxical.

Separate and Dominate is Delphy’s manifesto, lambasting liberal hypocrisy and calling for a fluid understanding of political identity that does not place different political struggles in a false opposition. She dismantles the absurd claim that Afghanistan was invaded to save women, and that homosexuals and immigrants alike should reserve their self-expression for private settings. She calls for a true universalism that sacrifices no one at the expense of others. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, her arguments appear more prescient and pressing than ever.

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The blaze of the first bombs dropped on Baghdad, did I believe that this nightmare would become reality. Many of us, hundreds of thousands of people in France and Germany, protested against this war. And then once Iraq was defeated and destroyed we heard nothing more about it, or almost nothing, through twelve years of sanctions. It was clear enough to me that no country populated by whites would have been treated like this (though Serbia did experience comparable treatment for a few weeks).20 I.

Trampling on religious freedom – even Muslims’ freedom – is looked upon unkindly. During the second ‘veil’ affair in 1995, Nouvelles Questions féministes had expressed its opposition to the pupils’ exclusion, and in 2003 this journal again took a position against the anti-headscarf law. There was even less question of reconsidering its position considering that anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda had multiplied tenfold in the intervening eight years, and given that the law was passed on 15.

Dominated knocked at the door of a house that they were told was common property, but did not meet with success. They were told that this house is not in fact theirs, and that they can only enter if they are invited in: so they may well prefer to abandon it to those who claim to be its only legitimate owners, and begin to look elsewhere. That is to say, they will start to take a closer look at the red rag that the dominant wave in front of every protest: that is, ‘communitarianism’, or separatism.

Racist and sexist injunctions, which exhort the dominated to erase and yet simultaneously be comfortable with their ‘difference’. But that changed when some of them understood that this whole game deliberately sets out to exhaust them physically and mentally; that the ‘difference’ they’re labelled with is nothing other than an inferior status; and that they cannot be at ease with this difference unless they accept their own inferiority, which they can’t shake off because – according to racism’s.

Reproached are entirely constructed by the master groups; and in a number of ways. They are constructed ideologically, as one of their physical or behavioural characteristics is posed not as one of the countless traits that make individuals distinct from other individuals, but as a marker defining the boundary between superior and inferior. More precisely, one of the countless characteristics of humanity is posed as an axis with two opposite extremes: one good, one bad. Sometimes there are only.

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