Jennifer A. Boittin, The Pennsylvania State Univ.; Jacqueline Couti, Rice Univ.; Lucia Direnberger, CNRS-CMH; Silyane Larcher, CNRS-IRIS; Rose Ndengue, CEDREF – Univ. Paris 7 Diderot; Myriam Paris, CESSP – Univ. Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne

Time: 03.-05.03.2020
Venue: Campus Condorcet, Paris
Proposals by: 30.09.2019

The Paradoxical Reception of Intersectionality: Since the early 2000s, a paradox has shaped gender Studies, feminist Studies, and research on feminist movements in France. On the one hand, despite a series of essentially media-driven controversies, the notion of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) has become impossible to ignore, in fact nearly becoming a “buzz word” at the risk of eroding its original critical power (Moujoud, Aït Ben Lamdani, 2012; Bilge, 2015; Collins, 2016). On the other hand, political grass-roots campaigns against the French law of 2004 have crystallized profound divisions at the heart of feminist movements and beyond in the arena of “women’s causes” (Béréni, 2012). That law prohibits wearing religious symbols in public schools and therefore legalizes, in the name of secularism and the emancipation of women, the exclusion of Muslim schoolgirls wearing the headscarf (Guénif-Souilamas, 2003; Nordmann, 2004; Benelli et al., 2006; Dot-Pouillard, 2007; Karimi, 2018).

This theoretical and political context has contributed to the dilution of intersectionality’s critical complexity, both in the areas of scholarly research and activist movements, with as one result sometimes competing receptions and uses of the term. Perhaps most surprising, evidence-based scholarly research in France has not yet reflected upon the implicit Eurocentrism, and thus epistemic nationalism, that still underpins research on the history of women and the sociology of feminisms while using intersectionality as part of its framework. Many act as though the rights of women and women’s causes are contained within the boundaries of a hexagonal nation-state. Yet France’s historical reality is that … read more (Web).

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