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This article argues that a focus on the relations constitutive of sex classes is central to an effective understanding of women as a category that is both homogeneous and heterogeneous. By highlighting the unequal relations underlying the construction of social categories, materialist feminism as it evolved in France offers a unique contribution, which transcends culturalist and substantialist explanations. I thus maintain that combining the insights of postcolonial feminism with those of materialist feminism will provide a multi-dimensional transversal analysis that moves beyond fragmentation, be it empirical and/or theoretical.