Universalism as Epistemic Repression: How Lesbians and Veiled Muslim Women Became the “Others” of French Feminism
Type de matériel :
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Based on a cross-analysis of feminist discourses on lesbianism within the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s and on the Islamic veil in the last decade, this article intends to show how adherence to the regime of abstract universalism produces, within feminism, epistemic repressions and exclusions through which dominant positions are established. The analogical analysis of the epistemic regulation of differences is based on a corpus of interviews, archives and texts published by actresses of feminist movements and aims to identify similar processes in the treatment of lesbian difference and racial difference. In particular, we identify three rhetorical tropes through which universalism is deployed in feminist discourses and appropriated by an exclusionary (heterosexual and white/secular) “We, women”: nationalism, separatism, and extremism. Bringing together the subject “lesbians” with the subject “veiled Muslim women”, the article shows how the construction of heterosexual privilege and racial privilege functions according to discursive and epistemic modalities which are repeated over time, and thus allows to complete existing analyses of the French uses of universalism seeking to legitimise the majority reason.
Réseaux sociaux