Resisting Whiteness, Claiming Feminism

Abstract

Abstract This chapter analyzes how racialized feminists have forged specific political vocabularies to name and politicize their relationships with white feminists in the context of the headscarf debates. Their discourses are articulated with a set of emotions and moral dispositions. This chapter captures the formation of (collectively produced) moral, political, and ethical dispositions that are intimately linked to and shaped by the context of postcolonialism and postsecularism in France and Quebec. This chapter argues that by calling themselves feminists, racialized feminists in both contexts enter—among other processes—in relation with white feminists, a relation that they attempt to fashion with their own vocabulary, concepts, and discourses. Racialized feminists seek to create a new language from within a dominant discourse. The chapter explores the political emotions, such as indignation, frustration, pain, unease, anger, or lassitude, that sustain racialized feminists’ relationship to white feminists, and the forms of moral address they convey to white feminists through both resistance and resentment.