Mémoire
| Résumé : | How do feminists from the margins exercise their engagement and what motivates their activism? Feminists from the margins are involved in race and class relationships with the majoritarian feminists occupying the center of the feminist environment. They occupy the sideline of the feminist movement because of their socio-political identity which is not that of the white, heterosexual, christian, middle-or upper class majoritarian, abled feminists’ identity; and eventually because of their feminist vision and the form of activism they exercise. In Belgium, the common social characteristic feminists from the margins share is being an African or West-Asian migrant or descendant of immigrants. To properly address the articulation of feminist engagement, racialization and marginalization, the historic evolution of immigration and of the feminist movement and environment in Belgium is retraced. The concept of margins is being mobilized throughout the research and allows to study the power structures, hierarchizing positionalities and processes of exclusion, marginalization and minorization characterizing the feminist environment in Belgium. These processes can be traced back to how privilege and subordination interact with race, sex, and other characteristics. Therefore the framework of “intersectionality”, as framed by black activist and researcher Kimberlé Crenshaw shall be used to study the forms and causes of the engagement of racialized feminists who occupy the margins in society, but also inside the feminist movement. In five chapters, we analyze the interviews of feminist racialized activists that were conducted from January to June 2020 and investigate the three structuring hypotheses that explore the different aspects of a feminists’ from the margins’ engagement. The hypotheses address the forms of feminisms and places of activism, the generational differences and logics of engagement and lastly the visibility and recognition of feminists from the margins. Findings can be resumed as followed: Firstly, resistance towards majoritarian feminism can be expressed by the defended ideology such as queer black feminism, by the places of expression such as the creation of new organizations, or by only one of these two which means that feminists from the margins can simultaneously be part of a majoritarian organization and fight the discrimination racialized women experience. What is therefore the chore characteristic of a feminists from the margins’ resistance towards majoritarian feminism is not where the engagement is expressed but what motivates that latter. Secondly, racialized feminists interviewed articulate their feminist identity partly or exclusively from their immigrational background and the racialization they go through but undergoing a racialization process does not necessarily turn an activists’ engagement primarily anti-racist. Expression of ones’ feminist engagement, must therefore be differentiated from the evolution of ones’ engagement. Generational differences are not sufficient to witness markers of distinction but places and countries of socializations, frequented socio-political communities and the multiplicity of identities the activist accumulates are different elements that influence the evolution of a feminist identity and account for her the different degrees of radicalness. Thirdly, the visibility of the feminist from the margins reproduces the same processes of domination that characterize the feminist movement itself. Physically invisible in majoritarian spaces, feminists from the margins’ access to key strategic positions inside the movements remains limited. This research attempts to contribute to the many existing interrogations on how feminism can be able to include all women and work efficiently towards a better and more equal society. |
