I still arrive like a hair in the soup, two days after International Women’s Rights Day, which was itself colored by two weeks of perfectly sterile (non-)debate around the notion of intersectionality.
As March 8 approached, therefore, the Minister for the Status of Women, Martine Biron, chose not to support a motion tabled by solidarity MP Ruba Ghazal because it was about addressing inequalities between men. and women in Quebec from an intersectional perspective.
The government of the Coalition avenir Québec, you see, cannot line up behind a vision of feminism that highlights the specific impact of the different forms of discrimination suffered by Quebec women.
It does not matter that intersectionality appears in the Government Strategy for Equality between Women and Men 2022-2027, in which pilot projects are planned to be rolled out to subject public policies to a gender-based analysis “enriched with an intersectional perspective” (so-called “ADS+”). This is simply not this government’s vision of feminism, said Minister Biron, scorching in passing the so-called lexical rigidity of Québec solidaire.
One could simplify the matter: CAQ feminism does not just ignore intersectionality, CAQ feminism simply does not exist. A party which defends a vision of society organized around the patriarchal family (preferably white), which cultivates on every occasion the fear of the migratory invasion, which penalizes poverty and which is distinguished by its constant contempt for low wage earners, care work, union action simply has no affinity with feminism.
This is what happens when you empty words of their political content. They become what the philosopher Sara Ahmed describes as “non-performative”: they come to produce the opposite effect of what they affirm. The “feminism” of the CAQ is at best a social club for women who already occupy places of power, and its “feminist” positioning crystallizes the inequalities that this vision underlies.
Moreover, if we want to elevate the reflection that has been obsessing us for two weeks a little above the ground, it must be said that intersectionality itself has experienced such a diversion. It has been torn from its origins in black feminist thought, purged of the critique of capitalism that was inherent in it, whitewashed, technicalized and reduced to the state of an “analytical grid” without any particular political tenor.
There is indeed a criticism to be made of the “State” intersectional analysis, but certainly not the one that has been served up to us for two weeks by people who obviously do not know the thought they are criticizing, and who do not probably have nothing to do with it. Note for those who read it in the last few days before venting publicly: there is more to read than Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 article.
Anyway, the debate is elsewhere. In fact, it has nothing to do with intersectionality itself and everything to do with the political benefits that the CAQ derives by playing petty politics on words. Ironically, others are criticized for being obsessed with terms, but it is this government’s business: trapping words that allow social criticism, like activating mouse traps.
We transform the field of criticism into a minefield, to be sure that, each time citizens try to name the violence experienced in its most pernicious, subtle, invisible forms, they are blamed for their paranoia, and they are punished in passing for their use of language.
Islamophobia, systemic racism, cultural genocide of indigenous populations and, now, the distinct effect of patriarchal social organization on elderly, poor, black or disabled women (to name a few examples): words are confiscated by transforming them into ideological detonators. The term in English is perfectly evocative: dog whistling. We designate markers that are used to stir up the troops, without ever getting our hands dirty.
The CAQ excels at letting others do the dirty work for it that serves its ideological agenda, while preserving its veneer of respectability. When the inevitable slippages occur, we even position ourselves as a voice of reason and of the pear cut in half. All our sympathies for the hatred that you are reaping, really, it is deplorable, but afterwards, you have to know how to make compromises so as not to offend the sensibilities of Quebecers.
This scheme is not innocent. It serves to constantly shift the center of gravity of political discourse, to uninhibit the extreme right, to discipline critical speeches and to make the existence of marginalized populations ever more uncomfortable. This is played out in the field of the debate of ideas, in the newspapers, on television, in the National Assembly, but the consequences are material, immediate, disturbing. Our inability to name this dynamic for what it is makes us utterly complicit in this onslaught.