Mayanthi Fernando: Another member of the Indigènes Feminists was Bouteldja of the PIR, who has now turned her back on feminism completely, seeing it as, at best, irrelevant to the struggles of minorities and, at worst, an attempt to make Muslims conform to the dictates of the white majority in France. She does not identify as an intersectional feminist like Assbague, because, she told me, the historical and political specificity of feminism’s emergence in Europe and the United States make it untranslatable to other struggles. When I asked her why she had organized the PIR’s tenth anniversary celebration to feature only women of color—seemingly a feminist statement par excellence—she said that she wanted to valorize the real, rather than imagined, struggles of the women of her community. That real struggle, she continued, “has been about the violence of the state.” Her new book cites former Black Panther Assata Shakur’s statement that “we cannot be free while our men are oppressed.” Following this line, Bouteldja takes some controversial positions, demanding communal allegiance from minority women and writing that as long as racism exists, “the critique of indigène patriarchy is a luxury.”
Bouteldja seems to posit a clear hierarchy of priorities—racism first, patriarchy second—in part because any critique of indigène men can be coopted by the state to further stigmatize them. But she is also arguing more subtly that racism exacerbates, even generates, gender violence and inequality in the banlieues, and so one cannot improve gender relations without addressing racism. Bouteldja’s critique is reminiscent of some aspects of black feminism in the United States, and her citation of Shakur is not coincidental. She, Assbague, and other Muslim women activists draw inspiration from black, Chicana, and postcolonial feminist currents in the United States, including many black feminists’ focus on police violence and the mass incarceration of black men. More than white, middle-class feminists’ continued emphasis on reproductive rights, it is these critiques that resonate for Muslim communities in France, where ghettoization, racial profiling, and a structurally racist criminal justice system mean that Arab- and African-Muslim men—about 8 percent of the population—comprise up to 50 percent of the prison population, according to the sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar. More here.