Françoise Vergès, December 19, 2020. -
Aude Lorriaux / 20 Minutes
Françoise Vergès, known for her books
Le Ventre des femmes
and
Un feminisme décolonial
, released
A Feminist Theory of Violence
last month
.
She criticizes “prison feminism”, which proposes as a solution to violence against women more punishments and more prison.
If the political scientist justifies to a certain extent the "violence of the oppressed", she considers that this violence is "a self-defense", which must not lose sight of "the objective of peaceful life" and that decolonial work must "transform aggression in action ”.
She is one of the most important feminist figures in France, a spearhead of what is called "decolonial thought", for which Western modernity is intrinsically linked to slavery and colonialism.
Françoise Vergès recently released
A Feminist Theory of Violence
(La Fabrique), where she explains that violence is inseparable from neoliberalism and patriarchy, themselves closely linked.
To the violence against women aroused by this “racial capitalism”, some feminists respond by increasing the penalties or ending the limitation period.
It is against this vision that Françoise Vergès rises, who refuses what she calls "punitive feminism".
Without refusing any form of violence, since that of the dominated and dominated seems to him justified.
This is the risk of this book: that its epigones consider this tolerance as an authorization to attack.
All the more so as the author calls very different things “violence”, ranging from rape to being “taken over by a teacher”.
You criticize what you call “prison feminism”, what is it?
Prison feminism is the one that offers more punishments and more prison as a solution to violence against women.
And who thinks that this way of solving violence?
Violent husbands, companions and fathers are sent to prison.
It is a feminism which nevertheless has great confidence in the police and the courts, but they are sexist and racist institutions, studies show it, and of class.
To criticize this prison feminism is to ask oneself: what can we put in place as protection policies that do not involve prison?
There are neighborhoods in other countries, where people come together, to appease the neighborhood, to confront violence, to try to reduce the neighborhood's criminal economy.
It goes against individualistic withdrawal.
And then there is restorative justice [or “restorative justice”], which we find in Quebec, in the United States, in South Africa, and there are some experiences in France: it is to put the person who has committed the crime in front of her victims, make her discuss, talk, get her out of her identification as an absolute executioner.
They are human beings.
You tell of your experience on an American campus, where, you say, the demand for the protection of women had resulted in a segregated landscape… Tell us.
I had been invited in 2017 to a campus in the eastern United States, in a fairly wealthy, liberal, very pretty university, with lots of trees, flowers, two hours north of New York, near a city with a very poor population, near Boston.
I arrive and I am asked to answer a questionnaire, I am told that the questionnaire is mandatory.
I was asked in the questionnaire if I knew how to react to sexual harassment.
What struck me was that I quickly realized that the correct answer was to call the private police officer on campus.
It was a campus with a profusion of security services, numbers, a feeling of overprotection.
Two things struck me: this construction of a hyper-secure enclave in a country where racist, gender-based violence from the ruling extreme right was unleashed.
It's like we have a wall.
Beyond this wall, violence could be unleashed.
And second thing, I had students who were mostly queer, Latino, trans… who told me they didn't feel safe on this campus because of racial discrimination.
At the same time, there were testimonials from women in their college life of sexual assault and harassment that was staggering to me.
Teachers who came to students' doors in the evening, etc.
Some students had to change universities.
It was massive.
There was an immense contrast between this hostile environment and this construction of security by the private police.
And which responded to a certain feminism, not to all feminisms, since on campus there were queer people who had asked to form self-defense groups, and that it was women who patrolled the campus, and that did not had not been selected.
You call for "setting fire, causing disorder" and at the same time you criticize the condemnations of violence that you qualify as "bourgeois" condemnations.
But can we fight against violence by advocating violence?
Because the violence of those who are dominated is self-defense.
There are times when the violence that is done to you, you have to respond to it blow by blow.
We must aim for constructive, active non-violence.
When Martinican women say "set it on fire", it is because they know that there is an unrecognized state crime, chlordecone pollution, which attacks bodies, water, rivers, ground… There will be hard confrontations but the objective of peaceful life must not be lost, in meetings and discussions.
We need spaces where we can hear anger and frustrations, because we must take into account this accumulation of tensions in order to build peaceful speech.
Some of the anger has to be accepted in order to overcome it.
Decolonial work turns aggression into action.
Otherwise there is self destruction.
Has not your thought been for some and some an authorization to attack, on social networks in particular?
I do not know, maybe.
Social networks are incredibly violent.
I am dragged through the mud.
Including by people who I might think are my allies.
There were times I thought to myself that I was going to end up getting hit by someone I didn't know on the street.
But aggressiveness is also something else, it is also a response to what attacks.
From time to time I tell them: "But what are you doing?
To do, collective action, is much more difficult.
You have to deal with others, who have other opinions than you, you have to let go of your ego ...
If I summarize, you are against the violence of incarceration, against what you call state violence but for the violence of the oppressed against the state?
I find the violence of the oppressed to be absolutely justified.
But it is a violence which aims at something quite different from the moment of pure violence.
The Hirak in Algeria was exceptional.
We see other forms of resistance that are developing more and more, which respond to state violence.
In Chile, among the people who come to demonstrate, not everyone has the capacity to demonstrate, so we organize the first lines that feel capable of it, and the second lines that carry water ... There is an intelligence of this issue of violence.
It's not just 'we're gonna fight with the cops'.
You say that you are against “institutionalized non-violence”.
Who does this include?
The so-called “
mainstream
”
feminists
?
Or people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and the associations that were created after them?
When non-violence becomes a weapon in the hands of the state.
In the sense of a policy of respectability.
What we see on the side of the Ministry of the Interior at the moment, where suddenly the violence is on the side of those who receive the blows.
You have to be nonviolent to set your conditions, but this nonviolence is understood as submission.
So yes, we want to sit around a table, but with a balance of power, saying what we think, and according to our executives.
Martin Luther King is often presented as a kind of baby, when he spoke out against the war in Vietnam, that he denounced whites who present themselves as allies but who are sometimes the greatest opponents of the struggle.
It is a rewriting of non-violent struggles to pit them against more radical struggles.
When non-violence means resistance which does not take the form of a frontal attack, but uses the law, for example by bringing capitalists to court because they have polluted, these are forms of non-violence that pass. by institutions but which are not what I call “institutionalized non-violence”.
Are you also targeting
mainstream
feminist associations
that receive grants?
It depends on which ones: there are associations that receive grants to serve the feminism of Marlène Schiappa, to crush other feminisms, and then there are feminist organizations that need grants to absorb the effects of violence.
I'm not against it, but the fight for shelters, there will never be enough, we cannot simply build a preserved space in a space where other injustices continue.
We often hear it said that precarious people do not have the luxury to imagine the future, but you say that they have no choice, despite everything, to imagine this future, because the climate crisis will affect them first. .
And you, what future do you imagine?
I think that the right to the imagination must become an absolute right.
To get back to imagining, to delirium, in the sense of allowing oneself.
It is over incredible dreams that struggles have taken place.
And when they cannot be realized in the present, they can serve as a basis for the future.
When the slaves said: "one day we will be free", it took four centuries.
Abolition is not fully achieved, but it has moved forward.
For this new abolition program, we must dream.
Dream the impossible, and things will take shape.
And what is your craziest dream, exactly?
There must be an upheaval in the distribution of wealth.
People are indecently rich.
Then we should measure what wealth is.
What is it that produces happiness?
The well-being ?
How to distribute what constitutes comfort?
How can we ensure that the seven billion inhabitants live in decent conditions?
There are many more people dying from air pollution today than anything else.
This leap in the imagination would be around a policy of repair, repairing the world.
Dreaming of a world where you can hear birds, where you can live.
And a concrete proposal?
Stop the military budget: no more army, no more prison, no more arms sales.
The prisons must be closed completely.
Because Fresnes, or Fleury Mérogis, no.
It is enough to have set foot once in prison to understand it.
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