TG: Within the Marxist frame of reference, to take an example, the primary aim of theory is to help the revolutionary class become self-conscious by exposing the mechanisms of exploitation. But in view of the “daily experience of oppression” (FD 39) of, for example, the racialized women in the cleaning industry, it seems that they are not only self-aware by default, but also see the sources of their exploitation very clearly. What function do theory and analysis play then, and who are they aimed at? How can we repoliticize theory?

FV: Theory has too often been written by academics, and in that case, it has few connections with the struggles from below. When I read some of these texts, I am, may I confess?, bored. I know that theory is not a journalistic commentary but I sometimes feel that it is too detached, not immersed enough in the complicated, messy state of the real, it often lacks “life,” energy, desire. It still wishes people to be good and embrace reasonable goals. I grew up in a political family, very much engaged in the struggle in a French overseas department – a colony in another form – and I witnessed fear, courage, determination, solidarity, joy, all the feelings sometimes expressed together, and how the politics of respectability functions, its impact, its capacity to seduce racialized peoples into believing that if they play by the norms, they may get a small place at the table. I learned not to be judgmental, which did not mean that I did not distinguish between collaborators and people who for a lot of reasons remained quiet.

Women in the cleaning industry who strike and fight make a very strong case against patriarchy, sexism, racism, and capitalism. When they describe why and how their bodies suffer from their working conditions, when they articulate in detail what I call the “economy of exhaustion,” they are doing theory. We observe everywhere a strong desire to change the ways to organize politically, to eschew the top/down structure with bureaucratic leaders, spokespeople, etc. Neoliberalism, which has understood this need, has found answers: celebrating “anonymous” individuals, singing the praise of grassroots movement while maintaining the structure of power and decision intact. So, we always have to fight, to invent ways of escaping the politics of assimilation and respectability. What’s happening around the world is fantastic: despite incredible repression and intimidation by states, private militia, corporate business, resistance is everywhere.

Though the notion of intersectionality is now widely adopted, it is still very difficult to fully apply it when entanglements are complex, on multiple levels, with effects of past discriminations lingering or brought up way after the actual event — in other words, working with multiple temporalities, with different perceptions and experiences. How to bring together the multifarious links that construct a situation of oppression, going deep into the entanglements. About women in the cleaning industry for instance, are the notions of class, race and gender enough? (The notion of gender must already be questioned). How do we bring in the chemical industry that produces cleaning products according to the fabricated needs of the consumers (must smell “clean,” not too chemical, must be “green”…), its economy and protocols of research, the evolution of the notions of clean/unclean, sexual violence, anti-migrant politics, the history of the racial organization of cleaning and caring… For a workshop, I applied that method to the banana to speak about anti-black racism, sexualities, sport, imperialism (banana republics), fashion, music, cinema, advertisement, middle class life and tastes, pesticides, Cold War (banana as a symbol of freedom), contemporary art… My goal was not to show a causal effect, that one thing led to another, but to observe cultural, social, economic, racial, gendered entanglements starting from a very banal object of consumption, very much loved, associated with care.

TG: In Le ventre des femmes you analyze the scandalous practice of abortions and sterilizations without consent on the racialized women in Réunion. Such practices were the direct consequence France’s antinatalist policy in the DOMs after WWII. This policy was precisely the opposite of the one that was promoted in mainland France, where abortions and contraceptives were criminalized and women were encouraged to have children. With this analysis you show how the control over the women’s bodies, and specifically their wombs, served different functions for white and for racialized women. Where do you see, in that sense, the difference between a decolonial feminism, and a feminism that will potentially collaborate with the neoliberal structures?

FV: The feminism I defend is radically anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, therefore anti-patriarchal. Patriarchy was racialized (you could be a tyrant at home but outside you were a black, Arab, Muslim, Asian man, a man who was not fully a man in the colonial/racial/social/cultural/economic organization). They could be publicly humiliated in front of women and children, they could be accused without any kind of proof of being rapists and lynched. Masculinity is not neutral, becoming a “man” is heavily ideologized. And patriarchy, we know, is indispensable to Capital. I am interested in the notion of de-patriarcalization that indigenous feminist movements such as the Bolivian women’s social movement Mujeres Creando have developed. “The decolonization of the State is not possible without its depatriarcalization. […] We affirm that the ’social pact’ rests on a sexual contract that has expropriated from women the sovereignty over our own bodies,” they say (see: Mujeres Creando, Virgen de Los Deseos and Maria Galindo, 13 June 2007, http://topicsandroses.free.fr/spip.php?article58). They see the “demand for ’the original culture’ as pure, as the culture that will build the nation, the project of power and then nationalism” as leading to “the patriarchal and colonial renovation of power, where power simply exercises power with a mere change of actors.” I would need more precision though about their idea of women and men as being “complementary,” but the project of working to de-patriarcalize institutions is promising.

A decolonial feminism must show how racial capitalism, as Cedric Robinson has shown, is gendered. Economic emancipation from Capital means attacking the ways in which it is structured by race. Bourgeois women have access to a “good life” thanks to the exploitation of women in the Global South and of black and brown women in the Global North. From the cheap clothes of fast fashion that allow them to wear the latest fashion, to work that is done by black and brown women to make their lives more comfortable (taking care of their children, their homes, their husband); from their access to the business of care and beauty (being pampered in spas, massaged by migrant women from Asia), to their appropriation of practices of care such as meditation, yoga, detox food, these women perpetuate an economy of extraction. Their “good life” rests literally on the broken back of the exhausted bodies of black and brown women. White women are agents of the racist economy; it is not just a question of patriarchy, as the white women who vote for fascistic regimes, for Trump, are the accomplices of the most brutal patriarchy. They need to understand this.

The politics of disposable lives are deeply connected to the economy of extraction: extracting energy and labor from racialized bodies to the extent that their lives are shortened, extracting from the soil and subsoil, extracting from forests, rivers, seas, oceans… We are witnessing on a global scale the devastation that Capital and colonialism brought to the Global South(s). In that history, the fact that for centuries, the African women’s wombs were “looted” as their children were captured, trafficked, and deported, that they constituted an endless source of bonded workforce for transatlantic and Indian ocean commerce in human beings, that men were made fatherless, the fact that in the colonies Black women’s wombs were transformed into capital and black babies into currency and capital, and Black men forbidden to become paternal figures, that monocultures were imposed, mines emptied, cities built on genocides, art looted, languages erased, that there were genocides, epistemicides, massacres of indigenous peoples, their lands stolen — the list is long, and all this set up the stage for the current devastation. The West is calling this age “Anthropocene” but we, peoples of color, know that the Plantatiocene was the cradle of the current global disposability. In that context, a decolonial feminism insists on working for a post-violent world, a world where violence is not praised and is the basis of power, where security and protection are not militarized, where violence is not answered with carceral feminism.

I would like to add something. Three years ago, I suggested a collective performance on Utopian thought (for four years, I organized a workshop in Paris called “L’Atelier” with 20/25 artists of color of different disciplines. Its principles: realizing in two days a collective performance — not a succession of works but really a collaborative performance, with the lowest budget we could imagine, opened to the public the second day, joyful, radical…). We wrote a manifesto after walking a full day in a forest, then the following day, we paid homage to an Algerian thrown into the Seine by the French police, before going to La Colonie, the space set up by artist Kader Attia. I wanted to challenge the idea that utopia always ends in dystopia, and rather than imagining a future, it brings back the energy of imagination. The first paragraph is the following: “The mighty, the masters of Capital and of the Empire tell us that their current dystopia is the norm and they have us believe that they control time. Paraphrasing Frantz Fanon, we declare that “we must shake off the heavy darkness” into which we are plunged “and leave it behind”. We want to imagine a utopia, one that will give us energy, the force to contest, an invitation to emancipatory dreams and represent an act of rupture: daring to think outside what is presented as “natural”, “pragmatic” and “reasonable”. We do not wish to build a utopian community, but to breathe creative force back into dreams of indocility and resistance, justice and freedom, happiness and kindness, friendship and wonderment.” And we concluded: “In these reconfigurations, the figure of the Maroon, those men and women who refused the long night of oppression, strikes us as primordial. To escape, if only for an hour, a day, a night, or years, to create, against all odds, a space of freedom is the lesson they bequeath to us. Making a reified icon of the Maroon would be to betray their memory. It is a danger that looms for all figures of freedom and, before we know it, we would risk seeing this figure set in stone on the fronts of museums. We take our imperative of constantly being on the move, in motion, inventing new, free territories, from the Maroons. The night welcomes our dreams and opens up still unexplored paths. We claim the right to be unfinished and contradictory. We want to creatively redefine the visual traces of history, to explore the past to analyze the present and imagine the future. Our utopia must remain a never-achieved goal; it must instill a permanent state of curiosity.” For me, a decolonial feminism is that, a permanent state of curiosity, being on the move, opening up unexplored paths and thus, first never forgetting what we owe to the ancestors, to their courage, determination, and daring, second, making the constant effort to breathe life into our thoughts and actions, and finally always being on the side of the exploited.