Read more  Focus on a concept that is also a struggle: Afrofeminism. A notion that has the merit of raising awareness of the fact that being a woman is not easy, but being a black woman in France, even in 2023, remains even more complicated. In this show, we talk about intersectionality and discrimination.
Has Afrofeminism become necessary in a society where white feminism too often forgets to include black women?
To enlighten us on this notion, the guest is Kiyémis, author, poet, speaker. She works mainly around the questions of self-love, body positivity, and the place of Afro-descendants in Europe. In 2008, she published a collection of poetry, À nos humanités révoltées, published by Métagraphes and last fall, Je suis ton pire minuit, published by Albin Michel*.*
Where does Afrofeminism come from? In the 1950s, in the United States, it began with gatherings of African-American women protesting the discrimination they suffered because of their race or gender. In 1969, black feminist activist Mary Ann Weathers wrote An Argument For Black Women's Liberation As a Revolutionary Force. This text became a founding text of Afrofeminism.
In the 1970s, it was Angela Davis' turn to establish herself as a figure of American activism. In the autobiography she published in 1975, she recounts in particular the many times she was a victim of sexism and racism. The Black Panther would be one of the first women to raise the issue of intersectionality. She underlines an essential fact: the issues of women's emancipation are not the same for black women and white women.
In 1970, the Third World Women's Alliance denounced the particular discrimination that existed against black women, through the Black Women's Manifesto. This text was one of the first to denounce sexist and racial oppression against black women and to develop the bases of what would become intersectionality. We can read this excerpt, from the media Madmoizelle: "The black woman demands a new range of definitions of woman. She demands to be recognized as a citizen, a companion, a confidante and not as an ugly matriarch or an auxiliary to make babies."
For Kiyémis, Afrofeminism is not a response or a sub-branch of feminism, but really a movement in its own right, with its vitality, with its strength, with its power. This desire for emancipation goes back well before the 20th century.
Afrofeminism, where are we? Our society is the result of a sexist and racist history, as the guest says: "How can we fight against hundreds of years of colonialist racist imagery? Because it was necessary to justify the enslavement of Black people through a discourse and a form of imagination. Without deconstructing it, without confronting this past and without confronting this history, it is very complicated. Anti-racist movements are trying to uproot these great baobabs or these great internal oaks, but not without difficulty."
There is still a lot of work to do, as Kiyémis explains: "We still have a lot of work to do, from the point of view of discrimination, of representation. There is an overrepresentation of racialized populations, particularly women, in the poorest, most precarious classes. So, there is still a long way to go, a lot of work and we need a lot of anger and joy."
For her, we should not oppose universalist feminism versus communitarian feminism: "I rebel because I think that we embody universalism, real universalism, the one that is anchored in reality, and not this kind of idea that we should erase all differences, as if we were not all different and that erasing differences in an absolute way would be enough to change the world. It is false."
Glossary: ​​Afrofeminism, intersectionality and misogynoirWhat is the difference between intersectionality and Afrofeminism? Kiyémis explains: “Intersectionality is a reading grid, an analysis grid that was designed by Kimberlé Crenshaw in Cartographie des marges in the 1990s, but which is obviously part of a longer, intellectual and political history of emancipation movements led by and for black women. Obviously, it is a theory that inspires and fuels Afrofeminism, which is action or denunciation, while intersectionality is really an analysis grid, which makes an observation.”
What is misogynoir? "It's a word that was coined by Moya Bailey, an African-American intellectual and sociologist, and which describes the specific processes of sexism that particularly affect black women." Kiyémis gives an example of specific discrimination that affects black women: "On the issue of medical discrimination. We see that for example in the United States, because of sexism, racism, and poverty too, it must be said, black women die more in childbirth than white women."
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