ABSTRACT
As a project to challenge privileges, intersectionality elicits resistances, which help to explain why, despite numerous calls to adopt intersectionality in feminist organizing, researchers also observe a lack of implementation of intersectionality. This chapter argues that this resistance is primarily located in whiteness, a privilege directly challenged by feminist intersectional discourses and practices. It proposes to document feminist whiteness – i.e. how feminism is made white – in the context of French feminist organizations. It first identifies discursive repertoires used by white feminists to secure the centrality of feminist whiteness in the movement. Drawing on whiteness studies showing how whiteness is produced and performed through emotional and moral disposition, it analyses how feminist whiteness also consists in marking non-white feminists as ‘others’, through two types or moral attitudes: patronizing solicitude and indignant anger. It concludes by calling attention of scholars of intersectionality in social movements to the study of resistance to intersectionality, taking into account how whiteness, among other sites of privilege, produce it.
