Rewriting French Feminisms: Muslim Women and Intersectional Storytelling with Fatima Daas and Faïza Guène

ABSTRACT

As intersectionality has burgeoned into a buzzword, it has not always retained its origins in black women’s lives and standpoints. Unfortunately, criticisms of the concept can further marginalise longstanding histories of resistance to overlapping systems of oppression. This article examines the value of an intersectional lens on transnational French-Algerian feminisms. It analyses the stories that circulate about intersectionality and feminism in France, particularly a misleading tension between, on the one hand, universalism, national identity and French feminism, and on the other, intersectionality. To ensure a situated and embodied approach, the recent works of two French writers, La petite dernière by Fatima Daas and La discrétion by Faïza Guène, guide this article’s rethinking of the epistemological bounds of (intersectional) feminism. An analysis of how the authors engage publicly with feminism, how their characters navigate sexism, racism, and Islamophobia in Paris and how the works are received, reveals a productive tension between the plural modes of resistance and agency Daas and Guène present, and dominant French feminist discourse. I argue for the value of an intersectional lens in bridging this gap and enabling the lives of Muslim women to shape the feminist project and participate in the construction of the universal.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• French feminisms
• epistemologies
• Muslim women
• francophone literature
• migrant

French literary sensation Fatima Daas, author of debut novel La petite dernière (LPD) (2020a), calls herself an ‘intersectional feminist’ in her author biography. According to Daas, this mode of feminism enables her to live all her identities at once and speak freely (Daas 2020b). In the contemporary Western context, the label is hardly surprising, especially for a queer millennial woman. Yet, for someone in Daas’ position, both terms come with complex histories and potential negative connotations: within dominant feminist discourse in France, intersectionality is frequently positioned as a recent and peripheral development; within French-Algerian and Muslim communities, feminism is often associated with colonisation and French imperialism.

This article examines the stories we tell about feminism and intersectionality in public discourse and academic spheres, together with the way they travel. It analyses the power of dominant national narratives of feminism and the work of renegotiating the boundaries to make space for plural and inclusive formulations. Two recent French novels, LPD by Fatima Daas and La discrétion (LD) by Faïza Guène (2020a, 2020b), serve as ‘companion texts’ to this study. Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed (2017: 16) defines a ‘companion text’ as ‘a text whose company enabled you to proceed on a path less trodden’. LPD and LD support this article’s feminist theorising: they guide, turn our attention in unexpected directions, foster epistemic curiosity.

Authors Daas and Guène have several things in common. They both shot to acclaim in their teens or early twenties, are daughters of French-Algerian migrants, and have often found themselves reluctant spokespersons for Franco-Maghrebi and Muslim women in the Parisian banlieue. Occupying both ends of the millennial generation, Guène, born in 1985, published her first novel, Kiffe Kiffe demain/Just Like Tomorrow (2004), at the age of 19 and LD is her sixth; for Daas, born in 1995, LPD is her debut. LD and LPD have recently been released in English translation as Discretion (2022) and The Last One (2021) respectively.¹ Through fiction and autofiction, these two novels explore diverse experiences of what it is to be a Muslim woman in contemporary Paris; they also offer nuanced depictions of feminist agency. Both works foreground the way gendered and heteronormative systems of oppression intersect with colonisation, racism, and Islamophobia, and trace long histories of transnational and intersectional feminist resistance in the francophone context.

Rather than apply external and decontextualised theories to an analysis of these writers and their works, I look to them for how they contribute to the epistemology of the feminist project and work to reshape its boundaries. Significantly, many Franco-Maghrebi and Muslim writers have expressed frustration that their work is read as testimony in France; whether autobiographical or not, Franco-Maghrebi writing is often interpreted by critics and the mainstream as the mimetic depiction of lived experience, rather than a work of literature created by a critical thinker (Chraibi 2021). Such a reception limits the extent to which the authors can impact the epistemology of feminism. There is a productive tension then between what I argue the works by Guène and Daas do in terms of feminist storytelling and how the novels and writers are received through pre-established national frameworks. This tension is critical to my analysis of the feminist imaginary and the extent to which it is connected to the lives of women like Guène and Daas, and the characters they centre.

The article begins with the concept of intersectionality and how it has taken root, or not, in contemporary France, as well as the role of universalist discourse and its influence on a singular narrative of French feminism (The Stories We Tell About Intersectionality).² The second section introduces the writers and their works through their complex relationship with feminism: how they engage with the label and the movement as creatives (Is Feminism A Dirty Word?). A closer text analysis follows, organised by book and the different but interconnected ways through which the texts reveal tension and possibility in French feminist narratives: LPD and French Feminism, Queerness and Islam; LD and French Feminism, Migration and Domesticity. These parts centre the characters Fatima and Yamina, exploring how they navigate oppressive social structures and exercise different notions of agency, and using their stories to elaborate intersectional modes of feminist resistance. The final section articulates how an intersectional lens on these works, the writers, and their reception, can better reveal the transnational roots that shape the feminisms of millennial French women today (Mothers of the Movement).

The Stories We Tell About Intersectionality

The term ‘intersectionality’ is widely used yet not always clearly defined or understood. American theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) coined the term describe how race, gender and class intersect to shape the experiences of women of colour in the US. Her work offers a critical analysis of black women’s lives, according to three dimensions: structural (how social locations shape experiences), political (how feminist and anti-racist movements marginalise issues of women of colour) and representational (how women of colour are culturally constructed) (1991: 1242). Crenshaw’s use of the concept has resonated with many activists and academics globally and intersectionality has burgeoned into an array of projects/approaches/lens/praxes. Vivian May (2015: 12) describes intersectionality usefully as:

an epistemological project that contests dominant mindsets; an ontological approach that accounts for complex subjectivity and offers different notions of agency; a radical political orientation grounded in solidarity, rather than sameness, as an organizing principle; and a resistant imaginary useful for intervening in conventional historical memory and prevailing social imaginaries.

In each instance, intersectionality suggests seeing and organising the world differently: rethinking old versions of reality and re-building together, through nuanced solidarities.

Intersectionality has become something of a buzzword, and intersectional analyses and black feminist methodologies have been picked up in academic and popular spheres globally. Yet approaches to overlapping systems of oppression are far from new; they did not emerge with Crenshaw, nor did they arise solely or even primarily in the US. Indeed, Silma Bilge (2015: 14) argues that, even if intersectional theorising finds a current home in the Global North, owing to hegemonic processes of knowledge production, the practice came out of the South, with movements involving the Zapatistas and Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian feminists. Around the world, the realities of women of colour and the shape of black feminist resistance movements speak to intersectional praxes; for black women, intersectionality is not a new idea or a choice but inherent and fundamental to a situated and embodied standpoint. Crenshaw (1991: 1243) elaborates on this notion of standpoint, describing intersectionality as a way of ‘advancing the telling of that location’: locations which have always existed but have frequently been ignored or devalued by the mainstream, and have historically had little influence on dominant feminist discourses in the West.

As intersectionality has travelled and transformed, it has received criticism for losing these origins in black feminist thought and practice. In Europe, the current popularity of intersectionality in ‘women’s studies and feminist theory’ has been associated with the concept’s appropriation in ‘white-dominated discourses’ (Carastathis 2014: 304). Its take-up in elite academic spheres and in connection with neoliberal frameworks has raised concerns about intersectionality’s use as ‘a “catch-all” feminist theory that can be used by all feminists’: in this ‘sanitized’ version, intersectionality offers insufficient attention to context and power relations (Salem 2018). In Francophone discourse, the ‘sanitized’ approach is sometimes dangerously understood as the beginning; some theorists mark the arrival of intersectionality and black feminist analyses in France as late as 2008 (Maillé 2017: 175–176). Unfortunately, such chronologies obscure the intersectional praxes and analyses that have long existed in Muslim and black women’s movements in francophone spheres; they may also fuel public and political opposition to intersectionality in France, by locating the concept’s origins in the US.³

To understand the dominant narrative of intersectionality in mainstream French discourse, it is important to contextualise the nation’s history of political organising and conception of identity categories within the frame of French Republicanism and universalism. These discourses have privileged a shared French identity and national belonging, often over the recognition of cultural, racial or religious differences and bases for belonging.⁴ From a French Republican perspective, attention to socially constructed identities, such as race, may be understood as sparking undue division rather than as problematising existing differences and power relations (Blidon 2018: 593). A very public example of political criticism of intersectionality came from French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021. In an interview with Elle France, Macron (qtd. in Djamshidi et al. 2021) labelled intersectionality divisive and responsible for ‘racialising’ French society; he also announced himself on the ‘universalist’ side of feminism, exhibiting a common mindset which sets intersectionality in opposition to universalism.

Republican discourse intersects with feminism in francophone spheres to produce a dominant strand of the feminist movement, based in metropolitan France, which has tended to universalise cis, white and middle-class experiences of sexism and gender-based oppression (Maillé 2017: 174). If the concept of race is politically fraught in France, sex-based difference is well established as a platform for political mobilising but is sometimes problematically understood as the only identity difference.⁵ Intra-group differences amongst those who identify as women have not always received adequate attention, nor have ways of exercising agency or organising in solidarity with cultural, racial and religious communities (Bilge 2010: 11). In the case of religion, a secular basis to feminism (in France but similarly in Western feminist movements more broadly) may prevent the inclusion of Muslim women in the movement and the recognition of religious agency (Salem 2013).

While it is critical to acknowledge the dominance of a certain ‘French feminism’, this narrative should not lead us to conclude that intersectional approaches to oppression are new, nor to trivialise or misinterpret the feminisms of Muslim and black women. As French activist Rokhaya Diallo (2020) notes, these women ‘are intersectional because of their realities … They do not ask themselves if the feminist fight should privilege anti-racism or vice-versa’ (my translation). I argue then for the necessity of an intersectional lens on French feminisms to recentre Muslim and French-Algerian women and enable their experiences to reshape the epistemological and ontological boundaries. As such, the article takes a broader view of feminism than some, with the understanding that ‘feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’ (Dzodan 2011).

Within this framework, I adopt intersectionality as an ‘epistemological project’ (the crux of this article’s feminist theorising), an ‘ontological approach’ (with particular attention to the complex subjectivities and notions of agency we see depicted in LPD and LD) and a ‘radical political orientation’ (critical to how we can better understand Guène and Daas as feminist creatives) (May 2015). Rather than positioning intersectionality in opposition to French values and French feminism, and treating it as a US-specific concept, I use it as a lens through which to uncover and shape a different story of feminisms in France and construct the universal.⁶ As Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003: 7) describes, ‘solidarity is always an achievement, the result of active struggle to construct the universal on the basis of particulars/differences’. LPD and LD explore this struggle by articulating the standpoints – rooted in transnational French-Algerian histories – of many different French women. How do the texts build unexpected coalitions and guide us towards an intersectional feminist movement, constructed with attention to differences in gender, sexuality, religion and race?

Is Feminism a Dirty Word?

In Daas’ LPD, the narrator and protagonist, Fatima Daas, shares many of the author’s identity markers, not least her pseudonym. In what is a work of autofiction, ‘Fatima’, a student of literary studies in Paris, searches for herself in a hostile world, while ‘Daas’, the writer, works to carve out an inclusive space in French literature. Both writer and narrator live in the Parisian banlieue, have Algerian parents, are queer and are practicing Muslims; they both challenge gender norms, and how they intersect with whiteness and heteronormativity. Yet only the writer explicitly calls herself a feminist. Within the novel, the label is mentioned once, and with negative connotations. When Fatima meets love interest Cassandra, she explains: ‘Cassandra didn’t come across as a lesbian, not when it came to a dress code, or group values, or overinflated feminist ambitions’ (Daas 2021a: 81). Fatima is attracted to the fact that Cassandra does not look like a stereotypical lesbian and does not espouse an ‘overinflated’ feminism.

This idea of a feminism which is ‘too much’ recalls several stereotypes: the man-hating lesbian, the radical – and the woke or politically correct, as we see in France today with regards to intersectional feminism. Oftentimes, the derogatory use of the feminist label works to protect the hegemonic culture. Feminism is framed as incompatible with culture and tradition, in a way which preserves an unjust status quo. In other cases, feminism is rightly criticised for its contribution in the West to protecting whiteness and the colonial project. In historically colonised countries such as Algeria, feminism often has negative connotations: not for its tenets of gender equality or anti-sexism but for its use of imperialism in the name of feminism. In the Franco-Maghrebi context, there is a history of women being encouraged to break from culture and/or religion and family/men and assimilate to French society for gender equality and freedom; Guène (qtd. in Ayuso 2021) describes this occurring in the media reception of Daas’ work. Across the West, a history of secular feminism has excluded and subordinated Muslim women (Carland 2017: 6–9; Salem 2013); those Muslim and Franco-Maghrebi women in France who wish to mobilise around feminist issues have tended to experience more influence and success by conforming to state rhetoric and ideologies (see Sheth 2010: 43–45 on the example of the movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises).

Authors Daas and Guène illustrate a consciousness of the complexity of the feminist label, and the danger of constrictive definitions of what feminism should look like, as well as theoretical, abstracted, and false claims of feminism. Rather than distance themselves from the feminist project, however, both writers incorporate canonical French feminist thought and use their work and public discourse to interrogate and expand the movement’s bounds. Critically, they do so by centring praxis, and the bodies, lives, and everyday acts (within the home, the community, the religion) of very different Muslim women. In LPD, Fatima, who describes herself as having internalised homophobia, cannot afford to look outwardly like a lesbian or be publicly ‘out’ (Daas 2021a: 192).⁷ At the same time, Fatima seeks freedom of gender expression in a way that is not defined by exclusionary or imperialist French feminist frameworks, and is connected to anti-colonial resistance strategies.

In Guène’s novel LD, heroine Yamina is similarly disconnected from French feminism, although not nearly as consciously as Fatima. We meet Yamina in Paris as an older woman, who moved to France from Algeria to get married and raise a family. Far from Fatima’s elite ‘prépa’, Yamina is not traditionally educated, and has little interest in, or connection to, terms like ‘intersectional’ or ‘feminist’. The ‘discretion’ of Guène’s title refers to the way first generation French-Algerian migrants frequently keep quiet about racism and sexism, holding shame and suffering inside and attempting to adapt to and accept French culture, even if it kills them. Guène (2022a) dedicates the novel to her father Abdelhamid Guène, whom she describes as having ‘died of discretion’.⁸ Within the narrative, which is not autobiographical, Yamina takes on this role of quiet sufferer – and fighter. While her adult daughters are angry, and often explicitly embrace the feminist movement, Yamina struggles against intersecting systems of oppression in more subtle ways, through everyday acts and the domestic sphere. In an interview with Beur FM, Guène describes Yamina, perhaps unexpectedly, as both a ‘resistant’ and a ‘feminist’: not through theory, but through what she does and what she passes on to her daughters (2020b). Guène’s interview also exhibits a wariness at feminist façades; she distinguishes her book from those which try to appear feminist and lose the essence of the movement in the process (2020b).

As companion texts, LPD and LD assist us in the question of how we should define feminism. Who does the term, or the movement, include and exclude? While most definitions of feminism logically centre gender equality, or an element of transforming gender relations, Ciccia and Roggeband (2021: 184) note that definitions which hinge on one axis of inequality may privilege ‘mainstream feminist organisations, concealing the contextual nature of feminist goals, as well as their intersection with other social justice struggles’. I would also argue that singular understandings of agency and resistance can exclude and subordinate. Even phrases as simple as ‘transforming gender relations’ have different resonance for women like Yamina who exert agency within social structures and hierarchies but have limited capacity to transform or transgress – and may not wish to.

In francophone discourse, a monolithic understanding of French feminism can strengthen a binary divide between a stereotyped modern liberated French woman and regressive traditional Muslim woman (Bilge 2010: 11). It can also confine resistance movements to anti-racist or anti-sexist lines, in a way which makes invisible the concerns of women of colour. Indeed, in francophone spheres, male anti-colonial figures such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi are frequently recognised as the purveyors of subaltern resistance (Maillé 2017: 175), while white women feature as the great figures of the feminist movement.

Broad definitions of feminism – which extend the bounds to movements mobilising around issues of class, colonialism and race, where they intersect with gender issues – are useful to foster intersectional coalitions (Ciccia and Roggeband 2021: 184) and ensure visibility to women of colour and Muslim women. LPD and LD are unique in the way they create space for unexpected solidarities. As I have outlined, Daas and Guène – both highly educated, young Parisians, relatively well known – connect explicitly with feminism, but their characters – who occupy very different positions, frequently with less capacity to transgress – do not. In situating their works as ‘feminist’ texts, and listening, as per Crenshaw’s embodied praxis of intersectionality, to the locations that they tell, we can discover important continuities. The women in Daas’ and Guène’s fiction struggle against intersecting systems of oppression and trace long histories of resistance in Islamic, Algerian independence, and global anti-racism movements. The novels, and this article, situate these within a gendered and feminist framework to reveal how different histories inform feminist stances from young millennial women in France today.

If we return to Sara Ahmed’s Living a feminist life (2017: 1), we can begin from a very basic definition of feminism: ‘how we pick each other up’. While too broad for targeted application, the description centres solidarity, more than sameness or difference. In the following sections, I examine the way Daas and Guène point us to the potential for solidarities via broader formulations of French feminisms: first through faith-based and queer resistance strategies, and second through domesticity, community action and mothering.

French Feminism, Queerness and Islam

A surprise hit, Fatima Daas’ LPD/The Last One attracted attention in France and internationally for its fresh voice. In this short, lyrical novel, a series of fragmented and seemingly repetitive vignettes (nearly every chapter begins with ‘My name is Fatima’) build a complex subjectivity for narrator Fatima. Radical French favourite Virginie Despentes notably describes the novel in the front matter (Daas 2021a: ii) as ‘updating’ canonical French male authors Barthes and Mauriac for Clichy-Sous-Bois (a suburb on the outskirts of Paris with a large migrant population), and LPD received significant coverage from the press. The mainstream coverage has, however, frequently overlooked the novel’s literary innovation to focus overwhelmingly on the question of identity. Two identities, in particular – Muslim and lesbian – have splashed across headlines in a way that conflates narrator and writer, and reduces Daas to a (queer Muslim) body (see examples in Franceinfo culture 2020; Guillard and Vécrin 2021; Ques 2022).

While Daas wished to explore questions related to her lived experience and marginalised identity in her work, she also employs a pseudonym and the distance of fiction. Moreover, while the novel is deeply attentive to identity categories, it focuses on the way they confine Fatima, and the way they intersect:

It’s the story of a girl who isn’t really a girl, who isn’t Algerian or French, who isn’t from Clichy or Paris, a Muslim, I think, but not a good Muslim, a lesbian whose homophobia is built into her. What else? (Daas 2021a: 192)

Following writers such as Leila Sébbar and Nina Bouraoui, Daas explores gender and sexual fluidity together with cultural and linguistic hybridity (from the perspective of the French-Algerian colonial history and French, Arabic and English languages), and problematises essentialist ideas of what it is to be a girl, a Muslim, a French woman, etc.

A singular interest from the press on Islam and queerness, and stereotypes of these identities, does several things. First, it flattens the text’s exploration of intersecting dimensions of oppression by obscuring the critique of Frenchness and femininity that Daas offers. Second, a projected contradiction between Muslim and lesbian in the mainstream coverage above locates Islam as the problem – and responsible for unduly shaming Daas (Guillard and Vécrin 2021) – and a normative French culture, together with French feminism, as the site of the free expression of gender and sexual identity. It also emphasises religious difference in a way which separates the character’s queer resistance from the rest of French society, and prevents Islamic feminism from contributing to the French feminist project. In interviews, Daas has labelled the media experience as ‘brutal’ (qtd. in Guillard and Vécrin 2021). She describes the feeling that others wanted her to ‘spit on’ or denigrate, her family, religion and country of origin (qtd. in Chraibi 2020). Sexual identity and human rights frameworks in the West can contribute to this dynamic, demanding the vilification of Islam and obscuring the complex role colonisation has played in the regulation of gender and sexual norms in the Maghreb (Massad 2007: 49–50). Moreover, Western feminist analyses, by assuming a certain kind of ‘autonomous subject’ have ‘proven unable to make sense of religious life experiences of contemporary Muslim women’ (Bilge 2010: 22).

Daas’ text reveals the conflict that women like Fatima face, when they seek to resist gender-based oppression in France, and explores means of transgression that have developed within and/or in solidarity with Muslim communities, drawing from histories of queer resistance and Islamic feminism.

For many Franco-Maghrebi women, Islamic feminism is a movement that can support all aspects of their identity; it offers a ‘dual function’: (1) ‘challenge French society’ and (2) ‘fight religious oppression within the Maghrebi community in France’ (Sheth 2010: 93). An important mode of resistance, notably articulated by sociologist Fatima Mernissi (1987), includes feminist and/or queer readings of the Koran. In LPD, when Fatima is struggling to embrace her sexuality, she draws strength from her faith and describes the Koran as bringing her peace. She seeks advice from an imam and, when he tells her that homosexuality is forbidden in Islam, critically interprets his response:

I don’t dare say that female sexuality isn’t mentioned in the Koran. Nor do I dare say that only the story of Sodom and Gomorrah mentions it explicitly. That there’s no talk of homosexuality, but rather of men raping young men, and not of consensual homosexual relations. (Daas 2021a: 132)

On a meta-textual level, the writer’s faith also enters the materiality of LPD, shaping the very language of the novel. Daas integrates passages of prayer and writes with a lyricism inspired by rap; Fatima’s recitations of the Koran exist in musical harmony with queer desire, not as discord. Such approaches understand sexism and homophobia to be connected to a global patriarchy, rather than inherent to Islam, and seek to influence gender and sexual norms in a way that is persuasive within Muslim communities (Slimani 2017: 155).

Daas’ public and explicit approach to feminist and queer expression is enabled and shaped by the liberal democratic context of contemporary France and her positionality as a French woman. At the same time, pre-determined Western frameworks only recognise certain aspects of LPD’s intersectional approach as feminist; narrow conceptions of the movement in the mainstream can continue to prevent writers such as Daas from shifting the epistemological boundaries and influencing what resistance, agency and transgression look like. Contributing to this phenomenon is what Christine Keating (2018: 179) calls a ‘protectionist framework’, wherein the dominant culture seeks to ‘secure the allegiance of vulnerable groups’. Upon the release of LPD, Daas was set against other Muslim women in a series of TV interviews with major networks. In one case, the writer tried to explore what it meant to be a ‘sinner’ (Daas 2020c); clips were taken out of context, becoming viral and used elsewhere by online activists to label Daas as homophobic (Mahrane 2020). In a follow-up interview with Médiapart, Daas (2020d) was featured alongside other queer Muslim individuals and groups; some expressed their hurt at Daas’ description of sin, others praised LPD for being the first work to make lesbian Muslim experiences in France visible to a wide audience. At the end of the interview, Daas was pushed to reflect on more ‘progressive’ ways of mobilising, from queer Muslim groups who were comfortable with their identities, and probed as to whether she regretted her earlier statements (Oberti 2020). The framing of these conversations does not allow for diverse experiences of being Muslim and queer, and ascribes Daas the role of spokesperson, even when she expressed her desire not to be (2020d). This media coverage also positions Daas as the problem, conceals the workings of Islamophobia and racism in pre-determined modes of feminist and queer resistance, and prevents new solidarities forming.

An intersectional lens can assist in moving past binary understandings of right and wrong ways to be a feminist, and singular notions of agency which perpetuate a dichotomy between subordination and resistance; it can also assist in new formulations of feminism which recognise the experiences and agency of Muslim women (Salem 2013). In LPD, Daas explores means of coming ‘out’ which reveal the limits of Western liberal models for Muslim women, and in fact could better be described as coming ‘in’: being queer within Islam and the family home. For example, I have elaborated elsewhere how Fatima and her mother come to an implicit understanding about Fatima’s identity, in a way which does not cause familial conflict or demand Fatima break from her religion (Egan 2023). Moreover, LPD is illuminating in the way it recognises, contextualises, and puts into relation – offering a loose coalition in the process – diverse feminist strategies. Significantly, we see Fatima rub shoulders with many different women in Paris, including Cassandra, who is out and ‘free’ in a Western sense. Fatima describes how Cassandra lives independently of her family, goes to Pride, and knows the rules for how to be queer. While it is Cassandra who educates Fatima within the narrative (she tells her, for example, to say: ‘PRIDE, Fatima! Not Gay Pride’), it is the narrator who better recognises the constructs that guide each of them (Fatima points out that, even within the Western LGBTIQA + community, ‘there were commandments to respect’) and demonstrates curiosity towards Cassandra’s exercise of agency, without judging it to be better or perfect (Daas 2021a: 82, 84).

Analogously, the intertextuality of the novel incorporates accepted understandings of French feminism, though does not centre them. For example, through the paratextual connection to Virginie Despentes, and intertextual references to Annie Ernaux, Daas’ questioning of French femininity comes into relation with other class-based and queer struggles from those on the margins. Through recognising and contextualising different modes of resistance, LPD presents a model for solidarity.

French Feminism, Migration and Domesticity

Guène’s novel La discrétion also reveals the way French feminism can subordinate and broadens our understanding of the movement to make space for new solidarities. The novel centres Yamina, but the third person narration alternates perspectives, giving us insight into each of Yamina’s adult daughters. In this generational gap, which is also a gap between migrant and French-born, the novel puts in close contact – or interrelation – different assumptions about the epistemological and ontological boundaries of feminism. Yamina’s youngest daughter, twenty-something Imane, shares many characteristics with Daas’ Fatima, and represents a Parisian millennial:

She supports freedom of expression but she isn’t pro-Charlie Hebdo either. She is Muslim and feminist. She is French and Algerian. Her hair is neither straight nor curly. She’s vegan when the food isn’t halal. She is modern and reactionary. She is everything and its opposite. Imane lives in a world which isn’t yet ready to welcome her in all her complexity. (Guène 2022a)

While Imane is perfectly capable of inhabiting this position – including Muslim and feminist – the text stresses that the rest of the world does not yet recognise who she is or what she stands for. We see the role of mainstream public discourse in determining which identities and beliefs are irreconcilable; we also see Imane paving a different way of being.

Yamina herself favours her son above her daughters and urges her daughters into traditional and seemingly confining gender roles; she wishes Imane would stay home rather than move out and pushes oldest daughter Malika into an arranged marriage at a young age. Malika, who has discovered Virginie Despentes (Despentes crops up again) and listened to hundreds of feminist podcasts, sees her mother as unconsciously misogynist. As the narrator describes it: ‘the subtle process by which misogyny is internalised escapes Yamina’. This French feminist lens on Yamina’s behaviour is revealing, but the text adds nuance to our reading by fleshing out Yamina’s history and context. The narrator reveals how patriarchy and colonialism intersect to reduce Yamina’s agency and efface her identity, and how difficult it is for first-generation migrants to navigate conflicting and/or ‘hybrid’ French and Algerian codes:

Making the right choices isn’t easy when you don’t understand the codes. They worried about losing everything, about jeopardising their futures, so they clung on to who they were. They didn’t want to renounce their identity. They refused to be erased, AGAIN. How could they not fear erasure? It’s what this country did best, it had already tried to erase them, the first generation, and now it was targeting their children. (Guène 2022a)

We understand Yamina to favour Omar not only because of patriarchal cultural norms but because Franco-Maghrebi men are frequently marginalised or even demonised by the French population. As the narrator notes: ‘He [Omar] was born on a throne. But out in the big wide world he’ll never be king’ (Guène 2022a). French feminism has notably contributed to this dynamic, claiming to ‘liberate’ Muslim women by separating them from Muslim men (Deltombe 2005: 66–70.). Yamina’s desires for her daughters also take on new meaning when we see what the unmarried women in her circles face; for Yamina, marriage is the way for women to gain social status and independence.

Where a feminism defined only in gendered terms breaks women like Yamina, LD creates space for Yamina’s politics by gendering anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. Significantly, Guène (2022a) opens the novel with an epigraph from The Fire Next Time by American writer and US civil rights activist James Baldwin:

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

Baldwin’s description of spiritual resilience frames the reader’s introduction to Yamina. In the opening pages, Yamina is an older woman, going about a quiet life on the outskirts of Paris. She is ignored or treated condescendingly at the market and at her doctor’s appointment yet remains cheerful and agreeable. A superficial reading would label Yamina naïve; it is only her daughters who explictly bristle at how French society treats their mother. The Baldwin quote, however, gives a different significance to Yamina’s behaviour, and the narrator adds, a few pages in:

Which begs the question of whether this is deliberate on Yamina’s part, for she seems unfeasibly deaf to the call of anger. Perhaps she has chosen not to be destroyed by the scorn of others? (Guène 2022a)

Upon entering Guène’s text, and the French language, the US civil rights movement comes into unexpected connection with a French-Algerian woman’s domestic struggle in Paris. The connections are clearer, however, when Yamina’s refusal to hate or submit is also compared to her father’s efforts as a resistance fighter in Algeria.⁹ These interrelated anti-colonial and anti-racist movements provide a global – and masculine – legitimacy to Yamina’s resistance in Guène’s text.

LD actively anticipates the way a reader might dismiss Yamina and uses these movements to valorise her everyday struggle; however, the text also reshapes the movements themselves, by centring Yamina. The character’s very capacity to pick herself up each morning, when women are ‘murdered by their own world, a thousand times over’, is in Guène’s text a courageous act of resistance in response to violence (2022a). Rather than use aggression or traditional political channels, Yamina counters hostility with kindness and discrimination with humour. She cooks and brings food to her neighbours, even though they do not return the favour or show respect for her religion; she hears Islamophobic slurs on the radio and plays them down for her children through funny names and laughter. As in LPD, the text foregrounds the uneven distribution of this labour of understanding and generosity. While Yamina accepts the French ‘way of life’, those around her to not extend the same courtesy.

Yamina’s daughters are frustrated when their mother urges them to be discrete, as though they are guests in France, but they also demonstrate an understanding of her position. Yamina has been socialised to be quiet and obedient, and remaining invisible has been ‘a matter of survival’ (Guène 2022a). One formative act of rebellion influences Yamina’s everyday politics and behaviour throughout her life. When she was a girl in Algeria, Yamina was supposed to be marked with a tattoo – a tradition passed down through women for generations – as a symbol of her passage to womanhood. Despite knowing she will be beaten by her father, Yamina refuses and runs away; her forehead is described as ‘belong[ing] to her alone’ and representing ‘her personal liberation front, her struggle, the first one’ (Guène 2022a). This fight for bodily autonomy connects the personal with the political and the language – ‘liberation front’ – links Yamina’s act to more explicit independence movements. While a Western feminist reading might read this scene and blame traditional Algerian culture for gender-based violence, LD associates the tattooing practice with wider patriarchy and shows Yamina to draw strength from Algerian women. In her moment of revolt, Yamina pictures idol Djamila Bouhired, who fought for women’s rights in Algeria and resisted the French rule, and expresses the wish that Bouhired was her mother. As such, LD articulates a lineage of feminist resistance in Algerian culture towards intersecting systems of oppression. In the final section, I trace these maternal genealogies: how are mothers passing down a transnational feminism which is both used and useful in France today?

Mothers of the Movement

While Guène is now an established writer and has achieved literary acclaim, she initially experienced an upsetting critical reception, not unlike what Daas is undergoing with her debut. In a recent interview, Guène (2022b) describes feeling frustrated at being read according to stereotypes and pre-determined frameworks as a young writer:

For a while, I was all over the press, but in the society pages and not on the literary or cultural pages. That tells you everything! I soon realised that I was a disappointment. People wanted me to say: ‘Thank you, France. Thanks to you, I was saved by literature’. But I said: ‘No, I am grateful to my community, my parents, my family’. I didn’t want to tell the story of the little Arab girl who was saved by reading.

Guène’s quote speaks to the experience of being separated from a pre-determined French universal, and from the home of literature and thought; unable to influence dominant mindsets, she was also expected to be grateful to those who could.

Similar patterns shape the epistemological bounds of feminism and intersectionality. French Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa (2009) describes and counters the tendency to ignore or devalue feminism that comes from former French colonies (particularly from older women who do not have a traditional Western education), describing his mother, who is mostly illiterate, as ‘a school of feminism’. Western narratives of feminism frequently assume it moves from West to East, North to South, and create a hierarchical binary between thinking and doing (Ahmed 2017: 4). Not only do these narratives privilege those who can access accepted intellectual circles, they also obscure the appropriation of theory from its origins in black and subaltern bodies and contexts.

Guène and Daas integrate and counter these assumptions and use intersectionality to resituate feminism in Muslim and migrant women’s standpoints and histories. In LD, Yamina loves school and is good at it (she still dreams with her school bag on her back) but is forced to drop out to help raise her little brothers and sisters. Similarly, Fatima’s mother Kamar in LPD wanted to become a nurse but her brother forbade it. Neither have a traditional education, but they work creatively within familial, religious and social structures to ensure their daughters thrive and feel supported. When Fatima asks her mother why she does not go to university now, Kamar replies pointedly: ‘now it’s up to you girls to do great things’ (Daas 2021a: 192).

In an interview, Daas describes how Guène’s novel perfectly articulates an intergenerational difference in the way French-Algerian migrants resist oppression: while the first-generation stays discrete, the next generation is not afraid to voice their discontent (Daas 2021b). Importantly, this difference is not conceived as a disconnect: both writers explore the unexpected lineage between these two modes, tracing the ways in which the explicit intersectional feminism espoused by millennials in France today emerges from transnational histories and maternal bodies. Even if it does not look like it, anger and heritage are actively passed down. Guène’s Malika is a good example of a daughter who takes up her mother’s battle at the same time as she explores dominant French feminist thought. She consumes canonical books and podcasts, but also investigates her mother’s hometown (going through archives and photos) and spends quality time with Yamina, talking and doing her hair.

In parallel, Guène and Daas integrate diverse movements into their fiction, putting French feminisms into dialogue with Islamic feminisms, feminist rap, anti-racist civil rights movements, and anti-colonial and Algerian independence movements. LPD and LD highlight the gap between, on the one hand, the lived experiences of Muslim, migrant, and queer women, and on the other, the shape of public discourse and political orientations, revealing where French Republican and universalist frameworks have uneven and harmful impacts. Beyond that, these texts explore how different movements might speak to the feminist politics of French Muslim women, and shift the bounds of feminism to better suit the needs and strategies of women facing intersecting systems of oppression.

When a terrorist attack takes place in LD, Yamina’s family, as Muslims in France, are called on by politicians and public figures in the media to ‘disassociate’ themselves from the terrorists. They must prove a stereotyped Frenchness (the example given is to sing La Marseillaise louder) and break from any appearance of Muslimness. Yamina’s daughters are angry; they want to know why it is not enough to simply be human and a citizen in these times. LPD and LD do not oppose the universal but rather work to transform it into something more just and inclusive.

An intersectional approach to feminism enables this transformation; there can be no common struggle against sexism and gender-based oppression without attention to power relations and difference, no universal without intersectionality’s focus on standpoints and how they relate. Opposing claims that intersectionality is an intrusion in France are the real lives and resistance movements that speak to and shape the praxis. Guène and Daas use intersectionality to better root French feminism in women’s lives and their communities and tell a different story: one which might better enable us to ‘pick each other up’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I have referred to these texts by abbreviated French titles as the French-language originals guided this article’s analysis. The cited material, however, comes from translations by Lara Vergnaud (The Last One) and Sarah Ardizzone (Discretion) to ensure access to English readers.

2 I use the term ‘French feminism’ to refer to feminism informed by French Republican and universalist discourse in mainstream France, and understand it to centre white and middle-class concerns. I by no means wish to imply that ‘French feminism’ is a singular or homogenous movement, or that many more plural modes of doing feminism in France do not exist – I use the term with the goal of identifying and critiquing this dominant narrative.

3 Global news outlets also play into this narrative; headlines following Macron’s speech, such as, ‘Will American Ideas Tear France Apart?’ (Onishi 2021) from the New York Times, are a good example.

4 These issues are not unique to French feminism but common to most Western feminist movements. Figures such as bell hooks (2014), in the US context, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000), in Australia, have notably outlined the necolonialism and imperialism associated with white-dominated feminism and the lack of attention in these frameworks to both whiteness and racial difference.

5 This is a generalisation, and it is important to note that, even within classic white French feminist works, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, we see attention to intersections of class and race (McNicol 2021).

6 It is worth distinguishing here between ‘universal’ and (French) ‘universalism’ (see, for example, Diagne 2013).

7 Fatima (like Daas, who chooses to adopt a pseudonym) navigates a queer identity against the backdrop of Maghrebi origins (in Algeria, same-sex practices remain criminalised) and the beliefs of her family and Muslim community in France (wherein Islam is generally understood to prohibit same-sex relations).

8 E-book version, no page numbers.

9 Baldwin himself spent time in France and examines the flows between anti-racist struggles in his work, notably writing on Algerian independence and racism towards Algerians in the French context in No Name in the Street (1972).