Contenu du sommaire : À l'intersection des dominations

This introduction revisits the concept of intersectionality and its history, particularly in the United States, in order to address its controversial reception in France. This reception must be contextualized with regard to the use of the concept of race, which is also a matter of controversial debate. While stressing that establishing linkages between various social relationships is not new to French historiography, this introduction describes how the concept of intersectionality can shed new light on social, colonial and migratory history, and even how it can help rethink biopolitics in a colonial or post-colonial context. Finally, it demonstrates that the intersectional approach in history is a product of the specific French political and social context of the early 21st century, wherein these questions have been disseminated throughout the public space thanks to new feminist dynamics.

This article proposes a genealogy of the concept of class in French historiography, from the working class of the post-WWII era to its resurfacing, after a long hiatus, as the middle or lower classes of the 21st century. It discusses how French historiography was slow to incorporate questions of gender, then questions of race, which have had difficulty gaining academic legitimacy in the face of an abstract universalism that refuses to consider individualities and identity groups. Finally, this article argues for the integration of the history of women and gender, of migrants, of men and women living under colonial regimes, and of all other oppressed peoples into a narrative that is open to the world and allows for a pluralist universality.

This article explores the depiction of the figures of ‘Jewish' and ‘Muslim' women in Algeria at the end of the 19th century through an intersectional reading of these two categories of ‘Arab women.' It offers a gendered analysis of a colonial society in the context of studies that consider Jewish and Muslim communities to be integral parts of the Algerian landscape. Sources from metropolitan rabbis and Jewish educators demonstrate how and why these community leaders took pains to emphasize the importance of ‘civilizing' the ‘Jewish' women of Algeria. Distinguishing between Jewish and Muslim female behavior, and highlighting these differences was in fact a way to situate these communities within a colonial hierarchy.

This article explores the trajectory of the members of a specific Franco-African family that lived in the French metropolis and in various colonies in sub-Saharan Africa over the course of the 20th century. Drawing on this unique family history, we examined the development of social differences and individual subjectivities (based on gender, race, class and generation) in relation to the historical dynamics of the transformation of the colonial empire. The story of the Arboussier family is thus also the story of a social space, where race, gender and class are constantly negotiated, where people try on multiple identities in an attempt to carve out a place for themselves, not without difficulty, under the ‘suns of independence'.

Between 1940 and 1945, the Nazi war effort in Germany depended on the forced mobilization of millions of foreign workers. This massive employment of foreign men and women had profound consequences on gender relations. Focusing on the maternal identity of French women employed in Berlin factories during this period, this article explores how racial hierarchies between women also helped to define gender in Nazi Germany. The unique position of French women— who were considered inferior to German women, but relatively privileged compared to Eastern European women— reveals the tensions and dynamics of the racial management of motherhood by the State and the world of work.

The article examines the forced sterilizations that took place in Peru during the government of Alberto Fujimori at the end of the 20th century. This tragic and traumatic phenomenon concerned nearly 70,000 women, almost all of them indigenous and poor. Sterilizations were carried out by the central Peruvian government under the guise of the fight against poverty. This article shows that sterilization was in fact a racist, classist and misogynist eugenic policy that targeted the wombs of the poorest and most vulnerable women. The hidden political goal was to better control the indigenous populations, which account for the country's majority.

Drawing on the archives of the Communist Party of the United States of America, those of organizations affiliated with the Party and fighting for equal rights for Blacks, and on the personal papers of leaders such as Louise Thompson and Claudia Jones, this article uses the concept of ‘triple exploitation' to analyze the struggle of Black women workers for equality within the framework of the Black Left Feminism movement. It also offers some insights into the generational transmission between this political sensibility (prevalent from the 1920s to the 1950s) and the subsequent Black Feminist movement that emerged in the late 1960s, of which intersectionality is the logical culmination.

In 1979, an activist from the Union générale des travailleurs réunionnais en France [General Union of Workers from Réunion in France], an organization founded in 1963 by anti-colonial exiles from Réunion settled in France, wrote the following : ‘against all powers, from one class to another, from one race to another, from one sex to another'. Gathered in the ‘women's wing' of this movement, activists shared their thoughts and actions in the press. Based on the analysis of militant archives, at the crossroads of the history and sociology of migration, social movements and activism, this article traces the history of an intersectional feminist mobilization carried out in France by migrant women from Réunion in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the early 1980s, months-long social conflicts plagued Citroën's and Talbot's car plants, with immigrant workers at the forefront of the mobilizations. The crisis in the factories can also be described as a crisis of hegemonic masculinity, as it upset the hierarchy between differentiated masculinities that was the culmination of a long history of workplace social relations. This article examines the characteristics of these masculinities before and during those conflicts, paying special attention to the violent practices of the different groups of actors involved.

This article examines the images exploited by social actors during the conflict surrounding the closing of a factory in southern France. It analyses the processes by which social groups mobilized different images of masculinity to discredit their respective ‘political enemies'. Hidden behind these images was in fact the ideal of what both groups (the executives in charge of closing the plant and the laid-off workers) considered to be the ‘right' way of being a man. These depictions of the self and other were part of different strategies, some of which were conscious, others largely subconscious : strategies of management, on the executive side, and strategies of political action on the laid-off workers' side. These depictions of masculinity thus helped to elaborate social power relations between groups of men before and during political action, establishing class boundaries in the process.

Seemingly ubiquitous in American academic research, the concept of intersectionality has become one of the main ways to theorize and describe power hierarchies. But this growing field of research is nonetheless also accused of reifying the modes of social identification that it presumes to challenge. Yet, most critics categorically refuse to consider its heuristic uses. Analyzing intersectionality as a catalyst for historiographical change, this article argues that intersectional thinking has helped to unearth the intellectual and political contributions of Black women since 1989. This article focuse on three important historical moments in the United States : the debates over the 15th Amendment at the end of the 19th century ; the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 ; and the war on poverty in the 1960s and 1970s.