Intersectional Feminisms — understood through the lens of
colonial legacies — is an opportunity to highlight the necessity to
incorporate forms of feminism into a political project of global
emancipation that pays attention to every oppression. While a large part
of contemporary feminist discourse is mostly advocating for women’s
rights and equality, intersectional feminism intends to consider how
overlapping identities — including race, class, ethnicity, religion and
sexual orientation — impact women’s experiences of oppression and
discrimination.
A feminist discourse that only focuses on women’s rights and equality
is not only often ethnocentric, but beneath its concern for women’s
emancipation, it is drawn by a long-time fear of alterity. This kind of
feminism can even be used to discredit and banish some people within a
society (for instance the veiled women — and their men); and to maintain
power relationships as they have always been. This kind of feminism is
also the most prominent through its connection to the institution, to
the State and its logics of domination.
Intersectional feminism is thus a call to work on a global analysis
of the power relationships that structure societies: “[…] remind
yourselves as often as possible that even as individual victories are
claimed, the ultimate elimination of sexist violence will depend on our
ability to build a new and revolutionary global order, in which every
form of oppression and violence against humankind is obliterated”
(Angela Davis in a 1985 lecture at Florida State University). Davis’
words recall this necessity to think feminism totally and
transnationally: feminism should be an analysis of the alienation of
women through the history of capitalism and its advent; and at the scale
of the planet. This also means that you can not consider your own
emancipation as a Western woman without thinking that it depends on the
emancipation of other women.
Women should work for a global — not partial — emancipation; their
feminism should be able to think the entirety of women — white and
non-white — and the entirety of discriminations — of gender, race and
class.
Invited by Alya Sebti, Director of the ifa-Galerie, for the third chapter — intersectional feminism — of her one-year research and exhibition programme Untie to Tie – On Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Societies, curator Eva Barois De Caevel chose to present a solo show by artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji.