Feminist Trouble

Open access funded by Swiss National Science Foundation

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY NC ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Feminism is in trouble. For more than two decades, Islamic veils, niqabs, and burkinis, forced and arranged marriages, polygamy and Sharia rules concerning women have been the object of intense public scrutiny and legal regulations in many Western countries, especially in Europe, and feminists have been actively engaged on both sides of the debates. In Feminist Trouble, Éléonore Lépinard draws on extended fieldwork with numerous women's organizations in France and Quebec. Giving voice to women of color and white women, Lépinard dissects hierarchies of privilege, in particular whiteness, in feminist politics, grappling with Islam and Islamic veiling debates to understand how these changes have transformed contemporary feminist movements, intersectional politics, and the feminist collective subject. A critical look at feminism, its divisions, and its future, Feminist Trouble argues that feminism should not be centered around an identity-women-but should instead focus on a feminist ethic of responsibility which reckons with power asymmetries and requires women to prioritize their ethical responsibility to the feminist project.