In many interviews, racialized/ migrant/ veiled women are conceived as the object of benevolent feminist care and attention. When talking about their feminist practice, white feminists insist that migrant women’s choices must be respected and that migrant women themselves can make the choices that correspond to their needs. This moral disposition is particularly displayed by white feminists working in organizations that deliver services to women (such as shelters and community centers). Indeed, it corresponds to a femi-nist intervention credo, shared across the Atlantic, that women are best posi-tioned to know what they need, and that they should define on their own terms what they want. In other words, while feminist officers and workers in shelters and community centers might have their own vision of what is freedom and emancipation, they should not impose their definition on women who come to receive support. Feminist intervention means giving the woman who comes for help the tools to make her decision. More pre-cisely, as Martine, a French officer at Women’s Health put it, “We don’t give
Feminist Whiteness 107 her the tools, she finds them.” In fact, in the context of service provision, fem-inist ideals are pragmatically revised and adapted to correspond to women’s needs because it is not expected that these women will become feminist subjects. What is sought is not their emancipation in the feminist terms held by white feminist activists and volunteers, but a “balance” that works for them. Sandrine, a white feminist officer who heads a network against do-mestic violence in Montreal, explains:
Feminist intervention is not always the best for all the women from migrant communities. That is, yes, gender equality— it’s perfect, it’s fine, it’s great, and it is what we must continue to claim. But, on the other hand, divorce or separation, for some women, are not the solutions that should be promoted, and if I must choose between proposing this solution and the woman never comes back in our center to get help, and another solution, which is to adapt the intervention to ensure that, step by step, this woman, she receives, she hears the message, and, finally . . . she puts herself in a safer situation, she puts her kids in a safer place, not necessarily by leaving her husband but by taking more space and keeping herself safe . . . everybody wins.
While here this attitude is presented as an adaption of a feminist practice to the reality of what is framed as cultural difference, this moral disposi-tion expresses a feminist tenet that does not apply only to nonwhite women.
Claudine, who used to be an officer in a French organization for rape victims, remembers that while pressing charges was her favored solution, she never encouraged victims to do so because she “always refused to dictate” solutions to women and because of the variety of reactions among victims.
Hence, both in Quebec and in France the vast majority of feminists who work in service- oriented organizations will insist that women should be wel-comed, listened to, and respected on their own terms. This translates, for example, into a pragmatic (and sometimes principled) inclusion of women wearing religious symbols in all Quebecois women’s centers and shelters that I interviewed. While many women’s rights community centers have shied away from taking a public stance in the political debates around laws ban-ning the Islamic veil in Quebec, for fear that it would divide their member-ship and staff, they have adopted a policy of tolerance in their day- to- day practice. Eliane, a young officer in the women’s community center Northern Montreal, reflects on the questions of Islamic veiling for her organization in these terms:
We think about it, we reflect, we revise. . . . We discussed about: Are we open to all women? A veiled woman who enters here, what do we do? A volun-teer here at the front desk who wears the veil . . . what do we do? All these situations can spur conflicts. Those are topics that, this year, we thought we should not keep that in the team. We must discuss with women who come here. In fact, veiled women— it’s absolutely fine, in the sense that a woman who wears the veil is totally welcome here.
For many Quebecois women’s center the central issue of inclusivity— that is, the idea that “all” women should be welcome— has overcome uneasi-ness or anxiety about religious difference and in particular Islamic veiling practices. Hence, what is displayed and valorized is a benevolent care that does not discriminate among women and is faithful to the feminist com-mitment of helping “women.” Yet, importantly, these women are mostly perceived as passive feminist subjects: they are included in the femi-nist project as recipients of help and empathy, which brings to the white feminist subject who provides help an enhanced form of morality and respectability.66
The situation is slightly different in France, where the veil sometimes raises
“discomfort,” “tension,” and ambivalence among white feminist volunteers and employees. While most white interviewees declared that they would never turn away a woman in need of help because she wears an Islamic veil, this attitude was not based on the idea of inclusivity of their organization but rather on a principle of helping women in need. Martine describes what tends to happen when young veiled Muslim women ask for false certificates of virginity in order to satisfy their family’s demands before their marital engagement:
For some counselors, these cases are really difficult ones. There is always this tension, and it’s even tenser for certificates of virginity. There’s a tension because it’s difficult to perceive them as alienated. . . . It’s not right either.
Some counselors are okay with it; it depends on their individual history if they can help, if they can discuss with the girls, to try to understand why they wear the veil, why they don’t, what it means for them. When a girl comes to the center veiled, it’s true, it’s a real question for us. It questions feminism. This fact that a woman can accept this ideological domina-tion . . . it questions us.
Feminist Whiteness 109 The moral disposition of benevolent care is here rife with tension and am-bivalence. Interestingly, the internal moral debate brought forth by the en-counter with religious Muslim women is expressed as relating to her feminist identity and ideals. The question becomes how “our” feminism can make sense of the agency of Muslim women, bringing an intrusive inquiry into the motivations and the moral disposition of Muslim women. This narra-tive, and the us/ them binary that structures it, denotes, once again, that fem-inist whiteness positions itself as the privileged femfem-inist subject. While the same interviewee presented the need to let women make their own choices as the basis of feminist intervention, when it comes to Muslim women this principle is in fact amended with a higher scrutiny for “proper” motives and moral dispositions. Yet this quotation also suggests a possible decentering of feminist whiteness, which is left unsaid and unresolved, but rather hovering over the interviewee’s consciousness: “It questions us.”
Hence, when feminist practice is about “helping” “all” women, nonwhite women are easily conceived as passive recipients of help. Feminist whiteness is characterized here by benevolence and ambivalence toward these passive subjects, who are, on the one hand, proper feminist objects of intervention and, on the other hand, at odds with some of the feminist ideals that they hold dear. These moral dispositions are also perceptible in the emotional vo-cabulary conveyed when discussing these issues, which denotes both con-tentment with the proper and professional way of practicing feminism, and anxiety over the challenge that Muslim women’s agency brings to a feminist intervention that wants to perceive them as alienated.
However, not all women’s centers approach nonwhite women as passive recipients. In some centers, in particular those who have signed a common Quebecois feminist charter, the aim of feminist intervention is also to enroll women in the feminist project, understood as a project for the Quebecois so-ciety as well.67 A white officer in such a women’s center explains:
We are feminists. But of course the majority of women who come here, they don’t care if we are feminist or not. They really come for a service, an ac-tivity. And we don’t start to discuss feminism from the moment they adhere to the center. We wait for a woman to come here, to gain her trust, to let her develop a network and feelings of belonging . . . and a few months later, we start discussing topics like women’s rights, violence against women . . . so that slowly she becomes conscious of her own condition. . . . All these
topics, we discuss them, but only after we gain women’s trust. This is the compromise that we make to keep all these women at the center.
Here a tension is perceptible between the benevolent care for a passive re-cipient and the active engagement with a woman in order to enroll her in the feminist project, to make her a feminist subject. This political subjectivation of migrant women is realized through “feelings of belonging,” that is, the enrollment in a collective subject, the closing of the initial social distance.
However, even if the feminist intervention is designed to politicize migrant women, rather than include them as passive subjects, their more active in-clusion in the Quebecois feminist project does not imply that white feminists should change their own feminist values. Quite the contrary, it is about enrolling nonwhite women in a predefined collective subject. Here benev-olence meets a patronizing impulse that mirrors the asymmetry along racial and class lines that characterizes the white volunteer / nonwhite recipient re-lationship. This is also the case, in a more blatant way, in some French shelters that, like some Quebecois organizations, adhere to a feminist approach that implies not only helping women on their own terms but also providing them with a “feminist analytical framework on gender inequalities” to show them that violence against women is not an individual problem but a collective issue, as Chantal, a white feminist in her late forties who runs a shelter in a Parisian suburb, puts it.
Chantal: I was discussing with a young woman who arrived veiled for the admission interview in our living center, but I asked her to take off her veil because here . . . here there is no [veiling]. . . . She explained to me that she chose to wear the veil. She was twelve at the time she chose to wear it. It's a little bit young to make a choice. But it's true it's a woman who has gone to undergrad, she claims her right to wear the veil, she says it's not compulsory to wear it. So . . . she follows her own path. Maybe with discussions that we will have on women's rights she may evolve or not on this issue of wearing her veil.
Question: And she accepted your proposal not to wear the veil while she was at the center?
Chantal: Oh yes, of course.
Question: Why did you ask that from her?
Chantal: Because, indeed, I think as far as I am concerned it is a sign of women’s oppression.
Feminist Whiteness 111 While Chantal insisted that not wearing the veil was not a precondition for being received for an admission interview at the shelter, it appears as a pre-condition for staying and benefiting from the protection of the shelter and the services it provides. Interestingly, though she does not deny the agency of her interlocutor, Chantal places herself in the position to actually decide what is a proper age for consent and, what is more, what is the meaning of the Islamic veil. In a move typical of whiteness, she creates a social distance with her interlocutor that is only mitigated by a possible class proximity re-lated to academic achievement.68 She also omits to reflect on the power re-lation at play during the interview and on the power she exercises over the woman she interviews, although her position of authority surreptitiously shows in her flat avowal of the result of her demand: “of course” the woman took off her veil— what other choice did she have in her situation? Here be-nevolent care and respect for a woman’s choice have been replaced by moral judgment, righteousness, and a unilateral definition of what type of practices feminist emancipation should entail. This difference in moral dispositions is clearly linked to the fact that in this shelter, women who come for help are conceived as subjects of care but also as subjects enrolled in a political proj-ect, that of making women into feminists. As the “Muslim veiled woman”
changes status in the relationship with the white feminist, from benevolent object of care to potential feminist subject— and therefore imaginably equal in the relationship— she must be made white by removing her veil. In this transaction, and to use Sara Ahmed’s terms, feminism is made white. Other moral dispositions that lead feminist whiteness to more extreme emotions, such as anger, as well as to forms of melancholy, contribute to this process, and I now turn to explore them.