Too Repressive and Right-Wing, 'Thought by White People for White People': Intersectional Feminists Oppose the Comprehensive Law

For intersectional feminists, France’s comprehensive bill on sexual violence is caught in a dangerous contradiction: it is too timid to bring real change, yet too punitive to be harmless. The legislation reaches a special committee of the National Assembly on Monday, while demonstrations against sexual violence against children resume across the country to pressure the government.

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It was too security-focused, shaped by an institutional feminism that is too close to the state, bourgeois and white, which ignored the cumulative vulnerabilities of racialized, trans or LGBTQI people.

Cécile Cée, a feminist and left-wing anti-racist activist, says she will not call on her 73,000 followers to join the protests. Doing so, she believes, would amount to supporting the comprehensive law, which has become the movement’s main demand.

Cée attended a Paris rally on June 8, organized by feminist and child-protection groups after the discovery of Lyhanna’s body. But she left disappointed. On one side, she wrote, demonstrators demanded the comprehensive law and the implementation of the 82 recommendations issued by the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against Children. On the other, people shouted, “Life for the pedos!”

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We demanded the comprehensive law against sexual violence and the implementation of the 82 recommendations of the Ciivise.

In the days that followed, Cée clarified her position. In its French form, she concluded, the bill could do harm. It is too security-focused and shaped by an “institutional” feminism that is too close to the state, bourgeois and white, she argues. Inès, an activist with the influential Nous Toutes collective, also opposes the bill in its current form. She says this approach “ignored the cumulative vulnerabilities of racialized, trans or LGBTQI people.”

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Life for the pedos!