Separate and Dominate: Feminism and Racism after the War on Terror Paperback – 2 Jun 2015

Christine Delphy, author of Separate and Dominate (translated by David Broder) is apparently one of France’s leading feminists. Now, I’m the first to admit that I am not as well versed in feminist thinking as I would like to be – or as this book has inspired me to become – but I was surprised that someone would be a leading thinker in the field without my ever having heard their name. A quick Google, however, shows that she is little known in the Anglophone world, as she works primarily in French. That’s a pity, her work is certainly worth the read.

Separate and Dominate has 10 chapters, but the book could be split further into three parts; first establishing Delphy’s underlying hypothesis on the origins and structural nature of discrimination; next looking at racism in the war on terror and the abuse of feminist ideals as retrofitted justification of the war in Afghanistan; and finally turning back to France specifically to grapple with the big picture of racism and sexism through the controversial decision to ban the wearing of the veil in schools.

First, her thesis. Delphy sets up what appeared to me – again, not an expert in this field – to be a convincing argument for a materialistic theory of discrimination and establishes that the book will examine the many similarities between forms of discrimination – sexism, racism and homophobia in particular – as opposed to the differences. She argues that extending Western philosophy of the individual to the field of sociology has resulted in the belief that divisions between an ‘in’ and ‘out’ group, or the creation of an ‘Other’ are intrinsic to human nature, but that this is an impossible leap to make as it involves ‘an epistemologically unjustifiable change of scale’(p7), from the individual to society as a whole. She argues that ‘the Other’s status does not derive from what the Other is, but from the Other’s lack of power, in contrast with the power that the One does have’ (p10).

I’ll admit to having at times been slightly lost by her reasoning (and having to run off to brush up on my Marxist thought when it came to idealism and materialism – my brain hasn’t been in academic mode for some time) but for the most part I found it easy to follow and a lot of the text resonated. She covers in this first third of the book the insidious nature of discrimination, and way in which the very structure of our society is built in order to prevent assimilation, should the oppressed desire it, but yet requires that the ‘Others’ do assimilate in order to be treated as equal. A lot of the arguments which she rebuts in this first section are those which I have heard often in feminist debates online and from white liberals in South Africa discussing the ongoing racism there, and I found it fascinating reading, articulating thoughts which I had previously not been able to put into words.

The central section of the work deviates to look at how Guantanamo is underpinned by racism, and at the war in Afghanistan and how feminism was used – and, in her argument, perverted – to justify it. While I still enjoyed reading this, it isn’t something I’d thought about before and the war itself isn’t a topic which I know a lot about, so I found it the least interesting section of the book. I could only read and absorb what she had to say rather than engaging fully with the material, as I didn’t feel that I knew the whole story. It did spark some curiosity in me, and I will try to read more around the topic, but I was relieved when the book swung back to more general arguments (albeit couched in a very specific context) in the third thematic section.

In these final – and for me most compelling – chapters, Delphy takes on the law banning the veil from schools in France. She shows that many feminists supported this law because they saw it as a choice between condoning sexism in the ‘immigrant’ (still so-called even when they have been French citizens for multiple generations) communities, and backing a racist law. Believing there was a choice, they chose racism as the lesser of two evils. She then goes on to effectively demolish this argument, clearly outlining the intersectionality of race and gender discrimination in France and demonstrating the racism involved in assuming that non-white women are subject to a worse patriarchy than white women.

In Separate and Dominate, Christine Delphy presents a nuanced materialist approach to sexism and racism. Rather than accepting an essentialist us/them or us/other dichotomy which, she argues, starts from a position of always already giving a group a dominant position she demonstrates that this way of looking at any form of -ism is common to them all and reinforces the hierarchical structure one is trying to correct.

While classism and heterosexism are also discussed, the focus is on feminism (her long time area of expertise) and racism. These arguments are accessible and presented in an invigorating manner. Thought-provoking and persuasive to say the least.

Reviewed from an ARC made available by the publisher via NetGalley.