Feminism from the Margin: Challenging the Paris/Banlieues Divide

This paper aims to cast light on specifically French constructions of gender, citizenship and nationhood and articulate two bodies of work, one dealing with political mobilizations of racialized minorities in the French context, and the other dealing with gender concerns in urban policy. Emerging social movements in the urban area of Paris are having to take position in a context in which a normative “state feminism” is being used to stigmatize working‐class neighbourhoods in the banlieues as well as their male inhabitants. This paper considers the “double bind” in which feminist activists, and women more generally, find themselves as a result. It argues that some formerly silenced groups are being granted space for expression by the current foregrounding of “women” in urban policy. Drawing on bell hooks' insights on the margin/centre tension in feminist theory as a useful way of thinking about the spatial dimension of these issues, the paper looks at one group in particular that defines itself and its strategies in spatial terms.