Decolonial Praxis Enabling Intranational and Queer Coalition Building

Decolonial Praxis Enabling Intranational and Queer Coalition Building
Author(s): Paola Bacchetta

Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2010), pp. 147-192
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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Decolonial Praxis
Enabling Intranational and Queer Coalition Building
An Interview by Marcelle Maese-Cohen
paola bacchetta
maese-cohen: Can we start from the beginning? Where are

you from? And I ask that in the most respectful and intersubjective
way possible, not in the migra or border patrol way—“where were
you born?”—but as a way of situating knowledge, the way that
Anzaldúa speaks of the importance of naming yourself, both for
the agency of the speaker and for the possibility of coalition work.
bacchetta: Thank you, Marcelle. I was born in New York
into a heterosexual family that was mixed nationally, culturally,
and in terms of its racialization and morphologies. My grandpar-
ents converged out of Italy, Venezuela, and farther back Turkey,
and even farther back northeastern Africa. I’ve lived most of
my life in Paris, in India, and in Italy, before settling in the U.S.
again in adulthood. These spaces, various languages, the forms of
hybridity of which I am comprised and in which I’m immersed,
my specific morphology and how it is perceived in the contexts
in which I live, the sometimes conflicting and sometimes overlap-
ping grids of intelligibility in which I’ve been formed, through
which I have been framed, but also through which and in relation
to which I inevitably make sense of the world, my specific type of
accumulation of knowledge, my sense of critique, the way theory

148 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2
and practice get linked in my life—perhaps these sites and frames

help to locate me for you?
But, may I add? I think it’s important to point out that else-
where, beyond the U.S., questions of where “the beginning” is, of
“situating” oneself, of what constitutes the basis for “coalitional
work,” might be posed quite differently. There are questions that
in one context might, variably, open, define, limit, or close discus-
sion in another. I won’t elaborate now. We are in this context, and
I respect that.
maese-cohen: What was it that led you to academia, and in
particular to academia in France? And how did this relate to your
early activist work?
bacchetta: Academia was not something I planned since
childhood. There were no models for it in my childhood. I think
it’s the effect of a convergence of many factors: family issues, my
early intellectual curiosity, how reading was connected to my
survival, my early concern with social justice and activism. I was
a bookish kid: nerdy, attached to the library. Poetry, religious, and
reflective texts including Third World philosophies, history, soci-
ology, anthropology: these were my great loves, along with music
and animals. There was no one in my family or milieu who was
an academic. I simply loved reading, knowledge, writing, playing,
and writing music.
I was concerned about social justice early on; I’ve been politi-
cally active since junior high school. After high school I ended up
in Philadelphia living in a lesbian collective house where I con-
tinued my activism. I worked in a feminist bookstore collective,
Alexandria Books, with a feminist newspaper, Hera, and was a
founding member of DYKETACTICS!, a group composed largely
of lesbians of color and a few white women. Recently I’ve started
writing about the group.1 DYKETACTICS! was the first lesbian
collective to pursue the police in court for brutality. We were
beaten up by the Philadelphia Civil Defense Squad in a demon-
stration for gay and lesbian rights and brought them to court for
it. Early on we wrote and published specifically lesbian analyses
of imperialism, racism, class, gender, sexuality. It was a sort of in-
tersectional analytics. I’d later rethink it many times, most recent-
ly through what I call coformations and coproductions.2

Bacchetta: Decolonial Praxis 149
I also had a second trial. I was arrested and jailed on trumped-

up charges while working in a solidarity group in support of
Assata Shakur (from the Black Liberation Army, who had been
falsely accused of killing a police officer). Eventually all my
charges were dropped. But had I remained in the U.S. I would
have risked being re-served with papers on other charges. On the
advice of one of our lawyers I left the U.S. and went to Europe.
I was undocumented in Europe for seven years. I was engaged
there, again, in feminist movements, queer movements, pro-immi-
gration and antiracism movements.
maese-cohen: And your studies?
bacchetta: I was an activist nerd and a nerd activist. I pur-
sued my studies at the same time. I studied for the first two years
in Rome and then finished my BA in Paris at the American Uni-
versity in Paris. After my BA I went into the French educational
system, and every one of my subsequent degrees is from there. I
did a MA in political science and law at the University of Paris,
then a degree in comparative law at the Institute for Compara-
tive Law in Paris. Then I did a DEA (post-MA specialization with
thesis-dissertation) in sociology and then a PhD in sociology at
the Sorbonne. My dissertation was about India, and part of the
time during my studies I was based as a graduate student at the
Delhi School of Economics.
I loved my studies. The university, with all of its problems and
all of its exclusions, was still a magnificent space. I got exposed to
a whole gamut of theory, modalities of analysis. In France I was
objectively in exile, without stable housing, living the daily anxi-
ety of being undocumented and of being targeted by racism in the
streets. I was always taken for Algerian in the streets, and that
had difficult consequences on a daily basis. Academia became the
most familiar and comfortable place for me, a home.
Our education was rigorous; I liked that. We mainly read social
theory produced in Europe, in fact mainly in France, but also
in the francophone world. We read it first to understand it inti-
mately, then to make use of it, to push it farther, open it up, and
if it refused to open up then to move beyond it. We read every-
thing as critically as we could, sifting through to find whatever

we felt was useful—and much was extremely useful—but also

moving along critically every inch of the way, eyes wide open,
taking no prisoners. We read Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Fou-
cault, Bourdieu, Touraine, and others, and really engaged deeply
with them in both complicity and oppositionality. I don’t think
they’re read in the same way in the U.S. We asked, for example,
what are the implications of the fact that Foucault has an analy-
sis of the constitution of sexual identities on the one hand, an
analysis of modalities of racism on the other, but the two never
meet? Why doesn’t racism figure into Foucault’s account of the
history of sexuality? What is the place of colonialism and slav-
ery in the thought of these authors we’re reading? And what are
the effects of this (non)place of colonialism and slavery on the
theories? Or how and where exactly might the thought of Der-
rida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Bourdieu, be compatible
with, or even complicit with, colonialism? Slavery? Capitalism? If
we understand these limitations we might be better able to think
with Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Bourdieu, about
our concerns. We never sought to simply “apply” some concept
or the other; instead we hoped to engage with theory critically,
sometimes using concepts as points of departure for our own
work, which is very different from the mechanics of applying this
to that. About any concept we asked: How might the concept at
the point of its very production be problematic and what might
be the effects of its formation? How is it good to think with and
what are its limitations?
maese-cohen: How did you manage your studies while you
were undocumented?
bacchetta: I became an expert in trying to remain below the
radar screen of power, as Frantz Fanon and later Steve Pile might
say.3 In Rome I lived in a political occupation, a squat, La Casa
delle Donne (Women’s Center) at the via del Governo Vecchio
(Governo Vecchio Street) for two and a half years. There were
about ten or fifteen of us living there together at any one time. I
did odd jobs to survive. We were involved in feminist struggles of
the period: queer creative productions, struggles against violence
against women, take back the night demonstrations, the environ-

ment, against nuclear power, etc. I wrote music and played in

a women’s music group called Lunaria. That was from 1977 to
1979. I’m still close to the women with whom I lived in the squat.
For a long time I found it difficult to speak about that period, but
I’ve written a bit about it recently.4
At that time I enrolled in the university in Rome. I was undoc-
umented, but they didn’t ask me for papers, so I could do that.
Then I moved to France and continued my studies. A family of
exiled ex-activists from black liberation movements in the U.S. al-
lowed me to live with them while I got myself stabilized and also
helped me get my first somewhat regular job. A Franco-French
feminist working at the university helped me get admitted. She
got a number of undocumented people through. I was one of a
series. Once I was registered, every year I simply showed last
year’s student card to re-register. I’m still grateful to all of them.
As you probably know, tuition in the French public system is
very reasonable; at the time it was about $200 per year. I gave
language lessons to pay for rent, food, and tuition. At one point I
became homeless for about a year; but then that’s another story.
Anyway, throughout I continued to study. The public university
system in France provided this opportunity, so you can imagine
how appalled I am to see the increasing privatization of educa-
tion in California. Eventually, I was able to get documented when
President Mitterrand was elected. He offered amnesty to undocu-
mented immigrants. They were actually just trying to count how
many people were there in France.
maese-cohen: Yes, that’s usually how amnesty works.
bacchetta: Yes, they asked everyone to come and sign on the
dotted line, and they promised not to throw us out. I was terri-
fied to come out of hiding, but after much consideration and many
conversations with friends I did it. Earlier you asked about situat-
ing myself. I think the daily experience of exile, the forms of other-
ing in the various spaces in which I’ve lived, but also experiencing
my own agency in daily and political struggle, the many different
types of solidarity, all have been very important to my formation.
maese-cohen: How was it that you went from radical activ-
ism to the university? To my mind, it’s not a clear path.

bacchetta: Throughout my life my intellectual pursuits have

been deeply connected to how I live in the world. When I was a
child, poetry, reflective philosophical works, and music sustained
me. My parents didn’t speak about the family’s past, but I listened
to my grandparents and found out about the various conditions,
erasures, othering, wars, prison camps, immigration, adaptations,
struggles. Then I read and read. Early on knowledge of the world
was knowledge that unlocked my past to myself. But it was also
much more: reading totally opened my world toward the exterior,
helped me learn about it and make sense of it.
I can’t remember a time when my intellectual opening, political
agency, and my education were not deeply interconnected. I ex-
perienced alienation in high school because of exclusion from the
curriculum, but we had other books in the library. I did my work,
got straight As, was in the honor society; then I’d go do what I
really loved, read in the areas that interested me most. By the time
I went to university I wanted to make sure I could study areas I
was most passionate about. As an undergraduate I began in in-
ternational relations; I was interested in how the world worked
at a macro level. I also studied psychoanalysis to try to figure out
human beings. I got awards in French and Italian literature as an
undergraduate, loved those subjects too. After the BA I wanted
to know more about political theory and about the law, so I did
that. Finally, everything seemed to come together in sociology.
In Paris it was a very open discipline, more like what in the U.S.
might be called social theory.
And I had some excellent models for bringing activism and
education together. Neither in France nor in India is there the
kind of divide between the academy and the streets as in the U.S.
In France intellectuals write in mainstream newspapers like Le
Monde to reach a wider public. Derrida, Cixous, Irigaray, Deleuze
and Guattari all participated in and sometimes organized dem-
onstrations. In India people I studied with, like Veena Das, Jit
Uberoi, and others, were similarly engaged in social and politi-
cal issues. In these sites every intellectual is a public intellectual. I
don’t know of anywhere else in the world besides the U.S. where
so many intellectuals are (what we might call by contrast) “pri-
vate” intellectuals.

maese-cohen: I want to now talk about your work in India.

I find your work on “right” wing or “conservative” women’s
movements extremely important. Your study of the “right” keeps
us on our toes and pushes for a persistent self-reflexive research
method and activist project of intersubjectivity insofar as your
work dispels binary conceptions of a “right” and “left.” You
teach us that conservative women’s social movements can be
anticapitalist, anticolonial, and antipatriarchal and can, in form,
appear identical to feminist struggles for higher pay, education,
the right to vote, the right to divorce, health rights, and so on, or
to more subtle claims for personal and sexual spaces. Ultimately,
you define an antifeminist project to be one in which the rights
or gains made by a group of women are neither conceptually nor
actively extended to Othered women and men.
bacchetta: Yes. Well, Marcelle, you see the binary of “right”
and “left” was constructed in the global northwest, where there’s
a self-identified right and a self-identified left. These categories are
situated, and not necessarily useful for understanding all societ-
ies. For example, how do we classify certain postcolonial societ-
ies that have liberal capitalist movements and religious political
movements of various sorts, but in which all political forces are
anticolonial? The binary of “right” and “left” has certain limita-
tions for understanding the global northwest itself too. How, for
example, do we account for a so-called left that is sexist, or racist,
or queerphobic when these positions are generally associated with
the right? Colette Guillaumin wrote in a 1988 article in Nouvelles
Questions Féministes that “sexism is a right-wing constant of
any discourse”; I think that helps us to interrogate the binary of
“right” and “left” in the (French) national context. I think it’s a
good point of departure for rethinking the national but also the
transnational context. Left, right, anticolonial, queerphobic, it’s
all interconnected. They really are sides of the same coin (and I
am thinking of the round sides of the coin too). But these are not
the only categories if we think of the globe.
maese-cohen: Yes, and the way you go about arguing this
provides an exemplary model in terms of method and theoretical
content. In terms of method, your work is highly interdisciplinary
or even antidisciplinary.

bacchetta: Interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary are quite

different. I guess I should address them both?
If we understand interdisciplinary to mean “involving two or
more academic disciplines,” then I’m in fact interdisciplinary by
training. I have interests in many areas, but I’ve been trained in
sociology, political theory, law, international relations. But I’ve
also been trained in sites where the disciplines are defined differ-
ently from the U.S. definitions. What constitutes sociology in
Paris or in India is not exactly the same as in the U.S. This is
true for all the other disciplines in which I’m immersed. But I
also hope I’m interdisciplinary well beyond my various degrees.
My work on Hindu nationalism has been informed by sociology
(Klaus Theweleit, Veena Das, or Kathleen Blee) but also, equally
so, by postcolonial theory (Spivak), linguistics (Bakhtin), psycho-
analysis (via Fanon, Irigaray, Nandy), critical cultural geogra-
phy (Lefebvre), feminisms of color and queer of color critiques,
scholarship in the interdisciplinary and mainly humanities fields
of South Asia studies, and so on.
If you mean by antidisciplinarity a stance against bounded,
internally purified disciplines: yes. I’m in opposition to disciplines
when they function like micro-nations within nations. That is, all
disciplines in the U.S. are national disciplines. They’re unmarked,
passing for universal, because here we are in Empire, in the domi-
nant, the unmarked. But the disciplines in the U.S. have a specific
genealogy, particular contours, their own assumptions, categories,
logics, and terms that are not necessarily shared or even appreci-
ated elsewhere. Everywhere disciplines are part of the educational
apparatus of a nation-state in Althusser’s sense. A discipline may
function like a micro-nation within a nation. A discipline might
have its own border police. Those in power in the discipline–
micro-nation might like to tell you who belongs, who does not,
under what conditions someone can be naturalized or not, who
can use the micro-nation’s resources and how, and who cannot.
They might regulate their own immigration policies. The disci-
pline–micro-nation produces its own discipline-citizens but also
discipline-exiles, or rather its discipline-citizens in relation to its
discipline-exiles and vice versa. I’m not against disciplines per se,

but I’m in favor of recognizing the many limitations of disciplines:

their national normativity which operates as a sort of parochial-
ism, their micro-national normativity which includes the relations
of power they contain, their border police, what they include and
expel and why.
At the same time, I worry that the anti in antidisciplinary may
operate to keep us within the disciplinary paradigm, opposition-
ally so. So if I’m for anything at all it’s perhaps what we can call
self-reflective transnational transdisciplinarity. By this I mean that
I think it’s very productive to be mindful of the relations of power
in which scholarship is produced, but also to establish all sorts of
connections among scholarship within and across contexts, trans-
local connections, connections of many different types of inten-
sities within and across the borders of disciplines, to urge disci-
plines to open their borders, dissolve some borders, to allow for
new scholarship that is not micro-nationally normative, to engage
with scholarship no matter where it’s located while also being
pointedly mindful of its location, its history, and what it means
in its context. That would be a whole different way of thinking,
working, and working together. It would involve decolonizing
the disciplines but also decolonizing ourselves, opening us to new
possibilities.
maese-cohen: Your work is a wonderful example of how to
undertake a respectful ethnography. Much decolonial feminist
thought has critiqued and revised the interview process which has
historically been tied to the suspect discipline of anthropology
and colonial projects of translation. How do you relate to that?
bacchetta: I think we need to remember that “ethnography”
or rather “fieldwork” is work in a specific context (field) and is
completely dependent upon relationships of intersubjectivity in
the context in question. I’ve had several different types of field-
work experiences. I’ve done fieldwork among Hindu national-
ist women and men (in Nagpur, Ahmedabad, Pune, and Delhi in
India). On one hand Hindu nationalists’ anti-Other stances terrify
me; they not only hate Indian Muslims but they also belong to
organizations that orchestrate mass murders and mutilations of
Muslims in pogroms. Still I built up a relationship with them. I’ve

also done fieldwork among people with whom I can identify in

terms of common life experiences and politics: lesbian of color ac-
tivists in Paris. In both sets of fieldwork there were relationships
at stake. I needed to enter into the world of each subject to build
a relationship. Not just the context. I needed to enter into the
subject’s specific modality of thought and communication, that is,
in the sense of their categories, assumptions, logics, terms. Their
way of relating or not relating, their silences, their speech, as well
as my own.
maese-cohen: By your pen, so called “right” women come off
as intellectually and politically capable as women on the “left,”
each of which are inserted into a complex analysis of power.
bacchetta: Yes, you’re right. Hindu nationalist women are
very capable intellectually and politically. From the beginning of
the Rashtra Sevika Samiti in 1936 they’ve developed their own
official political discourse, inscribed it in their own publications.
They’ve invented their own analysis, their own definition of the
Hindu nation, ideal Hindu women and men, the characteristics
they assign to Muslims, their own political positions on every
issue under the sun. I’ve argued that Hindu nationalist women’s
official discourse conflicts in many ways with the official dis-
courses of their male counterparts, especially on gender issues.
The women draw on some same and some different Hindu reli-
gious texts as their male counterparts, and reinterpret everything
for their own use. They selectively use Indian and non-Indian
feminist thought. They promote equality for women and men.
They think women would make better leaders than men in the
current age. They’ve appropriated some Indian feminist slogans,
like Ham phul nahi hay, ham chingari hay (We’re not flowers,
we’re sparks). And they’ve adopted and reconfigured some femi-
nist practices such as income generating projects for poor women.
maese-cohen: Perhaps you could tell me about your experi-
ences doing fieldwork on Hindu nationalism. Why the RSS? How
were you let in? What was it like?5
bacchetta: Why RSS? It began with a wider interest in right-
wing movements globally. I had wanted to do research on the
right-wing in France. But I knew that because I get interpreted in

the French context as a Maghrebian, the French right wing would

never speak to me. I’d be able to read and analyze their publica-
tions, but fieldwork would be out. It’s a question of how my cor-
poreality corresponds to “race” categories in France.
Then I went to India, at first not to do such work; I was travel-
ing. I met some feminists, we talked, they asked about my work
in Paris, I asked about theirs in India. As I traveled throughout
the country one contact led to another, and I ended up connecting
with feminists and queers everywhere I went. Even then the net-
working among activists in India was incredibly well organized.
Because of that trip, I had a fairly good introduction to the Indian
women’s movement and to what would later become a very pub-
lic queer movement. Then two years after my trip to India I ended
up moving to India.
At first I thought about doing research on the Indian women’s
movement. It was an amazing movement. But I was totally
inside it. I thought it could be more useful to study something
that would contribute to it. At the time Hindu nationalists were
becoming very public and were also recruiting women. It looked
like quite a contradiction: the male part of the Hindu nationalist
movement was publicly hypersexist, yet many women were enter-
ing the movement. I was living in Delhi, and I thought, let me try
to figure out how they’re recruiting, that could be useful.
And the fieldwork? I made many mistakes in my first attempts.
I began in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat; this was in the mid-1980s. I
was really naive. I phoned the most high-profile Hindu nationalist
in the city, K. Ka Shastri, and asked if I could interview him. He
agreed to meet me in his home. So I went. A servant greeted me at
the door, brought me to the living room. K. Ka Shastri was there,
but so were several other men. Before I could ask even one ques-
tion K. Ka Shastri began to interview me: Who did I work for?
What’s my religion? Why did I want to speak to him? In good
anthro style I told him my name, that I was a grad student, that I
lived in France, that I was interested in studying Hindu national-
ism. Well, he told me he did not believe me. He said he knew very
well I was a government servant from Delhi, a NRI [nonresident
Indian] and probably a Muslim, and he had nothing to say to

me about the riots. He told me to go back to Delhi. He was also

extremely polite and offered me tea before sending me along. I
did stay for tea before going. He said, if you want to learn about
Hindu nationalism you should read more VHP [Vishva Hindu
Parishad] and RSS publications. In fact, before doing any more
interviews, I did just that.
While in France the right wing would not talk to me because
they constructed me as Maghrebian; in India K. Ka Shastri would
not talk to me because he construed me as Indian, an NRI. In
fact, when I’m in Latin America, I get construed as Latin Ameri-
can; the same thing happens in North Africa as well. Every site
has its own racialized categories. One gets positioned in a particu-
lar way because of a morphology that is whatever it is. That was
vital in my fieldwork.
maese-cohen: What followed the failed interview with K. Ka
Shastri?
bacchetta: I was devastated, but it also forced me to rethink
the politics of fieldwork through the body. I had learned in the
academy that researchers going into a field are supposed to iden-
tify themselves to potential informants; this is supposed to be an
act of integrity and respect. But, I thought, how and under what
circumstances did this become an ideal and an obligation? On
what kinds of morphologies and positionalities did this idealized
situation of respectful identification get established?
Ultimately, what’s so noble about a white male researcher who
comes out as a white male researcher to his informants of color
in a stable field, usually in the so-called Third World, on a beach,
in a forest, in a jungle, in the countryside? What does all of that
have to do with the type of situation I was faced with? A young,
brown, queer woman trying to interview older, straight, right-
wing brown men in a context of postcolonial urban genocidal
riots? By this logic, should a Jewish scholar who passes and is
researching Nazism during WWII come out as a Jewish scholar to
Nazi informants? Absurd. We really need to rethink and reformu-
late the question of ethics of fieldwork to take into consideration
differently positioned researchers and potentially life-threatening
situations. In doing so, I found Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Foucaul-

dian study of witchcraft in the Bocage to be very helpful because

she engages with the “secret” and with “getting caught up” in the
field in particular ways.
To make a long story short, I tried many other entries into
Hindu nationalism. Eventually I was let in to the milieu at a lower
level, at the level of an RSS all-male shakha (neighborhood cell) in
Ahmedabad. Then the men of the shakha introduced me to high-
er-level RSS men and to women from the Rashtra Sevika Samiti,
the RSS’s women’s wing. One thing led to another. The women
were quite impressive. My fieldwork made me question every
single category about the right that I had previously encountered
and also about feminisms and even decolonial notions. It made
me rethink everything, including Fanon, Memmi.
maese-cohen: Can you say more about how it made you re-
think each of these categories and thinkers?
bacchetta: For instance, I’ve already mentioned the category
of right wing, how Hindu nationalism interrogates the right ver-
sus left binary and its supposed transnational universality. I’ve
also mentioned the category of right-wing women. Over the years
they’ve have been constructed in a variety of ways. For example,
early on Andrea Dworkin imagined U.S. right-wing women as
victimized, duped by their male counterparts. In the 1980s Rita
Thalman conceptualized Nazi women as agents, even if distort-
edly so. Then Liliane Kandel found that some women who be-
came Nazi activists had been feminist activists in their day; that
complicated agency. Claudia Koonz’s work, too, was instrumental
in pointing to fascist women’s specific types of agency. Kathleen
Blee, working on the KKK, argued the women were more interest-
ed in creating their own social milieu than in the KKK’s anti-other
politics. All that work was really inspiring. But what I found with
Hindu nationalist women was a bit different and more extreme:
unlike all other studies to date, Hindu nationalist women did not
simply adhere to or even reinterpret the ideology of their male
counterparts. Instead, they actually invented their own ideology.
They wrote it, published it, spread it. And it’s very different from
Hindu nationalist men’s ideology. Hindu nationalist women pro-
pose very strong models for women. They have a scathing critique

of Hindu men’s historical and current sexism, including Hindu

nationalist men. I consider their critiques of sexism to be every bit
as pertinent as any feminist critique I’ve ever heard anywhere in
the world. So that complicates things tremendously. In fact, much
of the time when I was with Hindu nationalist women I’d forget
they were Hindu nationalist women. We talked about all sorts of
things together. I’ve argued that Hindu nationalist men tolerate
Hindu nationalist women’s differential discourse as a strategy for
expansion. Hindu nationalist men’s discourse is too sexist to ap-
peal to women. Yet the project needs women. So they accept and
even cultivate these differences.
This said, there was one topic on which, while talking with
Hindu nationalist women, I would fully realize they were very
different from my feminist friends: Indian Muslims. They spewed
hatred for Indian Muslim men and contempt for Indian Muslim
women. I’ve analyzed this in their publications and in interviews.
I’ve argued that to be authorized to critique Hindu national-
ist men, and because they propose a sometimes starkly differ-
ent version of Hindu nationalism from their male counterparts,
the women need to prove to Hindu nationalist men that they’re
committed to Hindu nationalism, loyal to the project. One of the
main ways they do this is by loudly denouncing the enemies of
Hindu nationalism as identified by Hindu nationalist men: that is,
Indian Muslims. The women know that hatred of Muslims is one
of the few things that separates them from Indian feminists and
binds them with Hindu nationalist men.
But let’s be clear. I found the Samiti hatred of Muslims abso-
lutely terrifying. When they talked about Muslims I knew full
well it wasn’t just rhetoric, not just a sort of bravado spectacle for
Hindu nationalist men. It was inseparably connected to material
practices that range from beatings to rape, to cutting out Muslim
women’s fetuses in anti-Muslim riots, to mass murders, to the
destruction of physical spaces such as mosques—the whole
gamut of hatred, all the way to the most physically annihilating
violence.6 So it wasn’t a discourse that was sorted out from its
materialization.
maese-cohen: Given these violent material conditions, how
did you go about conducting your fieldwork?

bacchetta: It’s a very complicated process to explain. But, to

be brief, after the first try in Ahmedabad with K. Ka Shastri, I re-
turned to Delhi. I engaged in discussions with colleagues in Delhi
about what to do about the fact that the interviewees would con-
struct me inevitably as an NRI. It was a real dilemma. I almost
abandoned the research. Then I thought about how inappropriate
the methods in mainstream anthropology, and even in some criti-
cal anthropology, are for situations of direct political conflict, for
dangerous situations like this. I decided I wouldn’t identify myself
but rather allow the interviewees to identify me as they wished.
I met my interviewees, told them my name, which is not an
Indian name. They often just thought I had a weird NRI accent,
and they transformed Paola into Hindu names such as Parama,
Parul, and so on. Because they constructed me as an NRI, and as
a Hindu, or sometimes as a possible re-convert to Hinduism from
Christianity or any other religion, it gave me an in. They wanted
to recruit me to Hindu nationalism, which is how I learned the
most in my research. It was dangerous. I kept wanting to call it
off, but friends kept telling me no, don’t.
I couldn’t get away from the misidentification, though. Once,
in another part of the country, I walked into an RSS bookstore
alone as usual to buy books, and as usual there were only men
inside. They’d been waiting for a Hindu nationalist woman, a
witness to Muslim male rapes of Hindu women in Kashmir, who
was supposed to speak to local Hindu women about that. They
mistook me for her. I didn’t figure this out until it was too late.
We were talking, they asked if I wanted to go meet the Hindu
nationalist women now, and I said yes. The next thing I know
I’m on the back of a motorcycle driven by an RSS member, go-
ing through town. I thought he was taking me just to meet the
women; instead he was taking me to give a speech to them. When
I figured this out I was really terrified. I couldn’t speak, but it was
okay, they just thought I was traumatized. In my place the guy
who had transported me narrated what I had supposedly seen!
maese-cohen: Do you still speak to the women you inter-
viewed? From reading your work, Kamlabehn really sticks out in
my memory.

bacchetta: I haven’t kept in touch with all of them, only

some of them. What I’ve written about Hindu nationalism is criti-
cal. They’ve read it.
But, yes, I can see why Kamlabehn might stick out; she was
special. She’s in so many ways a radical feminist, except for the
discourse on Muslims. Even that discourse was complicated, not
straightforward. I don’t want to homogenize all Hindu nationalist
women. There are vast differences among them. Kamlabehn and I
spoke about Muslims only rarely. When we did, she expressed ha-
tred of Muslim men. But then some years later I went to her home
to visit, and there was a female Muslim student of hers staying at
her house. I was surprised because for most upper-caste Hindus
of her milieu it’s polluting to have a Muslim in your house. But
Kamlabehn had no problem. She said, they used to be Hindus,
and they could be Hindus again. It’s not like I’m going to murder
her family. This was a more mellow discourse than her earlier dis-
course about Muslims.
Then there was an elderly Samiti leader in Pune who was furi-
ous with me after reading my work. I went to meet her, she let me
in, but I could tell by her demeanor that she was really unhappy
with me. I was afraid in her house. We talked alone, but there
were people all over the house. She’s from a family that’s hardcore
Hindu nationalist. As soon as I saw a moment when I could leave,
I very politely asked for her blessing—she’s an older person, so I
asked for her blessing before I left. But I was afraid for my life.
maese-cohen: It strikes me that when you first talked about
your exile, you talked about how you were beaten by the police,
and now you mention this situation. How do you push forward,
knowing you are in such physically threatening circumstances?
It seems to me that this is something activists always have to ask
themselves: How much further should I go in terms of placing
myself in a violent situation? How do you negotiate that?
bacchetta: I think I’ve become a fairly good judge of when
the danger point is too much. You take reasonable precautions.
You figure out the situation. I do get scared during fieldwork, but
while I’m scared I’m also calm because I know I’ve gotten myself
out of difficult situations. If you’re going to do fieldwork in the

context of political conflict, you have to be prepared for unex-

pected and potentially violent situations. If you can’t deal with
that, you can’t do this work.
maese-cohen: I’m wondering how your work on Hindu na-
tionalism informed your later work with antiracist, queer, femi-
nist coalition building, both here in the U.S. and with women of
color in Paris. These situations are so different.
bacchetta: My work with antiracist, feminist, and queer al-
liances in the U.S. and Paris happened before, during, and fol-
lowing my work on Hindu nationalism. You’re right, they’re very
different contexts. They involve different material conditions,
differently situated subjects, different grids of intelligibility with
their different categories, logics, presuppositions, terms.
Earlier on, in Paris, the city in which I’ve spent the most years
of my life, there were no autonomous political groups of lesbians
of color. Only by the 1990s were there enough who were out and
politically active to form a group. For many years I knew only
one other out lesbian of color activist, Dalila Kadri. She was born
in Algeria, raised in France. Today she’s a brilliant filmmaker.
She’s done documentaries on immigration in France including the
first film ever about lesbian of color immigrants in France, called
Lucioles (Fireflies). We’ve remained very close.
For some time immigrants to France were primarily single
men—factory workers mainly—but by the 1970s women and
children were allowed in under the family regroupment laws.
Very soon some immigrant women formed feminist groups. They
were mainly organized around nations because the everyday lives
of immigrants were affected by France’s bilateral treaties with the
individual ex-colonies. France’s treaty with Morocco was differ-
ent from the one with Algeria and so forth; it was a continuation
of colonial divide-and-rule policy. So to survive, to make improve-
ments, it was necessary to struggle against particular immigration
laws by nation. It wasn’t because feminists of color were national-
ists, or essentialists, or into subaltern identity politics, or any of
the other sordid accusations by the unmarked dominant. Instead
it was about a politics of contextuality, of survival.
In 1982 in Paris about fifteen different groups came together

at La Maison des femmes (Women’s Center). A number of these

were immigrant women’s groups working on immigration law.7
It turns out that all the bilateral treaties had one thing in com-
mon: under them, immigrant women’s legal status was made to
be dependent on the legal status of their male family members.
So much for the French liberating colonized women, you know,
those claims of bravado; French law often reinforced franco-
phone postcolonial nations’ sexism and even introduced it where
it didn’t otherwise exist. Anyway, we formulated the demand for
“autonomous rights for immigrant women.” It went across all
the national boundaries, became a unifying rallying cry for all the
groups.
maese-cohen: It occurs to me that this kind of feminist soli-
darity across nationalities is not exactly the same as claiming a
subalternized racialized identity—such as we see in the U.S. in the
term women of color. And yet your work documents women of
color in Paris. Can you tell more about that work, and what hap-
pens when that term travels?
bacchetta: In Paris I think there’s quite a bit of solidarity
with some of the wonderful feminist of color and queer of color
analytics and practices in the U.S; it’s been inspirational. Still, un-
derstandably, we did not want to be represented through a term
(lesbians of color) that was constructed in a very specific U.S.
history unless it could be opened up to other histories. We didn’t
want to be subsumed or erased under it.
The notion of color has a different history in the French con-
text. It harks back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific
racism that proposed, among other criteria, skin color as a basis
for the construction of racialized categories. In the U.S. of color
was reappropriated, reiterated by subalternly racialized subjects.
Not in France. In France color is still most forcefully aligned with
reproductions of racism. It’s considered an insulting term, a sign
of complicity with racist power. As you know, after WWII, schol-
ars hired by UNESCO, which is based in Paris, examined scien-
tific racist doctrine, deconstructed it. Their findings were publi-
cized widely in France. Since then in France racist discourse does
not make claims about color. As Fanon brilliantly pointed out,

way back, such claims came to be organized around the criteria

of culture. He called that cultural racism.8 The biochromatic to
cultural shift was later thought through by Collette Guillaumin,
Pierre André Taguieff, Etienne Balibar, and others. But Fanon first
identified an early form of it.
In the U.S. I think this bio to cultural shift in emphasis also
happened, but differently, in a more additive than substitutive
way, a reshuffling to make room for newly articulated racializa-
tions such as the racialization of Islam and Muslims. There’s a
long history in the U.S. of racialization of Islam and Muslims
but only since 9/11 has it been articulated publicly so massively.
Such a formation did not happen on a clean slate. It draws some
of its elements from the white colonial construction of Native
Americans in the binary opposition Christians versus Others. At
the same time, the biochromatic (“color”), the notion of black
people, brown people, is still articulated both by racists and by
those working in opposition to racism. One form of racism (the
racialization of Islam and Muslims) has not replaced other forms
(like antiblack racism), but rather new constellations emerge
beside the old, sometimes overshadowing, sometimes overlap-
ping, sometimes merging. Every context has its own formations.
It’s not the same in France. One exception: the term noir (black)
has recently been appropriated by people of sub-Saharan African
descent in France. This phenomenon is connected to francophone
pan-African movements but also to transnational flows from the
U.S., with its history of strong black movements.
In France activist lesbians of color have long reflected on
whether or not to invent and claim a subalternly racialized self-
designation and, if so, how to proceed. We were post-Franco-
French-universalism; we saw dominant universalism and forced
assimilationism as oppressive. We were postnational normativi-
ties; national divisions had been forced on earlier generations.
We were not into biochromatics, or agentic reiterations of allo-
racialized, biochromatic designations (the names forced upon
subalternly racialized subjects by the dominant). But also lesbians
of color did not want to conveniently disappear or get erased into
what Norma Alarcon would call the unitary subject (of woman,

of lesbian, of queer, but also possibly of Franco-French national

normativity). Remember, France differs sharply from the U.S. The
U.S. sees itself as some sort of melting pot, as a collection of com-
munities. The French call this, with great cynicism, U.S. commu-
nautarisme. (It’s often translated as “communalism,” but actually
it’s more like “community-ism.” Communalism is a term out of
British colonialism.) The U.S. multiculturalism business is just as
problematic as Franco-French universalism, of course, as it all too
conveniently erases power relations, participates in the neo-liberal
“choice” schema, like the United Colors of Benetton business,
and in forms of museumification of otherness.
So in France politicized lesbians of color have tried to steer
clear of identitary categories but also to dodge erasure and forced
assimilation. I’ve written about this, how it’s been discussed col-
lectively, what terms we’ve constructed, abandoned, formulated,
a whole process. That’s the context in which I lived, worked, did
fieldwork.
maese-cohen: What was the process, the terms?
bacchetta: I’ll begin with one of the earliest coalitions, the
Collectif féministe contre le racisme et l’anti-semitisme (Feminist
Collective Against Racism and Anti-Semitism). I was a co-founder
in 1984. The group brought together feminists from many women
of color groups, also some white women. It was difficult to do
because of issues of Palestine. Some pro-Palestinian feminists,
both Muslims and non Muslims, didn’t want to be in a group that
included the struggle against anti-Semitism; they thought it would
confuse everything with Zionism. But anyway, despite problems,
the group managed to bring together the leadership of many
groups and to hold assemblées générales (general assemblies)
where we dealt head-on with many issues. It wasn’t easy, but it
ended up functioning fairly well and we had a presence in the
larger anti-racist movement. We then also created the more specif-
ically queer Collectif Lesbien contre le racisme et le fascisme (Les-
bian Collective against Racism and Fascism). These were mixed
groups, not autonomous, not yet. Anyway, at that time we formu-
lated the term lesbiennes ciblées par le racisme (lesbians targeted
by racism), also lesbiennes racisées (racialized lesbians), which is

still used a lot today. Later, in the 1990s, the Groupe du 6 No-
vembre, a pluralist autonomous lesbian “of color” group based
in Paris, proposed the term lesbiennes issues du colonialisme, de
l'esclavage et de l'immigration postcoloniale (lesbians begotten of/
out of colonialism, slavery, and postcolonial immigration).
All these auto-designations avoid attaching color directly onto
the body. They avoid reiterating the criteria of biochromatic ra-
cialization even if the biochromatic is still operative in the streets
(like, for example, when strangers assume I’m Maghrebian). The
term lesbians targeted by racism speaks to specific relations of
power and emphasizes the uncalled-for agency of the racist. The
term racialized lesbians evokes a process that produces bodies but
does not really mention biochromatics specifically, leaving the pro-
cess wide open for all sorts of criteria. “Lesbians out of/begotten
of colonialism, slavery and postcolonial immigration” names the
political conditions of the formation of the subjects in question.
In the past few years some lesbians of color have started using
the term lesbiennes en couleurs (lesbians in colors with colors in
the plural). Among ourselves for short we just say “colors,” as in
“yes, she’s colors.” The term calls to mind multiplicity. It marks
internal difference in the subject, across subjects. Reiterating
“color” signals solidarity with the struggles of U.S. Third World
women, feminists, lesbians, queers, and all people of color, and all
people across the globe for whom those struggles have meaning.
But also it’s in the plural (“colors”), which marks the difference
of context between France and the U.S. In the past few months
a new group has proposed the term lesbiennes of colors (with of
colors kept in English). This one combines French and English,
insisting on solidarity, on plurality, and again resisting homogeni-
zation (through the “s” in “colors”).
maese-cohen: What was your transition to the States like?
How do your experiences here compare?
bacchetta: It was shocking to come back. The U.S. seemed
to have changed so much. As you know, I was in a mixed collec-
tive before I left the U.S. called DYKETACTICS! It’s only been
recently that I’ve started to write about DYKETACTICS! and
that period.9 DYKETACTICS! published analyses of imperialism,

racism, patriarchy, everything. We left traces all over the place.

We issued statements in solidarity with the city workers when
they went on strike, with the Puerto Rican independence move-
ment, black liberation movements, Native American movements.
DYKETACTICS! members were simultaneously in many other
movements. We published in Hera, in Off Our Backs, elsewhere.
Similar collectives also published at the time. That was my reality.
It’s archived. But it’s all been excluded from the official historiog-
raphies of feminist and queer movements in the U.S., as if it never
happened. It would make a great dissertation topic: early lesbian
of color critiques of imperialism, capitalism, racism, and early
cross-movement solidarities.
maese-cohen: Can I ask what year this was?
bacchetta: The critiques happened in the late 1970s. I came
back to the U.S. in 1993, left again, then returned a few times for
various periods. I couldn’t make up my mind if I was really going
to do this. When I decided to live here, it was 1996.
At first I had really mixed feelings about the U.S. On the nega-
tive side I found the U.S. to be parochial. I had just arrived, and
I had the feeling many colleagues expected me to already know
everything about all the scholarly debates in the U.S. But why
should I? If someone is coming to France for the first time, or
to India for the first time, or even for the twentieth time from
elsewhere, we don’t expect them to position themselves in our
scholarly debates immediately. In France, in India, it’s assumed
that the new person is engaged in their own scholarly milieu. We
approach them hoping to learn something from them about the
scholarly debates in their context. But here in the U.S. I met schol-
ars who seemed not to be aware that there are other sites of very
intense intellectual production in the world besides the U.S. That
ignorance is a privilege of Empire.
Also, I found here a distorted view of both France and India.
For example, there was an official construction of “French femi-
nism” that reduced everything to three authors: Irigaray, Cixous,
Kristeva. I would read American authors on “French feminism”
in U.S. journals and think, what are these people talking about?
They clearly had no idea about the context in France. They in-

terpreted authors based on an incomplete archive, on one or two

translations. I found out later that, except for those in French de-
partments, in the U.S. you can be an “expert” on “French theory”
including “French feminism” and not speak French. But many of
the translations are so bad they’ve been denounced by the authors
themselves; Irigaray is a case in point. Many U.S. scholars were
using these inaccurate translations and didn’t get the (French)
context of their production. Some of these points are taken up in
Francois Cusset’s book (in French) entitled French Theory. Cusset
actually explains the U.S. construction of “French theory” to the
French. It’s an interesting and even amusing book.
When I speak about the limitations of Cixous, Irigaray, Kriste-
va, I don’t mean their intellectual limitations but rather the nar-
rowness, the U.S. distortion, under the sign of what Claire Moses,
in a very insightful article published in the journal Feminist Stud-
ies quite some time ago, rightly calls “French Feminism Made in
the U.S.A.” I took Cixous’s graduate seminar as an undergradu-
ate. Her work during her Vivre l’Orange phase and on Clarice
Lispector in particular opened me up in many ways. And it moti-
vated me to engage with Derrida. I had a very special relation to
the work of Irigaray. I read Kristeva but was particularly taken
with her connection to Bakhtin. All this work is very important.
But to reduce all feminist scholarship in France to these three au-
thors is absurd. What a privilege of U.S. empire, the authorization
to reframe, to reshape, to redefine its others, including its othered
objects of philia, of fascination, that are pinned down, defined in
the U.S. categories “French theory” and “French feminisms,” cat-
egories that produces many different types of internal others.
maese-cohen: Can you say more about Empire and your
shifting relation to it?
bacchetta: Yes. And “shifting” is appropriate; I’ve been seri-
ally, multiply located in relation to Empire(s). First, I think there’s
no complete outside to Empire, just differential concentrations of
power, differential positionings within and in relation to time-
spaces of power with their varying intensities of concentration. I
think of Empire as an inseparable part of the current wider global
dispositif of power, organized in a co-production, distributed

transnationally specifically in the formations that Inderpal Gre-

wal and Caren Kaplan call “scattered hegemonies.”10 We live in
a world where Empire and its effects are here concentrated, here
less dense, there weak, there overpowering. Nation-states are, of
course, ranked in the hierarchy of power; but each nation-state is
also internally contradictory, with time-spaces of greater or lesser
concentrations of power within. Sometimes the power relations at
the local level can take on all the importance of the world; for ex-
ample, Dalit activists (whom the British called untouchables and
Mahatma Gandhi called Harijans or people of god) in the nine-
teenth century identified local Brahmins as their main enemies,
and not the British. From their point of view, Brahmins had con-
trolled their lives for centuries, excluded them, enslaved them, de-
humanized them, tortured them. By the way, I think we can learn
a lot by studying early low-caste protest movements, like Jyotirao
Phule’s struggles, and how they defined subjects-in-struggle, but
that’s another topic.
To get back to your question: in the U.S. I was born into a form
of subalterneity-within-highly-concentrated-Empire. But I want
to point out, so that we don’t get into romanticizing the subaltern
element and erasing the rest, that the subaltern-within-highly-
concentrated-Empire is still within-Empire. That is, all subjects
formed here in the U.S. are formed in Empire, including queers of
color. The point is that Empire is the context of our formation, a
part of our most intimate psychic, social, and political life.
This is where the term people of color could be interrogated
for the silences and invisibilities it produces. It’s a useful term, but
let’s not forget its limitations. This kind of formation, a formation
of subaltern-within-highly-concentrated-Empire, is very different
from, say, subject formation in a dominant sector of a formerly
colonized nation; for example, formation as an upper-caste Hindu
subject in India or Nepal or as a proper Muslim subject in urban
Pakistan or Algeria. In local hegemonic relations, in the context
of their own postcolonial nation-states, each of these three post-
colonial subjects is born into, formed with, and possesses certain
psychic, social, and political privileges. Interestingly, very few
write about this privilege. Gayatri Spivak and Jacqui Alexander

have evoked it; they’re refreshing exceptions to what has other-

wise become a rule of silence about postcolonial subjects formed
with certain types of privilege.
Of course, I also lived in Paris in queer exile as a subaltern-
within-relatively-concentrated-Empire. I was undocumented, con-
structed as Maghrebian, the object of racialized interactions on a
daily basis. But I also had the privilege of education; I became a
student, a person with a potential future. Believe me, if you can
see the conditions of broken-down schools, of unemployment, of
no future, in the banlieues (suburban slums) of Paris where people
who look like me live, you can understand what an extraordinary
privilege it was for me to be a university student. The subalterne-
ity and the privilege are inseparable for me. Just when I think I’m
most subaltern, I’m reminded of my privilege. Just when I think
I’m privileged I’m reminded of my subalterneity. For example, I
remember the evening of the day I defended my 714-page-long
dissertation at the Sorbonne and received highest national hon-
ors for it. I was really happy. I left the university, walked to the
subway, stood on the subway platform in front of a map to find
the best route to get to a friend’s new apartment. I was exhausted
from the defense. It had gone on all day. I was squinting while
trying to read the map. A middle-aged Franco-French hetero-
couple approached me and gently asked: “Miss, can we help you?
If you don’t know how to read, we’ll be glad to read the map
for you.” They meant well, one knows when people mean well,
but they constructed me as illiterate. I had just received highest
national honors at the Sorbonne, and half an hour later in the
streets I was constructed as illiterate. In France privilege and sub-
alterneity were inseparable in my life at all times.
Finally, in India, after France I was really astonished to no
longer be an object of racialization. In India I passed for a mid-
dle-class north Indian, someone born into privilege in a context
otherwise characterized by extremely difficult material conditions.
No one even looked twice at me in the streets. I had never known
such tranquility. No one harassed me in stores, watched to see if I
would steal something, assumed I was illiterate. On the contrary.
Total respect. I wasn’t used to it. It made me very conscious of

how much damage living in France had done to me. I began to

live differently in my body in India. I spent a lot of time reread-
ing Fanon, rereading Memmi, trying to understand the damage
of Empire to the psyche, to the body. I think these texts are really
great points of departure, but they also have their limitations for
subjects such as myself, and we still have a lot of work to do to
decolonize.
In India just walking around in a nontargeted body I learned a
lot about what it must be like to be born into privilege, even if in
the midst of devastating conditions. But I also learned about what
Empire has done to its colonized and postcolonial others, includ-
ing those with privilege in their local national contexts.
maese-cohen: Concerning subjects who are formed in Em-
pire, I’m interested in your relationship to those who took up
the name U.S. Third World feminisms precisely because of that
concern of being located in Empire. I’m particularly interested
in your translation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and your
relationship to that text. Can you tell me about what it has been
like to translate Borderlands into French? How did this project
emerge?
bacchetta: My relationship to Anzaldúa’s Borderlands is
gratitude, relief, excitement, an opening. It’s a beautiful, dense,
multifaceted text. It’s a living text, a way of life. It’s very useful
for us in France. But I want to clarify that I am only translating
part of it. I’m not really a translator. But I’m delighted to do the
work necessary to produce a translation that can be read, that
could serve as a point of departure for more translations of her
work.
I want to put Anzaldúa’s work out there, into the silence, let it
make its own music for whoever can hear it. I don’t know, really,
who, under the present conditions, can hear Anzaldúa besides a
handful of lesbians of color and our allies. In France queers of
color have been cut off from each other, closed down, made invis-
ible not only in the academy but much more widely in the public
space. Hopefully this will change. Who knows? Can you imag-
ine, we’ve been around for so long, but the article I published in
France in June 2009 [“Co-formations: On Decolonial Spatialities

of Resistance by Lesbians ‘of color’ in France”; see “C”] was ac-

tually the first article ever about theories and practices produced
by lesbians of color in France to be published in an academic
journal. In December 2009 the first colloquium on lesbians out of
postcolonial immigration took place at University of Paris VIII. It
was attended by a number of lesbians of color, but was also boy-
cotted by a whole contingent. Right now some lesbian of color
activists are about to launch a website that will facilitate connec-
tions among lesbians of color within France and across the fran-
cophone postcolonial world. Things seem to be changing.
Hopefully the website and these initiatives will move us out of
erasure. Right now the Franco-French feminist and queer move-
ments do not engage with our theories. They don’t imagine we
have anything to say. And yet apparently we’re picturesque. I
mean, one little brown body, my own, ended up on the cover of
the first edition of what is now a classic, the Dictionary of Femi-
nism in France, published in Paris. A colleague of mine brought
this to my attention. I had not seen the first edition as I was in In-
dia when it sold out. But sure enough, there I am on the cover. It’s
the 1980s in Paris, I’m wearing a Palestinian scarf, there’s a ban-
ner, I’m yelling something. I don’t even know what demonstration
it is because they don’t show the banner fully. Anyway, I’m there,
looking exoticized. Nobody asked my permission to print the
photo. Well, it’s a Dictionary of Feminism, so I look inside: there’s
no entry for lesbian, none for women of color, racism, racialized,
nothing. There’s an entry for ethnicity, but it’s about Canada. So
this is the situation. You know, it’s really disconcerting to have to
wonder if we’re just exotic bodies to be paraded across the cover
of books that exclude us.
Now, in terms of French translations of works by U.S. women
of color, there are a few. It’s good to have translations! But they’re
also not without problems. For example, there’s an anthology
called Black Féminisme with a selection of texts by black U.S.
feminists. The title (Black Feminism) is in the singular, so that
should give you an idea. The introduction positions U.S. black
feminism in relation to (unmarked) U.S. white feminisms, without
any serious notion of the history or range of black feminisms and

their intertextualities with other feminisms of color. An astonish-

ing number of articles in the book are directly addressed to white
women. On the back cover a blurb reads: “why in France, an
ex-colonial power, hasn’t the equivalent of a Black feminism exist-
ed?” When I read that, I thought, where have you been? There’s
been a black feminist movement in France for many decades: in
literature, in activisms, everywhere. And part of it has been right
under your nose, in the most visible of all feminist activist institu-
tions, the Maison des femmes. How did you miss it? It was unreal
to see the way this book was constructed, presented, marketed.
It’s U.S. “black feminism” for a white French feminist audience; it
does not imagine French black feminists as readers, as producers
of theory, arts, activisms. Just about everyone I know was livid
about it. I got together with some friends, and we thought, we do
need translations, but they need to be done with a different kind
of intellectual acumen and political consciousness. They need to
be adequately contextualized and addressed primarily to the sub-
jects who are first concerned.
It’s been very difficult but also really wonderful to translate An-
zaldúa; I worked with my colleague Jules Falquet, who has lived
for a long time in Mexico. We’re very concerned about precision.
Along with Anzaldúa’s work, I want to translate Norma Alarcon’s
“The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back.”11
Norma has agreed to this. Isn’t it an amazing article? Two years
ago Norma came to stay with me while I was living in Paris. She
spoke at the university and at the Maison des femmes. Norma
Cantu also came and spoke. I see these translations in terms of
ongoing dialogues, a collective project. It’s not for one person to
do. It’s about bridges and traversing borders.
maese-cohen: It seems to me that part of your method or
your interview process and your research process is very inter-
disciplinary, very intranational, and you say that this was your
training. But I’m also thinking that, when dealing with an ar-
chive that has been so actively destroyed, it almost requires this
kind of transdisciplinarity. I’m thinking of your work that traces
Indian lesbians and “lesbians” of the 1980s where you say that
because there is no archive for this particular period, you must

turn to three different fields—published and unpublished works

of fiction, letters, and personal essays; informal conversation; and
memory.12 And these three different fields represent very different
kinds of knowledge production. The first is written; then there is
informal conversation, and I’m especially interested in how this
becomes such a critical tool; and lastly there is personal memory,
which involves the self-reflective position of the researcher or the
writer. I see this in your own work, in your research method, but
I also think it’s part of the nature of the missing archive and these
kinds of projects that haven’t been written about. And because
you were actually there you become part of a living archive; your
body actually provides a living archive.
bacchetta: Yes, in a sense one is always in, of, part of, and
even constituting a fraction of an archive that may or may not
be missing in action. It is at least partially through archives that
one is formed, through archives that one is articulated or not, and
the articulations and silences create their own archives. There are
many definitions of archives, many modalities of grappling with
what they can and cannot contain, suppress, articulate.
Some archives are missing in the sense that there’s no discern-
ible trace left behind. Subaltern studies scholars have drawn
attention to the absence of peasant rebellions in the colonial
archive. Dalits were not allowed to learn to read and write histor-
ically so their traces could not be directly inscribed. In both cases
it’s a question of the conditions of production and transmission,
though differently. Then some archives are missing in the sense of
missing in action. They fought, died in the field, were forgotten,
erased. Then there are archives that have not been imagined to be
archives at all.
I think the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope, or a time-space
in which some things can be said while some content is excluded,
is useful for thinking about different types of archives. Instead
of producing a hierarchy of archives (which has usually meant
the written versus oral binary, then the hierarchical classification
of written into official versus unofficial, and so on—a series of
binaries), instead we might horizontalize archival chronotopes,
think of each chronotope, how it is constituted, how chronotopes

are combined, separated, readjusted, each as their own world. So,

for example, fiction can tell us something different from news-
paper articles, and a newspaper article that draws from fiction,
or fiction that draws from newspaper articles, can tell us some-
thing else. The world of the oral, art, written text, audiovisual,
each with its own conditions of production: these are a world of
archives. And yes, the body of the researcher, the memory of the
researcher, I have included these as archives but also tried to un-
derstand their limitations, in the sense of body and memory as yet
another chronotope, our own that we can work with, that some-
times we must work with. Memory, body, rumor, possibly gossip,
these can and sometimes must be treated as archives.
When thinking about ourselves as speaking subjects, as forma-
tions that are productive of archives, we have to consider: in what
context can someone even be imagined to be a subject? To have
a voice or not? Many things happen to the voice in the social. It
might or might not be offered a place. It might be taken away,
refused. There are both non-agential and agential actions that can
happen to a voice. Then you have the issue that Spivak poses so
well in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” of what can be heard, in the
sense of capacity, the grid of intelligibility, the intersubjectivity
that hearing requires.
My article about lesbians in Delhi in the 1980s is something
that I wrote in reaction to how certain subalternized sexual sub-
jects were being categorized, but also to the selective erasures as
the archive was being constituted. By the late 1990s scholars in
the U.S. were using categories deeply embedded in U.S. scholar-
ship and debates to “see” Indian queers. Here we’re not talking
about a hundred years ago and everyone being long dead; the
erasure was happening before our eyes. They were looking at the
Internet and saying, “Oh look, there are queers in India,” because
there were a few queers visible on the Internet. That represented
the whole of it to them. The population of India is one billion,
very few people have computers, most people don’t speak English,
and so the queers from India on the Internet were extremely few,
limited. Queer Indian history was already starting to be written
in a way that erased most subjects. I was trying to insert a pause
into that process.

If I had not drawn on absolutely everything I had access to, in-

cluding myself, I would not have been able to write that text. The
point of it, however, was not to effect an additive move, or what
Spivak calls “information retrieval” as in, hey, you forgot about
this, let’s add a few lesbians from the 1980s and stir. No, I hoped
to have the text make a different kind of intervention, to insert a
pause in the ongoing bulldozing operation of dominant historiog-
raphy that creates its own mountains, margins, flatlands, burial
grounds. I also hoped to contribute to opening up a critique of
the very categories through which we were pulled and rendered
unintelligible, and of the violence of that pulling. So, for example,
the term single women, which includes lesbians and nuns and
prostitutes, makes perfect sense in India, as an otherness in rela-
tion to dominant kinship systems, but it isn’t necessarily meaning-
ful elsewhere. Also, the way the past was dealt with by lesbians
in the 1980s: appropriated, excavated, reconfigured, reinvented,
or re-analyzed. The work of history, of archives, has a whole set
of meanings in the context of 1980s Delhi that looks very differ-
ent if one is situated in the West and thinking about “queer” and
“past.” In the article I try to engage with the work of two lesbians
reading literatures, Indian philosophies, sacred architecture, read-
ing very differently from each other and doing something very
different with the readings. I tried to bring out this difference,
but I also know that from a U.S. point of view it can all get lost
or displaced onto other criteria such as that one lesbian is in the
academy, another is not, or that there’s some kind of obsession
with history happening there. If you read what’s being written
today, it’s as if the 1980s never happened, with the exception of
an anthology by Nivedita Menon called Sexualities, which does
work against the grain to un-erase a certain moment. Now my
article has become archival material for the period, something to
work with, hopefully critically.
maese-cohen: I’m also thinking of your review of feminist
scholarship on the experiences of Partition and how these authors
didn’t feel heroic about “giving voice” to Others but felt very con-
cerned about how to do this responsibly.13 And here you suggest
that part of the concern for those who haven’t had a voice turns

into a type of self-reflexivity that you name a “critical-intersub-

jective-feminist-historiography,” which you describe as having “a
deep personal style that refuses to negate the emotional nature of
narrations” and that also undoes the binary between dominant
historiographies of Partition and more aesthetic forms such as the
literary and the filmic (“RP,” 570). I’m interested in this because I
see this throughout much feminist work and decolonial work, this
double move of deep personal style and transdisciplinarity that
works across genres. I’m thinking of foundational decolonial texts
like Souls of Black Folk, Wretched of the Earth, Borderlands, Sis-
ter Outsider, Peregrinajes. Can you speak about this double move
of transdisciplinarity and autobiographical or self-reflexive voice
in your own work in women’s studies or as a more general pat-
tern of decolonial feminist projects?
bacchetta: Well, about voice, archives, and “critical-intersub-
jective-feminist-historiography”: yes. Many of us are working in
areas that are highly contestatory, characterized by a total absence
of recognizable archives. This is different from archives that si-
lence various voices (such as peasants in revolt for early subaltern
studies) or from an abundance of archives (as when I worked on
Hindu nationalist publications). I have a collection of Hindu na-
tionalist publications that fills up two large floor-to-ceiling book-
shelves. Hindu nationalist subjects are dominant subjects, they’ve
left an abundance of traces. In contrast, to work to find, listen to,
hear, certain subaltern subjects is actually to co-create archives as
one moves along.
The scholarship on Partition you mention, and two books in
particular, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition,
by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, and The Other Side of Silence:
Voices from the Partition of India, by Urvashi Butalia—all three
authors are friends of mine—these books were very interesting to
me because of the crisis that the authors went through in trying to
produce their archives. They produced a critical-intersubjective-
feminist historiography out of silence. They did so in intersubjec-
tivity with the interviewees. They were concerned with what to
do with silence: their own and the interviewees’; sometimes how
to hear it, render it intelligible, at other times how to retain it and

not try to fill it up, where the silence itself was most meaning-
ful. While trying to create an archive, then to analyze it, render
it meaningful, we need to think about what to do with silences;
there are so many different kinds of silences. Both books are ex-
quisite in that way.
maese-cohen: Can you say more about the attractiveness of a
decolonial framework? And then more specifically as you see that
it relates to Xicana feminisms?
bacchetta: My entry into U.S. decolonial feminisms is
through a range of feminisms of color in the U.S., and Xicana
feminisms have been central to that. There’s an immediate con-
nection for me through my experiences in the U.S. (early on) and
France (later) and through analytics in DYKETACTICS!, in fran-
cophone texts like Fanon, Memmi, Césaire, and many others that
remain untranslated into English like Rabah or Khiari.
Specifically in Xicana feminisms the work of Gloria Anzaldúa
and Norma Alarcon has been inspiring. Anzaldúa’s method for
doing critical and creative historiography, her notion of cono-
cimientos for alternative ways of knowing and mestiza, which she
redefines in her own way, her concepts of borderlands, multiplici-
ties, pluralisms, the New Tribalism that work against the grain
of national normativities, all these are very useful. Anzaldúa
refused to negate any part of herself, refused all the binaries, but
also refused to make “race” and racism disappear. Also Norma
Alarcon’s insightful notion of the unitary subject of feminism (the
unmarked white feminist subject as the unavowed basis for domi-
nant feminisms), her antiracist but also anti-essentialist analyt-
ics of racialized subjects, her response to dominant accusations
of identity politics. These ideas have been central for my work
on lesbians of color in France and on alliances. Chela Sandoval’s
work, too, is vital. It’s been wonderful to have the opportunity to
engage with other scholars on decolonial theory, especially in the
context of the conferences Norma Cantu has been organizing on
Gloria Anzaldúa’s work.14 And I think we really need to produce
more translations of Xicana feminisms, have more dialogues,
move forward together. Postcolonial theory is also useful, but
it’s different from decolonial feminisms. The critique of class and

sexuality, the place of the body, the place of the subject, how it’s
conceptualized, how these theories are positioned in power, all
these happen differently.
maese-cohen: Do you think that this inclusion of issues of
class and sexuality distinguishes the decolonial from the postcolo-
nial? Or let me open up the question and ask, how do you think
the postcolonial and the decolonial are different?
bacchetta: They are very different, even if sometimes over-
lapping. I think each has a different set of contributions to make,
and both are valuable. As intellectual formations they were con-
stituted in different sites, each with their own histories, by sets
of subjects who are differently positioned in relation to power in
their immediate contexts and globally. Decolonial theory is elabo-
rated by subjects in the U.S. who are marginalized, subalternly
racialized here in the U.S., formed as subjects through marginal-
ization and subaltern racialization. Postcolonial theory has been
elaborated by subjects who come of age after colonialism in a
context (India) that had been colonized and was still under the
effects of colonialism; but as subjects they are positioned at a
very high level of their society, in elite sectors, and so there is a
lot that gets missed. If you just look, for example, at a discussion
of class in subaltern studies, the whole question of whether the
subaltern can speak, some things about it were very shocking to
me because, as I told you, the knowledge produced by one among
many possible categories of subaltern, Dalits, all sorts of analyses,
written down, that Dalits have been producing are not taken up
in subaltern studies very much. Where are Dalit scholars in the
subaltern studies group? And when Dalits are the object of study,
where is the engagement with Dalit thought, with Dalit analyt-
ics? Postcolonial theory is useful, it deconstructs many things, it
explains many things, but it suffers from an incomplete analysis
of power. In that sense I very much agree with Anne McClintock’s
critique of how the notions of colonialism and postcolonialism
get simplified, homogenized, reduced. And I think postcolonial
theory could be enriched with a more intense critique of power,
with the notion of scattered hegemonies as a point of departure.
Decolonial feminisms and postcolonial feminisms as intellec-

tual formations do not have exactly the same pre-occupations his-

torically or currently. For example, Xicana feminisms have been
very concerned with thinking about macro-relations of power (as
in Anzaldúa’s critique of history and her production of alternative
historiography) but not to the detriment of power at every other
scale. The “de” acknowledges materialities, power across scales,
the symbolic, culture, and it acknowledges a completely intimate
relation to subject formation under conditions of colonialism.
And the “de” has a sense of undoing, and undoing also opens a
space for a different kind of doing. Anzaldúa, Alarcon, and many
others are concerned with power in the formation of the body,
with mobilities, with the inseparability of gender, class, racial-
ization, sexualities, culture, colonialism, and religion in subject
formation.
It’s important to note that the reception of decolonial theory
in the U.S. and European academies has been radically different
from the reception of postcolonial theory, and to ask why. Xi-
cana feminisms are excluded or devalued in the most elite sites.
The appalling problems faced by Norma Alarcon at Berkeley, the
fact that Gloria Anzaldúa, the author of so many books that were
part of syllabi in universities across the country, was never seen
to merit a PhD in her lifetime at UC Santa Cruz, all this should
indicate the place, or rather the nonplace, reserved for Xicana
feminisms in U.S. academic institutions. What academic positions
or high-level academic chairs specifically for Xicana feminisms
studies exist in any elite universities in the U.S.? In contrast, post-
colonial theory has been able to move into the center of the U.S.
academy, in elite institutions, in university-wide chairs. I think
it’s important for us to look at that situation and to analyze why.
But let’s be clear: I think of these more as a both-and than as an
either-or.
maese-cohen: Can you say more about the openness of
Anzaldúa’s work in relation to decolonial and coalition work?
It seems to me that intimacy is about everyday practices of de-
colonizing the mind and the body, related to coalition building.
To my mind, the intimacy of the body and the decolonial are
inseparable.

bacchetta: I think this is a major contribution of the “de,”

the labor at the site of the intimate, an ongoing process. An-
zaldúa’s Borderlands exemplifies it as method. And how is it
related to coalition work? One cannot build coalitions unless the
subjects of the coalitions can recognize themselves and each other
as subjects. And unfortunately, the damage of gender, racism,
slavery, colonialism, of heteronormativity and even homonorma-
tivity, of immigration, war, is such that those who are Othered in
relation to the dominant order, who are actually formed within
it as subjects, do not automatically consider themselves as full
subjects and are not considered as full subjects. I think there are
varying intensities of subjecthood in the world. The colonial has
done a number on time and space. Johannes Fabian (who wrote
Time and the Other) and others demonstrate how the dominant
imagines the other as fixed in an earlier temporality. The other
is constructed as “backward,” needing to be developed, pushed
into “progress,” saved, all that. I don’t think it’s possible to build
enabling alliances unless the subjects of the potential alliances are
willing to understand ourselves and each other as subjects-in-pro-
cess, in the sense of Norma Alarcon in her article “The Theoreti-
cal Subjects of This Bridge.” We’ve all been formed in power; it’ll
require a lot of work to undo our own formation, to open up to
something else. No matter how we’re positioned we have a lot
of work to do. Those from dominant sectors need to decolonize
themselves, albeit differently since their formation is different to
begin with. The “de” process has to happen all over the place,
and not just for subaltern subjects who have been damaged in
one way or the other and who are imagined to be the only ones
damaged. Colonialism is a damaging process for all involved:
colonized, colonizer. Building coalitions—and I’ve done a lot of
coalition work—requires a lot of work from all subjects involved.
The “de” of decolonial feminisms can help us get there.
maese-cohen: I know that you are currently working on a
book about coalitions. Can you tell me more about it?
bacchetta: The book I’m writing is called Enabling Transna-
tional Feminist Alliances. I mean enabling in several ways: creat-
ing conditions to enable alliances, constructing alliances that are

politically enabling. It engages with how we’ve understood power,

in dominant feminist and queer scholarship, in scholarship on
intersections to assemblages to co-formations and co-productions.
It revisits Fanon, Levinas, Anzaldúa, Alarcon, and others to re-
flect on what it takes to produce the kind of intersubjectivity that
will allow for alliances. Then there’s a chapter that addresses and
deconstructs a whole range of unhelpful alliances, such as the
national-normative ones between dominantly positioned-minded
white feminists or queers in the United States and their similarly
located counterparts in other countries. There are also savior alli-
ances where certain women in the Western world or global North
think they’re going to go save everybody else, the kind of so-
called alliance that buys into what Spivak has termed “white men
saving brown women from brown men.”
But actually the main aim of the book is to reflect upon the
kinds of alliances we can construct that make sense politically,
that are enabling, and this at a number of different scales. I ana-
lyze a lot of examples, from local to transnational. For instance,
at a small scale, the city-wide scale: in Paris there’s a group called
Lesbiennes contre la Discrimination et le Racisme (Lesbians
against Discrimination and Racism, or LDR). The members are
lesbians of color and some white lesbians. They first came to-
gether out of a desire to undo racism within lesbian communities
together. There’s so much of it, but I won’t go through that with
you now. This group is really surprising. I was able to be a part
of it for three months when I was based in Paris two years ago.
It’s amazing, its members all want to do decolonial work together.
They’re fine with being vulnerable with each other while doing it.
It’s very unusual in France. Their work goes beyond the group.
Several of the white women live in a collective living situation
with lesbians of color. There’s a real bond.
What can I tell you about racism in France? It’s very difficult.
If you’re white and you talk about it, other white people are fine
with that. If you’re a person of color and you briefly mention it,
watch out. I can give you an example. I gave a talk version of my
piece on “Co-productions” before it was published, in Paris in an
auditorium of two hundred women, mostly lesbians and probably

98 percent white. I thought I was going to be murdered on the

stage. The last part of the text, on the veil issue and protests by
veiled lesbians—that’s all they could talk about. It’s a piece that
does theories of power, theories of resistance, racialization, postst-
lavery, and only at the very end do I include a short section about
the veil law and veiled lesbians protesting it. That part was to
illustrate how some content is inaccessible to analytics of power
(here the lesbianism of the veiled lesbians whom those observing
the march presumed were straight), how a grid of intelligibility
limits visualities, but also the imperfect agency, not the romantic
agency, of Muslim lesbians who are veiled. Everybody’s agency is
imperfect; while I was refusing to categorize the veiled lesbians as
alienated cows I also wasn’t trying to construct them as heroines
or even as holier than thou. I was trying to talk about how they’re
much more than all of that, and how they provide an interesting
critique of everything we think we already know. But the audience
did not hear anything beyond “veiled lesbian.” They got incensed.
People stood up and yelled, “How could it be that there was even
one veiled lesbian?” The veiled lesbian was an impossible subject
for them. They couldn’t believe that even one lesbian was veiled.
That is, they believed me—they know me, I didn’t make it up—
but there was still a disconnect. I had to point out that this dis-
connect was precisely the problem, the problem of the incapacity
to think about power, subjects, histories, and contexts outside of
a certain schema.
maese-cohen: Which seems to reinforce your point as to why
veiled lesbians at the march didn’t announce themselves as such.
Look at the kind of violence you received just by proxy.
bacchetta: Yes. There’s an enormous amount of violence.
maese-cohen: I also want to get your views on anti-Muslim
violence in this country. In your work on Hindu nationalism, you
describe anti-Muslim violence as religious-cultural. Is that a useful
framework for the U.S. context? When looking at anti-Arab, anti-
Muslim violence, how far can a U.S. model of race take us?
bacchetta: Actually I describe Hindu nationalism as a reli-
gious-cultural nationalism (since the primary criteria for inclusion
and exclusion is religious-cultural), as opposed to, say, territorial

nationalism (where the primary criteria for inclusion and exclu-

sion is land of birth).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but perhaps your question is about
the different frameworks for the construction of “race” (as dis-
cursive categories, the situated fictions) that are operative in prac-
tices of racism, and those practices themselves, together, or what
I’ve been calling the complex “race”-racism. There are in each of
these contexts very different histories, different categories, differ-
ent modalities, of “race”-racism.
Let’s take Hindu nationalist violence against Indian Muslims
and more recently against Indian Christians. It’s dependent upon
the specific forms of “race”-racism that have their genealogies in
the Indian context. It involves upper-caste Hindu auto-racializa-
tion, dominant racialization, and its production of caste catego-
ries. Then there are British colonial categorizations, elaborated in
different registers: the administrative construction of categories
like “tribal,” the delineation of religions in the early census, the
physical Partition of Bengal, orientalist constructions of Hinduism
and Islam, the production of political-legal definitions of religious
personal laws, a whole vocabulary and inscription (legal, social,
political, and inevitably psychic) about otherness in relation to
the dominant. The operative categories of “race” in India have
not been about morphologies primarily but rather about religion,
caste, culture, other criteria. (There are some issues of morphol-
ogy, too: today in India lighter skin, referred to as “wheat col-
ored,” is openly valorized. There are bleaching products like Fair
and Lovely. But at the same time some subalterns are lighter, some
dominants are darker. For example, Indian Muslims and Dalits
in the north might be lighter skinned than Brahmins in the south.
Bodies are filtered through specific categories in India, as in other
contexts.) The Hindu nationalist targeting of Muslims is pro-
duced in that history, which includes, inseparably, gender, racial-
ization, postcoloniality, class, sexuality. I’ve tried to think about
inseparabilities in lots of ways. For example, what I’ve called
queerphobic xenophobia (or the construction of others, such as
Muslims, as queerly sexualized, anormatively sexualized in terms
of excess and lack) and its interdependence with xenophobic

queerphobia (or the construction of Indian queers, including Hin-

du queers, in xenophobic terms as always already outside the na-
tion).15 Today the racialization of Muslims in India is reinforced
by transnational flows from the global West–global North. Some
Hindu nationalist organizations are referring to Indian Muslims
as “our Osamas.”
Now let’s think about the U.S. context. There’s a long history
of orientalizing Islam and Muslims in the U.S. and quite a bit of
excellent critical scholarship on it: in film studies, history, an-
thropology, work on the construction of Middle East studies, etc.
Historically U.S. Muslims have been relatively invisible as such in
the public space, compared to other racialized groups, with a few
exceptional moments. Then, since 9/11, figures of Muslims have
been massively articulated, as a negative backdrop against which
to construct ideal U.S. citizen-subjects. The targeting of Muslims
here in the U.S. has all sorts of elements mixed into it. It can’t
rely on morphologies the way the targeting of African Americans
relies on biochromaticism, though, of course, there is a chromatic
element, the idea of people who “look Muslim” and all that.
Biochromaticism is always part of U.S. racializations—peoples
constructed as groups get assigned a color—black, brown, red,
yellow, white, even olive. That doesn’t make any sense in many
places across the globe. In Britain black is a coalitional term for
people of color, while here people of color is a coalitional term
to include all subalternly racialized subjects. So, transnationally,
we’re really talking about vastly different grids of intelligibility
and categories, each with a very different type of genealogy. But
in the U.S. morphological delineation business there’s, of course,
a tremendous amount of confusion too. The first person to be
murdered after 9/11 as the subject of a racist crime “against Mus-
lims” was a Sikh mistaken for a Muslim in Mesa, Texas. Many
non-Muslims who “look Muslim” are harassed at airports, myself
included, and many Muslims who “do not look Muslim” are not.
There are morphological issues of recognition and especially of
misrecognition.
But let us not forget this: there are also histories of racialization
in the U.S. that have not operated primarily through the criteria

of biochromaticism but rather through criteria of religion, cul-

ture, civilization. That’s the case for Native Americans. To better
understand the current period, the racialization of Muslims here,
we should read the scholarship produced in Native American
studies about then and about now.
We could also remember that between 1989 and 2001 there
was an empty space of the other produced through the official
collapse of communism. There’s something in the targeting of
Muslims that combines the historical targeting of Native Ameri-
cans, fulfills the need for someone/something to occupy the empty
space of the other left by the disappearance of communism, some-
thing to constitute the backdrop for the auto-construction of the
proper U.S. citizen-subject.
Some Muslims can inhabit that category, too, of the proper
U.S. citizen-subject. For example, the so-called authentic Muslim
woman who denounces Muslim patriarchy from within is held
up now as a hero. Go to any mainstream bookstore, most any-
where in the Western world, and it’s the big bestseller. Even white
women married to Muslim men denouncing them, that sells, too.
Think of that film Not without My Daughter. Of course, this
is all tremendously problematic, it’s murderous, it has material
consequences.
In the U.S. right now there’s a cathecting of what bell hooks
calls controlling images of African American men onto Muslim
men. They’re constructed as hypersexual, hyper-aggressive. It’s
been there for awhile; Jack Shaheen talks about it, the documen-
tary film Hollywood Harems displays it: the hypersexual sheik
figure who attacks white women, the purity of white women that
is at stake not unlike in Birth of a Nation. This reshuffling is also
affecting other subalternly racialized communities. For instance, I
never saw so many “I love America” T-shirts worn by brown and
black people as after 9/11; it’s a survival mechanism.
maese-cohen: Your work on the Shah Bano case shows us the
limits of using the law as an index of the rights gained for certain
communities—in that case, for the category of woman. What are
your thoughts on U.S. discourses and activism around legalizing
gay marriage, in general, and in relation to queer people of color?

bacchetta: I find marriage to be highly unappealing politi-

cally, whether heteronormative or homonormative. Look at the
genealogy of marriage in the global Northwest. It’s historically
based on propertied individuals who had a familius, meaning
dominant, property-owning men who had a wife, children, and
land. Woman, children, and land, all of these are a man’s prop-
erty. That’s marriage. Now, the forms: marriage has changed
historically, of course. But today in the U.S. marriage still defines
kinship; it does so in terms of a dominant mythical heterosexual
nuclear family. It’s mythical because, in fact, such a family does
not correspond to reality; statistically there are massive heterosex-
ual divorce and multiple kinship forms. In fact, just when white
nuclear-heterosexuals are really tired of marriage and are arrang-
ing their lives in many other ways, white queers want to revive it.
Whatever happened to the feminist critique of marriage?
Marriage is a real problem for queers of color. We need to
think about what kinds of queer subjects and relationships gay
marriage legitimizes and what kinds it farther marginalizes. We
need to think about the place of “race”-racism in the construction
of queer of color sexuality and heterosexuality of color. In fact, all
sexualities of color have been constructed as anormative, in terms
of excess or lack in relation to white sexualities. Patricia Hill Col-
lins’s work shows, for example, this anormativity in the hetero
figures of the Jezebel, the Mammy, the Welfare Queen, and so on.
If the proper model for marriage is white heterosexuals, when
queers of color marry, who and what is transacting, entering into
a deal, getting domesticated, and how? And what effect does
queer gay marriage have on other forms of queer of color kinship,
on straight of color kinship, on any form of alternative kinship?
I think there are two main desires in gay marriage: recognition
and rights. Both have problems. Recognition is about seeking ap-
proval for queer relationships. But it requires domestication; the
dominant can only recognize what is intelligible to him. There is
violence in attempting to fit oneself into dominant intelligibility. It
does psychic damage, closes off and de-legitimizes other forms of
queer relations.
The second element is about equal rights because, of course,

heteronormative marriage confers, literally, a thousand types of

rights, some of them very useful. If you can’t go see your part-
ner when she’s dying in the hospital because you’re not a relative
by blood or marriage, it’s really problematic. I think everyone
should have the one thousand rights. Currently queers are not full
citizens because we don’t have full rights. I just think these rights
should belong to every human being, decoupled from the require-
ment of marriage.
The law is also limited as an index of improvement in our con-
ditions. In fact, gay marriage is making conditions, issues, invis-
ible. It operates in the public space as though it’s our only issue.
It’s mobilized LGTB people, drained LGTB funding. But whose
interests does gay marriage serve, and whose does it erase? Have
you seen the galactic rate of homelessness among queers, espe-
cially queers of color? Joblessness? Suicides? How does the “let’s
go get a piece of paper and live in a suburbia of the mind” kind
of thing have anything to do with the materialities of the most
subaltern in our communities? I’m delighted that queers raised
$43 million in California, but why did it all have to go for gay
marriage? We could have used it in queer communities to create
housing for our homeless, retirement homes for our aged, jobs,
operations for trans folks, research on AIDS, breast cancer.
It’s complicated, though. The U.S. right wing is attacking gay
marriage as a way to attack queer humanity. I see this, so I’ve
actually been in the contradictory position of having to argue
against right-wing arguments against gay marriage. Then there’s
the fact that two sets of my closest queer friends got married;
I’m as close to them as ever! My point is not to attack those who
are into gay marriage as somehow more privileged or even more
alienated than thou. It’s not personal. Instead we need a wider,
more inclusive political debate about how to define and work on
queer issues.
maese-cohen: I’d like to ask you about a similar issue in a
different context. What are your thoughts on the recent overturn-
ing of the 1861 British colonial law that criminalized homosexu-
ality in India?
bacchetta: Yes, IPC 377 (Indian Penal Code article 377)—an

annoying symbol of British colonial queerphobia, and the juridi-

cal means to exile queers from the social. It’s nice that it’s over.
But I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s a victory after a
long struggle. I think of Siddharth Gautam Gupta, who unfortu-
nately is no longer with us. In 1991 he called a press conference
in Delhi and presented a pamphlet called Less Than Gay that
proposed sixteen legal changes that would benefit all queers. I
attended the press meeting; the media were much more open to
queer rights than we expected. The recent end of the sodomy law
is an interesting victory that should be celebrated.
But at the same time I have two concerns. One is that queers
have been, are, threatened in other ways aside from the law.
When gay men go to Connaught Place in Delhi to pick up other
men, police come in, try to exhort money, say “pay up or I’ll tell
your family.” That’s worse than IPC 377, because your whole
family is going to know. But beyond that, the conditions of queers
vary enormously, depending upon how one is located in relation
to religions, castes, the urban-rural divide, the north-south divide.
And also, sexual positionalities: what does the end of this law
do for hijiras (trans men to women), for example? What about
maitri karar (the coming together of two maidens or customary
lesbian marriage in rural Gujarat), which had escaped all laws?
And here’s another issue: what political work does the end of IPC
377 do right now, when, as Jasbir Puar rightly argues in her book
Homonationalism, Third World states’ acceptance of homosexu-
ality has become a litmus test for their entry into “civilization”?
The overturning of IPC 377 is great, but let’s remember that
there’s a lot more work to do.
maese-cohen: I’d like to close by saying thank you, and I
also want to ask you if there is anything you would like to say or
ask me.
bacchetta: I want to thank you as well. I think it’s quite in-
teresting that you’re doing this dossier, and in such an inclusive
way. I’ll be thinking about the interesting questions you’ve posed
for a while! I look forward to continuing the conversation with
you and especially to hearing more from you about your work,
your dissertation, your relation to decolonial feminisms, the deco-

lonial group you’re in, all of that. There’s something about it that
reminds me of the Anzaldúa conference, which, as you know, had
some wonderful panels. The way that Gloria’s work has traveled
and has been used in so many different ways for so many differ-
ent kinds of things, it’s very refreshing; there is a kind of openness
there. I’m not a person who feels like I have that many homes,
but I must say that there I felt it, I was happy. Intellectually, it was
a brilliant conference—fine discussions of the conceptual contri-
butions that Gloria made, which then enabled many others, serv-
ing as points of departure for vastly different problematics. I have
a feeling that this is going to last for a long time because we’re in
a present situation that calls for us to think with her. I can imag-
ine us thinking with Gloria for many generations away.
Notes
1. See Paola Bacchetta, “Dyketactics! Notes Towards an Un-silencing,”

in Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Lib-
eration, ed. Tommi Avicolli Mecca (San Francisco: City Lights Books,
2009), 218–31. Hereafter “D.”
2. Paola Bacchetta, “Co-formations: Sur les spatialités de résistance de
lesbiennes ‘of color’ en France,” Sexualité, genre et société 1, no. 1
(June 2009). Hereafter cited as “C.”
3. Frantz Fanon, “L’Algérie se devoilent,” L'an V de la révolution algéri-
enne (Paris: La Découverte, 2001 [1959]); Steve Pile, “Introduction:
Opposition, Political Identities and Spaces of Resistance,” in Geog-
raphies of Resistance, ed. Steve Pile and Michael Keith (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 1–32.
4. Paola Bacchetta, “Réflexions sur les alliances féministes transnation-
ales,” in Le genre au coeur de la mondialisation, ed. Helena Hirata et
al. (Paris: Presses de Sciences Politiques, 2010).
5. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sang (RSS) is a right-wing Hindu Na-
tionalist organization. See Paola Bacchetta, Gender in the Hindu
Nation: RSS Women as Ideologues (New Delhi: Women Unlimited,
2004).
6. Paola Bacchetta, “The (Failed) Production of Hindu Nationalized
Space in Ahmedabad, Gujarat,” Gender, Culture and Place 17, no. 5
(forthcoming).
7. For example: Tunisian Women’s Group, Movement of Black Women,

Algerian Women’s Group, and the Nanas Beurs. See Miriam Ticktin,
Paola Bacchetta, and Ruth Marshall, “A Transnational Conversation
on French Colonialism, Immigration, Violence and Sovereignty,” on-
line at http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/immigration.
8. Frantz Fanon, Pour la révolution africaine (Paris: La Decouverte,
1964), 37–52.
9. See “D,” 218–31; see also Paola Bacchetta, “Extra-Ordinary Alli-
ances: Women Unite against Religious-Political Conflict in India,”
in Feminism and Anti-Racism: International Struggles, ed. Kathleen
Blee and France Widdance (New York: New York University Press,
2002), 220–40.
10. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, introduction to Scattered He-
gemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed.
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1994), 1–33.
11. Norma Alarcon, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called
My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” in Making Face, Making
Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Femi-
nists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books,
1990), 356–69.
12. The term “lesbian” in quotation marks refers to Indian women who
love women and do not identify with the term lesbian. See Paola Bac-
chetta, “Rescaling Trans/national ‘Queerdom’: 1980s Lesbian and
‘Lesbian’ Identitary Positionalities in Delhi,” Antipode 34 (Novem-
ber 2002): 947–73.
13. See Paola Bacchetta, “Re-interrogating Partition: Voices of Women/
Children/Dalits in the Partition of Indian and Pakistan,” Feminist
Studies 26, no. 3 (2001): 567–86. Hereafter cited as “RP.”
14. See Paola Bacchetta, “Transnational Borderlands: Gloria Anzaldúa’s
Epistemologies ‘of Color’ in France,” in Prietas y Gueras: Celebrat-
ing Twenty Years of Borderlands/La Frontera, ed. Norma Cantu and
Christina L. Guiterrez (San Antonio: Adelante, 2009), 77–92.
15. Paola Bacchetta, “When the (Hindu) Nation Exiles Its Queers,” So-
cial Text 61 (Winter 1999): 141–66.


Decolonial Praxis Enabling Intranational and Queer Coalition Building

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Decolonial Praxis Enabling Intranational and Queer Coalition Building

Author(s): Paola Bacchetta

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maese-cohen: Can we start from the beginning? Where are

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and practice get linked in my life—perhaps these sites and frames

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I also had a second trial. I was arrested and jailed on trumped-

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we felt was useful—and much was extremely useful—but also

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ment, against nuclear power, etc. I wrote music and played in

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bacchetta: Throughout my life my intellectual pursuits have

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maese-cohen: I want to now talk about your work in India.

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bacchetta: Interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary are quite

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but I’m in favor of recognizing the many limitations of disciplines:

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also done fieldwork among people with whom I can identify in

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the French context as a Maghrebian, the French right wing would

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me about the riots. He told me to go back to Delhi. He was also

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dian study of witchcraft in the Bocage to be very helpful because

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of Hindu men’s historical and current sexism, including Hindu

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bacchetta: It’s a very complicated process to explain. But, to

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bacchetta: I haven’t kept in touch with all of them, only

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context of political conflict, you have to be prepared for unex-

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at La Maison des femmes (Women’s Center). A number of these

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way back, such claims came to be organized around the criteria

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of lesbian, of queer, but also possibly of Franco-French national

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racism, patriarchy, everything. We left traces all over the place.

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terpreted authors based on an incomplete archive, on one or two

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transnationally specifically in the formations that Inderpal Gre-

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have evoked it; they’re refreshing exceptions to what has other-

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how much damage living in France had done to me. I began to

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of Resistance by Lesbians ‘of color’ in France”; see “C”] was ac-

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their intertextualities with other feminisms of color. An astonish-

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turn to three different fields—published and unpublished works

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are combined, separated, readjusted, each as their own world. So,

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If I had not drawn on absolutely everything I had access to, in-

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