Francoise Verges – författare

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021***'A vibrant and compelling framework for feminism in our times' - Judith ButlerFor too long feminism has been co-opted by the forces they seek to dismantle. In this powerful manifesto, Francoise Verges argues that feminists should no longer be accomplices of capitalism, racism, colonialism and imperialism: it is time to fight the system that created the boss, built the prisons and polices women’s bodies. A Decolonial Feminism grapples with the central issues in feminist debates today: from Eurocentrism and whiteness, to power, inclusion and exclusion. Delving into feminist and anti-racist histories, Verges also assesses contemporary activism, movements and struggles, including #MeToo and the Women's Strike. Centring anticolonialism and anti-racism within an intersectional Marxist feminism, the book puts forward an urgent demand to free ourselves from the capitalist, imperialist forces that oppress us.

An antiracist theory of cleaning.In Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism, Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies, and resources and the organized deprivation of clean water, shelter, and access to health services—in other words, the structural denial, along racial lines, of vital needs. Through 38 short sections, she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into drudgery and into a racialized, gendered, poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or, simply put, of “decolonial cleaning.”To Vergès, the structural denial of the elemental needs of women of color (sanitary pads, access to water, and privacy for basic washing), and why these needs are considered insignificant and trivial, shows how racism and class war are gendered. By examining the banal, the trivial, and the elemental, the author addresses cleaning as a necessity rather than the maintenance of a consumerist lifestyle, a condition of basic care of the body and the mind that is considered with indifference by racial capitalism, white environmentalism, and even, too often, by humanitarian organizations. She argues that by building “life-affirming institutions,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore advocates, struggles against the whitening of cleaning create sites of freedom. “Decolonial cleaning” imagines cleaning as taking care of land, humans, plants, animals, and rivers, not seeking to discipline them or transform them into commodities or objects of conservation but cleaning as a practice dedicated to sustaining the living world.

For too long feminism has been co-opted by the forces they seek to dismantle. In this powerful manifesto, Francoise Verges argues that feminists should no longer be accomplices of capitalism, racism, colonialism and imperialism: it is time to fight the system that created the boss, built the prisons and polices women's bodies. A Decolonial Feminism grapples with the central issues in feminist debates today: from Eurocentrism and whiteness, to power, inclusion and exclusion. Delving into feminist and anti-racist histories, Verges also assesses contemporary activism, movements and struggles, including #MeToo and the Women's Strike. Centring anticolonialism and anti-racism within an intersectional Marxist feminism, the book puts forward an urgent demand to free ourselves from the capitalist, imperialist forces that oppress us.

'A robust, decolonial challenge to carceral feminism' - Angela Y. Davis***Winner of an English PEN Award 2022***The mainstream conversation surrounding gender equality is a repertoire of violence: harassment, rape, abuse, femicide. These words suggest a cruel reality. But they also hide another reality: that of gendered violence committed with the complicity of the State.In this book, Françoise Vergès denounces the carceral turn in the fight against sexism. By focusing on 'violent men', we fail to question the sources of their violence. There is no doubt as to the underlying causes: racial capitalism, ultra-conservative populism, the crushing of the Global South by wars and imperialist looting, the exile of millions and the proliferation of prisons – these all put masculinity in the service of a policy of death.Against the spirit of the times, Françoise Vergès refuses the punitive obsession of the State in favour of restorative justice.

'A robust, decolonial challenge to carceral feminism' - Angela Y. Davis***Winner of an English PEN Award 2022***The mainstream conversation surrounding gender equality is a repertoire of violence: harassment, rape, abuse, femicide. These words suggest a cruel reality. But they also hide another reality: that of gendered violence committed with the complicity of the State.In this book, Françoise Vergès denounces the carceral turn in the fight against sexism. By focusing on 'violent men', we fail to question the sources of their violence. There is no doubt as to the underlying causes: racial capitalism, ultra-conservative populism, the crushing of the Global South by wars and imperialist looting, the exile of millions and the proliferation of prisons – these all put masculinity in the service of a policy of death.Against the spirit of the times, Françoise Vergès refuses the punitive obsession of the State in favour of restorative justice.

'A complete overhaul of the Western museum tradition' - Publishers WeeklyIn A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès strips away the veneer of the universal Western museum to reveal its origins as the foundation of liberal ideology.By exploring the history of the Louvre, and following the radical tradition of Frantz Fanon, she argues that the modern institution cannot just be fixed with a more diverse board or by finding new ways to display the art.Instead, she demands a 'post-museum': a space that rejects the financialization of art, acknowledges the bloody history of its collections, and prioritises the labour and dignity of those who clean, guard and inhabit its halls.

In the years since #MeToo, misogyny, sexism and gender based violence have flooded the news and our social media timelines. Anti-privilege politics and intersectionality have entered the mainstream—systematically trolled on one end of the spectrum; embraced, to questionable ends, on the other. But what has this increased visibility entailed, other than the marketisation of the feminist struggle?Feminism for the World argues that we have been witnessing an erasure of feminism as a long-term tradition, with its many conflicting histories and geographies of struggle elided and forgotten.In this ground-breaking collection, eight leading international figures of contemporary feminism highlight feminist struggles and traditions from the Global South, presenting feminism as a project that is impossible without international solidarity from the West. In doing so they revive an authentic internationalism and propose paths for present and future generations.

'A complete overhaul of the Western museum tradition' - Publishers WeeklyIn A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès strips away the veneer of the universal Western museum to reveal its origins as the foundation of liberal ideology.By exploring the history of the Louvre, and following the radical tradition of Frantz Fanon, she argues that the modern institution cannot just be fixed with a more diverse board or by finding new ways to display the art.Instead, she demands a 'post-museum': a space that rejects the financialization of art, acknowledges the bloody history of its collections, and prioritises the labour and dignity of those who clean, guard and inhabit its halls.

In Monsters and Revolutionaries FranÇoise VergÈs analyzes the complex relationship between the colonizer and colonized on the Indian Ocean island of RÉunion. Through novels, iconography, and texts from various disciplines including law, medicine, and psychology, VergÈs constructs a political and cultural history of the island’s relations with France. Woven throughout is VergÈs’s own family history, which is intimately tied to the history of RÉunion itself. Originally settled by sugar plantation owners and their Indian and African slaves following a seventeenth-century French colonial decree, RÉunion abolished slavery in 1848. Because plantation owners continued to import workers from India, Africa, Asia, and Madagascar, the island was defined as a place based on mixed heritages, or mÉtissage. VergÈs reads the relationship between France and the residents of RÉunion as a family romance: France is the seemingly protective mother, La MÈre-Patrie, while the people of RÉunion are seen and see themselves as France’s children. Arguing that the central dynamic in the colonial family romance is that of debt and dependence, Verges explains how the republican ideals of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment are seen as gifts to RÉunion that can never be repaid. This dynamic is complicated by the presence of mÉtissage, a source of anxiety to the colonizer in its refutation of the “purity” of racial bloodlines. For VergÈs, the island’s history of slavery is the key to understanding mÉtissage, the politics of assimilation, constructions of masculinity, and emancipatory discourses on RÉunion.

In the 1960s thousands of poor women of color on the (post)colonial French island of Reunion had their pregnancies forcefully terminated by white doctors; the doctors operated under the pretext of performing benign surgeries, for which they sought government compensation. When the scandal broke in 1970, the doctors claimed to have been encouraged to perform these abortions by French politicians who sought to curtail reproduction on the island, even though abortion was illegal in France. In The Wombs of Women-first published in French and appearing here in English for the first time-FranÇoise VergÈs traces the long history of colonial state intervention in black women’s wombs during the slave trade and postslavery imperialism as well as in current birth control politics. She examines the women’s liberation movement in France in the 1960s and 1970s, showing that by choosing to ignore the history of the racialization of women’s wombs, French feminists inevitably ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of women of color. Ultimately, VergÈs demonstrates how the forced abortions on Reunion were manifestations of the legacies of the racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.

In the 1960s thousands of poor women of color on the (post)colonial French island of Reunion had their pregnancies forcefully terminated by white doctors; the doctors operated under the pretext of performing benign surgeries, for which they sought government compensation. When the scandal broke in 1970, the doctors claimed to have been encouraged to perform these abortions by French politicians who sought to curtail reproduction on the island, even though abortion was illegal in France. In The Wombs of Women-first published in French and appearing here in English for the first time-FranÇoise VergÈs traces the long history of colonial state intervention in black women’s wombs during the slave trade and postslavery imperialism as well as in current birth control politics. She examines the women’s liberation movement in France in the 1960s and 1970s, showing that by choosing to ignore the history of the racialization of women’s wombs, French feminists inevitably ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of women of color. Ultimately, VergÈs demonstrates how the forced abortions on Reunion were manifestations of the legacies of the racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.