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This conversation was recorded on 25th October 2022. Speakers: Gala Rexer, SPRC postdoctoral fellow // ¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð Vergès, political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist

Gala Rexer: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the SPRC podcast. My name is Gala Rexer. I’m a post-doctoral research fellow at the SPRC and I’m delighted to welcome ¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð Verges at the SPRC and here on the podcast. ¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð Verges is an activist and political theorist, who’s written on decolonial anti-racist feminism, slavery as a regime of extraction, the racial capitaloscene and anti-imperialism. 

She also curates exhibitions, anti-colonial workshops and performances with artists, refugees and activists of colour. The most recent one was at the Berlin Biennale in my actual hometown and her most recent books in English include A Feminist Theory of Violence, out with Pluto Press, The Wombs of Women, Race, Capital, and Feminism, out with Duke University Press and A Decolonial Feminism, also out with Pluto Press. Thank you so much for joining me today, ¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð.

¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð Verges:    Thank you.

Gala:    I appreciate it. So, I wanted to start our conversation by asking you a little bit about the broader questions that animate your recent work, so A Feminist Theory of Violence, The Wombs of Woman and A Decolonial Feminism. I have read them almost, I think, chronologically and I really felt that there’s a theme running through all of them, or several themes, and that they really connect, pick up questions that appeared earlier, like every book answers to a broader theme or a broader set of questions. So I was just wondering what are the major topics you wanted to address in these books and also maybe how they emerged from earlier work. 

¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð:    I think perhaps to begin with, it was my interest in understanding the emergence of a strong state feminism and written of white a bourgeois feminism, but really successful by the 2000s and what happened? What happened, how was it made possible that suddenly state and international organisations were all talking about women’s rights and even the business world, the corporate world. So why women’s rights had became so much… in fact, I would not say just manipulated but really of politics. So I wanted to understand that and from there, to explore different aspects or different examples that would allow me to analyse it and to clarify that. 

Then a second thing also was the strong emergence of decolonial feminist movement around the world. In South America the incredible courage and strength of the feminist movement there, the women’s strike, the fight against femicide and for abortion rights, but also, of course, Black Lives Matter connected with Palestinian Lives Matter and all those. Also still paying attention to the anti-imperialist, anti-racist movement, not saying that it had disappeared like we sometimes hear around.

And finally, I would say, to pay attention besides this movement to also… the need to express in my encounter with the younger generation for history, for giving the background, what happened before because we don’t get it at school, at the university. So this importance of transmission and this duty, in fact, for the older generation to do that work, very important for me to engage into that work of transmission.

Gala:    So can you talk a little bit more about that turn that you mentioned, to look really at the state level. So what you’re saying in your most recent book is really, we don’t need to look specifically at the individual man or the individual person who rapes or who harasses or who is violent in any way, but you sort of shift the discourse to look at a broader level, to look at the state level, to contest and to challenge that turn to carcerality in recent different sorts of feminism that you discuss. 

¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð:    Yes, you’re right. How do we answer to the incredible brutality and cruelty in the world today? And the turn to the state by some feminists, give us protection please and give us laws, give us more police, give us more possibility to harassment and put them in jail. And what’s happening? That was one thing but also what is the cruelty and the vileness today different than what happened before? And in a recent exchange with Christina Sharpe, and she was asking me how I was doing, and I say, as best as I can in these cruel times but when have they not been cruel? And she answered, yes, they always have been cruel but now more is unmasked and a lot is compounded.

And it made me think, because effectively, I had this feeling that it was like coming from everywhere, the assault coming from everywhere. There was not a place in the world that was not an assault on a woman’s body, on migrants, on refugees, on black people, on colonising, in occupation. There was like suddenly an incredible really setback, an incredible assault. So what could explain that, because effectively cruelty is not new and brutality is not new but what could explain? 

And for me it was an unleashing of capitalism gone wild, if I may say, that it needs to extract constantly. It needs to colonise, it needs to export, it needs to dispossess, to leave. It’s not just that, okay, it has to produce some goods and produce some desire for us to consume these goods. No. It’s kind of absolutely… it’s inseparable and inseparable from racism and, therefore, with sexism. 

I wanted also to make again the distinction in patriarchy, that patriarchy has been racialised. and I’m not the first one to say that but everyone understands that you can be even a tyrant at home but when you go out, you’re a brown man, a black man, an indigenous man and, therefore, you will not be a patriarch at the same level than the white patriarch. 

Secondly, we have heard from the women that came before us that we have to do two works, of course, two struggles - to fight for autonomy, woman’s autonomy but also not against the men in our community, our brothers, our son, our companion, our husband, our father. They are also colonised, racialised, exploited and these form a class, cannot disappear and anti-imperialism cannot disappear in the name of woman being the victim, and this binarism, all women are victims and all men are brutal did not for me absolutely erase an incredible history of brutality against men, against the body of brown and black and indigenous men, and really. 

So that view, that feminism view, seems to me totally, of course, abstract but also connected with the philosophy of liberal rights, of individual rights and also the defence of prison is for me astonishing. For me anyone who had been in a prison once cannot wish that to anyone and even for me, my enemies, where to put them is also a question because anyone who has been in jail knows that it’s a place that destroys, that crushes. It’s terrible, it’s cruelty and laws, of course, the state, the demand addressed to the state to protect, reinforcing police, reinforcing police, which are all patriarchal white or bourgeois, if not white, places. We see everywhere that this structure, this institution do not protect women. 

So what this question led to me because there is really a reaction that is emerging and also the last thing is it’s like more and more demand for laws of protection and more and more vulnerability and precarity fabricated against entire community and people. So that was not for me a paradox. It in fact, which are the [unclear] that deserve to be protected and those who can’t be, that not only do not deserve to be protected but even deserve to be sent to jail and criminalised, even the children being criminalised, the black, brown, indigenous children, Roma children being criminalised, Palestinian children being criminalised. At the same time there was so much work about protection of childhood and really making the world of children better and having the best education. So that for me again is not a product, it’s in fact the politics of capitalism. 

Gala:    Yes, and you really show that in the book. I would to have two follow up questions on that. Maybe first, because you just mentioned it, the idea of protection because you talk about it a lot in the book and it’s really an idea that’s been picked up by liberal white feminism but it hinges so much on the history of enslavement, colonialism, imperialism and I think the ways in which it shows up in the nation state form, it also is linked to citizenship, to recognition, to all these liberal concepts of access and representation. 

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about this conceptualisation of who deserves to be protected and in what terms this shows up in our societies, and maybe also how your work can help us understand a different politics of protection that doesn’t focus on vulnerability and weakness?

¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð:    Exactly, yes. First, of course, I wrote that all society is organised for protection, for the sick, for babies, for the elderly. Everyone understands, not weakness but the need for care, the need for help at one point, all this. But it’s conceived as organising the social life, that is effectively not based in individualism and the stronger the better I am. So that was important to say. So I was not advocating no protection because, in fact, that would be everyone for himself and is mostly. 

It was the way in which the protection was captured entirely by the state is an evolution that effectively to which feminists contributed. So, on the one hand, you could have laws of social protection that, in fact, we want to preserve in terms of daycare, maternity leave. We could call them laws of protection because effectively, they protect against an incredible precarity but they have been obtained because of struggle. So we should be careful when we talk about… when we attack protection by the state because it could allow the state to say, oh, then we could attack all this law which is happening here in the UK and is happening in France and everywhere else in Europe and, of course, in the United States, that attacking this because then you can take care of yourself. So that’s one thing. 

Then the other thing is I hope protection was captured by the state, in fact, to attack brown, black, indigenous people, especially black and brown women and that to effectively attack working conditions, housing – all of this was to attack that. So the protection became militarised and when I say that, it’s not just because in the end of the army but militarised in the sense of this is a war, of the vocabulary of war against the body of the people who are threatening the nation, the body of the nation and our women and our children. 

So how this discourse, and in fact politics, reinforces a xenophobic nationalism, a white nationalism, to wish in fact some people of colour can participate as we have seen recently in this country with the different Minister of Interior. So what I mean by that, that protection is we need to ramp up protection, to take it from this different end, grabbing it to, in fact, enforce individualism and one for oneself and repopulate it as effective politics that would be anti-racist and anti-capitalist, that will both fight against still to protect the rights of workers, women and men and others, but also to reinforce a form of solidarity. 

So solidarity as a form of protection, or protection as solidarity, I would say, because solidarity is also… the protection is not just physical protection, it’s also mental, that you know that if something happened to you, your friend would say or your companion or your comrade will come to you, and that’s also a form of protection against the state. So you are in a union, you are attacked, your comrades will come and protect you. You are in a collective, your friend will come. 

So again it’s like to clarify protection, that the state has been able to transform into one… giving it just one meaning only. The police will come, will protect you and will send the man who is responsible for attacking you to jail. So it’s very important because otherwise, if we don’t fight for this form of protection, we will be really in the kind of society in which people will arm themselves and what we are seeing here and there, an attack. So it’s very, very important to bring back solidarity, care, collectivity, community, again these laws.

Gala:    Yes, I agree. I really think that is a way, a beautiful way to think about it, like community and solidarity as a form of protection that is needed, of course, and I think I have a similar question for later on, but I think what’s so difficult in this book and in our world is how to talk about violence and how to describe it and how to analyse it and what I really found interesting is that you used Sayak Valencia’s term of Gore Capitalism. 

I felt like it had a short life. People were using it for a year or for two but then disappeared a little bit from leftist discourse, and it’s such an interesting term to really understand how violence is a form of governance and how death and violence is a commodity, has become a commodity. So I was wondering, for those who are not familiar with the term as much, if you could talk a little bit about how you use it, how it’s maybe needed to refine the term of racial capitalism and our analysis of capital more broadly. 

¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð:    What I found interesting in Sayak Valencia’s work was to say that capitalism, the violence is not just killing, it’s dismembering, throwing the body on a pile of garbage. There is, besides killing, an absolute will to demonise even the corpse, even the dead body and that there is some form of… capitalism is becoming like vengeful, and I think in response to what is being afraid of, of this, in fact, global mobilisation, because of course it is there but there is a global resistance, and we can see it and connect so many things. 

And the fear of that, the incredible fear, the punishment and we will… capital says we will punish you and very heavily. So this compounding to borrow again from Christina Sharpe of cruelty and brutality, we have to define it, to clarify it and not be afraid of it and be able to look really at the monster and not be petrified and say, okay, we see the incredible, how you destroy the world, plant, animal, river, forest, seas, ocean, mountain, everything. But that metaphor of the monster cannot become either something that becomes abstract, it’s very concrete, it’s very concrete and this concrete layer that we have also to grab on and then to answer in a matter... make materialist analysis of what’s happening, this is not just… this is not a movie, a science fiction movie with some kind of one of the stupid movies like an all-powerful monster. No, that monster is a social force. It’s socially constructed so it can be dismantled. This is not coming from whatever out of the universe, it’s not an alien force.

And I think Sayak with this proposition of Gore Capitalism, she was picking up on something with that and we have to show that it’s not enough to put people in jail at the border of Mexico. The state will separate children, even two-year-olds, from their parents. It has to go further. In Palestine, the Israel force will not just destroy the house, it will bring the family to see the destruction of their home and everything that is invested in that. So there was an incredible constant construction of, these people are a threat, an existential threat and that will lead to war, effectively, to this need, as I say, not only to kill but to a form of profanation of the body and that’s what Sayak Valencia showed in Gore Capitalism. 

And I thought it was important again, as I say, not to be afraid or not to be petrified by oh my god, this is horrible, how are people capable of that? Yes, of course they are capable of that because this is what’s happening every day. The violence is also the destruction of the world, of the condition of living for millions of people, billions of people and that is incredible violence. The fact that people can… so many people can no longer breathe because the air is polluted and contaminated. Breathing which is the first need of a human being and also the plant and animal and the water. It’s being forbidden. 

So we have to measure the extent to which capitalism is ready to unleash its brutality and for the few to imagine themselves living in an enclave protected, and this is an imperialist fascist protection, a form of protection, to be protected from the masses that could die of anger and contaminated water or air pollution. We really have to have the image of the world that is being constructed as we talk. 

Gala:    I think what’s really instructive in your work is the question that you ask and it relates to what you just said about who claims the world and what does this question tell us about space and bodies. So whose body is made disposable? Whose body is exhausted? And at the same time, whose body is made the perfect neoliberal subject and the perfect neoliberal body and the perfect clean space? 

And I think that’s really why your analysis is so important because it’s overarching. It talks about environmental pollution. It talks about social reproduction. It talks about, at the planetary state and its entanglement with coloniality and the afterlife of slavery. So could you talk a bit more about these extractive mechanisms that really are linked on the local and on the global?

¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð:    When I started to be interested in the strike of black cleaning women or brown cleaning women in Paris, cleaning railway station or hotels, because I thought that this was really an anti-colonial, racist, feminist struggle, not the blah-blah on radio whatever. These were on the ground and they had to overcome so many obstacles to do that and so when I was sometimes hearing, petty bourgeois or middle class young women complaining about what can we do, I said if these women can organise, they can read, they can understand and really formulate in a very clear way what is their experience as women, as black and as workers. So please. 

So that for me is really at the heart and the cleaning things is fitting because I find that there is such a naturalisation of cleaning, that you arrive in this room or everywhere you arrive in a bookstore, in a clinic, at the daycare centre or whatever, it’s clean and for me it’s so deeply that the society will not function without that cleaning. It’s not about just garbage not being picked up in the street which, when a strike happens, it’s like leading to total panic. It will not be possible, and I connected to what I call this economy of exhaustion that for me is connected with capitalism. So it’s not just extraction in the fact that you pick up and so you still, it’s you exhaust. 

Capital exhausts the soul and the body of brown and black people, indigenous people, exhausts in the fact that it sucks the life force out of it and we do know that what we call the life expectancy is shorter for all this community than for white people, it’s much shorter even among workers, white workers. For there is something here that is very important and when I say… because the cleaning body is exhausted but also has to deal with chemicals, has to deal with incredible physical effort. So that body has made possible the comfortable life of the healthy body that can live in a nice apartment, be protected from virus and everything because behind that clean healthy body, there is a body whose work is making that possible and with exhaustion makes that possible.

The last thing I wanted to say, I think that cleaning is also a decolonial, anti-racist, feminist question because we would always need cleaning. We’re not going to use robots. So for me, of course we have to fight for better conditions of work, possibly of unionised and all this, but then when we imagine that post-racist, post-capitalist, post-imperialist, post-colonial in the real sense of post-colonial world, how will we clean? It goes against what you asked me around the protection. 

So we also have to imagine, to put ourselves in this effort of imagination of what people before us, men and women before us, say okay, this is a dream towards which we have to fight. Freedom for the enslaved. Independence for the colonised. Rights for women. Rights for gays. What is our dream? So that dream, of course, needs imagination and so how would we clean our world, our post-racist world because this will no longer be organised like that. So for me it’s also after that to the world of imagination. 

Gala:    Yes, and I think that’s so connected to the family, to how we understand care, how we understand kinship, how we understand populations, even demography and how all of these also are used and we can see at present so strongly how these are used by conservative or right wing parties or movements globally. 

And at the same time, how your work or work of Sophie Lewis, for instance, to abolish the family imagines new ways of comradeship, of being together, of new ways of thinking how to do social and biological reproduction and I noticed obviously in your most recent book also the children, they figure really prominently in that work as subjects that we have to think about. 

So I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about how you connect all of these ideologies and how they’re so engrained in right wing political thinking, but also how we can think about them and organise them in a different way?

¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð:    Yes, that’s very important. As we know, slavery forbade kinship, the creation of kinship, making kin, making family. So we have to rethink family outside of patriarchal but we cannot just condemn family the way some white feminists have said. We know our family are very important in the struggle, in resistance and of course that is not to deny conflict within that structure but nonetheless, it’s also… black feminists have shown that but also feminists in the global south that, for a lot of people, men and women and children, going to the family, it’s nonetheless a form of refuge from the incredible racism and sexism, transphobia that we are confronted with. And effectively, it’s imagination of making kin but at the same time, what will happen with children who need care when they are babies, you don’t leave a baby like that. So how will we organise that? 

So this connection bringing back this kind of study also I think is very important, to realise, to rethink what are the links and the love that we need as human beings. So it’s not just an organisation, a mechanical organisation, how do we rethink love and affection with all the problems we know that go with these two things, because we need. As human beings we need to be loved and to love. We need to feel that there is, yes, a world of affect, that we live in a world of affect. 

So children, for me the way in which the state has criminalised some children for me also embodies so much, the fact that the state, the capitalist state, still want to forbid making kin and making family to some families, and this means that what is, even though as you were saying, white women always talking about family and family and family, for them there are some family that should not be allowed to develop and to live. 

Gala:    Yes, I think it sort of smoothly runs into my next question which is connected to the institution and we’re here at ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº, which was foundational in developing eugenicist thinking, which then again is connected to which sort of family and which sort of life and which sort of kinship is enabled by state violence, and which is prohibited and destroyed. I know that you’ve talked about that before and also your activism is about that. 

So how do we think about the institutions, such as the university, and its embeddedness in state violence and in surveillance and you talk about in your recent book as well, where you speak about an experience that you had in I think a North American university campus. So how do we think about that, how do we approach the institution and live in it but also beyond it?

¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð:    It’s a very important question because it’s a question for so many of us and so many people around, what do we do in an institution that structures in fact crushes us, crush our thinking? But at the same time to extract it for making more benefits. I don’t think there is an easy solution or a solution that would be all comfortable. We have to live with the contradiction. We have to live with the pain sometimes of working in that and the way to protect ourselves, to go back to protection, is to unionise, create collectives and live through that contradiction.

Because for now, I remember I have friends who say we should not even pay attention to the institution. But I say kids are entering this institution every day. I cannot let them alone confronting that. If they ask me, I cannot tell them, you should not go to the university. Me who has a PhD from Berkeley University, I’m going to tell people no, you don’t need that place and so on. Easily like that, whereas I can present myself as a person who has a PhD. 

So to overcome that pain or to overcome also a sense of powerlessness, because institutions create a sense of powerlessness. So you give up or you accept the position because it’s too much, it’s too complicated, it’s too heavy. and to navigate through that I will say in an institution, you are in a front position, let’s say at the university here. So you are in front of students, you’ve got to help them navigate through that institution. If one of the students comes to you and says what can I do, I’m black, I’m gay, I’m queer, I’m Muslim, whatever, I wear an Hijab and all this, you have, this is your duty. 

So we have to write about it, even if it has been written about before. We have to speak about it and we have to say yes, we know what you’re living. We have been through that and we’re going to help you to navigate, and we have to help those write Masters theses or PhD theses and we cannot find support here, we have to support, to help them through research, telling them this is effectively a work of solidarity, active solidarity. It’s active. It’s a lot of work and I understand that we sometimes can be exhausted but that’s what we have to do because people before us did it for us. So we have to do that. That is the only way to survive. 

Gala:    I want to end on a note of revolutionary love and joy because you also end the book on that note and I think you mentioned it a few times during the conversation. It’s so important to not just analyse and criticise but to imagine what’s next and to plan for what’s next. So what is your… how do you define, how do you think about peace in your project of a decolonial feminism?

¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð:    But first I would say that we have also to absolutely nourish friendship. Friendship is for me absolutely a source of incredible importance. Love of course but friendship is love. We have to have friends. We have to cook for them. We have to have fun, to go dancing, singing, walking in the forest, whatever, laughing about some kind of… I don’t know, the love story or one of them, whatever. We have to have this moment of lightness. That’s very important. 

I love to cook. I really love that, and I spend hours to cook for friends. When they arrive, I want that they’re going to have an incredible dinner that they would remember. So it’s not going to be just like one dish but it’s going to be like five appetisers and three things after and this and that and this, and the water will be perfumed with this and this and so on, and there will be the best wine for those who drink wine. It’s very important because this is what I can do. I cannot sing. I cannot play a musical instrument which is also a beautiful thing. I can’t play the piano or whatever. I cannot remember a poem to be able to say it loudly but I can do that. So this I do and that’s part of for me very important. 

So the question of love, the source of resistance but in a very deep way is absolutely essential because this capital cannot take this away. And the way in which one understands people who go together to strike or to organise a collective in the neighbourhood and the way in which they say we have five sisters and brothers, I have a new family, says something about that creation of something that gives them strength, hope and love. 

And that love is for me building a utopia, emancipatory utopia is extremely important and this is why for me the work of imagination is essential today. So this is for me a very essential work because they cannot colonise that dream and we have to have it and I think we have to clarify it because the capital has really colonised… even they want to colonise even imagination and the production of fear about superpower is part of that, like let’s invest in some kind of superpower that’s going to save us from the catastrophe in which they are taking us and for me it’s like no, that will not be some superpower, it will be us. We are the superpower. We are the superpower and we have to be clear about that and in fact, they are afraid of us. We should not forget that and that, effectively, we will be strong together. 

This struggle will not go without loss and real loss and setback and defeat but what has been the struggle if not also that? But also with a beauty of this memory, of people who dare, women and men who dare to walk in the street and say no, that will not be the world that we want and all that, or the daily resistance, you will not erase us, you will not erase us and that, you want us to disappear. We will not disappear and that is for me love also.

Gala:    I think that’s a good note to end the podcast on. Thank you so much ¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð.

¹ó°ù²¹²Ôç´Ç¾±²õ±ð:    Thank you.