Decolonial Feminist Thought: My conversation with Françoise Vergès

This event was hosted by UCL's Sarah Parker Remond Centre as part of the Perspectives on Racialisation, Gender and Feminist Methodologies Seminar Series 2022-2023 organised by Dr Gala Rexer, Research Fellow at the SPRC.

“If feminism and feminists are in the service of capital, the state, and empire, is it still possible to breathe life back into them, by reanimating the movement with the objectives of social justice, dignity, respect, and the politics of life against the politics of death?”

—Professor Françoise Vergès in A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto, 2021)

Decolonial feminism: a politics, working towards the abolition of capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and the state; a theory, rethinking logics of exploitation, oppression, and the institutions that engender them; a pedagogy, recognizing and understanding difference as a pre-condition for working together across difference. Françoise Vergès and Edna Bonhomme repoliticize feminist thinking and practice, which have been increasingly deployed in the service of the carceral state, neoliberalism, and developmental paternalism. In this conversation, they will think through state violence, climate catastrophe, racial capitalism, and reproductive (in)justice in order to map out a cartography of decolonial feminist thought. This event took place on 25 October 2022 at University College London.