Everywhere and Nowhere. Intersectionality and the LGBTQ Movement in France

Despite social sciences’ growing interest in sexual minorities, literature regarding the role of race within LGBTQ social movements in Europe remains fragmented. The sociology of social movements, in particular, remains wary to question the whiteness and Eurocentric biases of queer theory and LGBTQ politics. Yet, race is a subject of contention that permeates LGBTQ movements. This paper addresses this subject in the French context based on a six-month ethnographic work undertaken among the activist group Tjenbé Rèd, established in 2004 and devoted to the specific issues faced by Afro-Caribbean, West African, black and mixed-raced LGBTQ people.

The data reveals that Tjenbé Rèd situates its claims concomitantly in various political spaces, reflecting the social position of its members. Nevertheless, this multi-spatiality tends to detract from its legitimacy in the eyes of the group’s political partners, maintaining sexual minorities of color in an interstitial space, an “elsewhere” of both the LGBTQ and the antiracist movements. This invisibility is strengthened by the ubiquity of narratives that overshadow the specific knowledge and positionality of these populations. An example is the rhetoric of “the homophobic Arab/Muslim men of the banlieue”, which considers race and sexuality exclusively through the lens of Islam and its supposed incompatibility with French/European values. While discussing the mechanisms that relegate sexual minorities of color to the margins of the political scene, this paper also argues that this “elsewhere” is a space where political subjects such as Tjenbé Rèd produce innovative registers of protest which reformulate fundamental aspects of the LGBTQ movement.