1For the past twenty years, the introduction in France of the notion of intersectionality (Crenshaw 2015 [1989]: 140 and 1991: 1244) and its associated political and scientific propositions (Dorlin 2009, Jaunait and Chauvin 2013) has given rise to considerable debate and controversy. In the press and in the political arena but also in a fringe of the academic world, unfounded attacks have delegitimized intersectionality outright as an American import that contributes to an excessive focus on mechanisms of racialization (Policar 2020, Lépinard and Mazouz 2021).

2In contrast, among specialists in social relations of domination and stigmatization, criticism has been leveled mostly against “whitening” by intersectionality (Bilge 2015), in other words the disregard of race in favor of gender and class, and the depoliticization of this approach. The resolutely applied and militant dimension of intersectional approaches at the origin contrasts with their use as a heuristic tool simply to produce knowledge as an end in itself. At the same time, the absence or scarcity of specialists from minority and notably non-white populations among those who derive the most symbolic and material benefit from the popularization of this notion has been denounced as a symptom of the reproduction of inequalities that the intersectional approach is supposed to deconstruct and combat (Aït Ben Lmadani and Moujoud 2012, Meyenga 2023).

4An ethnography of Marseille’s “QPOC” (queer people of color) networks, conducted since September 2021, reveals the extent to which, beyond trade unions, political parties and associations, the notion of intersectionality has become popular and has spread to the private sphere via the press and social media. The question this article addresses is whether those who refer to intersectionality in these non- or less academic contexts are themselves members of the minorities likely to suffer the combined effects of sexism, class exploitation, racism, LGBTphobia, validism and any other relationship of domination, exclusion and stigmatization. In addition to the study of the history of contemporary political ideas, analysis of the spread of intersectionality beyond academic and political circles raises more specific socio-anthropological questions. What more ordinary political and social uses of these ideas are made in everyday life as they become more widespread? More precisely, in what discourses, beliefs and practices do these ideas appear?

5To answer these questions, this article presents an overview of the research I am currently carrying out in Marseille and focuses more specifically on interviews with Awa and Ngozi, two artists in their twenties who identify as black and queer women. I also use elements of participant observation to provide contextual information on the chosen field of study.

6I first describe the social milieu of Marseille, which I unexpectedly joined because of my position as an anthropologist and my sociological profile. The processual approach adopted in the second part sociologizes the choice of an intersectional perspective. Entirely conditioned by a transmitted or acquired capital mainly educational and cultural but also financial, this paradigm places words on an experience of racialization implicitly linked to the status of women, while at the same time serving to construct an ethnicity based on the incomplete transmission of practices and beliefs from the country of origin of the parent or parents who experienced migration from Central or West Africa. The third and final section looks at how interviewees currently experience the connections between their double minority status as queer (and, to a lesser extent, women) and as non-whites (an experience of racialization always linked with a reshaping of their ethnicity, they rarely thematize as such).

Obvious intersectionality

Marseille, the intersectional “queer capital”?

9At demonstrations against poor housing conditions, I learned that activists and sympathizers on the left of the political spectrum were concerned about the disappearance of the popular Noailles district. Neighborhoods that previously held little appeal had been invaded by young, usually “white” couples in their thirties with young children. According to a discourse heard in various contexts, this neo-Marseillais profile assimilated to Parisians was said to replace the working classes and particularly those originating from post-colonial migrations. In the now highly touristy Panier district and around the busy Place Jean Jaurès, tags and manifestos against Airbnb rentals and rising rents were proliferating.

10This phenomenon of gentrification was unanimously observed and regretted by many of the people I encountered in the politicized student and artist networks to which my new LGBT+ anti-racist acquaintances and my colleagues belonged. Although their growing presence in Marseille, and –to a certain extent– mine, was one of the most obvious manifestations of the gentrification process, they were among those who condemned it most forcefully.

11This ambivalence can be explained in part by the militant anti-capitalist and intersectional framework that was spreading hand in hand with these changes. In response to the peculiar manifestations of heterosexism observed in Marseille by the residents who crossed my path in more or less radical left-wing militant gatherings, this paradigm contributed to normalize the expression of gender fluidity and trans-identity in the public space. The LGBT+ cause is one of the most ardently defended in the city, which contradicts –even from the point of view of the Marseille residents mentioned above– the stereotype of the Mediterranean city supposedly marked to the core by machismo and homophobia. In winter 2021, an issue of the LGBT+ magazine Têtu devoted a special report to these developments, hastily calling Marseille the “queer capital”.

Research questions in a familiar environment

13In September 2021, Ngozi was the first, and one of the few, to respond to an invitation to be interviewed I had posted a few days earlier on a WhatsApp group strictly reserved for “racialized” people. After the first introductions in a bar in the fifth arrondissement, I interviewed her at my home. A friendship grew out of these meetings, and we quickly discovered that we shared many interests. Ngozi’s response to my invitation reflected a personal and, as we shall see, academic interest in the issues raised by my choice of Marseille as a field of inquiry. In the months following our meeting, I noticed that we shared many acquaintances.

14A dancer-choreographer, Ngozi was born and raised in a rural village in central France, from a mother commonly identified as white but not originally from the region, and a Cameroonian father who, as we shall see, enjoyed a particularly rich financial, cultural and educational capital. During the interview, she defined intersectionality as “something obvious” to her, given her gender, her identification as black, Cameroonian and queer. During her studies at the Bordeaux art school, she had been actively involved in an Afro-feminist association, which she left when she moved to Marseille.

15On November 2, 2021, more than one month after our interview, Ngozi and I met in one of the famous anti-racist, feminist and anti-capitalist bookshops in downtown Marseille. That evening, writer and director Amandine Gay had been invited to present her books on international adoption, based on her own experience. The focus was mostly on the post-colonial dimension and the inequalities that characterize relations between the countries of the North, where adoptive parents live, and those of the South, where many adopted children come from. The speaker also addressed the way race relations are played out in the families of adopted children. The room was packed, and some of the people in the audience, whose stories resonated with the theme, shared their testimony.

16As the event ended, I joined Ngozi, who introduced me to Awa and suggested that I speak with her as part of my research, without telling me more. Noticing that Awa was commonly identified as black, I imagined the reasons for introducing us, and I gladly accepted. Awa, who was born in the Paris region to very low-income Senegalese parents, including an allophone mother, was in her third year of cinema studies at the time and was also Ngozi’s partner. I interviewed her at length on two occasions, first at my home, then at hers. When, at the beginning of the interview, I asked her why she thought Ngozi wanted us to meet, she explained that she identifies as a black and queer woman. She went on to explain that she remains very attached to her Muslim faith, and still practices some rites such as prayer and Ramadan.

17An intersectional understanding of the world seemed obvious for Awa and Ngozi, and for the circles in which they moved. This impression of being obvious needed to be investigated to understand how the two young women had come to adopt a similar worldview in order to give meaning, each in their own way, to their respective stories which, although very different, overlapped in certain respects, notably as regards class, race and ethnicity.

Implicit construction of ethnicity through direct reference to race

18Based on their personal experience of race and ethnicity, Awa and Ngozi, each in their own way, were engaged in a personal, political and academic attempt to theorize race in order to better interpret its importance in their trajectory and had, as a result, become more or less directly involved in militant movements.

Personal experiences of racial stigmatization

19Whether explicitly named as such or not, the intersectional viewpoint adopted by Awa and Ngozi helped them notably to analyze how their life experiences had been marked by racialization. They used this academic and activist framework of interpretation to speak about their past, mentioning facts that, as an anthropologist, I identified as mechanisms of racial identification and stigmatization as being “other”.

20Ngozi has memories of being stigmatized for her skin color as early as kindergarten. In her home village, almost everyone around her had a significantly lighter complexion than her own, and because of it, was commonly identified as white. Some of her little friends drew attention to what she could only call “[her] difference”, for lack of a better word, and nicknamed her Mamadou or Kirikou, in reference to an animated movie featuring a little child whose supernatural powers allowed him to brave the dangers of the West African bush. This movie and its spin-offs had been very popular in France in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

21Ngozi also remembers how, in elementary school, one of her favorite teachers, talking about her last vacation, mentioned the reluctance of Afro-Martinicans to work, an attitude she attributed to the climate. Shamefully, Ngozi admitted that she had confirmed the words of her teacher, whose approval she was seeking, and had offered the example of workers she had seen in a similar situation on her first trip to Cameroon. Insofar as Ngozi shared her teacher’s prejudices at the time, this can be considered a form of internalized racism, unless we consider this a tautology. It is hard to imagine that racialization mechanisms could have affected only the dominant populations, while sparing those they dominated. Racial prejudice also inexorably shapes the representations of the dominated (Balani 2023: XXI).

22Awa’s experience illustrates how these prejudices can be adopted by certain racialized populations to attack others (Fanon 1961). Awa, who was attending a high school in Paris after growing up in Chartres, remembers being assaulted verbally on two occasions, once by an inebriated Afro-Caribbean woman and another time by a North African man. The insult he uttered was also lesbophobic (“a monkey who is kissing another girl”). Beyond these occasional anecdotes, Awa had also been exposed in her cinema studies to what she calls “ordinary racism”, prejudice that otherizes and standardizes people identified as black. She mentions an art professor who claimed that it was more difficult to draw the features of black models, another who exclaimed about the resemblance she perceived between Awa and a woman depicted in one of the paintings in the Musée d’Orsay’s Black models exhibition visited during a field trip, and a classmate who took the liberty to touch Awa’s hair to better examine its texture.

23Ngozi believes that she and her father were able to avoid this kind of racist abuse within her mother’s family. She attributes it to the tolerance and open-mindedness of her grandparents, who lived for a time in Chad and Congo Brazzaville after the independence movements and were not limited to white social circles. However, in her teens she detected signs of racial and ethnocentric prejudice (linked to the idea of French cultural superiority stemming from colonial propaganda) in her wider maternal family. She especially remembers the tension caused by a comment made by one of her maternal uncles by marriage: “It’s a good thing they spoke French, because they can’t understand each other!”

24These more or less symbolically violent experiences of racialization were combined with mechanisms of self-identification and self-understanding that problematized the expression of a sense of belonging to a collective entity: the society of origin of their Afro-descendant parents. The experience of their parents, even more than their own, was not limited to racialization as blacks, but included the construction of a recomposed Cameroonian, Senegalese or Afro-diasporic ethnicity that nuanced the homogeneity implied by identification as racialized, black or Afrodescendant.

Dynamic reconfigurations of ethnicity

25The racialization mechanisms mentioned above were correlated with a phenomenon of ethnicity construction and reconfiguration, while remaining distinct in some respects. For Ngozi and Awa, it seemed important to address the difficulty of feeling that they belonged, even partially, to the society of origin of their Afro-descendant parent(s).

26When Ngozi discussed the stigma attached to her physical difference, she also retrospectively alluded to the absence of cultural references to Cameroon, Africa or the African diaspora in the education she had received. “[I had] no references other than my father. […] Beyond my father and my physical appearance, there was nothing.” Referring once again to the racist prejudice she shared with her teacher, as a child, I questioned her about the cultural and ethnocentric dimension –though clearly racialized by using a colonial imaginary– of this prejudice. Ngozi felt that this episode showed her cultural proximity to this teacher, in the absence of Cameroonian cultural socialization.

27For Ngozi, this lack of cultural socialization is characteristic of what she considers to be the Métis condition in the context of mainland France. The majority status of the parent designated as white further complicates the value granted to the Afro-descendant parent’s languages, practices and beliefs, and their transmission. It also shows that the history of European expansion has permanently established the global domination of Western culture. The French parent identified as white transmits hegemonic European cultural elements through the education provided, which can be perceived as the reproduction at family level of an asymmetry operating on a much more general level.

28According to Ngozi’s activist experience, discussed in the next section, this mixed-race condition is experienced differently depending on whether the mother or the father is identified as black (Brun 2023). In Afrofeminist circles, Ngozi noticed that, like herself, many other members categorized as mixed-race complained about a “gulf between themselves and [their] fathers.” According to Ngozi, this produces an “identity vortex” that she believes is less critical when the mother is Afro-descendant and identified as black. She believes, along with certain African American researchers (Banks 2000, Walker 2007), that hair styling and care techniques establish a relationship with the body and provide minority and racial cultural socialization.

29While this link between parenting, gender and cultural socialization needs to be more fully explored, the issue is clearly different in the case of Awa, who grew up in a modest family with two parents who had been socialized in Senegal. The question of class, and above all inequalities in linguistic, cultural and educational capital, clearly came into play. Unlike Ngozi’s diplomat father, who came from Cameroon’s upper class, it was impossible for Awa’s parents to teach her practices and values other than those that had influenced their own socialization. Their very modest social condition and the community network to which they belonged seemed to make it difficult for them to offer any alternative educational options.

30This was compounded by Awa’s migration experience. Before she was five, her father decided to return to Senegal with her and some of her brothers and sisters, without her mother’s consent. In addition to marital tensions, this unexpected trip was prompted by another project: the ritual removal of part of Awa’s genitalia. Although Awa does not explain it as such, this experience exposed her to ritualized physical violence marking in her body the difference between the sexes and even the “differential valence” of the sexes (Héritier 2002: 17). The cultural in-between (as we shall see below, the dynamics at work are far more complex and not binary) problematizes her gendering or assignment to a female role, both in the cultural universe in which her parents were socialized and in France, where the recomposition of a network of relatives and, more broadly, of a Senegalese network, established a cultural continuum with the environment experienced in the society of origin.

31When she says she was “the only black girl” in her Parisian high school, apart from the unconscious othering to which she was exposed by her teachers and classmates, Awa was referring less to the stigmatization of her color than to an awareness of differences that she defines as cultural. In her eyes, these differences were primarily expressed in practices such as cooking and music, whose material dimension is more immediately tangible. Through these practices and those of her parents, she was able, at least partially, “to feel Senegalese”, although she finds this “complicated”. As a result, Awa circulated in a multilingual and multicultural context in more ways than one, where she encountered different systems of cultural and moral representations and references.

32In addition to the opposition between France and Senegal, she was also caught between Bambara and Soninké, the populations to which Awa’s mother and father respectively belong. The young woman explained that there was a relationship of domination between the two populations, linked to their number and status in various West African countries. Religion plays a key role in this hierarchy. Awa describes the Soninkés as “the first converts to Islam” and the Bambaras as the last. The Bambaras were therefore suspected of practicing a more syncretic and less orthodox form of Islam. The hierarchical relationship between the two populations overlapped with the gendered relationship between Awa’s parents. The combination of these two factors placed her mother in a doubly subordinate position. Awa’s mother had no say in Awa’s trip to Senegal and was therefore unable to prevent the separation from her daughter.

33The process by which Awa defines her boundaries and redefines herself as an African or Senegalese from France is based on the Senegalese age-old process of ethnicity construction, which was profoundly altered by colonization. Porous borders (not necessarily abolished by mixed marriages) are defined by historically unequal relations linked to cultural and religious domination.

34Racialization and the production of ethnicity affected the trajectory of Awa and Ngozi and gave rise to an ethno-racial consciousness, mainly interpreted in an academic language evoking race, which they acquired as part of their activist intellectual education.

Academic and activist intellectual education

35The politicized affirmation of an intimate and political awareness of how intersectional approaches echo their biography was for Awa and Ngozi the result of a process of interpretation of personal and sensitive experiences they were able to theorize by notions, categories and currents of thought. While Ngozi remembers childhood experiences of racialization and even racism, it was an incident during her second year in art school that marked a tipping point.

36In this predominantly white artistic milieu, she became aware not only of the way she was identified as black from the outside, but also of the sociological implications of this racialization. During the dress rehearsal for a production in which she and a fellow student of North African origin played servants rebelling against their bourgeois mistress, played by a white student, the teacher-director changed the cast after being informed by one of her colleagues that this could be considered racist. Fearing that they might be perceived as racist, the teaching staff, who was obviously entirely “white”, deprived Ngozi of a role she enjoyed playing and about which she had not yet developed an opinion. In her view, this was the starting point for the academic and activist investigation of her racial socialization.

37Ngozi discovered the books and films of black-identified Afro-descendant authors and directors such as French-Cameroonian novelist and author Léonora Miano, French journalist and author of Afro-Caribbean descent Tanya de Montaigne and Guadeloupean director Ghislaine Gadjard. The documentary film Ouvrir la voie by activist, writer and director Amandine Gay made her aware of the experience she shared with other black women. In this film, “people say the exact same thing in the exact same words,” comments Ngozi. Watching this film was a turning point in her “awareness of [her] trajectory as a black woman in France,” and was as violent for her as it was for one of her friends, who felt the same uneasiness. Further research and reflections led her to French Afro-feminist media and associations. Because of her interest in and knowledge of the English language, she discovered “things that weren’t being said in France,” namely academic and activist discussions that openly addressed the relationship between gender and race, such as black feminism in the United States and the writings of Saidiya Hartman.

38While all these discoveries mostly awakened Ngozi’s anger, the book Afrofem by the Afro-feminist collective Mwasi (2018) gave her the desire to become actively engaged. She learned from the book’s arguments, also found in the book Afrocommunautaire by Fania Noël, founder of Mwasi (Noël-Thomassaint 2019), that policies for increasing the representation of racial minorities, adopted under a capitalist logic, were of no use. From then on, Ngozi claimed affiliation with decolonial activism, as defended by racial minorities themselves, which she decided to express through her art.

39As for Awa, she first acquired her academic and activist knowledge of race by regularly listening to anti-racist podcasts, such as Kiffe ta race, hosted by journalist Rokhaya Diallo and writer Grace Ly. Given the importance in her mind of the transmission of practices, beliefs and values linked to her parents’ country of origin, the construction of a Senegalese or, more broadly, African ethnicity was the focus of her personal investigations and reflections. She mentioned reading about Senegal, West African societies (Amadou Hampaté Ba), and pan-Africanism (Cheik Anta Diop).

40For Ngozi, this activist intellectual education gave rise to a feeling of great anger that led her to become involved in an association. During her second year in art school, she was increasingly in conflict with her surroundings. She began to denounce racism strongly at the time, “offending” fellow students and teachers in the process. “I was so on edge,” she explains. During this period, a misunderstanding and a computer problem led her to believe that she had been the victim of racist cyber-attacks by a fellow student. The fear she felt at the time spurred her decision to become involved in collective activism. She joined an Afro-feminist movement whose political line was similar to that of Mwasi.

41What came out of Ngozi’s interview was that Afro-feminism was mostly the means for her to address the issue of race. Despite my interest in feminism and my convictions about it, it could be that my gendered socialization led me to downplay this issue and not thematize it in the same way as anti-racism and the LGBT+ experience. That said, aside from her identification as both a woman and black, Ngozi did not take the time to explain more precisely the specifically gendered or feminist dimension of her ideas and activism. This may be due to the difficulty of jointly addressing social relations of domination and stigmatization that shape the sum of individual experiences.

42In any case, Ngozi has decided to pursue her personal militant and intellectual education by completing a master’s degree in choreographic studies in Canada where she will be studying the initiatives of black artists in France since the twentieth century. Her discovery of the currents and authors mentioned above enriched her art and her militant and personal reflection, while producing academic knowledge related to these themes that strongly resonate with her. The same process occurred for Awa who, following in the footsteps of one of her older sisters, Fatoumata, is also writing a memoir as part of her cinema studies. She is using oral archives, textiles and photographs to reconstruct her family’s personal history. Awa sent me a dissertation she wrote for her final year at the university, which deals with her family history using similar material.

43Awa’s and Ngozi’s unique experiences of racialization and ethnicity reconfiguration pointed them in the direction of militant intellectual studies and, in Ngozi’s case, political activism. They also both moved from the acquisition of academic and political knowledge to the construction of academic knowledge inspired by their creative practices. The way they defined their sexual orientation also came into play.

Understanding the queer condition in light of race and ethnicity

44In the case of both Ngozi and Awa, the way they define and experience their sexuality is influenced not only by gender dynamics, but also by the mechanisms of racialization and the construction of ethnicity mentioned above. The singular interweaving of these mechanisms is reflected in their trajectory and provides an insight into the multiple, complex factors involved.

Queer or lesbian of color: a dynamic identification

46In contrast, Awa’s affirmation as queer was much more explicit. The following section clarifies the causal link between her socio-cultural background and the much more prominent role played by her attraction to women in her trajectory, identification and political positioning.

Reconciling the queer condition and Islam

47For Awa, living out her desire for women and identifying as queer were initially experienced as incompatible with the values taught by her family. She had attended Koranic school and describes her family as “hyper-religious”. She also portrays them as “100% homophobic” and feels the tension between her homosexual desires and her religious upbringing particularly strongly during Ramadan. She was faced with a loyalty conflict or dilemma: should she abandon her religion or give up her attraction to women? Awa is certainly not the only one to have struggled with this question. 

50Beyond the family sphere, participation in queer networks also gave Awa the opportunity to reflect on her sexual orientation and how it relates to her faith and her status as a black woman. While Awa was feeding her mind with podcasts, lesbian films and books about West Africa, she discovered multilingual content and international virtual communities through TikTok and WhatsApp. These communities provided her with the vocabulary to describe her social position and identify individually with a collective with loose, diasporic and globalized contours. These Muslim queer networks and virtual spaces helped her connect two aspects of her socialization that were important for her but that her parental upbringing tended to oppose. Through these networks, she started attending events organized by associations of Muslim women from North Africa, some wearing the Islamic veil, where she made a few friends.

51The intellectual journey of Awa and Ngozi, and the circles of socialization representing different minorities they joined, belong to a more general movement. The intellectual patchwork combining feminist critique, anti-racism, and LGBT+ (queer, notably) activism is where ethno-racial minorities in northern countries, connected by the internet, social media and popular culture are able to find a middle ground. This movement is opposed, on the one hand, to the rhetoric that legitimizes homophobia, in the name of anti-colonialist resistance to Western cultural hegemony and, on the other, to popular or militant LGBT+ subcultures that tend to be Eurocentric or socially and, no doubt in part as a result, racially exclusive. Without necessarily becoming institutionalized within new organizations, the spread of this paradigm has led to the emergence of a shared militant interpretation that transcends national borders.

Conclusion

52More generally, the trajectory of Awa and Ngozi reflects how, in the field, in Marseille, individuals are discovering, through the press, the internet and chiefly through social media, the analytical tools provided by intersectionality to understand the combined effects of heterosexism and racialization and their impact on their personal development. Social media is the means for discovering the existence of a community sharing several minority experiences, and for getting to know people with similar experiences, whether at a distance or in the same city.

53More recent findings also reveal that, via WhatsApp and Facebook groups, these contacts have led to new more or less formal collectives that organize social events, meetings or discussion groups, restricted or not to non-white people, where they can share their minority experiences face to face, and participate in militant events such as Pride marches.

54It seems that social media, by making more widely available the categories of analysis and targeted academic references linked with intersectionality, has been able to remedy the “whitening” denounced in academic circles. However, while the availability of information has certainly contributed to enrich the academic capital of social media users on targeted themes and has helped them to better understand and position themselves socially, social media usage clearly remains conditioned by social class. The inquiry suggests that there are other cases of upward social mobility similar to Awa’s, in which additional educational, cultural and activist capital has been acquired alongside a formal university education. Nevertheless, the question arises as to whether individuals from disadvantaged classes who do not have the same dispositions to succeed in higher education make the same use of social media. In other words, despite easy access to theories on intersectionality and related themes, the propensity to take an interest in these issues seems correlated with, if not determined by, an individual’s social trajectory. It remains to be seen, then, how queer people from racialized minorities and working-class backgrounds who are not sociologically oriented towards these domestic uses of intersectionality analyze and experience their situation.