This text was posted to Nettime Fri, 18 Nov 2005. It is an uncommon response to the riots in France in 2005, a series of events that has drawn a great deal of attention and speculation from across the political spectrum. The riots challenged the abilities of the broadcast media and political commentators to interpret current events and struggles in the face of subjects who were underepresented in the 'Republic' and apparently unwilling to represent or articulate themselves by anything other than destructive actions. Meanwhile commentators on the left either turned away from a revolt that refused to explain itself or declared the movement's refusal to speak or organise on anything other than 'invisible' terms as the new face of the multitude. Yet, apart from speculation or hyperbole, how much can we say in terms of the political composition of this movement? Whilst there are deeply reactionary generalisations at work in this account, nonetheless it seems a worthwhile counterpoint to rash and uninformed celebration.

Been thinking about the posts on the French riots, public space and race in France - and what inevitably goes unsaid and censored in so much leftwing thinking on resistance, the multitude, whatever. I feel there needs to be some serious thinking on intersections of race, sex,
sexuality and class but all this makes it so difficult to feel any straightforward solidarity and makes political alliances so tricky - and
who wants life to be complicated??

Public space in Paris is, across the board, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly straight. French political, institutional, professional,
scientific, academic whatever space is white, male, mostly upperclass and closed to racial minorities (not specifically to Muslims as some
media reports like to claim, but to anyone of Magrebine, African and differently, Afro-Carribean descent). On the other hand, much of urban public space (by which I mean street space and transport space) in North and North-East Paris and the banlieues is also overwhelmingly male but belongs to men of racial minorities. Take a train from la Chapelle (this is intra-muros Paris) after 7pm and take a trip into male space, where as an unattached woman you feel dangerously identified with unappropriated property. Its ten times worse in the banlieue. This is not to deny the constant, incessant, incredibly violent police presence and harassment that exists here - but to remind people that this applies to everyone, not just the young 2nd or 3rd generation son of immigrants, as the media and unfortunately the rioters themselves would like to suggest, but to the daughters of immigrants too, to female prostitutes, the sans-papier transexual Algerian sexworkers on the periph (the ring road that separates intra-muros from the banlieue), the check-out chicks, cleaners, menial service workers.... Unfortunately, the latter category not only have to put up with the CRS but also with the constant harassment of the very same disaffected "youth" who are supposed to represent the general state of oppression in the banlieue. The riotors are in fact overwhelmingly male & straight - not suprising, since even in non-riotous times, it is the same young straight men who effectively control and police the minutiae of public space and movement in the suburbs, particularly if you're female, old or queer or some potent
mixture of the above.

I lived in Paris for 8 years, for two years on a council estate, with my partner who is of Afro-Carribean background. As a queer, mixed-race couple we endured constant harassment from young Magreb, African and Carribean guys - I'm not talking verbal abuse and getting spat on here, I'm talking bashings and death threats. Most of my queer female friends (of white French and Magrehbine and Kabbyle descent) have been seriously bashed, often more than once, two of them have been hospitalized. One Algerian friend was forced to move from her Algerian foyer because she was a woman living alone - other single women in the building were beaten by their Algerian compatriots for daring to live without a man.

And spare a thought for the sans-papiers transexual prostitutes who were regularly pelted with rubbish and doused with buckets of water (by their dissaffected brothers) as they went off to work outside my flat. So where do I place fascism? Or neo-fascism? To give you an idea of the complexity of the situation in France, my partner would be constantly harassed by the white LePen sympathisers in almost every apartment block she moved into - but this didnt make her any more of a friend to her "brothers" on the street. Actually, as a 'sister' who had betrayed her "brothers" by not belonging to them she was in serious danger and curiously, accused of being the ultimate cause of their oppression, much more so it seemed than any fuckwitted LePen voter or even left-leaning white French man (who by the way somehow manages to maintain an incredible freedom of movement in all parts of the city and therefore doesn't have all that much to lose in hero-worshiping the young male from the suburbs). On one issue, there is a serious and unanalyzed collusion between the generic LePen voter and the generic male banlieusard, no matter how genuinely oppressed the latter is - and that is that women, queers and other stray deviants should stay in their place. Unfortunately, this is not an incidental aspect of their politics but the very core of it - which is why I consider the current phenomenon in the banlieue to be a reactionary, fundamentalist response to oppression rather than a spontaneous manifestation of the multitude. (Here I don't mean fundamentalist in the religious sense - it doesn't even need to be). A recent French media report, commenting on the oppression of 2nd and 3rd generation children of migrants, suggested that the problems of youth in the banlieue were compounded by the fact that their sisters generally managed to get employment and make their way up in the world, unlike them. Their problem was "emasculation"! (this is the actual word used). Obviously, this reporter (like everyone else) didn't seem to find it strange that the youth he was talking about were all male. His argument would be laughable (I mean yeah all those young Algerian women in the 16th arrondissement wearing Hermes scarves and Chanel) - except that it is widely shared in the French media and
intelligentsia ...

I don't want to suggest here that there is any inevitability or cultural specificity to this situation - actually in the 8 years I lived there, it worsened palpably every year, so that I could probably draw a map of the spaces that got cut off to us from one year to the next... Also this is not specifically a "muslim" phenomenon - tho it may become one, given the propensity of islamicist groups to hijack any free-floating disaffection they can get their hands on (much like international socialist actually!). Besides the fact that many people of Magrhebine descent are not muslim, the rioters are also of African and Afro-Carribean background.

Hopefully this sketchy picture of everyday life in Paris will help to explain why, whenever there was a riot of anykind in the streets where we lived, we battened down the hatches and stayed quietly inside, knowing that we would be just as much a target of the violence happening outside as any Renault!

All this makes me sad b/coz it feels like all these things have been said and debated before and each time the wheel gets reinvented. Is it
necessary to wait till after the revolution for these complicated and not so easy issues to be thought through, or is this just a very facile
understanding of resistance in the first place? I feel that right now its really important to recognize that not all "uprisings", riots, popular, or even anti-state movements etc are progressive - actually what we're seeing a real resurgence of popular, micro-political, street forms of (neo)fascism... and its important to think about the way they intersect, clash and sometimes collude with state fascisms.

I hope this doesn't sound all too anecdotal but I really think its the lack of thinking about these issues that is making post-Seattle
activism/political thinking so stagnant and facile ...

Melinda