Race, classe, genre et sexualité: Entre puissance d'agir et ambivalence coloniale

Without wholly rejecting the perspective proposed by Bhabha (who sees in the colonial subject's mimicry and in the ambivalence of the colonial discourse the site of a structural rift within colonialism, working towards its own subversion), the author refuses the idea that the identification of such structural rifts could be enough to account for the political agency of the subaltern. She thus calls for focused historical analyses of actual political situations, capable of understanding the concrete articulation between the deeply inter-related dynamics of gender, sexuality, race and class. She shows that (1) colonization was not, from the point of view of the colonial powers, an external affair, nor a historical accident unrelated to their historical essence, and that (2) colonization and the processes of socio-political transformation within the colonial powers maintained a close intricacy (as intricate as the transformations taking place on issues of class, gender, race, etc.).