“Le net et le flou. Lettre à Houria Bouteldja,” by Sandra Lucbert, first appeared on 4 September 2025 on Contretemps. Revue de critique communiste. In her letter, Sandra Lucbert responds to Houria Bouteldja’s speech “Bye Bye Jane Fonda,” delivered at the decolonial summer school held from 18 July to 20 July 2025 in Pantin, organized by Decolonial HQ and the media outlet Paroles d’honneur. Its English translation and publication on Communis takes place within the framework of the collaborative partnership between Communis and Contretemps. Read the English translation of Bouteldja’s response to Lucbert’s letter here.

“This letter to you, Houria, because I take very seriously the building block. Why should we remain stuck in positions that have become ineffective, under the pretext that they were effective in yesterday’s conjuncture? The white radical left has broken with its structural Islamophobia. LGBT people are breaking with all sorts of progressive recuperation. Now: should the indigènes be abandoned to reaction? Absolutely not: so we must think clearly about unity outside of it. You named it: decolonial communist revolution.”

— Sandra Lucbert

Letter to Houria Bouteldja

1.

A round table discussion entitled “Combattre le progressisme liberal” at Paroles d’Honneur summer school; Houria, you are the last to take the floor.

2.

First and foremost, I want to tell you this: in fifteen years of writing and speaking, you have made us shift. You have brought to our attention issues and categories that were tragically absent from our minds. We now think about situations that we didn’t know how to think about — that we didn’t think about at all. I am writing to you from this place of gratitude.

3.

Inevitably, rigor breeds rigor.

4.

You reiterate it: that your disposition is revolutionary. What does “revolutionary” mean? At the very least, it means seeking a radical reversal of the political status quo with the aim of reducing oppression and inequality on all fronts where they manifest themselves. Game-changer for game changer, having changed the game, you too have been changed. For some time now, you have been calling yourself a “decolonial communist.” That is to say: seeking ways to establish a collective order based entirely on the regulatory principle of equality. By specifying “communism,” you have added class relations to race relations. What is missing in there?

5.

Gender and sexuality: awaiting discussion.

6.

At the heart of your argument is the famous letter that Jean-Luc Godard’s addressed to Jane Fonda), with its dialectic of what is clear and what is blurred. While Jane is clear about the image, she is not clear about the capitalism in which she lives, which undermines her good intentions in Vietnam. Unlike Jane, you take stock of your method: “decolonial” is not “intersectional.” “Intersectional” would be a form of idealism, “decolonial” would look at affects as they are — to work towards making them play towards communism. You want to be clear about what drives the indigènes*, even (especially) if it thwarts good intersectional intentions.

7.

To doing which you apply yourself from the very moment you take the floor, in two vignettes, which are to be understood both separately and as a whole. The first story: you were told about the existence of a cruise for the rich — white rich people, we assume — dedicated to “sex,” to “self-enjoyment and unbridled freedom” (your words). These activities take place under the watchful eye of the Tunisian sailing staff, whom the cruise passengers are forbidden from involving in their revelries. Second story: in 2019, in Saint-Denis, the first Pride parade in the suburbs took place, with the support of the socialist mayor’s office and viewed favorably by Beauvau. The white authorities clearly hoped that an incident would occur to lend credence to their Islamophobic propaganda.

In your view, the indigènes, subject to all forms of institutionalized censorship and prevented from expressing their disapproval, were “abused” (your words) by the passage of this procession. This is your central argument: offence — the feeling of offence. You repeat it: dominated in every way, the indigène community has no other solution than to maintain certain customs — including sexual ones — against all the racist logic of the State, which seeks to embark on this attempt at collective consistency under the guise of progressivism. That some indigènes are offended by the challenge to gender binarism or the family, no one would dispute that. The question that can be asked, however, is this one: are you right to make of it a decisive strategic argument, all other things being equal?

8.

Striking as they may appear, these two stories do not speak by themselves. To bring them into focus, we need to make them speak. You apply yourself to achieving so, but we are not entirely sure what you are saying exactly. Captatio for captatio, I will therefore start again from these vignettes and the blurring they produce. To tell the truth, you are skilled at making grand gestures leading to vague statements. It is not the least of your rhetorical talents. Usually, we leave your tricks unexamined, to stand with you against all those who do not read you, do not listen to you, and busily pursue their scandals without in any way hindering your reasoning. I share your amusement at blowing the doors off the speed reader. However, I wonder if you haven’t gone a little overboard. If the joy of provoking, the joy of turning the offence back on itself, doesn’t end up contradicting your own book, Beaufs et Barbares: “In the following lines, there is no trace of the primacy of race over class (or gender).”[1]

9.

In each of your interventions, the issue of gender has been reduced to the dimensions of progressive laundering. You turn any problematization of these issues into “a white thing” — in reference to Joseph Massad: before capitalism was brought to Africa and the Middle East by the West, sexuality regimes were heterogeneous to the categories of hetero and homo. As long as the indigènes are subject to postcolonial State racism, such problematizations, in your view, contribute to assimilationism. Which is not entirely false. Nor is it entirely sufficient: we need to try to propose a reworking of it. Otherwise, questions of gender and sexuality end up simply not being asked at all. And when they are not asked, gender finds itself subordinated to race and class.

10.

What does the cruise of rich white people (or those who have been whitened) tell us? It tells us how the Global South is proletarianized at the service of Western pleasures. It would be difficult to find a more accurate metonymy for the international division of labor based on racist logic. The most vulnerable populations are assigned to subordinate positions. The members of the white bourgeoisie enjoy themselves all over the planet, and racialized people from all over the world are forced to serve them for their self-enjoyment. This comment alone would suffice. The cruise could be a floating casino or a crossword puzzle battle: the double domination would be the same — to be fought. But you are less interested in this aspect than in the details of the self-enjoyment: in this case, its sexual nature: “Wealthy clients come to indulge in sensual pleasures, to engage in orgies in full view of everyone present.” In addition to “orgy,” you use a phrase — “unbridled self-enjoyment” — which you are obviously aware has been subject to reactionary reappropriation and reversal. You don’t even forget the apophasis: “so far, I will refrain from any judgement.” Apophasis: saying something by saying that you are not saying it. Vagueness with clear effects: you are not only condemning white bourgeois licenses; you are condemning sexual experiences themselves — apparently characteristic of this form of domination. What exactly are you doing here? You are waving a figure of decadence.

11.

This story about the cruise creates an atmosphere, a moral sfumato, so to speak. You can then appeal to its political interpretation, to a demoralization of situations in order to analyze them: everything has already been decided, you have colored your interpretation with a judgement, in this case of immorality, concerning the sexual mores attributed to white bourgeois people.

12.

The second story thus follows in the wake of sexual deviance. A parallelism that produces meaning: here is Pride in the suburbs captured through the prism of The Love Boat meets Kama Sutra meets the geisha balls (invented by the West, as their names suggest). On the one hand, we find the indigènes; this time, those of Saint-Denis, who, according to you, are forced by the white establishment to endure an LGBTQIA+ parade in their streets. On the other, we have Pride in the suburbs, the equivalent of the cruiser. It has the support of the public authorities and, as such, is an exercise in white, bourgeois power — power, if we are to believe the collage of sketches, to impose a debauchery that is degrading to the populations exposed to it.

We are somewhat dismayed to follow the rhetorical path you are constructing. Still sheltered by the conservative viewpoint of indigènes-whom-you-see-as-they-are-and-not-as-the-white-left-would-like-them-to-be (the dashes are there when a discourse becomes automatic: they serve as a simple signal), you present, in fact, due to the overdetermination of The Love Boat, a parade of homosexuals and trans people as a variant of white decadence, protected by the integral racial State. This Pride in the suburbs would include only a small number of indigènes followed by a majority of Whites (you say). “Progressive” white people would enlist racialized people in an exhibition that would mistreat the latter, whose values, supporting their perseverance, demand respect for family and gender assignments. According to you, such attacks are likely to automatically push the indigènes towards a representative of decency in the next elections: Dominique de Villepin. He will not defend their interests, he will cause Mélenchon to lose votes, but he has a particle that would put things in their place.

13.

An orgiastic specter now looms large, with disastrous political consequences. At sea and in the inner suburbs, deviant behavior on display is pushing the indigènes to vote for Villepin. The problem is that your reasoning is based on a new and questionable operation, given the revolutionary strategic aim you have set yourself. Not only is morality being invited where it has no place, but you deny the political reality of the situations described. At this price, you maintain your position as a problem: we will not consider any course of action on gender and sexuality other than invisibility as long as the indigènes are persecuted — because these issues (of white people) are part of their persecution.

14.

You refer to a description of Pride in the suburbs from six years ago: the first one, in 2019. This choice is surprising, especially in July 2025. Where is the update? In 2024 and 2025, Pride in the suburbs took place not in Saint-Denis, but in La Courneuve. La Courneuve: a city hall that openly supports Palestine and calls genocide a genocide. Similarly, the parade was dotted with Palestinian flags and banners denouncing the genocide perpetrated by Israel. This year, at the end of the parade, racialized doctors and nurses spoke out about the public hospital system and the devastating consequences of its deliberate impoverishment through austerity measures. We search in vain for the shocking incongruity, the offensive picture you reported to us.

15.

In truth, in 2025, even the intramural Pride parade (!) — which is, in fact, an institution of major compromise with white capitalism, and largely financed by it — suddenly shook off its neoliberal shackles. You didn’t want to see the parade in La Courneuve, but you couldn’t miss the poster for the Paris March and the outcry it sparked. The poster features an Act-Up activist, a veiled woman, a Palestinian flag, and a far-right activist being strangled by a gay man with his own tie. One might have wished to see a representation of capitalism as well, but even so, it’s already a spectacular change.

The far right, this time not mistaken, mobilized its troops to denounce this “call to violence;” and, in sync, Le Monde — whose foresight has never wavered: it still does not use the word “genocide” — published an opinion piece by a watchdog of (bourgeois, white) democracy: William Marx. This professor at the Collège de France (now sanctifying political debasement and the courage of nuance), who teaches that literature is “a training ground for discernment,” gave striking proof of this in his decisive text: “By making the issue of the body and love invisible, the Pride march poster fulfils the dream of homophobes.”[2]

It could not get any better : if there were an equivalent to the cruise you’re talking about, in fact, it would be this — the white cultural bourgeoisie stepping up to the plate so that we remain silent about Islamophobia and fascism; so that they can enjoy themselves offshore. There, I agree. It all seems as if you’ve even got the wrong target. The rest of the story confirms this. The intramural Pride lost its main financial backers: the RATP [Parisian Autonomous Transport Administration], because the march’s slogan — “fight against the reactionary international” — did not respect “the principles of neutrality and secularism”; Valérie Pécresse, who withdrew €50,000 in public subsidies following a report, according to Mediapart[3], by Beit Haverim[4], which described the poster as “anti-Semitic”; and finally, the private companies PayPal, Henkel, Air France and Accor. Liberal progressivism is losing all the characteristics of liberal progressivism, but… is it still liberal progressivism? Clearly, a large section of the mainstream LGBT community (the inter-LGBT community, not a niche group) has realized what it is being used for — and has made a sharp U-turn.

16.

Has Pride from time immemorial been a white thing? In any case, it seems to be striving to be something else. Something other, for that matter, than what it initially was. It is worth remembering how Pride began: it was not created by white people. In 1969, in the United States, it was illegal to serve alcohol to “homosexual” people: which at the time meant not only gays and lesbians, but also trans people, drag queens, transvestites, etc. At the Stonewall Inn, a bar on Christopher Street, however, they were still served, and so the police made regular raids there — with humiliation and beatings being the norm.

The Stonewall riots broke out during one of these raids: this time, the customers fought back; the police began to arrest people; Stormé DeLarverie, a racialized lesbian who was being handcuffed, reportedly shouted to the others: “Aren’t you going to do anything?” And the insurrection broke out. The two leading figures in these six days of fighting with the police were also people of color: Marsha P. Johnson, a black trans woman, and Sylvia Rivera, a Latina trans woman. Pride arrived a year later: a celebration of this liberation. Hiding in the shadows, fearing batons, beatings, spitting and insults: that’s no way to live. And that is exactly what you are pointing out about the indigènes. Pride, in its political principle, is about showing oneself in public space, as belonging to that space, having the right to be there, and, in doing so, through demonstration, creating a common bond. Of pride.

17.

The 1983 March, in which the indigènes of France refused to continue hiding in the shadows and being killed with impunity, falls into this category. Pride events are political movements in motion, and you are freezing them in time. The LGBT visibility of Pride in the suburbs is not striking for its assimilationism, at least not in the last two years. In your first book, there was not a word about capitalism. You have moved towards anti-capitalism, which you now make the cornerstone of a consistent struggle. Why don’t you let others move too, they are no less mobile than you, why always refer questions of gender and sexuality to the same objections, instead of seizing the momentum: since, on that side, things are clearly starting to move?

18.

Revolutionarily, it normally begins with an analysis of the current situation: however, the landscape of forces has changed — largely thanks to the PIR [Parti des Indigènes de la République], then the PDH [Plateforme Droits de l’Homme]. You love nothing more than to spank the white radical left (which they love nothing more than to receive from you), but how does the saying go: all good things must come to an end? Especially since, in fact, you also give it to indigènes on the radical left who are homosexual or trans. If the balance of power is changing, why not take this into account and adjust your analysis? You don’t want to “do as white people do when it comes to sexuality,” you don’t want to “beg the State.” No one is asking you to do such a thing. On the other hand, you talk about building a communist revolution: we are beginning to fear that “not doing as white people do” will result in sacrificing gender and sexual equality in the overall program.

19.

Especially since the situation has not only changed on the Pride front. On a global scale, as the organic crisis of capitalism deepens, the radicalized bourgeoisie is betting everything on its two instinctive outlets: hatred/persecution of foreigners and racialized people, and relentless attacks on women, homosexuals and trans people. Until recently, it took a seriously dystopian mind to imagine something like incel-masculinist terrorism.

Incidentally, you are well aware of this, since you have provided us with a list of the calamities of inconsistent progressivism, which includes the Zionist exploitation of anti-Semitism in France and Germany, attacks on same-sex parent families in Italy and the United States: the abolition of affirmative action, attacks on trans people, the banning of the Pride flag but the authorization of the Nazi flag “for educational purposes,” etc. A perfectly accurate list, but one that does not lift a finger theoretically: a list without any corresponding elaboration in your revolutionary discourse.

An enumeration that does not change the representation of the bloc to be formed against this reactionary shift — which nevertheless changes the front lines. As I write to you, the U.S. Secretary of Defense has just called for an end to women’s right to vote. The decadentist register alone is becoming acrobatic. If “Faire Bloc” follows the slope of global reactionary … all this risks ending in BBB on the backs of women and LGBT people — unless we think very seriously about this pitfall.

20.

There is a major problem here, which Wissam, at the same round table, is trying to address[5]. Why don’t you do the same? What alternative proposal, he asks, can be offered to the indigènes’ investments in order to “be human”? That is: to analyse emotions as they are, without ever giving up on transforming them into what they could be — except, having analyzed them, to ratify them purely and simply. That is quite a challenge. The identifying proposals of fascism, which is triumphing everywhere, are both racist and masculinist. Incidentally, this is also why fascism, unlike communism, electrifies dominated people. You have no doubt noticed this, however. There is no detour of mediation: we regain consistency on the backs of categories that have been dehumanized to the point of complete dehumanization — deportation, exclusion from public spaces and the end of political rights. Foreigners, racialized people, women, LGBT people.

21.

Not you. But this tendency to always put off gender and sexuality issues, regardless of LGBT movements, is strongly reminiscent of the way the white left has strung you along for so long: class first, the rest can wait. You know better than anyone how that ends. “Until the racial question is properly addressed” already has indefinite, delaying connotations.

22.

A communist example — firm theory… and then fraying in the practice of communism. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels see this characteristic of capitalism as dissolving all other social relations, including family and marriage. Faced with this, two reactions are possible: a regressive retreat into these dissolved relationships, or a call for a complete overhaul of fundamental social relationships. Marx and Engels immediately set to work on this task, and they did not mistake the direction they were taking. We cannot go back on what has been changed by the anthropological revolution of individualism. We must change from there: find something else to build.

To return to my communist example, now for the practical part: the 1917 revolution. A rather explosive Bolshevik, so much so, in fact, that Lenin sent her to lecture the soldiers, who were awestruck by her power: Alexandra Kollontai, a leading figure in the revolution, then People’s Commissar. She had set out to theorize socialist feminism in order to rescue proletarian women from the false promises of bourgeois feminists. Her reasoning was simple (in fact, too much so, but let’s give her credit for having thought about all this, going against the grain of her time): heterosexual couples, marriage, family, all these things are matters of private property; they must therefore be done away with, and something else done instead. Kollontai: a Red Russian, not a liberal Westerner.

These questions of sexuality regimes, to use Massad’s term, are also addressed in a communist context. Unfortunately, the least we can say is that this part of the revolutionary agenda has been “put on the back burner.” In The End of the Red Man[6], Svetlana Alexievich, who writes from capitalist Russia, compiles hundreds of interviews with former Soviet citizens. This work, which took 15 years to complete, is an extraordinary demonstration of how a common political imagination — anti-capitalist — had indeed become the glue that held together the populations of the entire Soviet Union. Voice after voice, a collective portrait emerges, that of populations convinced that they were making history — despite the cabbage meals, the violence and the purges.

As the stories unfold, one is nevertheless struck by gender relations that seem completely frozen in time. The male/female binary, the hierarchical relationship it implies, and the division of labour it supports remain untouched. Women are for men, women cook, look after children, women are raped — and endure it in silence. As for homosexuality, it is mentioned only once: to specify that Perestroika suddenly made it possible to claim it. No other horizon than the hetero-patriarchal one is ever mentioned: it goes without saying. This book demonstrates that it is possible to completely rebuild a society (even if we were very far from real communism, the experiment is instructive), its imagination and its drives: but that on this point, we have not even tried.

23.

Incidentally: for ten years, you have been presenting things in such a way that the existence of white progressivism cancels out developments and experiences on gender and sexuality that do not fall within its scope. What do you make of the proposals put forward by LGBT natives and indigènes who have sought to define what the intersection of race-gender/sexuality-class entails and how to resist it? You attack intersectionality for its academicism — let’s move on. I am talking here, inseparably, about activists, racialized political action groups, and decolonial LGBT theorists. Norma Alarcón, Comhahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, Betty and Barbara Smith, to name but a few of these decolonial lesbians. Whose work and actions remind us that being LGBT is not just a matter of sexual practices, but a political position.

24.

So, the question of visibility — which you recode as whiteness and decadence. You often insist on this: as an indigène, you believe that sexuality should be discreet. But where have you seen the slightest discretion in families, whether white or non-white, whether heterosexual or homosexual? Heterosexuality and the family saturate the social space. Pat Parker, a Black Panther who became a lesbian as her male partners and their beatings convinced her of the dead end of the patriarchal order, wrote about this famous discretion that is demanded of homosexuals. You asked for poetry; here it is (full version here).

For The Straight Folks Who Don’t Mind Gays But Wish They Weren’t So Blatant

You know, some people got a lot of nerve. Sometimes I don’t believe the things I see and hear.

Have you met the woman who is shocked by two women kissing, and, in the same breath, tells you she is pregnant?

But gays shouldn’t be so blatant.

Or this straight couple sitting next to you in a movie and you can’t hear the dialogue because of the sound effects.

But gays shouldn’t be so blatant.

[…]

You go into a public bathroom and all over the walls there’s John loves Mary, Janice digs Richard, Pepe loves Delores, etc. etc.

But gays shouldn’t be so blatant.

Or you go to an amusement park and there’s a tunnel of love with pictures of straights painted on the front and grinning couples are coming in and out.

But gays shouldn’t be so blatant.

Fact is, blatant heterosexuals are all over the place. Supermarkets, movies, on your job, in church, in books, on television every day and night, every place — even in gay bars — and they want gay men and women to go hide in the closet.

So to you straight folks I say, “Sure I’ll go if you go too. But, I’m polite, so after you.

25.

Shall I mention some people who are not in France? In Île-de-France, for example, Lesbiennes of Colors took the “progressive” appropriation by sexual nationalisms seriously and sought to oppose it with resistance strategies, particularly in solidarity with refugees.

26.

In truth, we are amazed to hear you talk about a white people’s thing when we read the collective work Féminicides[7], where the majority of contributions come from the Global South, which has been at the forefront of developing the theoretical framework on these issues. The editor of the book says it explicitly: this is where almost everything (outside Italy) is thought about feminicide. Just one example: Rita Laura Segato (Brazilian) developed her entire thinking on the property relations authorized by patriarchy and the right of life and death that they induce from the mass murders of women in Ciudad Juarez. She seeks to articulate this right to kill and desecrate with capitalist logic. Not exactly liberal progressivism, is it?

27.

This letter to you, Houria, because I take very seriously the building block. Why should we remain stuck in positions that have become ineffective, under the pretext that they were effective in yesterday’s conjuncture? The white radical left has broken with its structural Islamophobia. LGBT people are breaking with all sorts of progressive recuperation. Now: should the indigènes be abandoned to reaction? Absolutely not: so we must think clearly about unity outside of it. You named it: decolonial communist revolution.”

Notes

* In contemporary French political discourse, in contrast with the more neutral autochtone (native/indigenous) or First Nations used to refer to Indigenous peoples elsewhere, the term indigène refers to people from former French colonies in North Africa, the Caribbean, and other parts of the world who face discrimination in France. Rather than just original inhabitants of the land, in this context, and therefore in this text, the indigènes reclaim a history of colonial marginalization, highlighting a “postcolonial colonialism.” [Translator’s Note]

[1] Houria Bouteldja, Beaufs et barbares, La Fabrique, 2023, p.29.

[2] See https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2025/06/20/l-affiche-de-la-marche-des-fiertes-en-invisibilisant-la-question-du-corps-et-de-l-amour-realise-le-reve-des-homophobes_6614825_3232.html.

[3] See https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/100625/affiche-de-la-marche-des-fiertes-paris-une-polemique-et-beaucoup-de-fausses-informations.

[4] See https://x.com/AlainBeit/status/1930623382346691027.

[5] Wissam Bengherbi, Les hommes non blancs sont-ils des Hommes ?, Université d’été du QG décolonial,, Decolonial HQ Summer University, 19 June 2025 — video online.

[6] Svetlana Alexievich, La Fin de l’homme rouge, Actes Sud, 2013. [See in English Second-hand Time, translated by Bela Shayevich, Fitzcarraldo, 2016.]

[7] Gita Aravamudan, Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Dalenda Larguèche, Rita Laura Segato, Aminata Dramane Traoré et al., Christelle Taraud (ed.), Féminicides, une histoire mondiale, La Découverte, 2022.

Featured image: Sandra Lucbert. Photo: Francesca Mantovani/Editions Gallimard. Courtesy of l’Humanité.

 

Translated from the French by Rolando Prats.

Sandra Lucbert