“Territory Trouble”: Feminist Studies and (the Question Of) Hospitality

This essay is an attempt to revisit feminism through the issue of hospitality. What if hospitality were essential to the idea of feminism? How might this potentiality be put to work and made productive? Dealing with questions of language and territory, of the intimate and the enemy, “hospitality” appears as a way to question universalizing feminist proposals and their capacity to disrupt domestic and national orders. These “promises” are first addressed in a general way before being more precisely considered through the lens of the French “republican” model of politics and science. Stories of inhospitality from within are evoked—from within the academic sphere, (post) colonial French society, and the French Parliament—offering paradoxes to French universalism. This essay addresses the presence and possibility of feminism/s as alternative and transnational territories and questions the economic and epistemic constraints at play in both academic and political spheres, pleading for territories to be recaptured.