The colonial matrix of French public development aid: Decolonizing representations of sexual and reproductive health and rights

Gender studies have gained visibility and are now widely applied to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Conversely, while anti-choice and anti-rights movements are particularly vigorous, decolonial studies have had little impact on French strategy and operating methods. The reluctance to use this analytical framework to think about the way France (re)presents itself and acts toward institutions and populations in the Global South raises questions regarding the produced effects. Acknowledging this colonial matrix is to question principles of meritocracy and universalism that are blind to assignment processes and power relations linked to gender, class, and race. Drawing on the situated and marginal perspective of a racialized, fifth-generation French woman from an overseas territory who has been working for nearly fifteen years in the field of SRHR-related international cooperation and development, the author observes an epistemology of ignorance maintained by othering and objectification mechanisms specific to the creation of norms and representations in SRHR. She analyzes the particular "representations of absence" perpetuated by colonial imaginaries fueled by processes of racialization, ethnicization, and subalternity. Noting their effects on herself, the relationship to French people, and Global South actors, she proposes confronting this colonial matrix of French representations in SRHR. For her, it leads to an inability to change relations of power and knowledge, which the "Chaos-Monde" renders a matter of urgency.