Feminism of Colour
In the previous post we learned about Global and Postcolonial Feminism. This post focuses on the need for the creation of black feminism, feminism of colour, and the idea of intersectionality, which is used to comprehend the oppression brought on by intersecting axes of oppression (gender, race, class). At the end of this post the reader should be able to:
- Recognize the background of the development of feminism of colour.
- Recognize some of the cornerstones of black feminism
- Gain knowledge of the intersectionality framework.
- Recognize some conceptual issues with feminism of colour.
Contents
- Introduction
- Feminism of Colour: A background
- Black Feminism
- Intersectionality: introduction
- Black Feminism and Intersectionality
- Conclusion
Introduction
The premise that all women possess a specific set of inborn characteristics that define them as women is challenged by feminism of colour. Additionally, it opposes the notion of female chauvinism, or the claim that some women have the authority to speak for and represent all women. Feminism of colour emphasises the idea that women cannot be viewed in isolation removed from their sociocultural contexts, as other axes of oppression (race) play a significant role in forming distinct set of experiences. Feminism of colour rejects the idea that all women are somehow similar in their experience of oppression (Tong 2009). This module focuses on the need for the creation of black feminism, feminism of colour, and the idea of intersectionality, which is used to comprehend the oppression brought on by intersecting axes of oppression (gender, race, class).
Feminism of Colour: A background
The feminist movement largely concentrated on the disparities between men and women during the 1960s and 1970s. The majority of second wave feminists, particularly the radical cultural feminists, tried to categorise traits as either exclusively male or exclusively female and argued for the supremacy of one over the other. Some second wave feminists who advocated for sameness felt that if given equal chances, women would be entirely equal to men on all levels—intellectual, physical, and moral. Sexism, which restricts women from doing what males do and keeps them in the domestic sphere, was the principal antagonist for these feminists. Contradicting this notion, other second-wave feminists known as difference feminists held that androcentrism—where maleness is the norm and women are oppressed because they are not like men—was the primary adversary (Tong 2009).
Women from other oppressed groups began speaking out in the 1980s, arguing that gender is neither the only nor necessarily the primary cause of women's oppression. These feminists argued that the gender-focused feminism of the 1960s and 1970s excluded a significant portion of women who belonged to other socio-cultural contexts by focusing primarily on the issues of a select group of elite women, namely, white, heterosexual, middle-class, and educated (Tong 2009).
In her book Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, Elizabeth Spelman discusses how oppression can occur when both distinctions and similarities are denied. The liberal feminists' fight against sexism and their aim to demonstrate that women and men are equally valuable was based on similarity—both to one another and to males.
Black Feminism
The elitism, racism, and classism within the movement effectively "whitewashed" the movement by disregarding issues pertaining to Black, Third World, Working Class, and Queer women, despite the fact that Black women were actively involved in the feminism movement from its very beginning. Black feminist politics significantly borrows on Black liberation movements, but disappointment within these movements as well as within the liberal left movements drove Black women to develop a politics that is both anti-racist and anti-sexist (Combahee River Collective).
Bell Hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and Audre Lorde were some of the first feminists in the United States to examine the nuanced identities of women of colour and other minority groups and talk of their "dual peril."
Bell Hooks claims that although being unique, sexism, racism, and classism are all interrelated. She emphasises that none of these axes of oppression can be eradicated without eradicating the others, with an emphasis on African American women. She advised Black women, among other things, to defy harmful sexual preconceptions associated with their bodies. She claimed that when black women were portrayed as sexually promiscuous, people either reacted as sexual prudes or as exploiting this alleged sexiness. According to her, black men and women won't be able to value themselves independently until they stop internalising the views of their oppressors (Tong 2009).
According to Patricia Hill Collins, there are three interconnected layers to black women's oppression: economic, political, and intellectual. The ideological dimension has a very specific picture of black women that supports this discriminatory treatment, while the political dimension denies them the rights that are enjoyed by white men and many white women. The economic dimension limits black women to service occupations. She argues that because race, class, and gender can never endure without a strong ideological rationale, the ideological component was more potent in upholding the subjugation of black women. She also advised black women to break free from these harmful preconceptions as a result. Intersectionality is one of the theoretical frameworks that have been used to conceptualise feminism of colour.
Intersectionality: introduction
The concept of intersectionality as a theoretical framework dates back to the Second Wave of feminism in the 1970s, when third-world women coined the phrase "triple danger." This made reference to three interconnected oppressive systems: racism, sexism, and capitalism/imperialism. The dominant conception of feminism in India is clearly upper caste, upper class, and substantially influenced by White feminism. Since then, Dalit feminists have embraced the term intersectionality to distinguish between this brand of feminism and their daily struggles against sexism and casteism.
As a result, the concept of intersectionality has come to stand for the intersections of various identities such as gender, race, class, caste, and so forth. The foundation of the concept of intersectionality is the idea that people have numerous, overlapping identities that are shaped by their social interactions, past, and interactions with structures of power. People can experience privilege and oppression at the same time because they hold multiple identities. In addition to recognising structural forms of oppression like racism, patriarchy, class, and caste, intersectionality also acknowledges the distinctive personal experiences brought on by the confluence of various identities and forms of discrimination that determine where women fall in the social hierarchy. Therefore, intersectionality requires that one treat the fusion of identities as producing experiences that are essentially separate rather than oppressions that pile together. This demonstrates that different forms of tyranny are not better or worse than one another. Collier, 2000
Black Feminism and Intersectionality
Intersectionality is the complexity of marginalised people's everyday experiences (Crenshaw 1991). This casts doubt on the idea that because of their different positions within the patriarchal system, women are all subjected to different forms of oppression. In order to assess a society's level of powerlessness, various axes of diversity that intersect in historically (Avtar ja Phoenix 2004), politically, and socially particular situations are instead examined.
Although Kimberlie Crenshaw first used the term "intersectionality" in 1989, the concept itself has existed for much longer and acknowledges the particular oppression and experience that Black women confront. Sojourner Truth emphasised in her 1851 speech "Ain't I a Woman" how the term "woman" sometimes refers primarily to "white women," completely omitting the lived realities of black women. Given that black women belonged to two repressed racial and sexual categories, the oppressive relationship between them and the white male control of America is where Black Feminism originated (Combahee River Collective).
Because both discourses are based on distinct experiences of sexism and racism independently, black women frequently experience exclusion from both the feminist and the anti-racist discourses. She contends that adding the "Black Woman subject" to this previously established analytical discourse will not alleviate the exclusion problem. This is due to the fact that the intersectional experience is more complex than the "sum total" of racism and sexism, and as a result, it is unable to fully convey the specific kinds of subordination experienced by Black women. (1989 Crenshaw)
Despite feminist theory drawing inspiration from Black women's history, according to Crenshaw, it purposefully excluded black people by claiming to speak for "all women" while, in fact, it originated in a culture that was predominantly white. She notes that the "authoritative universal voice" is frequently "white male subjectivity" that adopts the appearance of a "non-racial, non-gendered objectivity," and that this is transferred to people who have a similar cultural context, with the exception of the gender (white women). Due to the necessity to consider how race benefits white feminists over other women, race is usually disregarded in the examination of sexual oppression. In her book Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins also draws attention to Sojourner Truth's speech, in which she made the observation that the concept of "woman" is a cultural construct. This means that this term has come to uniformly represent all women as a result of normalising the lives of white women while neglecting the lived experiences of women of any other race (Collins 2000).
Hill Collins refers to the interlocking systems of oppression that Black women have experienced throughout history as a "matrix of domination" in the same book. The "additive model of oppression," which accepts gender or race as the primary identity marker and then adds on other identity markers like class, religion, etc. to understand the relative status of people in the social hierarchy, is explicitly rejected by this matrix. Instead, it discusses people who occupy intersectional identities, putting them in unusual positions of privilege and/or marginality. This effectively refutes the argument that the status of the "most oppressed" is determined by the overarching structure of oppression, which is gender (feminism), race (antiracism), or class (Marxism/anti-imperialism), for example, and that others simply build on this to move the person even further down the social hierarchy. As a result, the matrix of dominance discusses concurrent and interconnected systems of oppression that are mutually constitutive and continually interact with one another to cast people as either the oppressor or the oppressed, depending on the situation. 2008 Winter
This does not, however, disprove the idea that some forms of oppression have more severely afflicted some groups than others based on their identity. When it comes to oppressing Dalit women in the Indian setting, for example, caste and gender are the two main factors at play, but other identities such as class, education, geographic location (rural/urban), sexual orientation, etc. all play a role. It goes without saying that there is no single matrix of dominance; rather, people's experiences of it vary depending on their personal circumstances.
Exact definition of intersectionality: this. It is challenging to distinguish between the politics of race, class, and sex oppression since they are most frequently experienced concurrently in the lives of Black women. Sexual politics under patriarchy are as ubiquitous in Black women's lives as are the politics of race and class. For Black women, racial-sexual oppression is not just a matter of race or sexuality (Combahee River Collective).
Conclusion
Thus, this blog emphasises the idea of feminism of colour and where it came from, which essentially refutes the idea of female essentialism. There are certain conceptual difficulties, though. In addition to Black feminists, Latina, Asian, and Native American feminists all raised concerns about marginalisation within the movement. Even though they had initially looked to their colour for liberation, they eventually began to question whether this was really just a cover for oppression and whether they were othering themselves by using white feminists as the standard. In response, Audre Lorde asked African American women and other women of colour to stop defining themselves as different from white women and instead describe themselves as "self" and the "other." She asked that white women start outlining how they differ from women of colour.
The idea that a person's appearance—whether white or coloured phenotypically—has nothing to do with her genetic makeup or even her own perception of who she is was brought up in relation to women of colour as well. It was also noted that language, nationality, and culture all play a role in how race is seen, therefore what is deemed black in the United States might not be the same in other cultures or nations. In other words, just like the categories of class and gender, race is a fluid concept that can be challenging to utilise logically. Race must therefore be understood in relation to other axes of oppression and identities rather than as a single idea.
Reference
- Avtar, Brah, and Ann Phoenix. 2004. "Ain't I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality." Journal of International Women Studies 5(3) 75-86.
- Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black feminist thought : knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.
- Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review 43 (6) 1241-99. —. 1989. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of AntiDiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." University of Chicago Legal Forum, Issue 1, Aritcle 8: 139-167.
- Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.
- Tong, Rosemarie. 2009. "Multicultural, Gobal and Postcolonial Feminism." In Feminist Thought, by Rosemarie Tong. Westview Press.
- Winter. 2008. "Feminism 101: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination." mind the gap. February 15. Accessed November 28, 2016. https://mindthegapuk.wordpress.com/2008/02/15/feminism-101-patricia-hill-collinsblack-feminist-thought-in-the-matrix-of-domination/.
Comments