Feminist Theory And Women Of Color Research Paper

1. Emergence Of ‘Women Of Color’ As A Political Subject

The terms ‘women of color’ and ‘white women’ throw into relief the political nature of discourses and practices in and through which these terms emerged as political subjects and became conceptual components of social, political, and cultural theory. They show how seemingly neutral words such as ‘color’ may assume specific meanings in different contexts so that, as in this instance, the color of ‘whiteness’ is placed into question. The political subject of ‘women of color’ decenters ‘whiteness’ as a modality of power constituted in varying forms in different times and places through historical processes of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. It challenges the ways in which white European-descent woman came to be seen as superior to other categories of women. Although black, brown, and other categories of ‘nonwhite women’ have been engaged in feminist practices for centuries, the concept of ‘women of color’ first emerged in post-World War II Northern America and Western Europe, especially Britain. Hence, the primary focus here is upon the anglophone debate in these locations.

Political tensions in Western feminism surrounding the interrelationship between ‘race’ and other factors such as class and gender in the USA date back to the antislavery campaigns. During the decade of the1830s, for example, American women became increasingly active in the abolitionist movement where they learnt to champion their own right to engage in political work and where their experience of relative marginalisation compelled them to form separate women’s antislavery societies. The first female antislavery society was formed in 1832 by black women in Salem, Massachusetts, followed by similar societies established by white women in other locations. Paradoxically, when the motion for women’s suffrage was first introduced amid immense controversy at the Seneca Falls Anti-Slavery Convention of 1848, black women were conspicuous by their absence. This omission was incredible, not least because black women already had brought into the arena of public debate issues such as women’s education which the Convention was only just beginning to address. In May of 1866, when women decided to establish an Equal Rights Association incorporating struggles for Black emancipation and woman’s suffrage into a single campaign, a number of eminent speakers, including the white feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, argued against it. In class terms too, this was predominantly a middle-class women’s movement. While a few individual black women, as for instance Sojourner Truth, were able to participate in specific events, nonetheless, the movement overall did not take on board the contradictory relationship between racism and class, or the question of sexuality in any significant way. Nor was the plight of Native American peoples, or non-European immigrants an identifiable feature of these debates and activities (Davis 1981).

As a form of self-conscious protest, feminism in Britain arose in the seventeenth century. Here, as in the USA, the early women’s rights movement and later the Suffragists failed to give sufficient priority to the needs of working-class women or the issue of ‘race.’ This is not to deny that there were some women as, for example, Annie Besant who was active on the anticolonial front as well as on gender issues, and Sylvia Pankhurst who placed considerable emphasis on the conditions of the working class. Nevertheless, the effects of racism and class inequality did not become a major feminist concern at this stage. Such amnesia about issues of ‘race’ cannot be attributed to the lack of presence of Irish, Jewish, African, and South Asian descent people—the primary target of racisms of the period—because they were far from absent in Britain from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Moreover, the first usage of the term ‘race’ in Britain also dates back to the sixteenth century and the subsequent history of the discourse of ‘race’ is interlinked with slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust of Jews, gays, gypsies, and others. Racism therefore can be said to be one of the key factors in the formation of Western societies.

The last five decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a variety of social movements: anticolonial movements for independence, Civil Rights and the Black Power movement, the Peace movement, student protest, and the Workers’ movements. The Women’s Liberation Movement was formed during the late 1960s and the 1970s as a part of this intellectual and political ferment. Women of color were active in all these groups. Yet, a significant number of early publications by ‘Second Wave’ white feminists seemed to display a certain disregard of racism as an internal feature of Western patriarchal relations. This neglect drew critical scrutiny from women of color. One of the first critiques was launched by the Combahee River Collective, a black, lesbian feminist organization from Boston, USA. In 1977, they produced a document that demonstrates the complexity of theorizing women’s subordination when analyzing experiences based on simultaneous intersection of diverse forms of injustice: ‘We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression (Smith 1983, p. 275). The Collective saw itself ‘actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression’ and advocates ‘the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking (Smith 1983, p. 272). Pointing to the global dimensions of gender, the text speaks of the impact of ‘politicaleconomic systems of capitalism and imperialism’ and emphasizes the question of institutional racism as well as ‘racism in the white women’s movement.’ It repudiates those political positions which accept that the end justifies the means: ‘… as feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics’ (Smith 1983, p. 282). In taking a stance against biological determinism, this feminist discourse articulates a certain non-essentialism even as its notion of identity politics would seem to exemplify what SpivakChakravorty (1999) was later to call ‘strategic essentialism.’ The idea of ‘simultaneously interlocking oppressions’ is one of the most productive insights of this period.

While the composition of ‘women of color’ in terms of ethnicity may vary from place to place, the generalized category itself remains wide-ranging and global. According to the anthology Home Girls, for example, ‘the terms Third World Women and women of color … designate Native American, Asian American, Latina and Afro-American women in the USA and the indigenous peoples of Third World countries wherever they may live’ (Smith 1983, p. 1iv). Taken together, women of color comprise the great majority of women of the world and a very high proportion live in conditions of material disadvantage. Hence, the centrality of a concern with social inequality in women of color feminisms.

Writings by women of color have a history of being treated as ‘personal testaments’ rather than ‘theory.’ The question of what counts as theory and whose intellectual work gets treated as being theoretical has been the subject of much debate (cf. Collins 1990). A related point concerns the theoretical subject of ‘women of color.’ In her analysis of the book The Bridge Called My Back—a seminal American text of the early 1980s—Norma Alarcon argues that the theoretical subject of Bridge is a figure of multiplicity, representing consciousness as a ‘site of multiple voicings’ seen ‘not as necessarily originating with the subject but as discourses that traverse consciousness and which the subject must struggle with constantly.’ It is associated with subjectivity that is deeply marked by ‘psychic and material violence’ and it demands a thorough ‘reconfiguration of feminist theory’ (Alarcon in Anzaldua 1990, pp. 359–65). In other words, the theoretical subject of ‘women of color,’ in its very constitution, decenters the Eurocentric discourse of the rationalist, masculinist subject of modernist philosophy. It challenges essentialist readings of skin tone or physical appearance as inherent ‘difference’ and disrupts any notion of ‘woman’ as a unitary category.

2. Black British Feminism

A similar yet different process occurred in1970s Britain when ‘women of color’ came to be figured as ‘black.’ This was a consequence of coalition politics among African, Caribbean, and South Asian descent groups who borrowed the Black Power vocabulary but resignified ‘black’ to embrace all ‘nonwhite’ people. The concept of ‘black’ was designed to substitute the colonial term ‘colored people’ and interrogate ‘chromatism’—the hierarchy based on differences of skin tone—that could potentially threaten unity between these groups. Black British feminism was forged through the work of local women’s organizations active around such issues as wages and conditions of work, immigration law, fascist violence, reproductive rights, and domestic violence. By 1978, local groups had combined to form a national body called the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD). This network held annual conferences, published a newsletter, and served as an active conduit for information, intellectual conversations, and political mobilization. The ensuing dialog entailed sustained analysis of racism, class, and gender with much debate as to the best means of confronting their outcomes while remaining alive to cultural specificities:

Our group organises on the basis of Afro-Asian unity, and although that principle is maintained, we don’t deal with it by avoiding the problems this might present, but by having ongoing discussions … Obviously, we have to take into account our cultural differences, and that has affected the way we are able to organise (OWAAD cited in Mirza 1997, p. 43).

Like its ‘women of color’ counterpart in the USA, emerging black feminism in Britain came to prefigure later theories of ‘difference.’ The internal conflicts within OWAAD, especially around homophobia, proved salutary so that, even as British ‘black feminism’ assumed a distinctive political identity separate from ‘white feminism,’ engaging the latter in heated debate, it did not become oblivious to the contradictions of its internal heterogeneity. The careful reflection and analysis that went into the deliberations resulted in a very significant corpus of scholarship.

Hazel Carby’s essay White woman listen is symptomatic of conflicts and tensions that characterized feminist debate during the 1980s. Carby develops a trenchant critique of key feminist concepts— ‘patriarchy,’ ‘the family,’ and ‘reproduction’— drawing out their interconnection with racism and colonial history. Taking issue with the Euro-centric approach of certain white feminist discourses, she stresses that racism is not simply about exclusion but equally about the manner of inclusion itself. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty has argued, Western feminisms during this period tended to reproduce the very categories through which the ‘West’ constructs and represents itself as superior to others. In 1984, a group of British feminists of color collectively edited a special issue of the journal Feminist Review (Issue 17). This text, together with the edited collection Charting the Journey (Grewal et al. 1988), represents intellectual intervention through work that was the outcome of collective thinking. Some of the main points addressed in these publications may be summarized as follows:

(a) As a consequence of capitalist colonial relations, labor migrants from former colonies are constituted as a racialized class fraction in the metropolitan society.

(b) The institutionalization of racism and gender inequality within global sociopolitical and cultural relations means that ‘women of color’ may face some similar injustices all over the world, but they will also share experiences with the metropolitan white working class.

(c) Women of color in Britain are subjected to ‘double patriarchy’: a generalized, all pervasive, racialized form of British patriarchy; and, specific configurations of patriarchal norms current among particular groups of people of color.

(d) Lesbians of color have to contend with: heterosexism in British society; homophobia among people of color; and, eurocentricity and racism among white lesbians and gay men. These aspects must be addressed as part of feminist theoretical and political practice.

3. Postmodernism And The Theory Of Difference

Feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980 were informed by conceptual repertoires drawn largely from ‘modernist’ theoretical and philosophical traditions of European Enlightenment such as liberalism and Marxism. The ‘postmodernist’ critique of these perspectives, including their claims to universal applicability, had precursors within anticolonial, antiracist, and feminist critical practice. Postmodern theoretical approaches found sporadic expression in Anglophone feminist works from the late 1970s. But, during the 1990s they became quite a significant influence, in particular their poststructuralist variant. Some of the main points emerging from the encounter between women of color feminism and postmodern poststructuralist theories are that:

(a) It is no longer tenable to conceptualize ‘white feminism’ and ‘feminism of color’ as if they are mutually exclusive entities, each carrying some unchanging transhistorical ‘essence.’

(b) Contrary to analysis where process is reified and understood as personified in the bodies of individuals, these two distinctive yet overlapping sets of feminisms are now viewed as representing historically contingent relationships, contesting fields of discourses, or ‘reading strategies.’

(c) The concept of ‘agency’ has been reconfigured through poststructuralist appropriations of psychoanalysis in order to take account of psychic and emotional life. The concept of subjectivity now covers both conscious agency and unconscious psychic dynamics, and it represents a site of multiplicity where effects of racism and ethnicity intersect with other structural and experiential dimensions.

(d) Reassessment of the notion of experiential authenticity has highlighted the limitations of ‘identity politics.’ Experience is now understood primarily as a ‘signifying practice’ referring to the process of making sense of the world symbolically and narratively.

(e) Poststructuralist insistence that meaning is relational; that identity and subjectivity are not ‘products’ but on-going processes; that power can be both coercive and productive; that subordination can occur through modes of inclusion no less than exclusion means that poststructural paradigm has much in common with theoretical interventions made by women of color over the years.

Overall, critical but productive conversations with theories of poststructuralism have resulted in new theoretical frameworks for refashioning the analysis of ‘difference’ (cf. Hooks 1990, Grewal and Kaplan 1994).

4. Postcoloniality, Transnationality, And Diasporic Space

One outstanding feature of the work of feminists of color during the 1990s is a concern with the potential of combining strengths of modern theory with postmodern insights. This interest in interdisciplinary ‘creolized theory’ would seem to stem from the following preoccupations:

(a) an interest in analyzing the effects of racism without recourse to the discourse of ‘race’;

(b) the need for theorizing ethnicity and cultural difference outside the imperatives of racism;

(c) the importance of understanding political identities as contingent forms of resistance;

(d) the necessity of distinguishing between political identity as conscious agency and identity conceptualised in terms of subjectivity;

(e) the importance of analyzing locality and globality as relational categories;

(f) sustaining the previous emphasis on colonial histories and ‘material conditions’ at the same time as analyzing cultural issues; and

(g) the need to attend to the problematic of the category ‘mixed race.’

This work has taken several forms. Some developments, especially in the field of literary studies, are known as ‘postcolonial’ theory. When used in the sense of a reading strategy, postcolonial theory emphasizes the point that both the ‘metropolis’ and the ’colony’ were altered deeply by the colonial process and that these articulating histories have a mutually constitutive role in the present. Postcolonial feminist studies foreground ‘Othering’ processes underlying colonial and postcolonial discourses of gender. Frequently, such work uses poststructuralist frameworks, especially Derridean deconstruction and Foucauldian discourse analysis. Some scholars have attempted to combine poststructualist approaches with neoMarxist or psychoanalytic theories. Other feminists of color have transformed ‘border theory’ (Anzaldua 1990, Mani 1998, Spivak 1999)

A related development is associated with valorization of the term diaspora. The concept of diaspora increasingly is used in analyzing the mobility of peoples, commodities, capital, and cultures in the context of globalizaton and transnationalism. The concept is designed to analyze configurations of power—both productive and coercive—in ‘local’ and ‘global’ encounters in specific spaces and historical moments. Brah (1996) addresses the concept of diaspora alongside that of Anzaldua’s theorization of ‘border’ and the widely debated feminist concept of ‘politics of home.’ The intersection of these three terms is understood through the concept of ‘diaspora space’ which covers the entanglements of geneaologies of dispersal with those of ‘staying put’ so that the ‘native’ becomes as much a ‘diasporian’ as the diasporic subject becomes the native. The term ‘homing desire’ is used to think through the question of home and belonging; and, both power and time are viewed as multidimensional processes. Importantly, diaspora space embraces the intersection of ‘difference’ in its variable forms, placing emphasis upon emotional and psychic dynamics as much as socioeconomic, political, and cultural differences. Difference is thus conceptualized as social relation, experience, subjectivity, and identity. Home and belonging is also a theme of emerging literature on ‘mixed-race’ identities which interrogates the concept of ‘race’ as an essentialist discourse with racist effects (Tizzard and Phoenix 1993, Zack 1993, Ifekwunige 1999). Accordingly, the idea that you are mixed-race if you have black and white parents is jettisoned. Instead the analytical focus is upon varying and variable subjectivites, identities, and the specific meanings attached to ‘differences.’ Theoretical perspectives developed by women of color are central features of innovations in feminist theory. They herald a new phase in feminist alliances and coalitions. They promise new ways of formulating democratic futures (Alexander and Mohanty-Talpade 1997).

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