Black Feminism

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Black Feminism

• Black Cultural Studies
• April 13, 2009
• Professor Ralina L. Joseph

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Why do we need Black Feminism?

• African American woman viewed through limited
  tropes, like those of, for ex., mammies,
  matriarchs and jezebels
• Black women in academia are pressured to use
  their authority to help legitimate a system that
  devalues and excludes them
• The struggles of Black women not articulated by
  traditional social research science
• Redress

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Turn to Hazel Carby, White Women Listen! Black
Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood
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How do we read representations of Black women?

• Resources on Black Feminism
• Cynthia Dillard endarkened feminist
  epistemology (historical roots of Black feminist
  thought differences in cultural standpoints,
  located in the intersection of theories of racial
  construction, gender and other identities and
  contexts of oppressions)

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Turn to Black Feminist Thought, The Politics of
Black Feminist Thought
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P.H. Collins Black Feminsim

• issues affecting African American women are part
  of the global struggle for womens emancipation
• concerned with fighting economic, political and
  social injustice for Black women and other
  oppressed groups
• Resistance Movement Black womens acts oriented
  toward social change and supported by other
  Black women.
• Culture of resistance

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Black Feminist Epistemology

• The truth of any conquest is that of the
  conqueror
• Western white male epistemology excludes black
  women as knowledge producers
• Black feminist epistemology borne out of
  experience
• Expressed through music and literature

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Who can be a Black feminist?

• Not just by living as a Black woman (conflates
  woman and feminist)
• Certain consciousness
• Both men and women (DuBois and Douglass)
• Investment in dialogue and coalition building
• Importance of Standpoint

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Black Feminist Standpoint Theory

• All African-American women share the common
  experience of being Black women in a society that
  denigrates women of African descent. This
  commonality of experience suggests that certain
  characteristic themes will be prominent in Black
  womens standpoint (Collins 1991, 22).
• Experience consciousness

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Standpoint, cont.

• Black womens standpoint rejects either/or
  dichotomous thinking that claims that either
  thought or concrete action is desirable and that
  merging the two limits the efficacy of
  bothInstead, by espousing a both/and orientation
  that views thought and action as part of the same
  process, possibilities for new relationships
  between thought and action emerge (Collins 1991,
  28-29).

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Barbara Christian

• Literary scholar
• Being a Black Feminist Critic means working
  towards changing Black womens lives.
• NO objectivity participant, not observer
• Black feminist scholars participate in an
  on-going dialogue between the writer and those
  who are reading the writer (quoted in Bobo
  1995, 51).

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Jacqueline Bobo

• Black female cultural producers, critics and
  scholars, and cultural consumers comprise an
  interpretive community strategically placed
  in relation to cultural works that either are
  created by black women or feature them in
  significant ways (Bobo 1995, 22)
• Black women are constantly engaged in
  interacting forcefully with the various
  structures of power (Bobo 1995, 31)

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Bobo, cont.

• The work of black feminist critics is to
  acknowledge these different voices, to explicate
  the responses, thus ensuring that they are also
  heard (Bobo 1995, 54)

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On rape and lynching

• The institutionalized rape of black women has
  never been as powerful a symbol of black
  oppression as the spectacle of lynching. Rape
  has always involved patriarchal notions of women
  being, at best, not entirely unwilling
  accomplices, if not outwardly inviting sexual
  attack (Hazel Carby quoted in Bobo 1995, 45)