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336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
Black women intellectuals from all walks of life must aggressively push the theme of self-definition because speaking for oneself and crafting one's own agenda is essential for empowermentbut its work resonates widely: 'if you write from a black experience, you're writing from a universal experience as well... you don't have to whitewash yourself to be universal' says Sonia Sanchez. Other groups engaged in social justice projects can identify points of connection that forward Black feminist as well as their own agendas. Collins notes that such people may become 'traitors', to their own privilege, for example whiteness. Another key point here is the dynamism of Black feminist thought; it responds directly to changing social conditions, for example to changing relationships between African Americans as they have moved through the labour market and social classes since WWII.
Black women are expected to fix systems which are in crisis due to underfunding, infrastructure deterioration, and demoralized staffsor as Barbara Omolade puts it:
Black professional women are often in high-visibility positions which require them to serve white superiors while quieting the natives. Collins emphasises the need for Black feminist thought to work through these modern class relations to prevent Black women from becoming oppressors of each other.
As the "Others" of society who can never really belong, strangers threaten the moral and social order. But they are simultaneously essential for its survival because those individuals who stand at the margins of society clarify its boundaries. African-American women, by not belonging, emphasize the significance of belonging.The 'mammy' image of the faithful and obedient domestic servant who cares for everyone and makes no demands is the oldest image, while the 'bad black mother', the matriarch is contrasted with her. This aggressive, unfeminine woman is the counter-ideal on which the cult of true womanhood stands in all its Whiteness. This image means that assertiveness is penalised in various ways in all women, but especially Black women. The 'absence of a Black patriarchy' has been said to indicate cultural inferiority, so this image feeds White supremacy and pressures Black men to be more dominating. Collins explains and thoroughly exposes the oppressive functioning of other controlling images: 'welfare mother' 'black lady' 'hoochie'. All of these images, in different ways pathologise the sexuality and fertililty of Black women. Collins discusses the hoochie's deviant behaviour as both hyper-heterosexual and lesbian, 'freaky' in either case, in the words of 2 Live Crew. I would like to go back to Mapping the Margins briefly here:
White men have exploited, objectified, and refused to marry African-American women and have held out the trappings of power to their poorer brothers who endorse this ideologyAnother obstacle is White women, those institutionally desirable creatures painted as 'racial innocents' yet often seeming to rub salt in the wound by boasting to Black acquaintances about their relationships with Black men, from whom Black women so often experience rejection. Briefly mentioned here is a thread of Black Feminist thought towards redefining beauty in, for example, contrast and action, making use of African-derived ideas - not replacing one ideal with another, binary style, but creating space for erotic autonomy. Love between Black women, erotic or otherwise, is also important here.
Each group perceives its own knowledge as... unfinished [and] becomes better able to consider other group's standpoints without relinquishing the uniqueness of its own or suppressing other groups' partial perspectivesbell hooks calls this dialogic method humanising speech 'one that challenges and resists domination'. I will continue to struggle away from binary thinking, positivist ways of deciding who is right and that everyone else must be wrong, away from domination and epistemic violence, towards both/and.
black lesbian theorizing about sexuality has been marginalized, albeit in different ways, both within Black intellectual communities and women’s studies scholarship. as a result, black feminist thought has not yet taken full advantage of this important source of Black feminist theory. as a group, heterosexual african-american women have been strangely silent on the issue of Black lesbianism. barbara smith suggests one compelling reason: "heterosexual privilege is usually the only privilege that black women have. none of us have racial or sexual privilege, almost none of us have class privilege, maintaining 'straightness' is our last resort."
black heterosexual women’s treatment of black lesbians reflects fears that all african-american women are essentially the same. yet, as audre lorde points out, “[...]the black lesbian is an emotional threat only to those black women whose feelings of kinship and love for other black women are problematic in some way.” black lesbian relationships pose little threat to “self-defined” black men and women secure in their sexualities. but loving relationships among black women do pose a tremendous threat to systems of intersecting oppressions. how dare these women love one another in a context that deems black women as a collectivity so unlovable and devalued? [...] as a specific site of intersectionality, black lesbian relationships constitute relationships among the ultimate other. black lesbians are not white, male, or heterosexual and generally are not affluent. as such they represent the antithesis of audre lorde’s “mythical norm”[...] visible black lesbians challenge the mythical norm that the best people are white, male, rich, and heterosexual. in doing so lesbians generate anxiety, discomfort, and a challenge to the dominant group’s control of power and sexuality on the interpersonal level. for african-american women, taking seriously the idea of generating loving “mirrors” for one another requires taking on all of the “isms” that keep black women down, including heterosexism.
may madison [...] alludes to the difference between work as an instrumental activity and work as something for self: "one very important difference between white people and black people is that white people think you are your work. now, a black person has more sense than that, because he knows that what I am doing doesn't have anything to do with what I want to do, or what I do when I am doing for myself. now, black people think that my work is just what I have to do to get what I want." ms. madison's perspective [...] recognizes that work is a contested construct[...]
at its core, the image of the welfare mother constitutes a class-specific controlling image developed for poor/working-class black women who make use of social welfare benefits to which they are entitled by law. as long as poor black women were denied social welfare benefits, there was no need for this stereotype. but when u.s. black women gained more political power and demanded equity and access to state services, the need arose for this controlling image. essentially an updated version of the breeder woman image created during slavery, this image provides an ideological justification for efforts to harness black women's fertility to the needs of a changing political economy. [...] with the election of the Reagan administration in 1980, the stigmatized welfare mother evolved into the more pernicious image of the welfare queen (Lubiano 1992). To mask the effects of cuts in government spending on social welfare programs[...], media images increasingly identified and blamed black women for the deterioration of u.s. interests. thus, poor black women simultaneously become symbols of what was deemed wrong with america and targets of social policies designed to shrink the government sector. wahneema lubiano describes how the image of the welfare queen links Black women with seeming declines in the quality of life:
“welfare queen” is a phrase that describes economic dependency—the lack of a job and/or income (which equal degeneracy in the calvinist united states); the presence of a child or children with no father and/or husband (moral deviance); and, finally, a charge on the collective U.S. treasury—a human debit. [...]
the welfare queen represents moral aberration and an economic drain, but the figure’s problematic status becomes all the more threatening once responsibility for the destruction of the american way of life is attributed to it.
given the ubiquitous nature of controlling images [i.e., stereotypes of black women], it should not be surprising that exploring how black women construct social realities is a recurring theme in black feminist thought. overall, despite the pervasiveness of controlling images, african-american women as a group have resisted these ideological justifications for our oppression. unlike white women who “face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power,” and for whom “there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools,” black women are offered fewer possibilities.
through interviews with women who were being detained in jail, richie advances the innovative thesis that those black women who had been self-reliant and independent as children and thus imagined themselves as strong black women were more likely to be battered than those who did not. upon first glance, this is a curious combination—the more self-reliant simultaneously value themselves less. richie’s explanation is revealing. the strong black women saw themselves as personal failures if they sought help. in contrast, those women who did not carry the burden of this seemingly positive image of black womanhood found it easier to ask for help.
In my own work I write no only what I want to read—understanding fully and indelibly that if I don't do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction—I write all the things I should have been able to read[.]It's been good to get back into theory after so long a drought. My eagerness to rid my shelves of some of the longer staying residents meant going back in time to when nonfiction was was in the realm of meaningless foibles and the effort of thinking was not considered something one should do "for fun", and I feel, once the challenges are over, I'll be doing work more intensive and less led by the carrot. Collins' work has its flaws and lack of comprehensiveness, but certain definitions and ideas she establishes have value in any academic realm intrinsically tied up with conversations about social justice. It was also exciting to recognize a number of referenced works as either read or in my future reading, and made for a feeling of, after much lackadaisical trash and inconsequential meanderings, finally coming back to the bedrock of my way of life. I am no black woman, but that doesn't forbid me from critically evaluating spaces in terms of, would a black (lesbian) woman be welcome here? If she wouldn't be, neither am I.
-Alice Walker
[I]t is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others—for their use and to our detriment[.]
-Audre Lorde
Autonomy and separatism are fundamentally different. Whereas autonomy comes from a position of strength, separatism comes from a position of fear. When we're truly autonomous we can deal with other kinds of people, a multiplicity of issues, and with difference, because we have formed a solid base of strength[s.]As much reading as I've done in my life, I hadn't come across a text deemed academically credible that touched upon the cornerstone of my evaluating procedure, which takes into account the natural tendency of writing of any form to indoctrinate and, as a result, expects that authors give evidence that they know what they're doing and don't consider the trajectory of a fiction scribbler a free ride to spewing hatred and being congratulated for it. Collins' words in certain sectors were a veritable balm to my soul, as here we have a text that has been around for a tad longer than I've been alive, and it's saying exactly how I've been thinking and acting and writing for the past few years. The text was a give and take of this sort throughout, as while I certainly learned a great deal about how to avoid misogynoir of all sorts, I also took away principles that that served well in contexts outside those that the texts touched upon, namely mental illness and queerness beyond the realm of lesbianism. The fact that this didn't prove a five star and favorite is due to how inflexible the text was at parts, especially with the burden, despite all overt comments that denied such, put upon every single black woman to be responsible for both herself and all others of her race. Again, I'm not black, so I'm not reading this correctly, but the text did end on a rather pull yourself up by your bootstraps tone that got increasingly more jargon filled as time went on. Not as accessible as it claims to be, but not to the point of meriting passing by.
-Barbara Smith
Firmly rooted in an exchange-based marketplace with its accompanying assumptions of rational economic decision making and white male control of the marketplace, this model of community stresses the rights of individuals to make decisions in their own self-interest, regardless of the impact on the larger society. Composed of a collection of unequal individuals who compete for greater shares of money as the medium of exchange, this model of community legitimates relations of domination either by denying they exist or by treating them as inevitable but unimportant[.]
Hair type quality rapidly became the real symbolic badge of slavery, although like many powerful symbols, it was disguised...by the linguistic device of using the term 'black,' which nominally threw the emphasis to color[.]This is the first book in a long time that's made me excited about all the other books I have left to read. Part of this is the sheer number of references to theoretical texts I have on hand. The other part is recognizing how few and far between the works are that encompass my moral compass style of academia, and thus how much I need to relish them while the rare experience is ongoing. Collins wears a bevy of hats throughout this, and when considering such, it's amazing, despite my quibbles, how holistic a paradigm she is able to offer in the face of a mainstream that would do anything to segregate and isolate and ultimately destroy such a full faithed comradery. A prime example of this is the number of quotes I gained that weren't Collins' words, indicating the wealth of a community of black women writers I've yet to experience, whether for the first time in the vein of Fannie Lou Hamer or in the next time in the form of Alice Walker. In either case, I have a long, fruitful, if difficult journey ahead of me, and that feeling is the most I can ask of any written work to provide.
Rather than emphasizing how a Black women's standpoint and its accompanying epistemology are different from those in Afrocentric and feminist analyses, I use Black women's experiences to examine points of contact between the two. Viewing an Afrocentric feminist epistemology in this way challenges additive analyses of oppression claiming that Black women have a more accurate view of oppression than do other groups. Such approaches suggest that oppression can be quantified and compared and that adding layers of oppression produces a potentially clearer standpoint...One implication of standpoint approaches is that the more subordinated the group, the purer the vision of the oppressed group. This is an outcome of the origins of standpoint approaches in Marxist social theory, itself an analysis of social structure rooted in [European] either/or dichotomous thinking. Ironically, by quantifying and ranking human oppressions, standpoint theorists invoke criteria for methodological adequacy characteristic of positivism. Although it is tempting to claim that Black women are more oppressed than everyone else and therefore have the best standpoint from which to understand the mechanisms, processes, and effects of oppression, this simply may not be the case.
An ethic of personal accountability is the final dimension of an alternative epistemology. Not only must individuals develop their knowledge claims through dialogue and present them in a style proving their concern for their ideas, but people are expected to be accountable for their knowledge claims.
You can but die if you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not.
-Maria W. Stewart