Critical Race Feminism

In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-colonial feminisms emanate from), or as a platform to re-center internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually ‘decolonized’. By contrast, this article focuses on the specific contexts, issues and lifeworld concerns that ground anti-colonial feminisms and provides a brief survey of the literature. (...) Because the terms implicated in the analysis (Third World, transnational, women of color, postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous feminisms) are highly contested on their own, I only provide provisional and non-foundational histories and definitions for the purposes of resisting philosophical appropriations of anti-colonial feminist theory. (shrink)

One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses of structures from embodied and phenomenological st¬¬andpoints--with (...) the day-to-day concerns of our lives. The essay is divided into three sections. In section one, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analysis of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, I discuss the diverse contexts of interpretation that background women of color feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure. I argue against a unified theory of women of color structural feminisms that supplants difference, favoring a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purposes of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. I offer the example of systematic marginalization produced by colonial violence and mythology as one reason to take up this approach. In section three, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, it can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into ‘resources’ to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into ‘labor’ in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual (...) architectures. Settler systems of epistemic and conceptual resources and the relations among them are constructed to preclude certain forms of knowledge. This is not an accident; it is a central goal of colonial violence. Colonization and land dispossession would not be possible without the violent disruption of Indigenous knowledge systems and ongoing organized attempts to disrupt their survival. Violently disrupting the relationships of people to land is as much an epistemic project as it is a material one, and these two projects are inherently linked. The task of theorizing epistemic oppression is not only about epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression is a story that gives language to a phenomenon in order to get past it, to carry on with the maintaining and reviving the forms of Indigenous and diasporic knowledge that colonialism has worked tirelessly to corrupt and silence. (shrink)

This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field in feminist philosophy. The editors' introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, to feminist perspectives on prominent subfields (...) of philosophy. The first section contains chapters that explore feminist philosophical engagement with mainstream and marginalized histories and traditions, while the second section parses feminist philosophy's contributions to numerous philosophical subfields, for example metaphysics and bioethics. A third section explores what feminist philosophy can illuminate about crucial moral and political issues of identity, gender, the body, autonomy, prisons, among numerous others. The Handbook concludes with the field's engagement with other theories and movements, including trans studies, queer theory, critical race, theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. The volume provides a rigorous but accessible resource for students and scholars who are interested in feminist philosophy, and how feminist philosophers situate their work in relation to the philosophical mainstream and other disciplines. Above all it aims to showcase the rich diversity of subject matter, approach, and method among feminist philosophers. (shrink)

Our ability to dismantle white supremacy is compromised by the fact that we don’t fully appreciate what, precisely, white supremacy is. In this chapter, I suggest understanding white supremacy as an epistemological system – an epistemic frame that serves as the foundation for how we understand and interact with the world. The difficulty in dismantling an epistemological system lies in its resilience – a system’s capacity to resist change to its underlying structure while, at the same time, offering the appearance (...) of large-scale reform. Using white supremacy as a case study, here I explore what features enable this resilience. An analysis of white supremacy that presents it as more than a tool of social and political oppression, but as an epistemic system that makes this oppression possible, allows us to better understand, and eventually overthrow, such systems. (shrink)

Though fatigue appears a constant of this pandemic year, I argue that we may not all be living the same pandemic. I highlight the non-belonging of most racialized and colonized peoples to a world where flourishing is taken for granted as norm. To think this, I use the term “weariness.” I want to evoke, wearing out, wearing down, as well as the medical concept of weathering. Drawing on Césaire, Fanon, Hartman, Scott, and Spillers, my concept of weariness articulates an exhausting (...) and enduring experience—the eroding, grating, and crumbling of racialized flesh—through repetitive colonial duration, not simply for a year, but over a longue durée. I read this as a wounding that needs to be thought not simply in terms of health outcomes and disease, but in terms of affective experience and dismembered possibility. (shrink)

Structural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license. This paper examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Fricker’s (2007) discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration. Fricker’s work produces structural gaslighting through several methods: i) the outright denial of the role that structural oppression plays in producing interpretive harm, ii) the use of single-axis conceptual resources to (...) understand intersectional oppression, and iii) the failure to recognize the legacy of women of color’s epistemic resistance work surrounding the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. I argue that Fricker’s whitewashed discussion of epistemic resistance to sexual harassment in the United States is a form of structural gaslighting that fails to treat women of color as knowers and exemplifies the strategic forgetting that is a central methodological tactic of white feminism. (shrink)

Calls for civility have been on the rise recently, as have presumptions that civility is both an academic virtue and a prerequisite for rational engagement and discussion among those who disagree. One imperative of epistemic decolonization is to unmask the ways that familiar conceptual resources are produced within and function to uphold a settler colonial epistemological framework. I argue that rhetorical deployments of ‘civility’ uphold settler colonialism by obscuring the systematic production of state violence against marginalized populations and Indigenous peoples, (...) relying on the colonial conceptual framework of ‘civilized’ vs ‘savage’, and excusing death-promoting rhetoric under the guise of liberal disagreement. (shrink)

Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism, I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. This analysis refuses the assumption that violence is in conflict with identity, and that, (...) therefore, the endurance of violence of liberal states/societies is dependent upon mechanisms of active blindness. I argue that this assumption, which is shared by many critiques of violence, fails to perceive that people can desire the violent arrangements supporting their communities. They therefore fail to address political settings wherein violence is an affirmative element of political identities. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the question of how to reconceptualize “women” in order to do a more intersectional feminism. Intersectionality—the idea that gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on operate not as separate entities but as mutually constructing phenomena—has become a gold standard in contemporary feminist scholarship. In particular, intersectionality has achieved success in showing that the old conception of women as a single, uniform concept marginalizes women and others who exist at the intersecting axes of multiple oppressions (e.g., women of (...) color, women in the global South, working-class women, and/or queer and trans people), and thus, demonstrating the need to develop a new way of conceptualizing women. However, the question of what such a new conception would be remains unanswered. Specifically, if feminist theory today is to destabilize the old notion of “women” that relegates multiply oppressed women to the margin of feminism, and yet still needs to use some notion of “women” to critically analyze how the social structure of sexist oppression operates to subordinate women and to dismantle this oppression, how should the concept “women” be reformulated? In this dissertation, I argue that we need to understand women as a concept that is open to constant redefinition, which is socio-historically situated in the actualities of oppression. This is what I refer to as the “situated redefinition” model of women, which is formulated in more detail as follows: -/- The Situated Redefinition Model of Women (SR) – The concept “women” should be always open to being redefined in a way that it could better serve political goals grounded in the actual, daily lives of the marginalized. That is, “women” should be always open to new meanings and provisional definitions that the marginalized would find more useful to achieve political goals, which grow out of their concrete experiences in the current intersecting structures of oppression. -/- My central argument is that we need to understand the concept “women” according to the situated redefinition model, in order to employ this concept for doing intersectional feminism. To support this thesis, the dissertation is divided into two main parts. By engaging with the intersectionality literature, critical race feminisms, Asian/American feminisms, and recent critiques of intersectionality, the first part of the dissertation elucidates what exactly it means for feminism to be more “intersectional.” The second part develops the situated redefinition model and articulates why this model is needed to do intersectional feminism, drawing on the social/political philosophy literature on non-ideal theory, postmodern discussions of universality, and feminist discussions of identity politics. Broadly, this dissertation seeks to shed new light on how we understand and use the concept women for feminist ends. My conceptual model offers a way for feminist scholar-activists to subvert the essentialist/exclusionary notion of “women” without abandoning altogether feminist-political deployments of the concept “women” for the purpose of ending sexist and intersecting oppressions. (shrink)

It is, without a doubt, a difficult task to address at once the state of philosophy as embodied by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the place of one’s own thought within it. This is the task that a co-director’s address tries to fill. Whether with a critical reexamination of the phenomenological mode of seeing distinctive of SPEP, of philosophical progress, or of the place of transcontinental philosophy, prior co-directors found ways to subtly chart the windings and turns (...) of the many streams that assemble to form this society.We seem to be, however, at a different juncture, so that another... (shrink)

This volume has its roots in two recent developments within mainstream analytic epistemology: a growing recognition over the past two or three decades of the active and social nature of our epistemic lives; and, more recently still, the increasing appreciation of the various ways in which the epistemic practices of individuals and societies can, and often do, go wrong. The theoretical analysis of these breakdowns in epistemic practice, along with the various harms and wrongs that follow as a consequence, constitutes (...) an approach to epistemology that we refer to as non-ideal epistemology. In this introductory chapter we introduce and contextualise the ten essays that comprise this volume, situating them within four broad sub-fields: vice epistemology, epistemic injustice, inter-personal epistemic practices, and applied epistemology. We also provide a brief overview of several other important growth areas in non-ideal epistemology. (shrink)

Neoliberalism, we are told, has “seduced” feminism. What is meant is that the libertarian and democratic hopes that have scoped this radical social movement have been reconfigured and re-energised by neoliberal project that models all our freedoms upon the market. Misgivings about “seductions” and “betrayals” require that feminist theory adopts the role of the arbiter on goals and meanings and this puts strains upon its deep commitment to democratic epistemologies. The following paper finds that the leading theorist of feminism as (...) critique in a neoliberal age has failed to fully grasp the normative tension that is involved. Nancy Fraser fails to rethink the tasks of critique in terms that is sufficient to its role as arbiter on meanings. I suggest that this rethinking might be done without betraying the demands of a democratic epistemology if we reconstruct the emancipatory idealisations that underpin Fraser’s account of a democratic epistemology. While this rendering of feminism as critique retrieves a representation of feminist ideals that might unmask neoliberal distortions, it does so without betraying the responsiveness to self-interpreted needs that is also claimed by a critical and democratic feminist theory. (shrink)

There is a growing trend across North America of women being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. Rather than being a series of aberrations resulting from institutional failures, we argue that this trend is part of a colonial strategy of administrative violence aimed at women of color and Native women across Turtle Island. We consider a range of medical and legal practices constituting gender-based administrative violence, and we argue that they are the result of non-accidental and systematic production of population-level harms (...) that cannot be disentangled from the goals of ongoing settler occupation and dispossession of Indigenous lands. While white feminist narratives of gender-based administrative violence in Latin America function to distance the places where such violence occurs from the ‘liberal democratic’ settler nation-states of the U.S. and Canada, we hold that administrative forms of reproductive violence against Latin American women are structurally connected to efforts in the U.S. and Canada to criminalize women of color and Indigenous women for their reproductive outcomes. The purpose of these systemically produced harms is to sustain cultures of gender-based violence in support of settler colonial configurations of power. (shrink)

In the wake of continued structural asymmetries between women of color and white feminisms, this essay revisits intersectional tensions in Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State while exploring productive spaces of coalition. To explore such spaces, we reframe Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in terms of its epistemological project and highlight possible synchronicities with liberational features in women-of-color feminisms. This is done, in part, through an analysis of the philosophical role “method” plays in MacKinnon’s argument, (...) and by reframing her critique of juridical neutrality and objectivity as epistemic harms. In the second section, we sketch out a provisional coalitional theory of liberation that builds on MacKinnon’s feminist epistemological insights and aligns them with decolonizing projects in women-of-color feminisms, suggesting new directions and conceptual revisions that are on the way to coalition. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been heralded as a canonical text of feminist theory. The book focuses on providing an account of the lived experience of woman that generates a condition of otherness. However, I contend that it falls short of being able to account for the multidimensionality of identity insofar as Beauvoir's argument rests upon the comparison between racial and gendered oppression that is understood through the black–white binary. The result of this framework is the imperceptibility of (...) identities at the crossroads between categories of race and gender. Hence, the goal of this article is to explore the margins of Beauvoir's work in order to decenter the “other” of The Second Sex and make known what is made imperceptible by its architecture, using Latina identity as an interventional guide. I conclude that given the prominence of The Second Sex in feminist theory, this shortcoming must be addressed if feminist theorists are to use it responsibly. (shrink)

The growing field of feminist disability studies explores how human bodies are interpreted through cultural values and expectations surrounding physical and mental ability. This paper contributes to and expands upon this conversation by examining how the ideal of “able-mindedness” functions to maintain racial divisions and inequalities through attributions of cognitive and psychiatric disability to bodies of color. Drawing upon contemporary examples from popular social media, public policy, and academic discourse, the author shows how racialized and nonnormatively gendered bodies are identified (...) and interpreted through norms of able-mindedness and used as markers against which the ideal of the able mind is upheld. This “discourse of pathology” operates insidiously within academic theorizing by remaining largely invisible because it tracks our deeply ingrained assumptions about the undesirability of cognitive and psychiatric disability. The author argues that because of the entanglement of race with disability, so long as the normalizing and privileging of the ideal of able-mindedness goes unchallenged and we maintain the myth that there exists a normal mental state, both racism and ableism remain very much alive, including within the academy. (shrink)

This paper asks how perception becomes racializing and seeks the means for its critical interruption. My aim is not only to understand the recalcitrant and limitative temporal structure of racializing habits of seeing, but also to uncover the possibilities within perception for a critical awareness and destabilization of this structure. Reading Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with Frantz Fanon, Iris Marion Young and race-critical feminism, I locate in hesitation the phenomenological moment where habits of seeing can be internally (...) fractured. Hesitation, I claim, makes visible the exclusionary logic of racializing and objectifying perception, countering its affective closure and opening it to critical transformation. (shrink)

Kathryn Gines's book details Hannah Arendt 's racial and conceptual biases against Black people in the US and post-colonial Africa. Gines makes original and significant contributions to feminist philosophy by applying various feminist and anticolonial strategies, including standpoint theory and multidirectionality, to Arendt 's political essays and concepts. Feminist critiques of Arendt in general and racial critiques of "Reflections on Little Rock" in particular are not new; however, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question offers a novel and comprehensive racial critique (...) of Arendt 's major writings. Gines offers a "sustained analysis of Arendt 's treatment of the Black experience in the United States", as well as racial violence within the contexts of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and French and British imperialism and colonialism. In this review I will offer an overview of the book as a whole, before evaluating the extent of Gines's critique as it pertains to Arendt 's misguided judgments and her theory of judgment. (shrink)

This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled “When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness,” which first developed out of my research work with White women in violence-against-women organizations. It documents an interview between a White woman and me, a Black South African philosopher. I lived and worked in Canada at the time but I traveled to the United States for conferences on a regular basis. I was presenting my work on Black consciousness, White consciousness, and Black existentialism—relying (...) on Derridean deconstruction and psychoanalysis—when I had the exchange with a White woman, a young faculty member in the philosophy department, which had jointly hosted the talk with the women and gender studies department. This paper offers a verbatim account of this dialogue wherein the history of philosophy is unraveled and where I draw on Jacques Derrida's “White Mythology” to demonstrate how White consciousness is engraved. It is out of this intertwined analysis that my work on White consciousness emerged in the 1990s—and with which I continue—as is evidenced throughout the paper. In unpacking this dialogue, I situate the complexities that arise from the pedagogical practices within philosophy when race takes center stage within a discipline that has written itself as though race does not exist. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider how to conceptualize “diasporic” subjects, namely those whose identities and homes cannot be easily attributed, with regard to the political and racial dynamics of intra-group tensions, alliances, and divergences of interest. These concerns are important relatives to topics that Critical Race Theorists and Critical Race Feminists have readily addressed, such as the war on terror, the not-so-gradual erosion of dignity and rights protections accorded to non-citizens, and the increasing antagonism, surveillance, and brutality toward Latino and (...) Muslim migrants. As such, the former issues should become central concerns for Critical Race Theorists. In what follows, I want to introduce a framework called “interstitiality” as a way to address them. (shrink)

Written over the course of twenty years, the essays brought together here highlight and analyze tensions confronted by writers, scholars, activists, politicians, and political prisoners fighting racism and sexism. Focusing on the experiences of black women calling attention to and resisting social injustice, the astonishing scale of mass and politically driven imprisonment in the United States, and issues relating to government and civic powers in American democracy, Joy James gives voice to people and ideas persistently left outside mainstream progressive discourse—those (...) advocating for the radical steps necessary to acknowledge and remedy structural injustice and violence, rather than merely reforming those existing structures. -/- “…this Joy James reader is at its core a portrait of ‘the making of a dissident voice’ … What we most desperately need in a world that fears and silences opposition—or worse—are revolutionaries who speak truth to power and beckon us to stand with them in solidarity. A luta continua. The struggle continues.” — from the Foreword by Beverly Guy-Sheftall -/- “These broad-ranging essays circle around the topic of building community under siege. Communities can be ‘thorny ties,’ as Joy James notes, yet are vital for developing a critical consciousness on one’s society. James also provides an astute analysis of the antirevolutionary trends in social theory today. Herein one will find the voice of a dissident humanist in full flower.” — Linda Martín Alcoff, coeditor of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader -/- Joy James is Presidential Professor of the Humanities at Williams College. Her many books include Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy; The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings, also published by SUNY Press; and Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. (shrink)

Bridging the gap between feminist studies of motherhood and queer theory, Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood articulates a provocative philosophy of queer kinship that need not be rooted in lesbian or gay sexual identities. Working from an interdisciplinary framework that incorporates feminist philosophy and queer, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, Shelley M. Park offers a powerful critique of an ideology she terms monomaternalism. Despite widespread cultural insistence that every child should have one—and only one—“real” mother, many contemporary family constellations do not (...) fit this mandate. Park highlights the negative consequences of this ideology and demonstrates how families created through open adoption, same-sex parenting, divorce, and plural marriage can be sites of resistance. Drawing from personal experiences as both an adoptive and a biological mother and juxtaposing these autobiographical reflections with critical readings of cultural texts representing multi-mother families, Park advocates a new understanding of postmodern families as potentially queer coalitional assemblages held together by a mixture of affection and critical reflection premised on difference. (shrink)

While social geographers have convincingly made the case that space is not an external constant, but rather is produced through inter-relations, anthropologists and sociologists have done much to further an understanding of time, as itself constituted through social interaction and inter-relation. Their work suggests that time is not an apolitical background to social life, but shapes how we perceive and relate to others. For those interested in exploring issues such as identity, community and difference, this suggests that attending to how (...) temporal discourses are utilised in relation to these issues is a key task. This article seeks to contribute to an expansion of the debate about time and sociality by contributing an analysis of a variety of ways in which Gloria Anzaldúa utilises temporal concepts as part of her work of rethinking social identity and community. In particular, I suggest that in contesting homogeneous identity, Anzaldúa also implicitly contests linear temporal frameworks. Further, in creating new frameworks for identity, I suggest the possibility of discerning an alternative approach to time in her work that places difference at the heart of simultaneity. I suggest that the interconnection between concepts of time and community within Anzaldúa’s work indicates, more broadly, that attempts to rework understandings of relationality must be accompanied by reworked accounts of temporality. (shrink)

This paper examines the long dialogue between Africana phenomenology and Africana feminism. In particular, it examines the exchanges between WEB Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon and Sylvia Wynter on the one hand, and a number of black feminists on the other, including bell hooks, Natasha Barnes, Farrah Griffin, and Joy James. The primary outcome of the survey of these exchanges is that the pro-feminist spaces created by black male phenomenologists have all been insufficient for the full representation of the (...) black female voice. In the words of Sylvia Wynter, such a full representation can only come through "a feminism in its own name". (shrink)

Feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories have established that social identities such as race and gender are mutually constitutive—i.e., that they “intersect.” I argue that “cultural appropriation” is never merely the appropriation of culture, but also of gender, sexuality, class, etc. For example, “white hipness” is the appropriation of stereotypical black masculinity by white males. Looking at recent videos from black male hip-hop artists, I develop an account of “postmillennial black hipness.” The inverse of white hipness, this practice involves the (...) appropriation, by black men, of stereotypical white gay masculinity and/or non-American, non-white femininity. I also argue that Shephard Fairey’s recent images of (mainly militant) non-Western women of color can be read as a new form of white hipness that revises the traditional logic in two ways: (1) by appropriating non-white femininity rather than masculinity, and (2) by adopting the practice of postmillennial black hipness itself. (shrink)

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” and Bergson’s Matière et mémoire and “La perception du changement,” I ask what resources are available in vision for interrupting objectifying habits of seeing. While both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty locate the possibility of seeing differently in the figure of the painter, I develop by means of their texts, and in dialogue with Iris Marion Young’s work, a more general phenomenology of hesitation that grounds what I am calling “critical-ethical vision.” Hesitation, I argue, stems from (...) affect and leads to critical memory. In hesitation, the seeming coincidence between my habits of seeing and the visible is decentered, revealing these habits and their social reference as the constitutive horizon of my field of vision. Hesitation, then, provides the phenomenological moment within which vision may become at once critically watchful, destabilizing its objectifying habits, and ethically responsive, recollecting its affective grounds. The critical and the ethical are here inseparable. Critically, this vision is an awareness of the structures of invisibility, diacritical and habitual, social and historical, to which my vision owes—dimensions which institute particular ways of seeing and being as norm while eliding others. Ethically, this is the recognition of how seeing is already seeing with others—others whose affective influence is operative within vision, even as their existence is reductively represented or denied. (shrink)

Historically critical reflection on whiteness in the United States has been a long-standing practice in slave folklore and in Mexican resistance to colonialism, Asian American struggles against exploitation and containment, and Native American stories of contact with European colonizers. Drawing from this legacy and from the disturbing silence on “whiteness” in postsecondary institutions, critical whiteness scholarship has emerged in the past two decades in U.S. academies in a variety of disciplines. A small number of philosophers, critical race theorists, postcolonial theorists, (...) social historians, and cultural studies scholars have revisited and reexamined questions of race and identity with an analysis that now focuses on historical studies of racial formation and the deconstruction of whiteness as an unmarked privilege-granting category and system of dominance. Collectively, these writings identify whiteness as a cultural disposition and ideology held in place by specific political, social, moral, aesthetic, epistemic, metaphysical, economic, legal, and historical conditions, crafted to preserve white identity and relations of white supremacy (Mills 2003). In this way, whiteness studies is a conscious attempt to think critically about how white supremacy continues to operate systemically, and sometimes unconsciously, as a global colonizing force. -/- We extended the notion of ‘reproduction’ to include practices of reading and cultural forms of reiteration, but shied away from making the special issue into a philosophically driven cultural studies volume. Our volume is interdisciplinary by necessity: it offers theoretical and philosophical perspectives grounded in a variety of disciplinary starting points, all of which illustrate how whiteness remains at the center of reproduction and social regulation. Our hope is that this volume will further open philosophical conversations on the ways white supremacy regulates gender by providing new ways of thinking through those histories and reproductive materialities that make whiteness simultaneously a centrally defining signifier of bodies, values, and meanings and a signifier coding the “normal,”“the pure” and “the real” in white supremacist thinking. -/- We have categorized the contributions to this collection into three major areas: Resistance, Genealogies, and Miscegenation and Purity. These serve as both a guide for the reader's pathway through the volume and as a way of interconnecting the essays, although the intertextuality of all these writings also provides a rich field of rhizomic offshoots and a deeper connectivity. (shrink)

Articulating heterosexualism is not to supplicate for gays but to better understand consequences of institutionalizing a particular relationship between men and women. In this essay, Hoagland takes up the claim from a number of women of color that women are not all the same gender.

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination (...) with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West. (shrink)

: This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a person's identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. Race thus (...) becomes gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning. (shrink)

Book Review of Naomi Zack's Women of Color and Philosophy.

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

Although often viewed as burdensome, academic writing guidelines are rarely treated as actively problematic. Even progressive scholars are unlikely to challenge the cultural assumptions or political investments of academic style guides. Yet standards regarding clarity, precision, appropriateness, sensitivity, and objectivity are not politically innocent. In codifying formal guidelines for the presentation of research, academic style manuals reflect and reinscribe the racialized and gendered power relations characteristic of the academy. Drawing on critical race feminism and whiteness theories, this paper considers how (...) scholarly investments in whiteness and patriarchy organize the influential APA writing guidelines. The present analysis refers specifically to the APA Manual, but similar analyses might apply to aspects of the Chicago and MLA manuals and the Bluebook, among other style guides. (shrink)

This dissertation is a formulation of a theory of racism that transcends the narrow focus upon individual intentions and attitudes, capturing the ways and means by which it becomes an "institutionalized" part of the larger social context. I argue that this larger institutional level of racism is what makes it oppressive, as opposed to simple prejudice or dislike. Chapter one establishes this basic position, and moves directly into an analysis of oppression, appealing to five basic "premises" which delineate the boundaries (...) within which any adequate theory of oppression must function. The chapter concludes by claiming that a successful theory of oppression, which must be understood in terms of a related notion of freedom, requires a "positive" theory of freedom, rather than the "negative" one that dominates contemporary discourse on race. Chapters two and three develop a concept of positive freedom, and a corresponding understanding of racism , using Hegel, Sartre, and Frantz Fanon. I argue that a successful theory of racism can be constructed with a foundation in Hegelian recognition, aided by the appropriation of the social ontology developed by Sartre in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. I use Fanon's texts both to provide important insights overlooked by Hegel and Sartre, and to provide a theater in which to demonstrate the interpretive and analytic power of the theory of racism as it develops. Chapter four lays out the final theory, and applies it to several compelling contemporary contexts. (shrink)

Trances, Dances and Vociferations provides a compelling feminist analysis of gender politics in the works of four major Africana women writers: Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Assia Djebar, and Paule Marshall. Nada Elia explores the way in which black women characters use conjuring, double entendre, and song to empower, liberate and determine their own female insurgency. She also explains how African and Afrodiasporic women have been forced to rewrite history and substitute a communal and individual wholeness for alienation and separation in (...) many different settings, from Algeria to Oklahoma. Ranging over works including Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Djebar's A Sister to Scheherazade, Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven and Morrison's Jazz and Beloved, Elia offers essential and provocative insights into the works of some of our most influential Africana women authors today. (shrink)

Antiracist white feminists and ecofeminists have the tools but lack the strategies for responding to issues of social and environmental justice cross-culturally, particularly in matters as complex as the Makah whale hunt. Distinguishing between ethical contexts and contents, I draw on feminist critiques of cultural essentialism, ecofeminist critiques of hunting and food consumption, and socialist feminist analyses of colonialism to develop antiracist feminist and ecofeminist strategies for cross-cultural communication and cross-cultural feminist ethics.

This course covers works of Indigenous North American Women through an examination of native and nonnative historical and contemporary oratory, argument, letters, addresses, and texts. From the influence of precolonial indigenous culture on Native women’s lives, through colonization via slavery, force of weaponry, policies of removal, allotment and disease, to such turn of the century works of Laura Cornelius Kellogg and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, and contemporary writings of Alice Kehoe, Winona Laduke, Annette Jaimes, Wilma Mankiller, Clara Sue Kidwell, Laura Whitt, (...) and Marilou Awiakta, we explore the interplay of Native women’s voices. We learn how Native women have influenced American women’s lives, and how certain philosophical concepts like gender, race, class, nation, genocide, indigenism, and progress, have impacted Native women’s lives. Traditional and contemporary North American Indigenist Women’s values will be examined in contexts of survival, ecology, law, reproduction, and education. (shrink)

In Critical Race Feminism, Anita Hill, Lani Guinier, Regina Austin, Patricia Williams, Emma Coleman Jordan (Anita Hill's lawyer) and over three dozen other women seek to ensure that their perspectives on race, power, law, and politics in America will never again be distorted or ignored. Revealing how the historical experiences and contemporary realities of women of color are profoundly influenced by a legacy of racism and sexism that is neither linear nor logical, the book offers a panoramic perspective on American (...) women's lives, illustrating how women of color derive strength from oppression. Both a forceful statement and a platform, the volume addresses an ambitious range of subjects from life in the workplace, motherhood, and parenting to sexual harassment, the O.J. Simpson trial, and criminal justice. Extending beyond national borders, it also takes on such global issues as female genital mutilation with sensitivity and eloquence. -/- In a foreword that discusses relations between black women and men in the wake of the Million Man March, Derrick Bell argues that there is a singular focus, and thus a unique power, in Critical Race Feminism that makes this anthology relevant for women and men of all colors. (shrink)

Feminist Cultural Studies is a key reference collection covering a broad spectrum including ethnographic studies, audiences and reading, culture in the making of subjectivity, and popular culture such as film, television, dance, make-up and advertising. Other areas addressed include contemporary theory and method, the uses of the female body as a cultural product, and the inter-relationship of ‘race’ and ethnicity in the cultural construction of gender. -/- This collection includes seminal essays by well-known writers such as Susan Bordo, Hazel Carby, (...) Sue-Ellen Case, Rita Felski, Jane Gaines, Susan Gubar, Angela McRobbie, Toril Moi, Toni Morrison, Laura Mulvey, Janice Radway, Jacqueline Rose, Gayatry Spivak, Carolyn Steedman, Catherine Stimpson, Elizabeth Wilson and many others. (shrink)

This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them-the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain-both attempt to think (...) through and thus revisualize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how "feminism as critique" can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both. (shrink)