Feminist Thought

Black Feminist Thought

Long History of African-American Women Activists, Theorists, Authors

Suffragette and Abolitionist Sojourner Truth

“Ain’t I a Woman”

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place!

And ain't I a woman?

Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!

And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well!

And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me!

And ain't I a woman?

Civil Rights Activist Fanny Mae Hamer

Activist and Historian Angela Davis

English Professor, Writer, Feminist Thinker, Social Theorist bell hooks

Author Alice Walker

Womanism

Third Waver Rebecca Walker

Common Themes

A critique of American feminism

Bourgeois white feminism

Angel in the House? Pedestal?

White middle class privilege

Sexuality

History of ownership of, abuse

Stereotyped as hyper-sexual

Tensions with black men

Also hyper-sexualized, to be feared

Intersections of

Race, Class, SES, Sexuality

Can’t be separated

Methods

Voice, Listening

Oral Tradition

Call and Response

Experience

Standing in Solidarity with the Oppressed

Readings:

Pat Hill Collins

Toward an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology

Criticizes the processes of “the academy”

Credentialing, recognizing each other’s work, scholarly contributions

Biased in favor of disembodied knowledge

Argument, marshaling of evidence, debate

Eurocentric

Masculinist

“objective”

emotionless

dispassionate

decontextualized

Black women’s standpoint

has no chance of being recongnized as

valid, valuable, “scholarly” by these standards

An Afrocentric epistemology

Should be based on African values

Pre-colonialism, pre-slavery

Rooted in everyday experiences of A-A women

“a heap see, but a few know”

practical wisdom, mother wit

Narrative

the story should be told and heard

not torn apart (i.e., “analyzed,” de-constructed)

Privileges contextualization, socialization

Rather than abstractions

Dialogue

Ethic of Caring

Accountability

Angela Davis

The Myth of the Black Rapist

Critiques how the sexuality of black men and women

white men and women have been

constructed to support white men’s political dominance

Black men: sexual predators, to be feared, lynched when the step out of line

Black women as Jezebels, unrapeable

White women: as virginal, maternal

they’re honor needs protecting

their sexuality possessed and

protected by their fathers, husbands, brothers, the mob

Deborah King

Multiple Jeopardy

How race, gender and class intersect for each person

Statistics on educ’l attainment

by gender and race and income (as proxy for class)

show these intersections

see pg 223-224 in FF

Group Experience (or the narrative of that experience)

Is not the same as women in the group’s experience

e.g. the group experience of slavery and lynching for blacks

genocide for native Americans

military conquest for Mexican-Americans and Puerto Riquenos

is not substantively comparable to

the physical abuse

social discrimination

cultural denigration suffered by women (of these groups)

One experience is not worse, better

Just Substantively Different

Need to be acknowledged, explored – because generally ignored

e.g. black women slaves exploited for labor, flogged and mutilated

AND sexually abused, raped