Feminist Theory
Multiculturalism

Multi-culturalism
 a reaction against the universalizing tendencies of feminist theory
 i.e. writing and theorizing AS IF there is a UNIVERSAL female experience
 that all women’s experiences and all women are the same

Criticism leveled at second-wave, white, educated, middle-class women
 who did most of the theorizing in the 1970s and whose theories, experiences
 were taken to apply to all women, everywhere

Chicanas, African-American, Asian, Indigenous women
women of many different backgrounds challenge this, object to it, insist that white women’s theories do not apply to them, speak for them, have erased them, silenced them

Cherrie Moraga

From a Long Line of Vendidas

Vendidas
translation "sell outs"

From myth of Malinche
Aztec princess who was lover and translator for Hernan Cortes
i.e., in the minds of indigenous people of Mexico, facilitated the conquest of Mexico

A second layer of betrayal in the myth when Malinche's mother passes over her for inheritance, to give wealth to son of her second marriage; chooses to sell her daughter into slavery.

Betrayal, especially sexual betrayal, a constant in Chicano culture

Women are untrustworthy because they are prone to being traitors

Thus, men are justified in trying to control women's sexuality, root of the unreliability, the means of their infidelity to the race, to the family

*Lesbianism, the ulitmate betrayal, a rejection of all Chicano men

*Are there alternative interpretations of Malinche's actions? (e.g., how does Aleida del Castillo interpret her story?)

*Moraga doesn't stress this point, but how free was Malinche to do otherwise?  Why do women choose men over women, choose to be loyal to them over others?

Moraga states as fact that her mother loves her brother best, that he doesn't have to earn her love the way she does

*Is this part of "anglo" culture as well? 

She begins with resentment about having to wait on her father and brother (brother more so).

Do men in anglo families enjoy this same privilege?

How different are anglo and chicano cultures regarding sexism?

**Why, according to Moraga, are Chicanas more comfortable attacking feminism for being racist, than chicano culture for being sexist?

Gloria Anzuldua

Mestiza consciousness

La consciencia de la Mestiza

Life in the borderlands, struggle, inner war

Ambiguity, a tolerance for contradictions

Breaking down subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner

Crossroads, no homeland, no country

The Mestiza Way

Take an inventory; what is the weight on her back? What did she inherit?

In other words, consciousness raising

Escaping machismo, “You’re nothing but a woman” “Eres pura vieja.”

Roots of machismo?

Racism, colonial domination, humiliation

Leads Chicano men to dominate, brutalize Chicanas

Bonds with other oppressed peoples

e.g.?

Homosexuals, Jews, Blacks, Indians

Tone of the writing? Style?

Norma Alarcon

Editor of anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

Essay in K and B

Criticizes the theoretical starting point of much of feminist theory as

“the modal person” (Flax): self-sufficient individual adult

individual, individualist (Spivak)

autonomous, self-making, self-determining

who proceeds according to

“the logic of identification with regard to the subject of consciousness, a notion usually viewed as the purview of man, but not claimed for women. Believing that in this respect she is the same as man, she now claims the right to pursue her own identity, to name herself,to pursue self-knowledge and, in the words of Adrienne Rich, to effect ‘a change in the concept of sexual identity.’” (489 in K and B)

“

this excludes the “native female” object of colonialism

unexplored asymmetries of race that permeate, structure society

Discusses de Beauvoir (491)

“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”

The Other

But the writer, the intellectual can escape

Become Self, transcendant self

But what of those who cannot escape?

MacKinnon, consciousness raising

Problem here?

It often “leads to privileging women’s way of knowing in opposition to men’s way of knowing,

thus sustaining the very binary opposition that feminism would like to transform” (491)

**see 492 – “the paradox that within this cultural context one cannot be a feminist without becoming a gendered subject of knowledge, which makes it very difficult to transcend gender at all and imagine relations between women.”

Advocates a “politics of solidarity” in place of a “politics of unity”

Hard to do

Hard to hold the complexities, multiplicitites, pluralities without splitting, labeling each one, creating opposition/division