I missed this when it was published right in the middle of the holiday season but I believe this is an important piece which is closely related to a couple of issues I’ve been going on lately. Namely: feminist intellectual production, epistemic justice and control of media platforms.
At The Guardian, Joanna Biggs under the title “Feminism is on a high – but it needs a strong intellectual voice” wrote:
What has feminism been complicit in this year? There are features common to the successful campaigns: they happen on Twitter and Facebook with occasional forays into the mainstream media; they are fronted and run by younger women; their target is very often the way women are seen in the media or portrayed in the public sphere; they are legion but uncoordinated, related but not connected; and every inch of ground they win is accompanied by trolling, abuse and rape threats.
She then lists what she considers to be the successes of 2013 and, unless I am misreading, there isn’t a single Woman of Color listed within the achievements. Ok then, let’s move on and see if the piece fared better in its premise of promoting intellectual work within feminism. She asks:
Where is the fourth wave’s intellectual? De Beauvoir was far from perfect, but she served a purpose for a movement that needed her as much as she needed them.
Leaving aside this wave classification which is a very specifically white feminist system of categorizing historical periods that have one thing in common: exclusion of anyone that isn’t white, cis, able bodied and of certain education, Ms. Biggs would like to know where are the intellectual producers of our time. She then continues:
The more I think about it, the more I see that it is only a matter of time until the fourth wave’s intellectual turns up, with a big book that will sell thousands and draw letters from the modern equivalent of de Beauvoir’s sexual maniacs who wrote on lavatory walls.
So, it’s not really about intellectual production but about contracts and book publishing? The question then, should perhaps be rephrased to “where are the white intellectual feminists capitalizing on knowledge production?” Because after we’ve extensively documented how the knowledge production of Women of Color is summarily dismissed by white feminists under the pretense that it is “too complicated”, the questions raised above couldn’t possibly hold any water.
This is possibly a founding moment of an entirely new genre of feminist analysis: intellectual gaslighting, or claiming that entire bodies of work that have been developed for more than a century do not exist. Just a cursory search across a library, the internet or social media would reveal that there is an incredible depth and width of intellectual knowledge being produced by Women of Color on a daily basis. Work that then is summarily dismissed by white feminism and used in spurious ways to erase and silence the producers. The claim that “there are no feminist intellectuals” is not only false, it’s damaging and erasing to the women who are creating, discussing, embodying and renewing this feminist knowledge on a daily basis.
I’m afraid that the real issue the writer has is that white feminists are not getting enough publishing contracts to capitalize on their politics. It’s yet another mechanism to push “career” instead of “justice”. Intellectual Women of Color need not apply for these contracts. In closing, Ms. Biggs writes:
As the main character in Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, one of the feminist novels of the year, put it: “One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t many examples yet of what a genius looks like.”
I do have plenty of examples: they are called Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Maria Lugones, Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks or Cherríe Moraga, to name just a very small few out of the top of my head. Checking blogs or twitter conversations among bright, amazingly knowledgeable intellectual women of color would be another place to start. But those are not the ones with the profitable book contracts and careers, are they?
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