Reading this paper, Intersections: The Simultaneity of Race, Gender and Class in Organization Studies by Evangelina Holvino (originally published by the Center for Gender in Organizations at the Simmons School of Management), this quote stood up:
As early as 1974 the Combahee River Collective recognized that the struggle of Black women was a unified struggle against race, gender and class inequality articulated in ‘A black feminist statement’:
[W]e are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking … we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
But, as Sandoval documents, a hegemonic feminist theory based on the experience of white women had developed. This theory, liberal feminism, suppressed, intentionally or not, the theorizing and practice of women of colour and the recognition of the contributions of ‘an original, eccentric and coalitional cohort of U.S. feminists of color’. One outcome of both ‘first wave’ US feminisms in the 19th century and the ‘second wave’ women’s movement, which grew during the 1970s and 1980s, was that women of colour were rendered invisible and their concerns and experiences were disappeared.[…]
Important differences between white women and women of colour’s theories emerged, which led to different paths in the theorizing and practice of gender at the intersection of race and class. The scholarship documenting these differences is extensive, particularly from Black and Chicana feminists. While some, in particular socialist feminists, tried to respond to this critique, the white feminist movement overall failed to successfully address it. This failure, in turn, overdetermined the lack of attention to the intersections of race, class and gender in organizational theory and research, even when feminist analyses have been deployed, for most of these analyses were drawn from white women’s feminist theorizing.
And I believe these few paragraphs succinctly synthesize why Black feminism and womanism and other Feminisms of Color do not come in “waves”. They are, in most cases, divergent and oppositional to them. So, while white feminist history has been written as “waves”, feminisms of color emerged as a number of forces that had to stand in opposition to both these “waves” that were erasing and exclusionary and the pull of white supremacist, heteronormative, cissupremacist capitalism. The paper also contextualizes a number of issues in regards to WoC’s relationship to labor and white feminist demands around careers and inclusion in the market.
I do wish the author had not glossed over the misogyny experienced by WoC within communities of color, though. This is a dynamic I often see reproduced in social media and other environments related to media production as well (tumblr, blogs, etc). Namely, when WoC create a space for self actualization or self empowerment, they sometimes become targets of men of color who seek to delegitimize their work but do not necessarily go after white men with the same degree of virulence. Moreover, I’ve seen the work of intellectual Black women and other WoC disqualified by men of color who later on have nothing but praise for the intellectual production of white men and women. Yet, in spite of this minor critique I have, I did find myself nodding in agreement with the author here:
Others have referred to this unique perspective of women of colour as a third gender category, multiple consciousness, triple jeopardy, oppositional consciousness, mestiza and borderlands, a bridge, a crossroads and interstitial feminism. I liken this position to a kind of belonging and not belonging, a ‘both/and’ orientation that allows women of colour to be members of a particular group (of colour, women) and at the same time stand apart from it as the ‘outsider within’. Hurtado calls it a shifting consciousness […], the ability of many women of colour to shift from one group’s perception of social reality to another and at times, to be able simultaneously to perceive multiple social realities without losing their sense of self-coherence. This position, in turn, creates a specific relationship to knowledge and knowledge production. It is informed by knowledge that expresses and validates oppression, while, at the same time, it also documents and encourages resistance to oppression. This places women of colour in a unique position to document ‘the maneuvers necessary to obtain and generate knowledge: [a] unique knowledge that can be gleaned from the interstices of multiple and stigmatized social identities’. Theory itself comes to be questioned, partly as a challenge to the apparatus and institutions of theory-making that silence the perspective of women of colour and partly as a way of connecting to their communities of origin, which are in many instances working class and non-academic. Feminist writing by women of colour is different in style and content. For example, there is a mixing of different genres such as poetry, critical essays, short stories, letters, memoirs, and the production of knowledge itself is less tied to the academy. The call is to create theory that uses ‘race, class, gender, and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders [and] blur boundaries — new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods’.
I believe this paragraph, right here, puts the finger exactly on the issue I’ve been talking about for the past few weeks (and even before when I was derided for not using “simpler” words or ideas); specifically, the above highlights some of the reasons for the systematic erasure and lack of recognition for the intellectual productions of Women of Color. As I stated before, it’s not that there aren’t any “feminist intellectuals”, it’s that this hegemonic definition of “intellectual” needs to be questioned, unpacked and, I’d dare say, dismantled. There is as much intellectual work in writing a paper like the one I am quoting here as there is in writing a short poem for one’s blog. After thinking this topic for weeks, I now reject the premise entirely: the question is not “where are the feminist intellectuals”. The question is “why does white feminism continue rejecting our knowledge production and hegemonizing the very definition of what it means to be an intellectual”.
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