Unit 9. Black American Feminism

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Unit 9. Black American Feminism
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• From Black Movement to Womens Movement
• Black Women and Femininity
• Black Women and Psychoanalytic Theory
• Rendering Visible
• Oppressive Images
• The oppositional Gaze

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1. From Black Movement to Womens Movement

• Cellestine Ware, Woman Power (1970)
• Frances Beale, Double Jeopardy (1970)
• Much has been written recently about the white
  womens liberation movement in the united states,
  and the question arises whether there are any
  parallels between this struggle and the movement
  on the part of black women for total
  emancipation. While there are certain comparisons
  that one can make, simply because we both live
  under the same exploitative system, there are
  certain differences, some of which are quite
  basic. ...

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• If the white groups do not realize that they
  are in fact fighting capitalism and racism, we do
  not have common bonds. If they do not realize
  that the reasons for their condition lie in the
  system and not simply that men get a vicarious
  pleasure out of consuming their bodies for
  exploitative reasons (this kind of reasoning
  seems to be quite prevalent in certain white
  womens groups), then we cannot unite with them
  around common grievances or even discuss with
  these groups in a serious manner because theyre
  completely irrelevant to the black struggle.
  (Frances Beale, in Guy-Sheftall 1995 153)

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• Patricia Haden et al, A Historical and Critical
  Essay for Black Women (1970)
• Myths unite people and steer their culture
  The American Dream is white and male when
  examined symbolically. We are the exact opposite
  black and female and therefore carry the
  stigma, almost religious in nature, of the
  spurned and scorned and feared outcast.

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2.Black Women and Femininity

• Femininity white, fragile, delicate, passive,
  helpless, refined etc black women as its other
• Sojourner Truth (1795-1883), Aint I a woman?

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3. Black Women and Psychoanalytic Theory

• Freud women as the dark continent
• What is lost by this metaphor
• What is lost in the process is the situation
  of the black woman. Her position becomes quite
  peculiar and oppressively unique in terms of
  oppression, she is both black and a woman in
  terms of theory, she is neither. In effect, she
  occupies a position which is difficult to think
  within current paradigms.
• (Doane Dark Continents in Femmes Fatales
  1991 231)

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4. Rendering Visible

• Barbara Smith, Towards a Black Feminist
  Criticism (1977)
• Patricia Hill Collins Black Womens Standpoint
  Theory (1990)
• Like other subordinate groups African
  American women not only have developed
  distinctive interpretations of black womens
  oppression, but have done so by using alternative
  ways of producing and validating knowledge
  itself.

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5. Oppressive Images

• Patricia Hill Collins controlling images
• the mammy
• the black matriarch
• the welfare mother
• the 'Jezebel, whore, or sexually aggressive
  woman'
• Ideological struggle

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6.The oppositional Gaze

• bell hooks the field of representation remains
  a place of struggle
• politics of the gaze
• Jacqueline Bobo re-coding representations
  negotiating texts