Unit 11Postmodernism and gender

Black feminist thought

Patricia Hill-Collins

Hill-Collins and knowledge production

• Knowledge, consciousness and the policitics of empowerment

• Black feminist thought=> placing black women’s lives and experiences at the center of analysis; a post modern approach to knowlegde production; new concepts, paradigms and epistomology

• Knowlegde is power and part of the social relations of domination and resistance of marginalized or excluded groups

Conceptual framework

• The interwoven mechanisms of race, gender, class; (ethnicity, culture, nationality, age..etc)

• Empowering (black or colored) women and men within an afrocentric epistomological perspective

• Paradigmatic shifts; how does it take form? Domination and resistance; Reconceptualizing race, class and gender as interlocking systems of oppression

• Black feminist thought sees these distinctive systems of oppression as being part of overarching structure of domination.

• Sociohistorical context essential for understanding the interlocking mechanisms

Examples of black feminist epistomologies and thougt

• Placing the particular in the center of analysis reveals much needed information about the expericences of a specific group and questions the eurocentric masculinist perspectives

Writers and scholars like Lorainne Hansberry, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Hazel Carby, Bell Hooks, Toni Morrison , Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Barbara Christian, Philomena Essed

The matrix of domination

• Models of oppression are rooted in the either/or dichtomous thinking of Eurocentric white masculinist thinking. Replacing models of oppression of interlocking systems of oppression replaces new paradigms, a shift in paradigm.

• Race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, religion and ethnicity affects heavenly the lives and experieces of black and non white women

• Analysing the displacement, marginalization and lack of epistemology of black women or other marginalized groups challenges prevailing notions, theories and definitions.

• The theoretical framework race, gender and class conceptulizes all experiences of groups and persons. It critiques the assumption that it does not matter

• Master thesis; From Black women studies towards black feminist research; paper for the MIT conferencie Black women in Academy. A summary

Multiple levels of domination

• The axes race, gender and socio-economic background form the matrix of domination and that is on several 3) levels: 1)the level of personal biography, 2)the group or community level or the cultural context and 3)the systematic level of social institutions

• The power of domination can take all kinds of forms; accounts are diverse and domination is always complex and diffucult. How is dominating who and where? (class, race, gender, education, age etc… within different context and situations)

• Oppression is filled with contradictions…. There are no simple victims and oppressors….penalties and privilege are part of the multiple systems of oppression in everybodys lives.

Resisiting the matrix of domination; revolution begins by the self. Audre Lorde

;…. But that peace of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us….

• Is it important to be a black women to understand the matrix of domination? How is knowledge produced? Example Zora Neale Hurston.

• All the stereotypical ideas about black females (teenagemothers, single mothers, abused by fathers and husbands, poverty, violence and at healthrisk (HIV). How to change this knowledge or research and from which perspective?

• Situated knowledge, subjugated knowledge and partial perspectives

• Knowledge about black women is produced in collaboration with them in their communities; it is specilized thought and epistomology (Foucault). It is partial… the particular. The matrix oversees multiple groups with varying experiences. No groups has the truth……

Agents of knowledge

• The importance of dialogue, empathy and truth• Dialogue and empathy: subjectivity, interdependence, taken for

granted knowledge and everyday practices…• Black women intellectuals realize that social conditions shape the

types of thought. Decentering the dominant group (whichever group) does not occur without struggle… in order to accept the variety of experiences that exists, a variety of ways of understanding the world, a variety o of frameworks of operation without imposing consiously or unconsiously a notion of the norm….

The politics of empowerment

Let go of victamization and a passive attitude and be accountable, ownership, complex and responsible, not either either but both, human beings

Constructing feminist knowledge in the Caribbean

Eudine Barriteau

• Barriteau perspectives on gender relations in the Caribbean.

• Who is Eudine Barriteau? The concept of gender justice instead of the concept of rights.

• Caribbean economies are charactized by post-colonial patriachal histories

• Based on Liberal conservative patriachal states ideologies

• Gender and development policies of international organizations (UN agencies) WID.

• WID and UN discourse on women , development theories and globalisation is utilitarian and very economic

• An analysis of the lack of female ontological right to be

• The interwoven mechanism of race, gender and class CAFRA

• The role of Caricom, UNDP , HDI, GDIand the role of postcolonial societies

• The lack of data on the lives of Caribbean women (and men)• Singular focus of family relations, householdstypes and

matriachal familystructures, glorifying caribbean women as or very vunerable or uber strong

• The role of the UWI gender and developement center in producing research and data on the lives and experiences of women in the Caribbean

• No feminist state ideology in the Caribbean• Backlash for women by the attention for the position of caribbean men,

Millers ´The marginalisation of the Black Male´+ drop out rates of boys, high unemployment rates of men, crime rate etc.

• Ideological constructions that favor men above womens experiences

• The invisibility of the experiences of women in political ideological constructions and philosophies