Locating the Critic: Intersectionality and Notes Towards the Politics of Location
Crenshaw "Demarginalizing"
What is the problem?
What is the methodology?
What is her archive/body of evidence?
What's our way out?
Rich "Notes"
Problem: let's be accountable to "intersectionality"; resisting "assimilation" or "hegemony" (from a white, western American perspective)
Methodology
Evidence/Archive:
Way Out: think about the body, then towards the global: :"Perhaps we need a moratorim on saying 'the body'" (67); "To say 'the body lifts me away from what has given me a primary perspective. To say 'my body' reduces the temptation to grandiose assertions" (67)--let's get specific about how we operate and what skin we're in.
when it comes to Black women, discrimination laws fail when sexism and racism are looked at as only one vector, we lose Black women and justice. "Deems their discrimination complaints groundless" (146)_
legal court cases
Moore v Hughes: Black women doesn't mean "all women" cause what about white women? the doubled identity
the court system is heinous
DeGraffenreid v General Motors: "to create a new classification of Black women who would have greater standing than a Black male" "only by the mathmatical principles" (ugh)
Payne v Travenol: pits Black women against Black men
"feminism must include an analysis of race" (166)
the limits of the feminist movement (and it's white-centered perspectives)
it can't be an added diversity, it needs to be a ground-up thing: change the system; jettison the "single-issue from framework discrimination" (152)--reminiscent of the birdcage and viewing macroscopically
in
"I was defined as white before I was defined as female" (67)
"I wrote a sentence and xx'd it out" (66)--knowledge is revision, it's reflecting, it repositioning yourself
the notes to her friend "Adrienne Rich, 14 Edgevale Rd" (64)--calls on us to position our tiny selves in a whole global movement
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