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Gender and Intersectionality (SOC1) - Coggle Diagram
Gender and Intersectionality (SOC1)
Black Feminist Thought
Patricia Hill Collins -
https://blackfeminisms.com/black-feminist-thought/
the thought as a critical social theory provides Black women with the tools to resist intersecting oppressions
not only Black intellectuals contribute to BFT
everyday Black women do so too
e.g. Cashawn Thompson, an early childhood development expert living in D.C., coined #BlackGirlMagic as a lens for Black women and girls to self-define and innovate positive representations of their identities as a counternarrative to the negative controlling images of Black women and girls that perpetuated by the social institutions of mainstream society.
U.S. Black women intellectuals are not a female segment of W.E.B Du Bois’s notion of the “talented tenth”
not a monolith/homogenous
dynamic, actively resists changes in social conditions that negatively affect Black women
advocates for coalitions rather than separatism
Black women's struggles are human struggles
Matrix of domination - describes four interrelated domains that organize power relations in society
https://blackfeminisms.com/matrix/
This approach to an analysis of power informs us about how structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power shape human action.
structural: the organization of interlocking, large-scale social institutions which reproduce the subordination of Black women - e.g. residential segregation prevents most Black women in the United States from having access from certain educational and job opportunities.
disciplinary: the disciplinary domain of power manages oppression. - e.g. Black women academics who embrace Black feminist thought might find themselves relegated to the academy and subject to monitoring of their radical potential.
hegemonic: the system of ideas developed by a dominant group that justifies their practices. - e.g. After the Civil War, the characterisation of Black men as hypersexual brutes seeking to rape white women justified the lynching of countless Black men (Emmett Till)
interpersonal: refers to how our individual consciousness perpetuates the subordination of others. - e.g. believing Black to be ghetto and ratchet
help to maintain the status quo
'Black' used as a political term which includes all oppressed minority groups
Addresses and is grounded in Black women's collective knowledge, historical-subject positions, lived experiences, and the political economy
Ghanian linguist and women's activist Florence Dolphyne (1991) on her involvement with Western feminists at the mid-decade meeting in Copenhagen in 1980: Western women wanted immediate laws to eradicate traditional African practices (polygamy and infibulation), whereas African women saw more sustained and systematic education/training as a better method
Reproductive Justice
conceived in 1994 by 12 Black feminists
= reproductive rights struggles embedded in social justice organising that simultaneously challenged racism and classism
abortion rights
right to have a child and right to parent
Criticisms:
case studies:
crack babies phenomenon
Black women under higher surveillance than white women, therefore more likely to be criminalised
Octomum: Nadya Suleman
a woman who used IVF (right to reproductive tech), was heavily criticised for this due to having no spouse and declared bankruptcy
Abolition Feminism
Queer Theory
Opposes heterosexuality
Core theorists: Michael Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler
transgender rights and how they intersect into many forms of oppression
Intersectionality
= acknowledges that individuals experience multiple layers of oppression, namely race, class and gender, simultaneously that intersect and shapes their lived reality
Term coined by Crenshaw in 1991 article - Mapping the Margins
Applied it to a US legal framework
Criticisms:
Intersectionality not robust enough -
Intersectionality Undone
'depoliticising intersectionality'
Has been or is threatened by 'whitening' from the mainstream feminist movement
link to the Ghana example and to Oyewumi
Applying intersectionality, in theory and practice, means engagement with the interrelationship of these systems of inequality
Criticisms of BFT:
Sexism
There's no strong consensus on how to respond to the issue of Black sexism in BFT
Black feminists utilising a Black nationalist or Marxist analysis of Black sexism fail to develop a serious critique
Many argue that "black feminists have not been good at critiquing Black male sexism"
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41674895.pdf
(pg. 53)
"within AA communities, there is an unwritten family rule that Black women will support Black men, no matter what"
Collins decided not to stress "the contradictions, frictions, and inconsistencies of Black feminist thought"
Gender
Women living in foreign countries:
Abu-Lughod (2002): Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?
examines the Western obsession with the plight of Muslim women and the centrality of the burqa to contemporary discourse
white-saviourism: a form of individual, cultural, and institutional racism that "results in the systemic silencing and dehumanisation of Brown and Black individuals by maintaining white privilege while simultaneously upholding systems of oppression.”
The body
can link to queer theory
Gill-Peterson (2018): Interrogates the limit points of Black trans and trans of colour life in early 20thC
Oyewumi (1997): In Yoruba society, social relations derive their legitimacy not from biology, like the West, but from social facts
In the West, the body used as a medium to express and identify subsequent forms of oppression