Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

2007-01-06 09:53:31

OK, so KH’s questions got me thinking. I decided to unbury Split Decisions I realized I needed to explain something that probably isn’t clear. Now, I was just going to flesh out Halley’s work. As I did so, though, I couldn’t help but think of how nubian and brownfemipower articulate their own convergentist and divergentist modes of social theory. I haven’t asked permission to do this, so I hope neither of you mind or feel I am appropriating your work. I kind of hope it’s understood as what you are both going to have happen to you throughout your careers: groupies are going to write about you on their blogs, write glowing reviews of your books, and uphold your work as exemplary of women of color feminism, like we do with Lorde, Moraga, Smith, Walker, and others. So, I hope you all can bear with me, because I want to really ground Halley in what we are doing out here, together. And as an aside, this will also help folks understand what Halley means by ‘irrationalism’ in sex positive/Queer theory, with its own type of convergentist/divergentist tensions. So, onward: One of the things I liked about Halley is that, not only did she give me better conceptual tools for thinking through the issues, she also sharply criticized ideas near and dear to me: namely, the intersectional approach to feminist theory. Before I can explain what “intersectionality” is all about, I need to begin by talking about what this approach to feminist theorizing rejected. In Shame Affirmative, I used the metaphor of those snap-together beads that kids drool all over. As my sister always says, when you come into this world, you experience it through your mouth. Hence, you don’t really know anything until you put it in your mouth and drool on it. :) I was using the metaphor to talk about how identity had been conceived in feminist thought: the additive model. This example of the baby bead blocks actually comes from an article by Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman, ‘Have we got a theory for you! Feminist Theory and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice’,’. Lugones and Spelman argue that philosophy in general and feminist theory in particular drew on essentializing notions of identity: the idea that there is a singular “Woman’s Voice,” for instance, or that there is a nebulous shared experience of socialization. As such, they said, such approaches to feminist theory had relied on a notion of identity that was discrete like the snap-together baby beads. There is whiteness. There is queerness. There is maleness. There is disabledness. There is upper-middle-classness. To know what someone was, one just added the discrete identities together: snap, snap, snap, snap. snap. done. This was all acceptable from the position of a white, het, middle class woman engaged in feminist theory and the political practice they called ‘consciousness raising.’ [1] Only by virtue of her gender, woman, was she marginalized. Otherwise, her identities weren’t much considered. They were normalized, naturalized, taken-for-granted, just as the identity white het male is normalized and naturalized: the standard against which others are measured and found wanting. But women of color, lesbian women of color, white lesbians, and working class women began chafing against all this. The 80s erupted with ever growing critiques of this mode of thinking. For a lesbian woman of color, one who might have worked to create The Combahee River Collective Statement (hereafter, The Statement — and yes, it’s really online this time, download it! *****), she didn’t experience the world this way. The beads didn’t snap together. They were integrated, they intersected: She wasn’t black. She wasn’t woman. She wasn’t lesbian. She was a black lesbian woman. Janet Halley, takes the Combahee River Collective Statement as a canonical text that exemplifies a convergentist, hybrid feminism. Thus, she writes that it is a “classic text in U.S. antiracist feminism. It is cited again and again for the almost perfect statement of the convergentist agenda.” (p. 84) I’m going to stop right there and harken back to when Hugo Schwyzer was getting thrashed about his comment policy in a thread at Feministe. Somehow, a spat broke out over race. When Hugo felt challenged on his approach to dealing with race issues, he got defensive and made some comments about being married to a Chicana and teaching at a community college with plenty of Chicano/as, Blacks, Asians, etc. Quickly on the heels of that (or perhaps before), Nubian wrote about what she saw as a very white-centric approach to feminism on the mainstream blogs. It was around then that piny at Feministe and Barry at Alas stepped up to the plate and reconsidered how they blogged. In one thread responding to nu bian’s challenge, one poster agreed with nubian and thought it high time to stop making excuses for being ignorant:

Women of colour have been telling us openly and constantly that we don’t listen for, what, at LEAST 40 years now. It’s long past time we stopped making excuses for why we can’t be bothered and just fucking did it.

However, Ms Kate took issue with that:

…I have found some women of color to be openly hostile to the concept that much of what they decry as marginalization due to race and gender is really marginalization due to class culture and gender. … Black students I know who do understand that academic hurdles are not so simple as gender or race alone seem to share my frustration, because such divides only serve the conquerers.

Kevin reported the quotes and responded in this post, Am I Reaching My Limit? Now, I recount all that because it was the point at which things started turning in Feminist Bloglandia. Nubian called out the whiteness problem and it’s been going on since then. Brownfemipower wrote a couple of powerful posts during all this: Guilty Bloggers, Chicana Bitch, and Oprah Made Me Radical. Fabulosa Mujer criticized the racism and elitism in comments about breeders in Impulsive. BlackAmazon wrote about her mother, women of color, and the whiteness problem in feminist thought and practice with GMA can KMA. Now, when you have Janet Halley telling us that The Statement is a “classic text” “ cited again and again” and it is “widely regarded inside various Unitedstatesean feminisms as a canonical statement,” then one is left to wonder: what is going on in Bloglandia? If its “convergentist vocabulary is … widespread and familiar,” then why isn’t it really? Those are rhetorical questions. But I wanted to highlight the rupture between what’s considered canonical and widespread in academia and how things proceed in BlogLandia. It’s not that academia is necessarily better about dealing with these issues. Rather, in academia, women’s studies tends to focus on intersectional anlayses of race, class, gender, nation, ability, sexuality. Thus, it draws on convergentist hybrid feminist theory. That’s why Halley upholds The Statement and its vocabulary as canonical and widespread. And I’d agree that it is, though there are deep probems, still, about walking the walk. So, what exactly is this convergentist, hybrid feminism? For Halley, it is embodied in three different strands of feminist thought that emerged from the mid-70s and 80s: socialist feminism, postcolonial feminism, and antiracist feminism. Convergentist feminism takes its cue from texts like The Statement, as well as that of white working class and working class women of all races and ethnicities. Their texts were largely marginalized out of the movement, confined to critiques from “outsiders” in the labor movement or simply considered not particularly important to feminist concerns at the time.[2] A convergentist, hybrid feminism attempts to bring together analyses of “class hierarchy, racial subordination, and postcolonial trauma” in order to show how they have “consequences ’inside’ gender, sexuality, and so on” (p. 81, emphasis added). The language here is the language you will often read from brownfemipower: the nation, the state, racism, nationalism are gendered. They are eroticized. They are sexualized. It’s not just BfP, consider Yolanda Carrington’s conversation with Heart in a recent thread at BfP’s (on 26 Dec 2006 at 3:21 pm):

Everything in US society is racialized; we are a white supremacist settler state after all. Gender is racialized, sexuality is racialized, and feminism is racialized. The transphobic shit over at Twisty’s was racialized too.

Her sentences here exemplify a convergentist, hybrid feminist vocabulary where it it is assumed that systems of oppression “act together.” In antiracist and postcolonial modes, society takes the “woman- disadvantaging forms it does because of something in racism or something in the history of postcolonial nation” (p 81, my emphasis). Thus Yolanda sees everything as racialized. There is, in other words, a very subtle “race in the final analysis” approach, just as there is a subtle “class in the final analysis” approach in socialist feminism. You can see this in the way Yolanda’s statement names everything but class. There is no capitalism there, and I assume this is no mistake since her blog is called, ‘Gender, race, and power.” And regardless as to whether Yolanda makes room for an analysis of capitalism, the point is that the movement is always toward racialization. So, even if we threw capitalism in there for extra bonus points, capitalism would be recognized primarily because it is experienced as racialized. A socialist feminist position would see movement always toward class. It would recognize all these systems of oppression, but it would speak of them as instrument-effects of class-based society. The one difference would be how it conceives of this as a situation where the systems of oppression exist in dialectical relationships with the system of class relations in the market and economy. (Update: It has occured to me, thinking about this while cleaning today, that the socialist feminist framework doesn’t fit so neatly in Halley’s typification. ha. I had this nuggest in my head earlier, complete with a succinct, three sentence explanation. Damned if it didn’t just float outta me peabrain as soon as I sat down to write it out. I’ll go wash dishes. It’ll come to me.) In any case, the movement is always toward convergence: to explore each of these systems of oppression in order to ask how they work together. The tendency is to push for a way to see how these systems “intersect, converge, reinforce one another, provide meanings and moments for one another’s success [3]” (p 85). Halley gives The Statement a close reading to show how the “convergentist problem” erupts, but also how it is also erupts in a divergentist moment at the end. From The Statement:

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we 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. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.

Here, the language of convergentism is loud and clear. It is convergentist in so far as oppressions are “interlocking” and “synthesized,” “manifold” and “simultaneous.” As such, they require an “integrated analysis and practice.” As such, Halley argues that strong convergentist thought tends toward an analysis and activism that shows “how multiplicity and hybridity produce not fracturing and splitting but harmony: racism and sexism … intersect, converge, reinforce one another.” That they do so results in a systematic and systemic overarching structure of oppression. Moreover, the appropriate political praxis for such a theory requires that it addresses not only sexism but also racism and class. As Halley puts it more eloquently:

“Failures to produce convergence are … understood to reinstate the oppressive norms belonging to the unconverged system of oppression: if gender is not fully racialized, the analysis is complicit with racism; if race is not fully gendered, the analysis is complicit with heterosexism.” (p. 83).

The Statement then articulates one of the earliest expressions of identity politics, making a claim about knowledge and one’s location in a system of oppression. For those who’ve read me talking about “standpoint theory” and the search for the most oppressed subject of history, you can see how the Combahee Collective, steeped as it was in the intellectual heritage of the Civil Rights struggle, the New Left, the antiwar Movement, the Black Power movement, etc. — all influenced by Marxist inspired standpoint theories — would turn toward this analysis of the relationship between one’s social location and knowledge:

We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual or class privilege to rely on, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess any one of these types of privilege have … We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap in revolutionary action. (my emphasis)

Ok? For all my babbling about Hegel and shit, what do you see there, especially where the words are bolded? They clearly saw themselves as the revolutionary agents or subjects of history. It wasn’t just that they had the most knowledge of how this oppressive system worked because they were at the bottom, it was that they could, without mediation or extra analysis or double checking about the clarity and objectivity of their thought, make a clear leap in revolutionary action. Halley also points out, there is a point of divergence where the Statement leaves behind the convengitist mode and diverges from the mission of focusing on integration, intersection, commonality. Halley quotes the passage for which the Statement is so often cited as an example of how women of color feminism differs from white, middle-class feminism: it’s position on their relationship to men. First, from The Statement:

”We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. … Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue.”

Halley reads this very closely, arguing that the movement

from ’struggle together with’ to ’struggle with’ emphasizes the solidarity within difference that the Collective wishes to maintain vis-a-vis black men [4]; the temporality imagined for the project is open-ended; the stance is strategic; and ‘while’ suggests both contradiction and simultaneity. By contrast, the Collective addresses white feminists as Others who have their own distinct project (one that they manage without aid from black feminist women and for which they are held accountable); the temporality of the encounter is imagined to have a blunt ending…rather than ongoing relationship; the encounter is what it is “by definition,” not because of the speakers strategic, situated judgment; and the “but” expresses contradiction simpliciter.

Divergence. The language signals a refusal to converge. It refuses to seek out points of agreement. It refuses to “struggle together with” or even “struggle with,” but rather to hold white feminists “accountable.” You can’t help but think of BfP’s quote:

Colonizer, my enemy I will confront and challenge you I will neither accept nor conform to your lies I will challenge you I know who I am. — D.K.Goodleaf

Divergence. Another point of divergence enters the text when The Statement addresses the then-widely held (though not uncontroversial) view among radical / cultural feminists and power feminists: the basis of women’s oppression was rooted in male biology. The Statement rejects this formulation because it is too much like biological racism. They hold out the hope that men’s behavior is a temporary condition. Thus, they believe men — all men — can change. Halley points out that, again, the concluding passages are very different from the convergentist moments in the text early on:

“This visionary humanism, the temporality of struggle, the uncertainty of identity in the process, and the longed-for vision of human redemption — all of these produce a conclusion that is stylistically quite different from the formulations with which the Statement begins. Here are the last passages in full: (From the Collective:) One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women’s movement. As black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and black history and culture. Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue. In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving “correct” political goals. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice. In her introduction to Sisterhood is Powerful Robin Morgan writes: ”I haven’t the faintest notion what possible evolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power.” ***** As black feminists and lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.

I’ll continue quoting Halley:

This is a seriously ambiguous passage. Robin Morgan justified her categorical disaffiliation from white men by invoking their ‘embodiment’ of dominant power, a basis that the Statement just rejected. There must be some distance between the quote (from Morgan), and the series of gestures that present it; exactly what that distance implies is left unarticulated. Moreover, the Statement’s own affirmations refer to a future of uncertain possibility and explicitly disavow a judgmental and knowing politics. One can read Morgan’s assertion that she ‘ha[s]n’t the faintest notion” as an ironic and dismissive equivalent of the statement, “I can’t imagine it because it cannot be real”; if the Statement adopts that formulation it has to be a more direct and even wistful confession that it is hard to imagine what a revolutionary future might bring. The conclusion provides us with an oblique, tentative, even dimly visionary moment, all the more striking in the delicacy as it follows immediately on the stern promise to hold white feminists accountable for racism.

As Halley notes, the conclusion is divergentist. It works against its convergentist beginnings by insisting that there is perhaps some very fundamental differences between women of color and white women. While it might not be always and forever, it is durable and recalcitrant. Resolution will not entail “working together” or “struggling together.” It will, rather, involve tension, conflict, disagreement. Thus, Halley writes that the conclusion “unperforms” the convergentist tendency. She picks this up because she sees the conclusion as very tentative, uncertain, expressing self-doubt. Yet, the statement begins quite differently as Halley sees it:

reality is consolidated and apprehended as a matter of fact; the voice already knows exactly what it is going to find out if it looks at the social world”

Phew. Lotta quotage that I had to hand type in there. I hope this has given everyone a concrete understanding of what Halley means when she speaks of a convergentist, hybrid feminism — as well as what KH and I and others are talking about when we contrast them with divergentist moments in feminist thought and in the thought and practice found in other justice projects such as sex positive/ sex radical / queer theories. Basically, convergentist theory tends to have a moral and even moralizing vision. There is a kind of certainty as to how the world operates. There is a belief that, while the POV of one group is limited in its perspective, there’s a possibility that if we can just gather together all points of view, we can keep on contributing to our knowledge of how this system works in order to produce a grand theory and accompanying political practice that can change the world. There is also what is called “functionalism” in the theory: a tendency to see a hybrid system where the different oppressions are ultimately interwoven, interdependent, interlocking and dynamic such that it creates this larger systemic and systematic structure of oppression to make function as it does. What women of color like Nubian and BfP do is rupture their convergentist, hybrid feminism by taking a break from white feminism (something of a given) but also do so within the women of color community and even within their own subject position. For both of them, they recognize that, sometimes, there’s tension and conflict. Things don’t converge. Sometimes, like the Combahee River Collective, a woman of color feminism is going to say, “We will work together with Black Men to fight racism, and we will also struggle with Black men about sexism. But the fight against racism among white women is their’s to wage on their own. The only thing we do is sternly hold them accountable. We are not allies in that struggle. We are not here to help them. They don’t get cookies or pats on the back simply for doing something that ought to be uneventful, ordinary.” Consider how Nubian thinks of being a radical women of color feminist in this statement:

like all feminisms, a radical woc version has its pitfalls. i must address that the term carries intellectual weight, as it has roots in an institutionalized academic and activist setting. the cultural capital of the academy maintains its power, as scholars have the ability to define others. and as scholars of color who identify as a “woman of color,” we have become the voice of authority. which brings up the question, how can we really be ‘radical’ when we have some ‘access’ to move within the white patriarchy like white women? (a question for discussion perhaps?) or more specifically, how can we not be? plus, i think, that my lived experience and other womens narratives similar to mine are not the end all solution to an emancipation of women of color. but, i do think that a collective feminist practice for women of color has to be offered for a new vision — a vision that attempts to resituate us as carriers of cultural agency. One that does not capitalize on the “shock value” of our oppression and instead, it interrogates and deconstructs the various forces that perpetuate inequality and injustice.

There is much more hesitancy here. Nubian does not presume that simply being in her standpoint or any other woman of color standpoint will automatically be a “end all solution to (the) emancipation of women of color.” Contrast this with the early claims in The Statement, which drew a hiearchical ordering, placing black lesbians “at the bottom.” I see nubian explicitly rejecting this in several ways, but most notably when she says, “one that does not capitalize on the ’shock value’ of our ‘oppression’ — instead, it interrogates and deconstructs the various forces that perpetuate inequality and injustice.” While I don’t know for sure, I’ve always seen BfP’s choice of initialism as an expression of her affiliation. She’s for Brown Power first: they are uppercase. They encompass and surround the middle term, femi, signifying both women and feminism. The f is lower case for a reason, I always figured. Correct me if I’m wrong. While sharing much with nubian I think, BfP’s own statement on what it means to be radical offers a strong moral claim about how to proceed via theory and practice. Specifically, she is asking that women of color are centered as the basis of any movement for liberation. Thus, she is clearly signalling that white women will no longer be considered the center of feminism. On the one hand, it is a convergentist demand in its boldness, in its moralizing insistence on a vision of what it is that will be found there when we examine an oppressive social system and what can happen when we create community and a politics for social change. However, it embraces a divergentist mode by refusing to demand any kind of permanent center. Instead, BfP’s statement embraces contingency, temporality, the recognition that various forms of oppression do not necessarily converge:

Thus, according to Smith, the uninspiring, boring, tedious, and nerve wracking work of building a community is indeed “radical” work — and that rather than creating a movement that creates one specific model on how to deal with oppression (thus creating a ‘who is the most oppressed’ competition between women of color), our movement should have the flexibility to constantly shift the center of analysis. In other words, civil rights might be fabulous for Chicanas and Black women, but when Native women are shifted into the center, civil rights becomes problematic. Likewise, when discussing abortion, sexuality, poverty, war, state violence, etc. What might be a great solution for one group, might also be nothing but problems for another group.

There is no hesitancy here. She is confrontational, just as the Combahee Collective was, about what her primary concern is –- violence against women of color in all its forms, including forms in which white women and perhaps even women of color participate in depending on their social location. That means that it’s not just male violence, but also the violence of the nation-state that is of concern. It’s the violence of silencing and erasure of voice. It’s the cultural violence of silencing and erasing cultural forms of expression, solidarity, and practices of commitment. She is adamant about what it takes to put this theorization of the problem into practice: community building and the centering of problems in terms of addressing the needs of women of color first. She doesn’t just admit of divergence from whiteness and white feminism, she also embraces a divergentist moment when she artculates the uncertainty and tension-filled relationships within women of color communities. Thus, as a Chicana, one might be part of an oppressed group in one situation, but in another situation, one might just be among the oppressors and thus in a position of resonsibility and accountablity to end one’s racism, ethnocentricism, bigotry, etc. Thus, BfP and Nubian articulate positions that are convergentist in their vision, but are also very much divergentist in their willingness to embrace radically incommensurate subject positions (where one is located in a social structure) that cannot be fully explained by converging them into an overarching explanatory framework and set of political practices. These different subject positions may exist in conflict. But that’s OK. That conflict need not be explained away. It need not be smoothed over, let alone ignored. We can make bold statements, have strong visions of what we think is happening in the world and about how to fix it, but at the same time, we can also recognize that nothing is settled. There is always a centering and recentering. There is always a willingness to be flexible, there is always a shifting. It’s also important to engage in self-criticism, to acknowledge doubt, and keep on shifting the center, refusing to let any one center become ossified and hardened into yet another way through which oppressive social relations manifest themselves. [1] To be fair to the earliest radical feminists, they had been profoundly shaped by Marxist anti-colonialist work, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the new left. Their texts often reflected an understanding of the problem as one where there wasn’t just sexism, but also racism, colonialism, and imperialism. They were steeped in movements that were, for that era, centered on anti-racist politics. That doesn’t mean they weren’t plagued by racism, just that, as they shifted away from those roots in order to really focus on the woman problem, other issues got left by the wayside as radical feminism made its cultural turn and tried to articulate a vision of theory and politics based on the notion that all women shared a common experience in socialization. [2] There are other texts from white working class women. IF we do end up moving, this will give me an opportunity to find my work uncovering the texts of white working class women that had been ignored, buried and marginalized — never included in feminist anthologies and, more often, never really heard since the criticisms were marginalized to union struggles and the like. [3] By success she doesn’t mean, Yay, this is great, but how these work together to create a larger oppressive social structure. [4] If Donna Darko is reading, this is where Donna wants to say “I want more d ivergence” when she wants women of color feminists to confront men of color on their racism within POC. I’m interpreting her here, but that’s how I’m reading her. Not to stir up a hornet’s nest, but I think we can have a good convo about this one at some point. I mean, I have little to say on the topic, but I know everyone involved seems to sincerely want to work through the issue without unnecessary disruptions. ***** Note that my copy, included in a reader, does not contain the passage from Robin Morgan. The current copyright is held by Zillah Eisenstein. I am now curious why the Morgan quote was excised. Will have to see if Eisenstein is still at Ithaca. I think she used to be there anyway.