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

finally. something i can sink my teeth into — something new. I’m about half way through this bridge we call home and I’ve finally hit on a contribution that is something I haven’t read before in an anthology like this. In this case, the article by four women about a women’s studies course on Latina Feminism reminded me of something that always troubled me about conversation where two groups explored their similarities of their oppression. I shouldn’t use the caromshot here. What I’m talking about are the generally really interesting conversations brownfemipower has had exploring similarities between disabled folks and women of color, between transgendered folks and women of color, between trangendered folks of color and women of color.

They troubled me because I always thought it was a practice that didn’t fully instantiate the message in books like This Bridge Called My Back. What I took from those books was that such practices must also be accompanied by practices in which people explore how they are different.

When it really hit home to me, it was reading Janet Halley’s Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism. Halley gave me a better set of reasons for being troubled by this form of convergentist feminist (or any social justice movement’s) thought. I set about exploring that issue in the series of posts I did on Split Decisions. One is still one of the more popular posts at the old blog, From Combahee to BfP and Nubian. I argued, there, that Bfp and Nubian embraced a form of convergentist feminist thought, although they were also building on the insights of those who forged a divergentist feminist thought.

Anyway, I didn’t realize how freaking tired I am, so I’m going to stop, but not after typing some quotes from this chapter, “Imagining Differently: The Politics of Listening in a Feminist Classroom” by Sarah J Cervenak, Karina L. Ceapedea, Caridad Souza, and Andrea Straub:

The narratives of authenticity that circulated in our class maintained an understanding of Latinidad as oppositional only through an allegedly nontheoretical posture where visibility was synonymous with demonstrating “experience” as a group member. Framing Latinada in this way excluded Latinas and African-American and white women who questioned the terms of that authenticity by raising concerns about the different sites, including the classroom, where power operates and difference is ultimately suppressed. Our experiences demonstrate how even subordinated people often misrecognize themselves and each other through rigid understandings about who people are and their potential for change. … (T)hose of us who resisted attempts to homogenize experience were tagged as unapologetically operating in collusion with the state’s efforts to silence people of color.

…

Our class’s structural and social power valence made it different from other women’s studies courses in important ways. As an elective in an ethnic studies department, two-thirds of the students were Latinas of various classes, colors, ideologies, and sexualities. The other third included women of African-American, African-Caribbean, non-Latina mestiza, and European ancestry.

…

One way binary thinking occurred was through a discourse of Sisterhood. Both hegemonic feminist and cultural nationalist ideologies draw the line around liberatory personhood by excluding racialized ethnic, economic, and queer identities

NOTE: I think, here, they are revealing their hand as deeply indebted to the insights of postcolonial, and postmodernizing feminist theories.

Sisterhood among cultural nationalist involes racialized claims to authenticity that valorize a “connection” with an imagined nation/ethnic community along the lines of sameness based on oppression and common interests. Feminists of color have challenged hegemonic feminists and cultural nationalists by marking the complexity of the multiple differences they live. Despite (Bridge’s — the original anthology from which this grew, This Bridge Called My Back) contributions to the dialogs across difference, many of us remain locked in oppositional practices preventing the mode of listening and learning that This Bridge advocates. …. The haunted (the oppressed) do not readily have names for their own abuses of power, nor do they always provide self-representations that critically address them. instead they rely on a “we/they” binary where the “we” functions as an undifferentiated group and “they” becomes all those whose separateness from the group somehow entails collusion with the State.

…

Unraveling the relations of power among and between whites and people of color means critiquing narratives of authenticity and homogenize — or make same — “experience” in the name of unity. According to Lorde, “the need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homgeneity.” (In Sister Outsider, Lorde, p. 119)Sisterhood in our class drew on an essentialized notion of Lantinidad that assumes it is a natural, innate, and easily recognizable identity. … Such an uncritical use of sisterhood invokes hierarchical and bourgeois familial ideologies that disavow the complex differences shaping Latina identities.

(Objections to this discourse) read as hostile criticisms against the alleged unifying principle of Latinidad, and those class members were labeled incomprehensible in ways that stifled and halted dialogue….

Our class’s construction of various disparate individuals into a “Latina group” shows how, in the very process of opposing them, we interanzlie state narratives created to dominate us. As our class polarized around two “self-consistent, but habitually incompatible frames” of “we” and “they,” it became increasingly difficult to listen to and learn from one another. About such counterstances, Anzaldua reminds us that “it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counsterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like cop and the criminal, both reduced to a common denominator of violence…. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with authority — outer as well as inner — it’s a step toward liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life.” (from Borderlands, Anzaldua, p 78).

Which, if you’ve stayed with me thus far, is reminiscent of Wendy Brown’s argument that identity politics in its weakest forms relies on a politics of resentiment that is anchored in its problem with authority — both external and internal.