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

thinking about a thread at a discussion list to which I subscribe, brought me to reading Wendy Brown and Janet Halley again. And as I read, I thought a lot about the disagreements that broke out over Renee Martin’s insistence that people need to get over their wounds, put their big girl panties on, and move on. I’m going to call this a politics of forgetting. Martin was specifically targeting particular radical women of color she characterized as being too attached to their position of suffering, too mired in constantly remembering wounds inflicted on them, and, as she put it (paraphrasing) ‘curling up in a fetal position’ to pick at their scabs. (see: http://www.womanist-musings.com/2009/03/big-girl-panties-and-cycle-of.html)

Interestingly enough, her position is a pejorative and not particularly generous view that is outlined by Wendy Brown in States of Injury and Janet Halley in Split Decisions. That said, given what they’ve written, which I can’t fully quote here because, well, you have to read the books, it is quite clear that they would be unlikely to characterize the politics of RWOC as mired in a wounded attachment to their marginalized, silenced identities.

Which is, really, the point of contention, of course, is that Martin has simply mischaracterized the work that Radical Women of Color are doing. Their projects are much more complicated, nuanced, and, I want to argue, clearly about a politics of re-membering and a politics of wanting and desiring for us — that is, wanting for a radical woman of color community.

To get there, I’m going to first pull out the material I’d written a couple of years ago. In the next post, I’ll elaborate on Wendy Brown’s critique of “wounded attachments” and identity politics. And then I want to show how, at least in most of Brownfemipower’s writing, the politics is a politics of re-membering (putting the pieces back together) and wanting for us. Such a politics is not articulating a politics of wounded identity alone. And it is not making the mistake of forgetting and moving on, which is what Martin seems to advocate. Rather, it is a politics that is both/and: it is a politics of of being and a politics of “I am” and it is also a politics of “I want us to have.”

Awhile back, on the other blog, I tried to illustrate what Janet Halley meant by a political practice and theory of divergence. I drew out Halley’s claims and then turned to specific examples I’d discovered when I read Radical Women of Color bloggers like Brownfemipower and Nubian of (Bl)ac(k)ademic. I’ll quote the specific part of that long post that gets into their work:

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 nubianthinks 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.