Black women fiction writers opened feminist debate in black communities more than nonfiction did.

Evidence

Literary criticism has been the location that has most allowed black female academics to claim a feminist voice. Much feminist literary criticism responded to the work of black women fiction writers which exposed forms of gender exploitation and oppression in black life; this literature was receiving unprecedented attention, and speaking critically about it was not a risky act. These works spoke to feminist concerns. Black women writing about such concerns could address them, often without having to claim a feminist standpoint. More than any nonfiction feminist writing by black women, fiction by writers like Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange served as a catalyst, stimulating fierce critical debate in diverse black communities about gender, about feminism. At that time, nonfiction feminist writing was most often ignored by black audiences. (Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman was a unique exception.) White women academics were usually accepting of black females doing literary criticism that focused on gender or made reference to feminism, but they still saw the realm of feminist theory as their critical domain. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 227

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scholarship on how medium and genre gate who gets to speak on contested topics, similar to claims in the Islamophobia-and-the-novel sources about novels being read as representative documents.