Black women produced gender scholarship while declining to claim the feminist label

Evidence

Despite a burgeoning body of literary criticism by black women from a feminist standpoint, more often than not black women academics focused attention on issues of gender with out specifically placing their work within a feminist context. Historians like Rosalyn Terborg Penn, Deborah White, and Paula Giddings chose critical projects that were aimed at restoring buried knowledge of black female experience. … A similar pattern developed in other disciplines. What this means is that we have an incredible work built around the issue of gender-enhancing feminist scholarship without explicitly naming itself as feminist. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 228

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Gender scholarship that omits feminist framing undermines the very movement it depends on — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 230; Studying gender does not require or imply feminist consciousness — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 225; Literary criticism gave black women a safe venue that feminist theory denied them — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 227 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Black women needed a separate feminist intellectual tradition #expands (0.85)
• Scholars frame black women’s organizing as anti-racist, not feminist #expands (0.80) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 466