Feminist scholarship on race often fails to interrogate the writer’s own location

Evidence

Individual black women engaged in feminist movement, writing feminist theory, have persisted in our efforts to deconstruct the category “woman” and argued that gender is not the sole determinant of woman’s identity. That this effort has succeeded can be measured not only by the extent to which feminist scholars have confronted questions of race and racism but by the emerging scholarship that looks at the intertwining of race and gender. Often it is forgotten that the hope was not simply that feminist scholars and activists would focus on race and gender but that they would do so in a manner that would not reinscribe conventional oppressive hierarchies. Particularly, it was seen as crucial to building mass-based feminist movement that theory would not be written in a manner that would further erase and exclude black women and women of color, or, worse yet, include us in subordinate positions. Unfortunately, much feminist scholarship dashes these hopes, largely because critics fail to interrogate the location from which they speak, often assuming, as it is now fashionable to do, that there is no need to question whether the perspective from which they write is informed by racist and sexist thinking, specifically as feminists perceive black women and women of color. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 161

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to hooks’s broader theme of the location of enunciation, and to standpoint-epistemology debates about who gets to theorize for whom. Resonates with the colonial archive literature’s insistence that enunciation/there is no view from nowhere. — connects to: Feminist literature is often racist and sexist despite its liberatory rhetoric — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 553; Race politics scholarship must replace generalizations with situated accounts — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1643; Gender scholarship that omits feminist framing undermines the very movement it depends on — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 230 (+4 more)
• SEED: Article angle: ‘the fashionable disclaimer’ — how white feminist critics gesture at race without interrogating where they speak from, and what that gesture accomplishes rhetorically.

Broader Connections

• Western race scholarship long ignored whiteness as a category of analysis #exemplifies (0.85)
• Race politics scholarship must replace generalizations with situated accounts #corroborates (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1643
• Feminist literature is often racist and sexist despite its liberatory rhetoric #corroborates (0.78) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 553
• Gender scholarship that omits feminist framing undermines the very movement it depends on #corroborates (0.75) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 230
• Erasing precolonial women’s contributions perpetuates racist historiography #exemplifies (0.74)
• Intersectionality struggles with fluid racial identity despite its anti-essentialist aims #exemplifies (0.73) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 76