Gender scholarship that omits feminist framing undermines the very movement it depends on
Evidence
A good example of such a work is Deborah White’s Ain’t I a Woman. Published after Ain’t I a Woman, this work, whether intentionally or not, mirrored my work’s concern with rethinking the position of black women in slavery. (White makes no reference to my work—a fact which is only important because it coincides with the absence of any mention of feminist politics.) Indeed, one can read White’s work as a corrective to interdisciplinary nontraditional academic work that frames the study of women within a feminist context. She presents her work as politically neutral scholarship. Yet, the absence of feminist standpoint or references pointedly acts to delegitimize and invalidate such work even as it appropriates the issues and the audience feminist movement and feminist scholarship creates. Given that so little solid academic factual work is done to document our history, White’s work is a crucial contribution even though it exposes the ambiguous relationship many black women scholars have to feminist thought. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 230
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Black women produced gender scholarship while declining to claim the feminist label — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 228; Studying gender does not require or imply feminist consciousness — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 225; A feminist classroom is distinguished by perspective, not course listing (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Refusing to acknowledge a woman’s own ethical framing paradoxically strengthens the misogyny feminists oppose
#exemplifies(0.92) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2242 - Politically responsible scholarship cannot assume gender equality is universally fulfilling
#expands(0.75) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 271 - Benignly invited feminism exposed unadmitted patriarchal power inside Cultural Studies
#complicates(0.70)