Abstract
Women of Color (WOC) feminisms offer powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression. This article discusses the critical contributions of some of these analyses. In section one, “What Is Structuralism?”, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analyses of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, “Women of Color Structural Feminisms”, I discuss diverse land-based contexts of interpretation of WOC feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure, and I argue against a unified theory of WOC structural feminisms that supplants difference. I further argue in favor of a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purpose of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. In section three, “Resistance to Colonial Myths”, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, WOC structural feminisms can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Today, the term as it is typically used in the humanities and sciences is very different, yet it is important to remember they share common antecedents in western scientific thinking. This shared history is especially evident in some accounts of the philosophy of science. In “Basic Concepts of Structuralism,” for instance, Holger Andreas and Frank Zenker (2014) explain that “the core idea of structuralism is to represent empirical systems by means of sequences of sets, and to model the application of scientific theories by means of set-theoretic predicates. The systematic use of set-theoretic predicates for the representation of scientific knowledge, therefore, distinguishes the structuralist representation scheme from other formal accounts in the philosophy of science” (p. 1367). Here, we see the joint concern with methods of analysis that seek to understand relations among objects (as elements) by specifying, with exactitude, the extent of necessary relations between them in a system (like an ecosystem) or framework (like a natural language). In both cases, there is a strong emphasis on predictive knowledge, whether through modeling or the specification of existing structures.
- 2.
There is strong evidence that Saussure did not hold this view, but that it is the product of blatant editorial revisions and disciplinary power plays by his disciples. For a review of this literature, see Ruíz (2016).
- 3.
This was especially important in the aftermath of WWII, when philosophers and social scientists were left with the task of making sense of social structures devoid of universal guiding moral principles once postulated to exist by the European Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). Structuralism created the illusion of human power over instability and powerlessness in a world full of seemingly ungovernable patterns. By the 1960s, structuralism was the order of the day in Parisian literary and intellectual circles, further privileging the close association between structures and logical analyses of natural languages.
- 4.
In The Postmodern Condition (1979), Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924–1988) extends this analysis to post-industrial societies, arguing that the diverse human interactions brought about by technological shifts in communication networks and globalization had peeled the mask off of the illusory foundations of universal knowledge projects, or metanarratives, that were once common to Enlightenment thinking. It is important to note that postmodernism takes on wider breath than the response to structural thought associated with post-structural thinkers. Deconstruction, post-humanism, and a wide breadth theoretical positions branched off from post-structuralism, such that it is not possible to give a full account of the diversity of postmodern approaches. What we can say is limited to their consistent and predicative ignorance toward sexist racism in their analyses of social structures.
- 5.
In this vein, Latina feminist philosopher Ofelia Schutte (1998) uses the postmodern notion of a decentered subject strategically to reject cultural hegemony in cross-cultural communication. Cultural alterity, as Schutte describes, “points to an ethics and to ways of knowing far deeper than the type of thinking wherein dominant cultural speakers perceive themselves to be at the epistemic and moral center of the universe, spreading their influence outward toward other rational speakers (p. 56). Schutte goes on to articulate the social and material conditions that make such an ethics difficult, yet necessary in the context of ongoing cultural imperialism and violence.
- 6.
Consider that post-structuralist, hermeneuticists, and other thinkers who reject the Cartesian subject do so in favor of cultural forces (such as language and historicity) that background the meaningful acts and practices of a “discursive” subject. We do not speak language, language (as social structure) speaks us. On this view, there can be no such thing as a historyless subject because meaning is linked to growing into social languages, suggesting that on their view, there are stable structures of epistemic dependency at work in human meaning formation and intelligibility. The solution has generally been to hold that these structures are part of open systems, not closed networks, thus marking relations between elements in social structures indeterminate, non-essentialist, and open to change. This view provides conceptual cover for innocence narratives about dynastic systems and white supremacy that continue to background settler colonial epistemological systems.
- 7.
Brady Hiener argues this reveals “a hidden genealogy of Foucault’s genealogical work” that has important ramifications for how we have come to understand—and police—the notion of power in critical theory (335).
- 8.
A colonial relation is here understood as “one characterized by domination; that is, it is a relationship where power-in this case, interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial and state power-has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their land and self-determining authority” (Coultahrd 2014: 6–7).
- 9.
hooks’s critique is especially important in light of her own intellectual commitments to anti-essentialist politics and her open stance toward exploring a critical discourse of identity that enacts “a postmodernism of resistance” for the purposes of social liberation (30). While she rejects the mechanical understanding of structure as an all-encompassing determinism of relations, she does not reject the notion of structure as the enabling arrangements for specific cultural formations that are oriented to produce oppression, such as histories that erase the lives of Indigenous peoples and women of color. When you lose sight of structures of oppression, one is not radical, but “rootless” in one’s anti-essentialist politics; analyses of structural oppressions rooted in colonialism are thus co-present with anti-foundational analyses of social structures in hook’s work. She points out, for example, that the operationalization of structures of oppression in academic production create double standards for who is seen as a legitimate producer of postmodern theory, noting that “writing I do which I consider to be most reflective of a postmodern oppositional sensibility, work that is abstract, fragmented, non-linear narrative, is constantly rejected by editors and publishers” (29). This is not a case of academic bad luck, but structured inattention that builds cultural payoffs for some populations but not others.
- 10.
To date, these two views (structuralist and post-structuralist) have dominated thinking about structures in the humanities. Despite their differences, structuralism and post-structuralism are complicit in colonial systems of domination and oppression that continue to this day. The notion of structure they rely on facilitates this by supporting exonerating views of cultural violence and complicity in systems of domination. While controversies exist over differences in views and methods, incontrovertible is the fact that both traditions perpetuated racist ideologies and/or methodologies, from Levi Strauss to Derrida. In philosophy, the typical whitewashed response is to contextualize intellectual labor in favor of white supremacy, separating the ethics of doers from the value of their deeds and citing the (allegedly) independent logical merits of metaphysical, epistemic, and ontological views they held. The only fashionable Cartesianism left today is in defense of racism. It is well known that Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, and many leading figures held that certain categories of people were unworthy of freedom or had to rationalize their claims to freedom to overcome their “natural qualities” toward enslavement. Curiously, these people were never white, for, as Kant contends, “the race of whites contains all talents and motives in itself.” Hegel held that Native Americans are “uneducable” and for that reason useless, while “the race of Negroes…can be educated, but only to the education of servants, i.e., they can be trained”; he is most famous for his claim that “in Africa proper, man has not progressed beyond a merely sensuous existence, and has found it absolutely impossible to develop any further” (1980: 172). These are the foundational thinkers of the western intellectual tradition. Anyone that takes up the idea of social epistemology and history seriously cannot think the philosophic systems generated by these lived commitments are neatly separable. Scholarship in the history of philosophy that actively downplays, ignores, and is even emboldened by the history of misogynist racism has not missed a beat. Today, there is a cottage industry of publications by high-ranking journals and publishers that take up emerging “charges” of racism and delve further into the “debate” over the xenophobic, sexist racism of the western intellectual tradition. For these thinkers, it is as if it is inconceivable that anyone but Leibniz could have thought up predicate calculus, or that anyone could replace the insights about what a human is, how we out go act in relation to others and the natural world, or what visions of the good life should reflect. As one student once asked: “say Virginia Woolf said something bad. Are we supposed to go backwards without her feminist insights?” I asked them to think less about individuals and more about motivating structures, and to speculate about why—safely assuming they had not—they had never read Gertrude Mossell’s (1855–1948) “A Lofty Study” (1908), written years before Woolf and advancing the same thesis. I also asked them to further speculate about why the burgeoning philosophical projects of genealogical recovery highlight the intellectual histories of white women and, in particular, class-privileged white noblemen.
- 11.
White feminist methodology has become functionalized across various disciplines that profoundly impact women of color’s lives today. The field of humanitarian work and international development is one such example, as it privileges capacity-building frameworks and capabilities approaches to human flourishing that universalize western views of freedom, nature, individual identity, and communal rights and responsibilities. Indigenous feminist scholars have been at the forefront of these critiques, particularly the view of freedom from anti-sexism as solely concerned with critiques of patriarchal structures, without attention to the settler colonial logics that support it. Recently, Mandy Li-Ming Yap and Krushil Watene (2019) have shown how the universalization of western development metrics based on positive life indicators and Sustainable Development Goals (MDG) work to thwart the autonomy of Indigenous peoples by silencing Indigenous knowledges on sustainability and self-determination. This places Indigenous women in difficult binds as environmental stewards of oppressed communities. Importantly, sexual violence is not disconnected from environmental violence and degradation of Indigenous lands. Lee Maracle et al. (2017) have also documented the structural link between petrochemical extractives, industrial resource exploitation, and sexual violence against Native women and girls. Individual harms cannot, on this view, be disconnected from larger social and institutional systems that generate normativity in the social structures of settler colonial society.
- 12.
“Western feminism responds to the needs of women in its own society: they developed struggles and theoretical constructs that purport to explain their own situation of subordination. In settling into the world of colonial relations, imperialist and traditional, these theories become hegemonic in the international scene thus making other realities and other contributions invisible” (my translation).
References
Alexander, M. (2020). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. United States: New Press.
Andreas, H., and Zenker, F. (2014) Perspectives on Structuralism. Erkenn 79, 1365. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9585-6.
Anzaldúa, G. (1981). La Prieta. In G. Anzaldúa and C. Moraga (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color. Berkeley, CA: Third Women Press.
Anzaldúa, G. (2012). Borderlands: The New Mestiza. United States: Aunt Lute Books.
Blanchot, M. (1995). The Writing of the Disaster. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Belle, K.S. (2014). Race Women, Race Men and Early Expressions of Proto-Intersectionality, 1830s–1930s. In N. Goswami, M. O'Donovan, and L. Yount (eds.), Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach (pp. 13–26). Pickering & Chatto.
Berenstain, N. (2020). White Feminist Gaslighting. Hypatia 35 (4): 733–758. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.31.
Bierria, A. (2014). Missing in Action: Violence, Power, and Discerning Agency. Hypatia 29 (1): 129–145.
Boggs, G. (1998). Living for Change: An Autobiography. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press.
Cáceres, B. (2015). Berta Cáceres acceptance speech. Retrieved from https://thousandcurrents.org Oct 2019.
Capra, F. (1996). The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Doubleday.
Carby, H. (1982). White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70’s Britain (pp. 212–235). London: Routledge.
Chomsky, N. (1969). Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar. The Hague, Mouton.
Collins, P.H. (1991). Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge.
Collins, P.H. (2017). Simone de Beauvoir, Women's Oppression and Existential Freedom. In L. Hengehold and N. Bauer (eds.), A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118795996.ch26.
Collins, P.H., and Bilge, S. (2018). Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cooper, A.J. (1892). A voice from the South. United States: Aldine Printing House.
Combahee River Collective. (2014). A Black Feminist Statement The Combahee River Collective. In B. Guy-Sheftall (ed.), Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press.
Coulthard, S.G. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1299.
Davis, A. (1983). Women, Race & Class. London: Women's Press.
Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1977). Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Viking Press.
Dotson, K. (2014). Making Sense: The Multistability of Oppression and the Importance of Intersectionality. In Namita Goswami (ed.), Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach (pp. 43–58). Pickering & Chatto.
Dotson, K. (2017). Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Unknowability. Social Epistemology 31 (5): 417–430. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2017.1346721.
“Don’t Abandon Us! Interview with Comandante Ramona” Matilde Pérez and Laura Castellanos. La Jornada, special supplement for International Women's Day, March 7, 1994.
Durkheim, É. (1983). The Division of Labor in Society. New York, NY: Free Press.
Farmer, P. (1999). Infections and inequalities: The modern plagues. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fayerweather Family Papers. https://library.brown.edu/riamco/xml2pdffiles/US-RUn-msg121.pdf.
Feyerabend, P. (1978). Science and a Free Society. London: NLB.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books.
Freud, S. (1900). What Are Dreams? New York: Tucker Publishing Company.
Fregoso. R. L. (2003). meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. University of California Presss.
Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, Peace, and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research 6 (3): 167–191.
Grande, S. (2003). Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis. Educational Theory 53 (3).
Heiner, B.T. (2007). Foucault and the Black Panthers. City 11 (3): 313–356.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1980). Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Hooks, B. (1990). Postmodern Blackness. Postmodern Culture 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.1990.0004.
Homespun Heroines: https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/brownhal/brownhal.html.
Hurtado, A. (1998). Sitios y lenguas: Chicanas theorize feminisms. Hypatia 13 (2): 134–161.
King, D. (1997). Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology. In Diana Tietjens Meyers (ed.), Feminist Social Thought a Reader (pp. 219–242). New York: Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1973). The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1971). Race and Culture. International Social Science Journal 23: 608–625.
Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Lorde, A. (2017). Your Silence Will Not Protect You. United Kingdom: Silver Press.
Marx, K. (1859). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Million, D. (2013). Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights. United States: University of Arizona Press.
Mohanty, C. (1991). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. In C. Mohanty, L. Torres, and C. Russo (eds.), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Moraga, C. (1995). From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism. In G. Anzaldúa and C. Moraga (eds.), Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Mossell, G. (1988). A Lofty Study. In The work of the Afro-American woman (pp. 128–130). United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Müller-Wille, S. (2010). Claude Lévi-Strauss on Race, History, and Genetics. Biosocieties 5 (3): 330–347. https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2010.17.
Narayan, U. (1997). Contesting Cultures: ‘Westernization,’ Respect for Cultures and Third-World Feminists. In L. Nicholson (ed.), The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge.
Paredes, J. (2008). Hilando Fino: Desde El Feminismo Comunitario. La Paz: CEDEC.
Report of the Arguments of Counsel in the Case of Prudence Crandall Plf. in Error Vs. State of Connecticut Before the Supreme Court of Errors at Their Session at Brooklyn, July Term 1834. Boston, MA: Garrison & Knapp, 1834. Retrieved https://archive.org/stream/reportarguments00bargoog#page/n4/mode/2up.
Ritchie, A. (2017). Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Ruíz, E. (2016). Saussure’s Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology: Undoing the Doctrine of the Course in General Linguistics, by Beata Stawarska. Human Studies 39 (1).
Ruíz, E., and Kristie Dotson. (2017). On the Politics of Coalition. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 3 (2). Article 4. http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/4.
Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. United Kingdom: Duke University Press.
Smith, L.T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.
Smith, L.T. (2016). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Spivak, G. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Strane, S. (1990). A Whole-Souled Woman: Prudence Crandall and the Education of Black Women. New York: W. W. Norton.
Tuck, E., and Yang, K.W. (2012). Decolonization is not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1).
Vargas, D. (2010). Representations of Latina/o Sexuality in Popular Culture. In M. Asencio (ed.) Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, ad Policies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Watene, K. (2013). Indigenous Visions for Sustainable Development Law? Continuing the Conversation. In K. Bosselman, P. Taylor, and D. Grinlinton (eds.), Environmental Law for a Sustainable Society (pp. 131–142). Auckland, New Zealand.
Wells, I. B. (1900). Lynch Law in America. The Arena 23.1 (January): 15–24.
Wormley, G.S. (1923). Prudence Crandall. The Journal of Negro History 8 (1): 72–80.
Yap, M.L., and Watene, K. (2019). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Indigenous Peoples: Another Missed Opportunity? Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 20 (4): 451–467. https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2019.1574725.
Yates, W. (1838). Prudence Crandall’s Case. In Merrihew and Gunn (eds.), Rights of Colored Men to Suffrage, Citizenship, and Trial by Jury: Being a Book of Facts, Arguments and Authorities, Historical Notices and Sketches of Debates—With Notes (pp. 54–75).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ruíz y Flores, E. (2022). Women of Color Structural Feminisms. In: Tate, S.A., Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Race and Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83947-5_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83947-5_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-83946-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-83947-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)