Page 12 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Knowing ‘whiteness’ 5
middle-class heterosexual feminists who then, in turn, failed to understand
why some women did not respond to the call for universal sisterhood. Thus,
black feminist critiques arose at a time when a range of challenges was be-
ing made to ‘mainstream’ feminist practice and theory. Part of the prob-
lem was that, with its ‘single “mistress narrative” of gender domination’
(Frankenberg and Mani 1993), much white feminism had omitted to analyse
how some women might be positioned as oppressors of others, rather than
merely as the oppressed (see C. Hall 1992; Ware 1992). With the singular
focus on patriarchy, white feminists had not developed the conceptual tools
for understanding complexities of racialised, classed and gendered power
and oppression (see Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983; Barrett and McIntosh
1985; Bhavani and Coulson 1986). As bell hooks argues: ‘we still do not
have the language paradigms for white women to be able to express “this is
how I am privileged” and yet “this is how I am oppressed”’ (Childers and
hooks 1990: 63).
These questions shifted the theoretical and political terrain of feminism
in general. This was not merely a case of rethinking the nature of feminist
campaigns, for instance around violence or reproductive rights, or of includ-
ing studies of black women’s lives as well as those of white women. These
debates raised the question of difference in such a way as to fundamentally
disrupt feminist categories, in particular the unitary concept of ‘woman’. If
there were so many differences and conflicts of interest between women – on
the basis of class, ‘race’, ethnicity and sexuality – then how could a singular
‘woman’ or even ‘women’ ever be theorised or mobilised? They also raised
epistemological questions about knowledge and standpoint (see Hill Collins
1990). These challenges prompted a reconceptualisation of the self, high-
lighting how the formation of identity through the process of ‘othering’ was
more complex than merely being an opposition between man/woman, but
was also – and already – white/black, heterosexual/homosexual. Thus, black
feminists stressed the need to understand and analyse the mutually constitu-
tive, intersecting axes of race, class and gender. There needed to be an ana-
lytical frame that could incorporate the complexities of power and subject
production and developments in politics that recognised these complexities
based on shifting identities and necessarily shifting coalitions and negoti-
ated alliances. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes: ‘sisterhood cannot be
assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete history and
political practices and analysis’ (Mohanty 1988; see also Reagon 1983).
An important part of this process of coalition building involves feminists
positioned as white acknowledging and examining the particularity of their
own experience – or else being complicit in racism:
Racism requires a perspective of deviance. It speaks (implicitly or explic-
itly) from a position of the dominant white group. A racist perspective is
composed of two elements: first, the failure to own the particularity of
white-ness; second, the failure to acknowledge that, in a racist context,
a ‘white’ voice stands in a relationship of authority to a ‘black’ voice.