Thank you, Lorde and Davis

That the Mothers  May soar and the Daughters May Know Their Names: A Retrospective of Black Feminist Literary Criticism, by Farah Jasmine Griffin, offers an exposition of black feminist literature. Barely two pages into this article I found a striking point:

"Today many shcholars and critics continue to contribute to and expand the field. Nonetheless, black feminist criticism ( as well as women's studies and African American studies) has experienced a backlash from both the left and the right. The overall assault on multiculturalism and political correctness as well as those critiques that fault the field for being a bastion of identity politics and essentialism have targeted black feminist criticism and challenged its adequacy as a mode of critical analysis. Interestingly, it i quite likely that the latter critique of essentialism was made possible by the very terms and successes of black feminist literary critics who were among the first to call attention to the constructed nature of racial and gender identity."

ESSENTIALISM!!!! The feminist recoils at the thought! To somewhat contextualize my reaction to this piece, the reader should know that within the week I have read Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde, and Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis, both of whom were mentioned on page 485 of the article. The latter book gives a comprehensive history of the Women's rights movement, as well as the history of slavery. Thusly, when I read "...masculinist bias of the civil rights..." and "...black people were gendered male, and women most often meant white women..." (pg 485), I nodded furiously.

Griffin writes "These writers published in genres as diverse as as the novel, drama, poetry and autobiography; in so doing they openly challenged any notion of the black community as a monolith of like ideologies, politics and standpoints," (486). This is a central point, and one reason that black feminism has been and is so crucial to critical thinking. "From the beginning, black feminist have been committed to the freedom of all people, especially black people."

Griffin's conclusion expresses that black feminism has withstood attacks from within and without, and still survived (502).

Discourse, Discourse Everywhere: Subject "Agency" in Feminist Discourse Methodology, by Carol Bacchi, offers a critique of how feminists use and understand the term 'Discourse.'  Bacchi writes, "The identification of discourse(s) as institutionally supported and culturally influenced conceptual  and interpretive  schemas that influence the understanding of an issue, has as its goal interrogating those premises, and showing how they operate to delimit an issue in specific ways. By contrast, the tendency to use the term discourse as shorthand for ways of talking about and issue like prostitution or quotas is ambiguous in its intent," (202).
A dead white man, Jacques Derrida, warned that language has been around for a long time, and has entrenched meanings, and therefore is a loaded gun as a tool for communication. We can not expect to communicate exactly what we mean by speaking. I found this argument useful for understanding this article and the implications for using the term in question.

In Feminist Reverberations, by Joan Wallach Scott I found two one-liners that were especially impactful:

"don't expect lawful behavior from those who are not allowed to make law," (7)
and "When you save someone...you are saving them from something. You are also saving them to something," (9). Both of the quotes are taken from others and used by the author.