U.S. Gender and Sexual Politics in Transnational Perspective HANDOUT Prof.

Gurel

Borderlands of U.S. Feminisms

History of Western feminism suggests that at no one point was modern feminism without its paradoxes. According to Nancy Cott, the successes of the American woman movement by the 1920s and the dissolution of the womans sphere brought to the fore contradictions inherent in a movement that called for womens unity while trying to recognize the diversity among women, a movement that requires gender consciousness for its basis yet calls for the elimination of prescribed gender roles.1 However, even before the resolution of the so-called First Wave, women of color challenged feminist assumptions on the primacy of sex. - Frances Harper criticized Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stantons American Equal Rights Association. Anthony had resented the 15th Amendment, saying, [i]f intelligence, justice, and morality are to be placed in government, then let the question of woman be brought up first and that of the negro last.2 Frances Harper insisted white women always think about sex before race but, it was a question of race and we [black women] let the lesser question of sex go. In 1892, Anna Julia Cooper noted the complications caused by the assumption that woman means white woman by recounting the dilemma of having to choose between two bathroom signs that read respectively for Ladies and for Colored People.3 Cooper also criticized Anna Shaws speech Women vs. the Indian for setting up a false and harmful opposition. 90 years later Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith would make a similar argument by naming their essay collection on black womens studies, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: But Some Of Us Are Brave (Feminist Press, 1982). The First Wave womens movement (19th and early 20th centuries) was predominantly white middle class. It had liberal, radical, and socialist factions, but liberal (integrationist) rhetoric dominated. The second wave (60s to 80s) had to deal with similar questions: 1. Problem of sameness/difference vis--vis men: Liberal vs. Radical Feminism. Early in the 1960s, liberal feminists began putting pressure on federal and state institutions to end the discriminations women face in the public sphere. This strain of feminism has been the most widely accepted in the United States; however, many in the movement found this add women and stir approach limited.4 Radical feminists emphasized womens differences from men and sought to change structures as opposed to make them more equitable. 2. Problem of difference among women: Queer Feminism, Women of Color Feminism, Transnational Feminism. As conflicting as radical and liberal feminisms seemed, they still worked along the binary opposition of men versus women. Liberal feminists sought to catch up to men in the public sphere. Radical feminists sought to undermine patriarchy, sometimes via separatism, defined in

1 2

Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale University Press, 1987), 5. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford University Press, 1987), 67-68. 3 Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892), Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 4 Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, edited by Lorraine Code (Routledge, 2003), 27.

U.S. Gender and Sexual Politics in Transnational Perspective HANDOUT Prof.Gurel opposition to men. Such feminisms tended to posit differences among women as differences within women, as a core group.5 This came out of a simplified vision of middle class white women as the norm and other women as white woman plus color or white woman plus color plus queerness, a pop-bead view of identity, under the assumption that the effects of race, class, sexuality etc. mere merely added on to this commonality of gender.6 Women of color were quick to question this view and point out the ways in which women of color were gendered differently, sometimes in opposition to white women (Intersectionality of Identity). Role of Creativity in Thinking Through the Paradoxes of Feminism By the end of the 1970s, there were few texts that were not acknowledging differences among women, as Linda Nicholson points out in The Second Wave. Acknowledging difference, however, often took the form of a disclaimer. This Special Third World Womans Issue approach was what Audre Lorde criticized in her essay The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House: difference must not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.7 Cherrie Moraga, "Theory in the Flesh, from Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzalda, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1981). A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives-our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings-all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity. Here, we attempt to bridge the contradictions in our experience. We are the colored in a white feminist movement. We are the feminists among the people of our culture. We are often the lesbians among the straight. We do this bridging by naming our selves and by telling our stories in our own words. Transnational Feminism The internationalization and institutionalization of Second Wave feminism with the declaration of the first UN Decade of Women (1975-1985) highlighted the divides between Western and nonWestern feminists. In 1978, a group of Third World feminists, including Fatima Mernissi from Morocco and Nawal El Saadawi from Egpyt wrote an open letter to explode the myth that the mere fact of being women can unite us. Chandra Mohantys Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses (1991) criticized the creation of a monolithic Third World Woman who is oppressed by her culture as a form of discursive colonialism. Transnational Feminism developed out of these cathartic crises as a feminism that strives to organize around issues, encourage complex analysis of how gender and sexuality intersect with other structures of power, and support local actors and agents.

Quoted in Norma Alarcon, The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called by Back, in The Second Wave, edited by Linda Nicholson (Routledge, 1997), 296. 6 Linda J. Nicholson, Interpreting Gender, in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, by Naomi Zack, Laurie Shrage, Crispin Sartwell (Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 187-212. 7 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (The Crossing Press, 2007), 111.