Black Feminism and Womanism

Black Feminism and Womanism

• Black feminism recognizes African American women face discrimination based on race and gender.
• Evelyn M. Simien emphasizes this idea of status deprivation for Black women.
• Black feminists articulate interlocking systems of oppression: sexism, racism, and class discrimination.
• Bell hooks describes these systems within "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy."
• Black women were involved in suffrage and anti-slavery societies.
• Anna J. Cooper's work is relevant in this context.
• White women stopped supporting anti-lynching positions after gaining the right to vote in 1920 to gain political allegiance in the South.
• Traditional norms of racism superseded the concept of sisterhood.
• The civil rights movement gave primacy to race and often excluded women from leadership positions.
• Black women continued to struggle against the double oppression of race and gender.
• In the 1960s, Black women felt excluded from both the Civil Rights Movement (primacy of race) and mainstream feminism (accommodated middle-class white women).

The Rise of Womanism

• Alice Walker coined "Womanism" to describe the requirements of the Black Feminist Movement.
• Walker first used the term in her short story "Coming Apart" and later in her book In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose.
• Womanism refers to African-American feminism or feminism of women of color.
• Walker sought a word that was organic, coming from the culture, and expressing the spirit of Black women.
• Womanism is not a surrogate for Black feminism, but the two concepts are related.
• Holism, the whole sense of being a woman, is central to womanism.
• A womanist is aware of her own value and femininity.
• Blackness is implicit in the term "womanist."
• One is womanist when committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.
• Walker addresses the notion of the solidarity of humanity.
• The inclusion of men provides Black women with an opportunity to address gender oppression without directly attacking men.
• Walker: "Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender," suggesting feminism is a component beneath the umbrella of womanism.

Key Concepts of Womanism

• Laura Gilman comments that there are no fixed, universal understandings about women's physical or metaphysical nature.
• There are no socio-cultural patterns or structures of feeling binding all women together.
• Feminists have mistakenly reproduced stereotypical femininity.
• Womanism considers femininity and culture equally significant.
• Femininity cannot be separated from culture.
• Culture is the lens through which femininity exists.
• A woman’s blackness is the lens through which she understands her femininity.
• "Black feminism is not a white feminism in blackface" - Audre Lorde

Ula Taylor's Summary of Womanism

• Womanism includes "a Black feminist or a feminist of color."
• A womanish girl exhibits willful, courageous, and outrageous behavior beyond societal norms.
• It is one who appreciates and prefers women’s culture.
• A woman loves other women sexually and/or non-sexually, appreciates women’s culture, emotional flexibility, and strength.
• Traditionally a universalist, not a separatist.
• Ideological contestations arose over the concept of lesbianism.
• "Love" of culture and "self": loves music, dance, the moon, the spirit, the folks, and herself.
• "Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender" - a literary device implying womanism denotes different things.
• Purple can be seen as a multifaceted erotic symbol, a sign of indomitable female spirit, and an encoding of joyous vitality of the female spirit.
• The dominant motif of womanism is sisterhood.
• Walker’s concept of womanism stresses solidarity, sharing, and community that creates a blossoming self and society.

Womanism as a Distinct Theory

• Womanism was created to center black women because white women are often seen as the standard victims of sexism.
• Feminism tends to be very white and rarely considers how black women specifically deal with being black and female.
• Womanists largely support the larger feminist movement and their ultimate goals but have carved out their own space to specifically center black women.
• Womanist theory fuses race, sex, and class oppression as forming one single struggle.
• Walker has given literary critical as well as philosophical recognition to black women’s intellectual, spiritual and emotional wholeness.
• Universalist quality gives black women more strength and power to prove that they are worthwhile despite criticisms.
• Womanism tries to avoid the “both and worldview," focusing on interaction and wholeness.
• Maparyan suggests that womanism has a metaphysical architecture as a form of spiritualized politics.
• The work of womanist critics Clenora Hudson-Weems and Katie Cannon predates Walker.
• Hudson-Weems coined "Africana Womanism" in the late 1980s, suggesting women of African descent have always been Africana womanists.
• Katie Cannon is credited with founding the idea of womanist theology and ethics in 1988.
• Womanism is self-authored and divinely inspired knowledge which has a distinct internal logic of black political organizing.
• Despite contention that "womanism is more encompassing," black feminism and womanism would seem to be merely interchangeable empowerment theories.
• Both theories acknowledge that the activism of black women should be based on their cultural heritage, which rejects docility.
• They also encourage black women to value and love their own self, irrespective of critique.
• Both recognize the responsible commitment a black woman has towards creating a whole community which avoids dominance.
• Womanism allows black women to have a femininity, which had been denied under feminism.

Historical Context of Black Femininity

• Enslaved black women were written about by historians as if they were androgynous.
• Sojourner Truth’s feminism acknowledged that slavery denied black women “feminine” qualities, particularly their right to be mothers.
• White feminists located their oppression in female roles.
• Black women's dress or home were not the principal sites of their oppression.
• The denial of black women’s femininity had been the main vehicle to exploit their labor power and womanhood.
• Black women’s work is analyzed, especially their labor market victimization as mules.
• Mules were dehumanized objects, living machines, and therefore, could be treated as part of the scenery.
• The paid work of black women is still organized within the intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender.
• African American women are constrained, but still empowered figures, who are able to have certain dignity even in extremely difficult labor market settings.
• Historical underpinnings of slavery and racism can be seen in the present-day financial status of African American women.
• Slave mothers were put in a contradictory and irreconcilable position.
• Mothers and their children were not seen as human beings, families were separated and destroyed.
• Toni Morrison’s Beloved views infanticide as a form of liberation and one of the most poignant fictional pieces of work about generations of mothers.
• The 2013 film 12 Years a Slave, based on the memoir written by Solomon Northup, shows Eliza Berry, a mother of two, separated from her children, never recovered, and died without ever seeing them.
• The discussion involves the purchase of slaves named Platt and Eliza.

Slave Narratives in American Literature

• Slave narratives are a very influential genre in American literature.
• They have impacted the themes and forms of both fiction and autobiography.
• Approximately 100 autobiographies of former slaves were published from the 1760s to the end of the Civil War in the US.
• After slavery was abolished in 1865, at least 50 former slaves wrote or dictated book-length accounts of their lives.
• With the rise of the abolition movement in the early 19th century, there was a growing demand for firsthand accounts of slavery's realities.
• These narratives typically depict the slave's journey from slavery in the South to freedom in the North.
• Slavery is depicted as a state of extreme deprivation that requires increasingly forceful resistance.
• Escape leads to freedom, marked by reaching free states, adopting a new name, and committing to anti-slavery movements.
• The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) is a key example, creating an ideal of an African American hero committed to intellectual and physical freedom, specifically pursuing literacy.
• Douglass later wrote My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855, detailing his ongoing struggle for freedom against Northern racism.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin was heavily influenced by slave narratives
• Stowe used incidents and character models from her reading of these narratives.
• Harriet Jacobs became the first African American woman to author her narrative in 1861.
• Her narrative depicted her resistance to sexual exploitation by her master and her achievement of freedom for herself and her children.
• African American women faced economic exploitation and violence during slavery.
• This denial of resources has led to exclusion, manipulation, and economic issues that persist even today.
• These issues have created frustrations and impacted family management.
• Gloria Naylor has highlighted the gendered exploitation of women in her novels
• She emphasized the importance of economic stability for Black women in novels like The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, and Mama Day.
• African American writers promote a feminism that opposes gender, racial, and economic hierarchies.
• This form of feminism acknowledges the culturally specific experiences of women across cultures.
• Writers like Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, and Louise Erdrich use womanism in their works.
• Gender identity is constructed in their work in relation to the construction of community.

Disruption of Traditional Gender Roles

• The Color Purple by Alice Walker is an epistolary novel that disrupts traditional gender roles.
• Characters like Sofia, Shug, and Harpo defy traditional gender boundaries.

Contemporary Writers

• Bernardine Evaristo is a contemporary British writer known for her innovative style.
• Her diasporic heritage is reflected in her work.
• Evaristo is compared to a new generation of British-born Black writers like Andrea Levy and Jackie Kay.
• Evaristo's themes suggest a continuity in terms of womanism.
• Her novel Girl, Woman, Other won the 2019 Booker Prize.
• Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of 12 characters in the UK throughout several decades.
• The characters are mostly in complex mother-daughter relationships.
• The novel examines 120 years of British history through the descendants of Black immigrants.
• The female characters deal with oppression and stigma in ways similar to African American writers.
• These women actively critique the world and oppose internalized self-oppression.
• These characters highlight different degrees and forms of oppression.

Intersectionality

• Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989.
• Intersectionality shows how overlapping social identities create compounding experiences of discrimination.
• It offers a lens to see how various forms of inequality operate together and exacerbate each other.
• Crenshaw notes the tendency to discuss race inequality separately from inequalities based on gender, class, sexuality, or immigrant status.
• Some people are subject to all of these, and their experience is more than the sum of its parts.