Friday Womanist - bell hooks (5)

Cross posted

Only when we confront the realities of sex, race, and class, the ways they divide us, make us different, stand us in opposition, and work to reconcile and resolve these issues will we be able to participate in the making of feminist revolution, in the transformation of the world. Feminism, as Charlotte Bunch emphasizes again and again in Passionate Politics, is a transformational politics, a struggle against domination wherein the effort is to change ourselves as well as structures. Speaking about the struggle to confront difference, Bunch asserts:

A crucial point of the process is understanding that reality does not look the same from different people's perspective. It is not surprising that one way feminists have come to understand about differences has been through the love of a person from another culture or race. It takes persistence and motivation - which love often engenders - to get beyond one's ethnocentric assumptions and really learn about other perspectives. In this process and while seeking to eliminate oppression, we also discover new possibilities and insights that come from the experience and survival of other peoples.

Embedded in the commitment to feminist revolution is the challenge to love. Love can be and is an important source of empowerment when we struggle to confront issues of sex, race and class. Working together to identify and face our differences - to face the ways we dominate and are dominated - to change our actions, we need a mediating force that can sustain us so that we are not broken in this process, so that we do not despair.

bell hooks, "Feminism: A Transformational Politic" in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, Toronto: Between the Lines, 1988

Friday Womanist - bell hooks

Cross posted

A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women. Sexism as a system of domination is institutionalized but it has never determined in an absolute way the fate of all women in this society. Being oppressed means the absence of choices. It is the primary point of contact between the oppressed and the oppressor. Many women in this society do have choices, (as inadequate as they are) therefore exploitation and discrimination are words that more accurately describe the lot of women collectively in the United States. Many women do not join organized resistance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices. They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppression. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme restrictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed.

bell hooks, "Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory", 1984

Friday Feminist on a day that is not Friday

Deborah's given me permission to promote the continuation of her excellent Friday Feminist series.

And this is her most recent addition:

Sandra Lee Bartky

And the previous one which I missed, sorry about that:

Toni Morrison

Deborah's putting together an index of them all and I'll be putting links up to them here each weekend/Monday, although I strongly encourage that you add In A Strange Land to your regular reading list anyway.

Friday Womanist - bell hooks (2)

Cross posted

Friday night in a small midwestern town - I go with a group of artists and professors to a late night dessert place. As we walk past a group of white men standing in the entry way to the place, we overhear them talking to us, saying that my companions, who are all white, must be liberals from the college, not regular "townies," to be hanging out with a "nigger." Everyone in my group acts as though they did not hear a word of this conversation. Even when I call attention to the comments, no one responds. It's like I am not only not talking, but suddenly, to them, I am not there. I am invisible. For my colleagues, racism expressed in everyday encounters - this is our second such experience together - is only an unpleasantness to be avoided, not something to be confronted or challenged. It is just something negative disrupting the good time, better to not notice and pretend it's not there.

bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992