bell hooks part 1
"Money-making has no color"
"This radical repositioning of black female images does not truly overshadow or change conventional sexist constructions of black female identity"
From Margin to Center by bell hooks
I never questioned the idea that the goal of feminism is to make everyone equal to white men.
Cellestine Ware:
“Radical feminism is working for the eradication of domination and elitism in all human relationships. This would make self-determination the ultimate good and require the downfall of society as we know it today.” 19
Modern feminist thought emerged from a Feminist Mystique viewpoint (privileged women). Volition= feminism, which accommodates conservative ideologies. Reformation (mainstream feminism) vs revolution (what bell hooks wants). Critiques ideas of liberating housewives that ignore the oppression of the women of color that would come in to take care of their children.
"By repudiating the popular notion that the focus of feminist movement should be social equality of the sexes and emphasizing eradicating the cultural basis of group oppression, our own analysis would require an exploration of all aspects of women's political reality. This would mean that race and class oppression would be recognized as feminist issues with as much relevance as sexism. When feminism is defined in such a way that it calls attention to the diversity of women's social and political reality, it centralizes the experiences of all women, especially the women whose social conditions have been least written about, studied, or changed by political movements. When we cease to focus on the simplistic stance "men are the enemy," we are compelled to examine systems of domination and our role in their maintenance and perpetuation. 25-26
She points at race & class here as examples of oppression of women that may not be recognized by the mainstream forms of feminism, and goes as far as to say/imply that feminism can be part of the problem and a contributor to that oppression.
bell hooks critique of Beyonce vs the Salon article
Are you still a slave? panel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJk0hNROvzs
bell hooks essay on Beyonce's lemonade: http://www.bellhooksinstitute.com/blog/2016/5/9/moving-beyond-pain
Salon rebuttal article to bell hook's essay: http://www.salon.com/2016/05/17/bell_hooks_vs_beyonce_what_the_feminist_scholarly_critique_gets_wrong_about_lemonade_and_liberation/
They both have extreme opinions.
Where do you draw your line in the complicity of these systems?
Beyonce's image on Time Magazine: bell hooks says she looks infantilized, and why is that as one of Times most influential people?
bell hooks is concerned with how the black body is portrayed reproduces condition of slavery.
Beyonce subverts political images in lemonade that aren't really discussed in either article.
Passive vs active feminism (tie in to the word ally). I am a feminist vs I advocate for feminism. Action vs identity.
compare to: Rihanna's "Bitch better have my money" https://www.vevo.com/watch/rihanna/bitch-better-have-my-money-(explicit)/QM5FT1590005
Violent empowerment fantasy. Metaphor for race relations (a white woman is kidnapped in the vid by Rihanna) ?
racial kitsch tie in http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/links/RacialKitsch.pdf
“oppositional spectatorship to the figure of racist kitsch cannot overcome its ability to reproduce scapegoating, because these practices of opposition inevitably reinscribe the object as a target for hatred and scorn, and in doing so, draw other people into the suffering orbit”
Question: what do good representational images look like?
Bell Hooks Notes
Modern Feminist Thought
- Description-- Friedman’s The Feminine Mystique , emerged from “a select group of women” and was organized around their “specific problems and dilemmas” (of leisure-class housewives).
- power relations among women: Vertical hierarchy, Privileged women on top: access to material resources, that set the terms of modern feminist thought.
- The “Life experience” of these leisure class white women shaping if not determining the nature and scope of feminist analysis, page 132 (starred). Their privileged perspective became the prevailing frame of feminist thought, which we use to make sense of the world.
II.limitations to feminist analysis:
a.Feminist thought is “irrelevant to masses of women”
b.the nature of problems and dilemmas that comprise the scope of modern feminism. Co-opt the language of oppression to legitimize their fight for social equity.
c.There was a material dimension to the select group of women’s feminism: page 137, “Privileged women wanted social equality” star. BUT the lion’s share of these problems were immaterial. Describes affect without consideration of material conditions. Absence of material analysis and concentration of affective universe.
i.“a sense of emptiness,” “boredom,” “impossibility to retain a sense of human identity,” “conditions in which it is difficult to feel completely alive.
ii.Implications: Racially discrepant measures of the impact of feminism. Working class people, people of color-- never forget that racial hierarchies exist. While privileged people do. 1/3 of the women had jobs-- not careers. Job vs. Career.
“Forgetting”--sounds as if it’s an inevitable and not purposeful, but actually it’s an ethical problem; ignorance, which is a choice.Cannot justify their erasure-- they should know the way the world works. Immaterial needs are based on material needs, and you can’t separate the two. Could focus energies on immaterial issues. If you are subject to despotic conditions, you have to know about your conditions.Not knowing, privileged ignorance, is a choice.
We started talking about their particular issues because they HAD POWER. Access to resources, both material and rhetorical.
III.Critique of feminist analysis
a.By focusing on the problems of leisure class women, that focus masked complicity with existing racial and class hierarchies.
b.False universalism, rhetoric of commonality around the issues of gender.
c.Having a career is predicated on maintaining racial and class hierarchies, because you can’t do it if you have a black domestic worker at home. Supporting infrastructure of feminism-- racial and class hierarchies. That have to remain intact and in place. Social but not radical contradictions. Existing system they protect is bourgeois, phallocentric.
d.Practice is elitist. Doesn’t matter if you intend to be elitist, if you are.
Issue with Modern Feminist thought: Asserts a false universalism across vertical hierarchies of power. Universalism-- a mechanism of crowding out experiences of oppressed.