bell hooks part two
Continuing the discussion from last week about Beyonce; Is bell hooks reproducing the conditions where white women felt threatened by her taking ownership of and reshaping the meaning of feminism when she accuses Beyonce of not practicing her version of feminism? Or is it just constructive criticism?
“Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” by Audre Lorde
http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/sites/all/pdf/class/Lorde-Age%20Race%20Class%20and%20Sex.pdf
“The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House” by Audre Lorde
http://www.muhlenberg.edu/media/contentassets/pdf/campuslife/SDP%20Reading%20Lorde.pdf
"Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educated men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance -- as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought." (115)
The oppressed are expected to explain their oppression to their oppressors. Women to educate men and women of color to educate white women, rather than being asked to hear their voices and insight and solutions.
Oppression usually gets double downed on those who are even more oppressed.
Black women's concerns can get subsumed by the greater goal of fighting against racism, and so suppressing outrage against black male violence and sexism so as not to give white people ammunition. (see: Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw)
From Margin to Center by bell hooks
theory vs ideology (ideology becomes dogma); praxis
"It is no accident that feminist struggle has been so easily co-opted to serve the interests of conservative and liberal feminists since feminism in the United States has so far been a bourgeois ideology." (20)
Capitalism absorbs and neutralizes movements such as feminism, gay culture, and hip hop (what started as protest music is not pushed mainstream without politicalization.