Wa(i)ving it All Away: Producing Subject and Knowledge in Feminisms of Colour

Abstract

This chapter is an intervention into post-identity and post-second wave feminist debates about essentialism and difference. 1 Hegemonic feminism has obviated the possibilities of coalitions with differential feminisms by abandoning essentialism as a necessary tool with which to theorise identity politics. Hegemonic feminism’s prioritisation of sex over race has been characterised by — and is symptomatic of — its anxiety over race, racial identity politics and racialised essentialism. This anxiety, in turn, marks itself as white, neutral and normative. Wendy Brown, in arguing for ‘the impossibility of women’s studies,’ notes this anxiety as the ‘compensatory cycle of guilt and blame’ which is ‘structured by women’s studies’ original, nominalist, and conceptual subordination of race (and all other forms of social stratification) to gender’ (93). Robyn Wiegman ‘interprets this anxiety as indicating that women’s studies — perhaps Western feminism as a whole - cannot not be inhabited by the powerful pain of racial wounds’ (‘Institutionalism’ 125; emphasis in original). Since the ‘specificity of sexual difference cannot be taken as a singular constant, but is… linked to explicit political questions of rights and equality’ (Price and Shildrick 18) it has become imperative that hegemonic feminism reinterrogates its Eurocentric agenda. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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