Thought and Core Themes for feminists

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Nikki Giovanni, "Ego-Tripping," 1973
http://nikki-giovanni.com/egotrippingqt.shtml
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Thursday, 2 October—Moving among knowledge worlds
• read: Collins, Part 2: choose at least three of the seven chapters to read carefully. Pick at least one that is something you know very little about experientially.
Tuesday, 7 October—Images, oppressions, relationships, self-definitions
• DUE: summary sheet 4, completed before and with book group; turn in logbook for the first time.



How do Collins' revisions from a transnational perspective alter the core themes of Black Feminist Thought? Why are these the core themes? When are they specific to Black feminism and when are they generalizable?

How do images travel and why? How do oppressions relate across differences? What relationships need to be nurtured by feminism and have nurtured it in various identity groupings? Why does self-definition matter?

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Nancy C.M. Hartsock
Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism
(New York: Longman, 1983), pp. 117-8

"...a standpoint carries the contention that there are some perspectives on society from which, however well intentioned one may be, the real relations of humans with each other and with the natural world are not visible.

"...the vision available to the oppressed group must be struggled for and represents an achievement that requires both science to see beneath the surface of the social relations in which all are forced to participate, and the education that can only grow from political struggle."


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Collins, p. 46: "... who controls the definitions...."

idealism, materialism -- not the ideal type, a fantasy, but the lived and varied experiences of many, in collective meaning and in singular and local specifics

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Freewrite:
Which chapters did you choose and why?

• Work, Family, and Black Women's Oppression
• Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controling Images
• The Power of Self-Definition
• The Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood
• Black Women's Love Relationships
• Black Women and Motherhood
• Rethinking Black Women's Activism


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Group work:
• Collect selves into similar size groupings for each chapter.
How does this work out? Observations?

• Each group will identify the core themes of chapter and about 3 key terms.
They will decide how to share these with the whole class, each person taking up some piece to present to the whole class.

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1: work, paid and unpaid, exploitation and resistance, networks within communities
public/private =/= paid/unpaid or masculine/feminine or work for others/work for self
alienated labor, privatized motherhood
post world war II changes; 80's and after
"middle-class" controls: 64: economic, political, ideological
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2: controlling images: mammies/matriarchs, welfare recipients/black lady, hot mamas
black women's sexuality to be controlled
ideology and mystification, masking social relations
appearance of normal and natural; global selling images
othering, binary thinking: subject/object; subjection and subject formation; subject position
naturecultures; situated knowledges
blaming the victim: 80: not the structural sources of inequality, married to the state
continually renegotiated color hierarchy: 90
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3: voice in resistance, self-definition, agencies
rearticulation: 118: redefinitions and recombinations
contradictions become visible
blues tradition
writers and stories
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MUSIC:
Sweet Honey in the Rock, "Stranger Blues," from Give Us Your Poor, 2007
Ma Rainey, "Prove It On Me," from Ma Rainey, 1992
Bessie Smith, "Do Your Duty," from Greatest Hits, 2005
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