Week 7, CTS

U.S. Third World Feminism- Differential Social Movement I

Sandoval, Chela. “U.S. Third World Feminism- Differential Social Movement I” pp. 40- 63. In Methodology of the Oppressed. Theory out of Bounds Volume 18, 2000.

READING NOTES

• “hegemonic feminist theory ” denying, permitting, and producing difference.
• U.S. third world feminism as a model for oppo sitional political activity and consciousness in the postmodern world. In mapping this model, a design is revealed by which social actors can chart the points through which differing oppositional ideologies can meet, in spite of their varying trajectories.
• Louis Althusser’s theory of “ideology and the ideological state apparatuses.”
• humans are called into being as citizen-subjects who act—even when in resistance—in order to sustain and reinforce the current dominant social order.
• “means and occasions”7 do become generated 7 whereby individuals and groups in opposition are able to effectively challenge and transform oppressive aspects of identity and social order,
• “equal rights,” “revolutionary,” “supremacist,” “separatist,” and “differential” forms of oppositional consciousness.
• Differential conscious ness is the expression of the new subject position called for by Althusser—it permits functioning within, yet beyond, the demands of dominant ideology
• contention is that the feminist forms of resistance outlined in what follows are homologous to five fundamental forms of oppositional consciousness that were ex pressed within all U.S. liberation movements active during the latter half of the twentieth century.
• The application of differential consciousness generates grounds for making coal tions with decolonizing movements for emancipation in global affinities and associations. It retroatively provides a structure, a theory, and a method for reading and constructing identity, aesthetics, and coalition politics that are vital to a decolonizing postmodern politics and aesthetics, and to hailing a “third-wave,” twenty-first century feminism.
• U.S. third world feminists is composed of “different kinds of humans,” new “mestizas,” “Woman Warriors” who live and are gendered, sexed, raced, and classed “between and among” the lines
  • “the Borderlands,” “la nueva Frontera.”
• How did this systematic repression occur within an academic system that is aimed at recognizing new forms of knowledge?
• 1980s hegemonic feminist scholars produced the histories of feminist consciousness that they believed typified the modes of exchange operating within the oppositional spaces of the women’s movement. These efforts resulted in systematic studies that sought to classify all forms of feminist political and aesthetic praxis.
• from the perspective of U.S. third world femi nism: from this critical perspective they are revealed as sets of imaginary spaces, so cially constructed to severely delimit what is possible within the boundaries of each narrative.
• manifestly different types of hegemonic femi nist theory and practice are, in fact, unified at a deeper level into a great structure that sets up and organizes the logic of an exclusionary U.S. hegemonic feminism.
• first-phase “liberal feminism” is fundamentally concerned with “demonstrating that women are as fully human as men.
• Jaggar too argues for the recognition of second-phase feminism, describing it as the moment when femi nists turn to Marxism as the way to undermine the feminism of the liberal first phase.
• this third phase that women seek to uncover the unique expression of the essence of woman that lies beneath the multiplicity of all her experiences.
• third-phase feminism was actualized under the names of either “cultural” or “radical” feminisms
• the “liberal,” the “Marxist,” and the “cultural” forms, construct different modes of oppositional aesthetics, identity, and politics.
• Jaggar’s book has much to say. She typifies first-phase “liberal feminism” as “tending to ignore or minimize” racial and other “difficult” differ ences, second-phase “Marxist feminism” as tending to recognize only differences of class, and third-phase “radical feminism” as tending to “recognize only differences of age and sex, to understand these in universal terms, and often to view them as bi ologically determined.” But fourth-phase “socialist feminism,” she hopes, will be capable of recognizing differences among women “as constituent parts of contem porary human nature.”
• “liberal,” “Marxist,” “radical/cultural,” and “socialist” feminisms. We can schematize these phases as “women are the same as men,” “women are different from men,” “women are superior,” and the fourth catchall category, “women are a racially divided class.”
• each position in this typology is an imaginary space
• history of oppositional consciousness.
• not as a typology, but as a topography of consciousness in opposition
• These orienta tions can be thought of as repositories within which subjugated citizens can either occupy or throw off subjectivities in a process that at once enacts and decolonizes their various relations to their real conditions of existence.
• feminist versions of four forms of con sciousness that appear to have been most effective in opposition to modernist modes of capitalist production insofar as these same four responses appear again and again across social movement theory and action of every type
• Unlike its previous and modernist hegemonic version, however, this alternative topography of consciousness and action is not historically or teleologically orga nized; no enactment is privileged over any other; and the recognition that each site is as potentially effective in opposition as any other makes visible the differential mode of consciousness-in-resistance
• addition of the fifth and differential mode of oppositional consciousness to these has a mobile, retroac tive, and transformative effect on the previous four, setting them all into diverse processual relationships.
• I describe its locations categorically here as the “equal rights,” “revolutionary,” “supremacist,” “separatist,” and “differential” forms of consciousness-in-opposition.
• The Equal-Rights Form the differences for which they have been assigned inferior status lay in appearance only, not in “reality.” Aesthetically, the equal-rights mode of consciousness seeks duplication; po litically, it seeks integration; psychically, it seeks assimilation. “liberal feminism.”
• The Revolutionary Form second ideology identifies, legitimizes, claims, and intensifies its differences—in both form and content—from the category of the most human. the only way that society can affirm, value, and le gitimate these differences will be if the categories by which the dominant is ordered are fundamentally restructured.
• The Supremacist Form Under “supremacism” the oppressed not only claim their differ ences, but they also assert that their differences have provided them access to a higher evolutionary level than that attained by those who hold social power.
• The Separatist Form organized, rather, to protect and nurture the differ ences that define its practitioners through their complete separation from the dom inant social order.
• The Differential Form of Consciousness and Social Movement “differential,” insofar as it enables move ment “between and among” ideological positionings it functions as the medium through which the equal-rights, revolutionary, supremacist, and separatist modes of opposi tional consciousness became effectively converted, lifted out of their earlier, mod ernist, and hegemonic activity
• without making this kind of metamove, any “liberation” or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppres sive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself
• positing a tactical subjectivity with the capacity to de- and recenter
• Cherríe Moraga defined U.S. third world feminist “guerrilla warfare” as a “way of life,” a means and method for survival.
• She interpellates a constituency of “U.S. third world feminists and their allies” when she writes that it is between such lines that “the truth of our connection lies. ”49
• The differential mode of social movement and consciousness de pends on the practitioner’s ability to read the current situation of power and self consciously choosing and adopting the ideological stand best suited to push against its configurations, a survival skill well known to oppressed peoples
• Within the realm of differential social movement, ideological differences and their oppositional forms of conscious ness, unlike their incarnations under hegemonic feminist comprehension, are under stood as tactics—not as strategies.
• “la conciencia de la mes tiza.” This is the consciousness of the “mixed blood,” she writes, born of life lived in the “crossroads” between races, nations, languages, genders, sexualities, and cul tures, an acquired subjectivity formed out of transformation and relocation, move ment guided by la facultad, the learned capacity to read, renovate, and make signs on behalf of the dispossessed.
• “outsider/within” identity that guides movement of being according to an ethical commitment to equalize power between social constituencies
• Audre Lorde, a “whole other structure of opposition that touches every aspect of our existence at the same time that we are resisting.”
• does not “support re pression, hatred, exploitation and isolation,” but which is a “human and beautiful framework,” “created in a community, bonded not by color, sex or class, but by love and the common goal for the liberation of mind, heart, and spirit.
• (1) the equal rights (“liberal,” and/or “integrationist”) mode; (2) the revolutionary (“socialist” and/or “insurgent”) mode; (3) the supremacist (or “cultural-nationalist”) mode; (4) the separatist mode; and (5) the differential (or “womanist,” “mestiza,” “Sister Out sider,” “third force,” U.S. third world feminist . . . it has generated many names)
• previous four, not as overriding strategies, but as tactics for intervening in and transforming social relations.
• deploys each mode of resistant ideology as if it represents only another potential technology of power.
• set of principled conversions that requires (guided) movement, a directed but also a diasporic migration in both consciousness and politics, performed to ensure that ethical commitment to egalitarian social rela tions be enacted in the everyday, political sphere of culture
• recognizing the structures around which consciousness disperses and gathers in its attempts to challenge social powers
• subjugated citizens either occupy or throw off subjectivity
• dialectical modulation between forms of consciousness permits functioning within, yet beyond, the demands of dominant ideology: the practitioner breaks with ideology while also speaking in and from within ideology.
• oppositional expressions of power as consensual illusions.
• the differential mode of resistance represents a new form of historical consciousness

POST-READ

i feel like sandoval is saying mode a differential conciousness as a mode of social action is already being enacted and she’s giving a name to it so it can be used and recognized more broadly. i am thinking about code switching and being sensitive to using different language in different situations, applying that kind of idea to feminist movements.

Chapter 1 Feminism is Sensational

Ahmed, Sara. Chapter 1 Feminism is Sensational pp.21-42 in Living a Feminist Life, 2017.

READING NOTES

POST-READ

Ahmed is very easy to read and I look forward to reading more of her other works (she appears often on my reading list!)

Module

NOTES

• differential consciousness – us third world feminisms
• mestiza consciousness (anzaldua) – oppositional living at the borderlands, those that exist outside socially constructed centre
  critique of feminist movements, reflect white hegenomy in united states.
• Jagger “phases of feminist thinking” doesn’t reflect how it intersects with race and class, attempt w/ socialist feminist “women are a racially devided class.” Jagger believes “us third world feminism” is descriptive/anecdotal and not worth of theorerizing
• Oppositional praxis (euro-american white feminists)
  • liberal feminism – ex. voting rights
  • marxist – equality to men is not enough, wanting to restructure system
  • cultural – claims of female superiority (essentialist: maternal instinct,
  • what a woman “is,” centre potential for social change in hands of women)4
  • socialist feminism – class differences as a key characteristic of inequality, and by extension race
• Sandoval – not negation of Jagger’s phases but rejection of theory that doesn’t include lived experiences. difference of sandoval vs jagger = jagger limits, sandoval emergents, moving, method
  • equal rights form – intergration and assimilation4
  • revolutionary form – women stop trying to equal achievements of men, pushback for radical change
  • supremacist form – women centered leadership, different experiences valid/superior to others w/o same struggle (representation)
  • separatist form – “separation from the dominant social order” (p 56)
  • differential conciousness – “history of oppositional conciousness,” aim to not have boundary driven categories, mobility in political and material ways, moving between and among ideological positionings, flexible mobile diasporic nomadic, tactical instead of strategic (tact vs strategy, micro vs macro)
• Sarah Ahmed
  • sensation as a form of mobilization (more feeling than affect)
  • tactics of sandoval in use, use to think about differential conciousness.
  • how do come to you align yourself with certain lines of thinking?
  • coming to terms with being in opposition to dominant positons