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Description
This research group is structured around a cluster of related ideas. The investigation of the relation among them is part of the work. Women of Color theorists have moved away from the theoretical concerns of both mainstream feminisms and feminist practices. This move is marked by a significant expansion of the structures and relations of power that are understood as constructing and informing the lives and situations of women of color in the U.S. and of Third World women around the world.
Current scholarship and activism has attempted to locate women of color in a way that makes our situations and concerns visible. That visibility requires new conceptual lenses and frameworks. The critique of a binary system of gender that “equalizes” the situation of white bourgeois women and women of color has been replaced by a model of gender that makes women of color visible through a historical revisiting of the genesis of the “modern/colonial gender system” (Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Modern/ Colonial Gender System,” Hypatia, 2006). This understanding of gender views gender as a colonial concept. It views the gender system as composed of a “light” and a “dark” side. The “light” side is constituted by sexual dimorphism (male/female), the gender binary (man/woman), heterosexuality and the patriarchal distribution of power. This “light” side of the modern/colonial gender system applies only to the colonizing, bourgeois classes but has become hegemonically understood as the natural and exclusive meaning of “gender.” The “dark side” reduced the colonized to non-human beasts, depicted them often as hermaphroditic monstrosities, non-gendered animals fit for deep and violent exploitation of labor, including forced “breeding” with colonizers and other colonized people. In some colonial situations, the colonizers chose to co-opt colonized male's allegiance to the females of their society by recognizing only the males as decision makers. Thus they imposed on the colonized a structure of gender similar to that among the colonizers but without the privileges and power accruing to them. In these cases the colonizers effectively destroyed the social structure of the colonized through internal betrayals by turning females into subordinate women. Thus, colonization did impose a structure complimentary to the “light” side of gendering, and that structure was determined by the exigencies of producing dominated peoples. The colonial/modern gender system is inseparable from the racial classification of peoples that emerged with colonization and the globalized capitalist structure of labor that Anibal Quijano terms “the coloniality of power.” (Lugones, 2006).
Understanding the complexities of gendering in the context of capitalism, racialization, and colonialism, gives rise to a set of connected investigations:
*What does it mean to say that women of color are seen at the intersection of race, class, sexuality and gender? Attentive to the ways the hegemonic gender binary (man/woman) has excluded the experiences and realities of non-white women, Women of Color theorists have been committed to theorizing the intersectionality of race, class, gender and sexuality. Intersectionality is in need of further investigation since, as it has been understood, it is too narrow a concept. This is because the “intersection” as understood by Crenshaw depends on hegemonic understanding of gender and race.
*How does nationalism and the idea of the nation occlude the situation of women of color and collude with the modern/colonial gender system?
*How does resistance to the demeaning, dehumanizing gendering imposed by colonialism appeal to pre-colonial traditions that have survived colonial domination? Historicized theorizing of the modern/colonial gender system from multiple geopolitical and cultural contexts allows for a deeper engagement with barriers to and possibilities for deep Women of Color coalition building and liberatory community transformations. This theoretical approach is important to us because we are concerned not only with analyses of power and systemic and interpersonal dimensions of violence in the lives of women of color, but also, and especially, with liberatory alternatives, resistance and coalitions enacted underneath the fragmenting pressures of these structures of power. Thus,
*Is Women of Color a social construction only possible in a reality that is not just oppositional to but also autonomous from the logic of domination? And thus, is Women of Color paradoxically, both the spring for and the result of a revolutionary reconstruction of the social?
*How is the understanding of violence against women of color affected by the change to a different model of the process of gender formation?
Women of Color is a coalitional term that responds to the multiple oppressions, erasures, and abuses that are imposed on non-white women's lives. The accent is on liberatory coalition. The coalition “Women of Color” lives in the liberatory impulse against social fragmentation and in the metamorphosing of realities, selves, and relations. The Politics of Women of Color workshop seeks to further the research and movement building that gives life to this coalition.
This workshop has been conceived and will be coordinated by a group of graduate students and faculty members from diverse departments and programs at Binghamton University.
Faculty participants:
Bill Haver (PIC and Comparative Literature), Workshop Coordinator
Mona Basta (Social Work). Lubna Chaudhry (Human Development). Arlene de Vera (History and Asian and Asian American Studies). Maneesha Lal (History and Asian and Asian American Studies). María Lugones (PIC and Comparative Literature). Dina Maramba (Human Development). Joshua Price (Human Development. Lisa Yun (English and Asian and Asian American Studies) .
Graduate student participants:
Mazi Allen (PIC). Pedro DiPietro (PIC). Azer Keskin (Anthropology). Jen-Feng Kuo (PIC). Goretti Mugambwa (Social Work). Noelle Paley (PIC).
Orlando Tirado (Comparative Literature). Carol Tushabe (PIC). Gabriela Veronelli (PIC). Wanda Alarcon (English). Chantal Rodais (Comparative Literature).
Local community participant:
Nelima Gaonkar, Incite! Binghamton: Women of Color Against Violence and Family & Children's Society
On-line participants:
Jackie Anderson, Olive-Harvey College of Chicago. Xhercis Méndez, Escuela Popular Norteña, Los Angeles. Azadeh Saljooghi, University of Utah. Julia Schiavone-Camacho, University of Texas at El Paso.
Shireen Roshanravan, Kansas State University.
The workshop will have bi-weekly face-to-face meetings on campus for presentation and discussion of ideas, discussion of readings, and workshops. There will also be on-line conversations and dialogue (connected to face-to-face meeting) as a way of including our long-distance members. We will begin with collective reading and discussion of María Lugones's “Heterosexualism and the modern/colonial gender system.” From there we will discuss how an understanding of the modern/colonial gender system informs and transforms trajectories of our current research/thinking/activism on gender and sexuality and then collectively organize an agenda of joint research/action on various themes. The goals of the workshop are to produce dialogue circles and networks, conference presentations, scholarly publications and workshop development that furthers an understanding of the oppressive/resistant realities of women of color and opens liberatory possibilities for living violence-free lives.
Below is the list of books and articles we read or discuss for our research agenda. It reflects the development of our research interests as well as our political and academic concerns. For your imformation, you could access to most of the journal articles online via databases paid for by your academic institution. For instance, the journal Hypatia is available at various databases such as Project MUSE, Academic Search Premier, and Literature Online (LION).
Bibliographies 2006 - 2008
Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color." Critical Race Theory: the Key Writings that Formed the Movement. Eds, Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. New York: New Press, 1995. 357-384.
Keating, Christine. "Framing the Postcolonial Sexual Contract: Democracy, Fraternalism, and State Authority in India." Hypatia. 22:4 (Fall 2007), 130-145.
Klein, Cecelia F. "None of the Above: Gender Ambiguity in Nahua Ideology." Gender in Pre- Hispanic America: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 12 and 13 October 1996. Cecelia F. Klein, ed. Washington, D.C. : Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001. 183- 253.
Lorde, Audre. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984. 110-113.
Lugones, María. "Hetersexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System." Hypatia. 22:1 (Winter 2007), 186-209.
Marcos, Silvia. Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions. Boston: Brill, 2006.
Oyewùmí, Oyèrónké. The invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
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