Gender and the Abjection of Blackness

Sabine Broeck

Description

In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness, Sabine Broeck argues that gender studies as a mostly white field has taken insufficient account of Black contributions, and that more than being an ethnocentric limitation or blind spot, this has represented a structural anti-Blackness in the field. Engaging with the work of Black feminist authors Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Broeck critiques a selection of canonical white gender studies texts to make this case. The book discusses this problem at the core of gender theory as a practice which Broeck terms enslavism—the ongoing abjection of Black life which Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This has become manifest in the repetitive employment of the "woman as slave" metaphor so central to gender theory, as well as in recent theoretical mutations of these anti-Black politics of analogy. It is the structural separation of Blackness from gender that has functioned over and again as the scaffold enabling white women's struggles for successful recognition of equality and subjectivity in the human world as we know it. This book challenges white readers to rethink their own untroubled identification with gender theory, and it provides all readers with a white feminist theorist's sophisticated theoretical and self-critical scholarly account of her own reckoning with and learning in dialogue from Black feminism's critique.
Acknowledgments

1. Against Gender: Enslavism and the Subjects of Feminism

2. Abolish Property: Black Feminist Struggles against Anti-Blackness

3. Gender and the Grammar of Enslavism

4. Abjective Returns: The Slave’s Fungibility in White Gender Studies

5. Post Gender, Post Human: Braidotti’s Nietzschean Echoes of Anti-Blackness

6. On Dispossession as a False Analogy

Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Gender studies
• Ethnic studies
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 22 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438470412
• Langue: English

Extrait

Gender and the Abjection of Blackness
SUNY series in Gender Theory

Tina Chanter, editor
Gender and the Abjection of Blackness
Sabine Broeck
Cover art: Migdalia Valdes, “Every Year in Black and White,” 2007
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bröck-Sallah, Sabine, 1954– author.
Title: Gender and the abjection of Blackness / Sabine Broeck.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York, 2018. | Series: SUNY series in gender theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017037080 | ISBN 9781438470399 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438470412 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women, Black. | Blacks—Race identity. | Racism. | Womanism. | Feminism. | Intersectionality (Sociology) | Slavery.
Classification: LCC HQ1201 .B83 2018 | DDC 305.896082—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037080
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Against Gender: Enslavism and the Subjects of Feminism
2 Abolish Property: Black Feminist Struggles against Anti-Blackness
3 Gender and the Grammar of Enslavism
4 Abjective Returns: The Slave’s Fungibility in White Gender Studies
5 Post Gender, Post Human: Braidotti’s Nietzschean Echoes of Anti-Blackness
6 On Dispossession as a False Analogy
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
T his book has been a long time in the making, dating back to first presentations around 2010. Parts of some chapters have appeared in previous publications. The entire text, however, has been written and revised for the purposes of this book. Some passages of the chapter “Abolish Property” were published in “The Challenge of Black Feminist Desire: Abolish Property,” Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century , edited by Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi, Liverpool University Press, 2013. Parts of chapter 4 , “Abjective Returns,” appeared in “Re-reading de Beauvoir ‘after Race’: Woman-as-Slave Revisited,” International Journal of Francophone Studies , vol. 14, nos. 1–2, 2011. I thank State University of New York Press, and particularly Andrew Kenyon and Tina Chanter, for their patience and support. Heartfelt gratitude goes to Dana Foote and to Gordon Marce for kindness and swiftly provided expertise to help make text into book. To the numerous friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and students in Bremen, Berlin, Bielefeld, Hannover, Potsdam, Oldenburg, Erlangen, Munich, Hamburg, Bonn, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Rostock, Giessen, Dusseldorf, and Munster, as well as in Italy, Poland, Austria, France, Spain, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Senegal, Mexico, Sweden, South Africa, and Russia, who I had the privilege to meet or work with for Erasmus visits, conferences, workshops, lectures, and seminars, and to learn from, I am deeply and sincerely grateful for your critical input, your always freely given listening and kind advice, your prodding and contradicting, questioning and thinking along with me, your pushing and pulling me to the finish line. You know who you are: thank you. Jana Geisler: nothing doing without your help. Christina Sharpe and Rinaldo Walcott: thank you for collegial “tough love”—interest in my work. Jane Desmond and Virginia Dominguez: your eager curiosity for the project gave me a beginning. Maria Diedrich: you trusted me to write another book. Sara Lennox: thank you, again, for unerring guidance through the versions. Renate Hof: without you, this project would not have become a book. To Malick and Youssoupha Sarr: jerejef , but words don’t really do it.
One
Against Gender
Enslavism and the Subjects of Feminism
H ow can one—in my case a senior white feminist German scholar who has struggled with and through decades of transnational, (post-)multicultural, intersectional, queered, intergenerational feminism—be against gender? Why—and how can one, or even need one—read the category of gender as constitutively anti-Black, not just in cases of racist practice but as a theoretical formation? This book is about a (self-)critical recuperation of white feminist interventions, which have paradigmatically shaped my generation’s trajectory of gender studies. It could not have been written without Black feminism. Writing it has been about coming to terms with where I come from: the white habitus of gender and my own being implicated in the longue durée of enslavism. It responds to Elisabeth Spelman’s pioneering attempt, as a white feminist philosopher, to question the essentialization and universalization of white women’s feminist approaches to gender, and takes up her questions, still unanswered. For me, this reckoning with the history of my own formation as a white feminist recapitulates an epistemic challenge: white gender studies’ evasion of the authority of Black theoretical interventions.
The book is neither a historiography of white feminism and gender studies, nor a painstaking discussion of lively and massive intramural debates in gender studies, including those over trans-difference, postcolonial and decolonial intersectionality, and queerness, which have shaped gender studies over the last half-century. It is a theoretical intervention focused on a, for me, paradigmatic set of intellectuals—Simone de Beauvoir, Jessica Benjamin, Judith Butler, and Rosi Braidotti—with an American and transnationally effective white feminist trajectory, engaging it with my readings of what have been key Black texts of my generational formation, by Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and Saidiya Hartman. It does look past the (de)constructionist, poststructuralist approaches of difference, performativity, and the nonidentity of gender, and at the ongoing racist agnotology of gender studies and the fungible status of Blackness within gender as a paradigm. Gender, as white feminism has known it, will be discussed here as an anti-Black concept in its inception and in a series of generative reiterations.
Accordingly, my interest lies in a critique of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century white knowledge formations, and not in transmitting, ventriloquizing, or explaining contemporary Black feminist activism and scholarship. This activism and scholarship has created a resurgence that has been lighting up the pressure on white institutions, formations, and agents outside and inside academia—as anybody connected to social media will or might have realized over the last years. The following is not at all an inclusive list of activists, scholars, cultural producers, but names only a few: Christina Sharpe, Kimberly Brown, Tiffany Lethabo King, Patrice Douglass, Lisa C. Moore, Nadia Alahmed, Samiya Bashir, Korina Jocson, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Aneeka Henderson, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Kai M. Green, Evie Shockley, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Keisha Blain, and Jessica Marie Johnson. As this is a collective movement, it has also become manifest in the brilliant work of the e-journal Feminist Wire , in the special issues of The Black Scholar published on Black feminisms ( On the Future ), and a series of recent Black feminist symposia: for example, The Flesh of the Matter: A Hortense Spillers Symposium, on March 18, 2016, at Cornell University; Feminist Poetics: Legacies of June Jordan Symposium, on March 25, 2016, at University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and the Black Feminist Futures Symposium, in April 2016, at Northwestern University.
While much attention has been given to white supremacy, and white privilege, this attention has been largely directed at the social, political, or cultural racist white positionalities, agents, and practices, from which anti-racist white feminists have learned to distance ourselves. By contrast, I do not read for a dissection of white privilege or for instances of obvious racism in gender studies’ theoretical pronunciations by way of finding imperfection and a “not enough” of feminist anti-racism, but for the anti-Blackness I see settled in the premises of gender theory’s genealogy, in its rearticulation of post-Enlightenment discourses of white freedom, that is, in the very fiber of its programmatic intent. Black feminism has been pushing for this epistemic break in most explicit, but insistently unnoticed, terms—a white feminist theoretical reckoning with a Black feminist genealogy remains an urgency.
“Feminist leaders rooted in the second wave such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Kerry Ann Kane, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Maxine Hong Kingston, Reena Walker and other feminists of color, sought to negotiate a space within feminist thought for consideration of race.” This is from the Wikipedia article “Third-Wave Feminism.” If Wikipedia may be seen as the reservoir of collective e-memory for the current and coming producers of knowledge in its most immediately accessible form, its acts of naming, framing, and formatting become crucial, signifying not just a particular info