Abstract
This edited collection had its origins in a series of lectures convened in 2009 at a time when women’s studies at the host institution, one of the longest-running women’s studies programs in the United States, was struggling for its survival as an autonomous department in the context of budgetary pressures. Feminist and women’s studies scholars, women and men across racial and ethnic differences, came from around the country to contribute in a spirit of collective solidarity. The series aimed to demonstrate and celebrate both the diversity of thought and strategy within intersectionality studies and a common commitment to transracial bridge-building that combines intersectional theorizing with transformative practice. The outcome is a truly visionary, inspiring, and challenging book, in which words unusual in academic work such as heart, soul, and love feature regularly and in which the limitations of intellectual endeavor without engagement of the whole person, including attention to experience and spirituality, are confronted head-on.
It is organized into five sections. Part I, “Women’s Studies at the Intersection of the Margins, Once Again,” addresses the challenges that face women’s studies, always an outsider in the academy, in the context of rising neoliberalism, managerialism, and corporatism, and the increased expectation that universities must produce students to meet workforce needs. Kim Marie Vaz discusses the particular threat of resegregation, arguing that the loss of small women’s studies units and dispersal of staff has allowed white feminism to predominate again, with a loss of attention to spaces both for women of color to reflect on how their lives have been shaped by white and androcentric beliefs and values, and for all differences to be brought to the table with no one allowed to rule. Across the chapters there are examples of resistance and persistence in a commitment to feminist solidarity and egalitarian practice.
Part II, “Embodying Theory, Intersectional Herstories: A Call to Remember,” takes a historical approach, remembering the development of feminist thinking on intersectionality, its links to activist struggles against sexism and racism, and its complexity (too often lost sight of now when the concept is used, often in ahistorical and reductionist ways) and drawing out its contemporary implications for transnational feminist and womanist projects. Vivian M. May argues that gender oppression is still all too often given primacy in feminist research, or an additive approach to different forms of oppression is taken that obscures the interdependence and mutuality of identities and social systems, while Layli Phillips Maparyan makes a compelling argument for “why the academy needs womanism, now more than ever.” She describes womanism as praxis rather than theory, a way of being/living and a spirit of doing things that is non-ideological, communitarian, spiritual as well as anti-oppressionist, and engaged with everyday, real-world problems in new ways. It is a fundamental shift Maparyan argues for, both in women’s studies and in academia, but one that she convincingly argues the world urgently needs.
Part III, “From ‘Heart to Heart’: Intersectional Approaches to Teaching in the Spirit of Political Love,” addresses the pedagogical strategies developed by feminists and the challenges they confront. In Chapter Seven, bell hooks makes a powerful pitch for teaching with love, of both subject and students, engaging students from the heart in community and attending to the emotional climate of the classroom. Like Maparyan, hooks explicitly rejects the dehumanization not only of oppression but of academic culture that all too often creates a climate of fear. Gary L. Lemons, a black man teaching feminist studies who brings his own autobiography into his work and expects the same of his students, also challenges the common lack of experiential engagement in academic culture, arguing it leads to dry and lifeless discussion and timidity of self-expression, undermining the potential of education to be transformative when intellect, emotion, and spiritual energy are all brought into play. His chapter (written jointly with Scott Neumeister, a former student) illustrates this potential with pro-feminist men willing to question their privilege as men and contest sexist ideas. M. Thandabantu Iverson discusses a similar approach with working-class people of color, applying principles of intersectionality and simultaneity of oppressions and shifting the center from the perspective of dominant groups to create space for those who have been marginalized, devalued, and excluded to rethink and reshape their identities positively.
Part IV, “At the Crossroads of Feminist Solidarity: New Coalitions, New Alliances,” addresses collaborative efforts across gender, race, class, and sexuality. Lemons gives a fascinating autobiographical account of the relationship between his personal life and work. As a black male intellectual working within women’s studies he theorizes his own position to include both the privileges of gender and heteronormativity on the one hand and outsider status by gender and race within academic feminism on the other. He explores his personal and professional journey from wounded black boy, much of whose complex vulnerability and humanity was unrecognized, to professor in women’s studies, rejecting along the way most of what he had been taught growing up in the South—the culture of white supremacy, patriarchy, and religious fundamentalism—and achieving at least a temporary sense of belonging within feminist solidarity. Both this chapter and Aaronette White’s on black feminist masculinities affirm the necessity of men’s active participation in feminism. A chapter by Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Ann Russo explores transracial alliances between white and black women. All make clear that solidarity cannot be taken for granted but must be actively built and sustained to overcome many challenges.
Part V, “Practicing Anti-Domination Politics: Visionary, Soulful Interventions,” further explores feminist practices of intersectionality and their problematics, including an inspiring account by Analouise Keating of her personal view of teaching as spiritual activism for social transformation. She writes of living her early academic career in a “spiritual closet,” aware that mention of such concepts as soul, sacred, and spirit would likely result in her being seen as flakey and apolitical. She gradually came out to speak her own truth. Keating argues convincingly that a spiritual vision of the interconnectedness of all facilitates the use of intersectionality theory to go beyond a politics of difference based on conventional social identities and to enable more transformative relationships that recognize both our fundamental human interdependence and the limitations of categories and binary axes.
It is always a challenge in edited collections to organize chapters into distinct sections with many recurring themes. It is equally a challenge to do justice to the richness this book offers and the real treats within it for anyone interested in the radical potential of education, despite the many ongoing challenges within the current contexts of higher education.