ABSTRACT
Recent feminist theorists view subjectivity as something that is produced, therefore not an immutable fact of life but something that is changeable. This understanding has been central to feminist social theory ever since the early distinction was made between sex and gender. According to this early theorisation, individuals were born with a biological sex (which was unchangeable) and then developed gender through the process of socialisation. Conceptualised within the dualistic paradigm, socialisation involved the idea of a unitary society impacting on a blankslate individual in the course of his or her upbringing and education. Here I have developed an understanding of subjective processes as being much more active and complex than has been implied by socialisation theory, during which people take up and move through different positions that are discursively and psychodynamically generated in the course of collective and individual social relations. Extending this approach to consider the production of black femininity leads us to pose the question differently, to consider just what it is about black women’s racialised subjectivity that is gendered.
