ABSTRACT
Individual black women engaged in feminist movement, writing feminist theory, have persisted in our efforts to deconstruct the category “woman” and argued that gender is not the sole determinant of woman’s identity. That this effort has succeeded can be measured not only by the extent to which feminist scholars have confronted questions of race and racism but by the emerging scholarship that looks at the intertwining of race and gender. Often it is forgotten that the hope was not simply that feminist scholars and activists would focus on race and gender but that they would do so in a manner that would not reinscribe conventional oppressive hierarchies. Particularly, it was seen as crucial to building mass-based feminist movement that theory would not be written in a manner that would further erase and exclude black women and women of color, or, worse yet, include us in subordinate positions. Unfortunately, much feminist scholarship dashes these hopes, largely because critics fail to interrogate the location from which they speak, often assuming, as it is now fashionable to do, that there is no 78need to question whether the perspective from which they write is informed by racist and sexist thinking, specifically as feminists perceive black women and women of color.
