Black Feminist Thought

Black feminist thought analyzes how race, gender, and class jointly shape the experience and oppression of Black women, and treats that experience as a source of distinctive knowledge.

Definition

A tradition of feminist theory centered on the experiences, activism, and knowledge of Black women, which treats the simultaneity of racial and gender oppression as both an analytic problem and an epistemic resource.

Scope

This topic surveys the tradition associated with Patricia Hill Collins, the Combahee River Collective, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde, which holds that the situation of Black women cannot be captured by adding 'race' and 'gender' analyses together, and which articulates a standpoint epistemology grounded in that situation. It describes the tradition's central claims, its critique of mainstream feminism, and its influence on the later concept of intersectionality.

Core questions

• How do race, gender, and class operate together rather than separately in shaping Black women's lives?
• What knowledge arises from the standpoint of those subject to multiple, simultaneous oppressions?
• Why did earlier feminist and antiracist movements often fail to represent Black women?

Key theories

Black feminist standpoint

Collins's claim that Black women, positioned as 'outsiders within' dominant institutions, develop a distinctive angle of vision that yields critical knowledge about systems of power otherwise rendered invisible.

Interlocking systems of oppression

The Combahee River Collective's argument that racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression are interlocking and must be fought together, an early articulation of what would later be theorized as intersectionality.

History

Black feminist thought has roots in nineteenth-century figures such as Sojourner Truth and grew through the activism and writing of the 1970s, including the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) and hooks's Ain't I a Woman (1981). Collins's Black Feminist Thought (1990; 2nd ed. 2000) systematized the tradition as a body of social theory and epistemology, and its concerns fed directly into the development of intersectionality.

Debates

Additive versus interlocking models

Whether the oppression of Black women is best understood as the sum of separate racial and gender disadvantages or as a qualitatively distinct, interlocking condition, a question that motivated the move from additive analyses toward intersectionality.

Key figures

• Patricia Hill Collins
• bell hooks
• Audre Lorde
• Barbara Smith

Seminal works

• combahee1977
• hooks1981
• collins2000

Frequently asked questions

How does Black feminist thought relate to intersectionality?

Black feminist thought provided much of the groundwork: its insistence that race, gender, and class operate simultaneously, articulated by the Combahee River Collective and Collins, was given the name 'intersectionality' by Kimberlé Crenshaw.