Transmuting Grammars of Whiteness in Third-Wave Feminism: Interrogating Postrace

Histories, Postmodern Abstraction, and the Proliferation of Difference in Third-Wave Texts

Author(s): Rebecca L. Clark Mane
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Signs, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn 2012), pp. 71-98
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 Rebecca L. Clark Mane

Transmuting Grammars of Whiteness in Third-Wave

Feminism: Interrogating Postrace Histories,
Postmodern Abstraction, and the Proliferation
of Difference in Third-Wave Texts

[Feminist scholars need to interrogate] what contexts, under what kinds of

race and class situations, gender is used as what sort of signier to cover over
what kinds of things.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1990, 52)

W hen Audre Lorde and other women of color critiqued mainstream

feminism for its refusal to recognize the very real differences be-
tween us of race, age, and sex, they were seeking to expose and
interrupt the solipsistic agendas, experiences, and ideas of middle-class
white women that were masquerading as concerns of the universal woman
in feminism (Lorde [1978] 2005, 339). As R. Claire Snyder (2008) out-
lines in her Signs New Directions essay on third-wave feminism, the move-
ments commitment to an intersectional and multiperspectival version of
feminism (176), nonjudgmental inclusivity, and postmodern antiessen-
tialism seems to be a direct response to this call. Inspired by Gloria Anzal-
da, Cherre Moraga, and Audre Lorde, Snyder notes, third-wavers de-
pict their version of feminism as more inclusive and racially diverse than
the second wave, so much so that some second-wave feminists complain
that the third-wave narrative makes the second wave seem whiter than it
was (180). However, although deployments of difference are ubiquitous
in third-wave texts, many women-of-color feminists and antiracist scholars
challenge this inclusive claim. For instance, Chela Sandoval (2000) argues
that while US third-world feminist scholarship has been included here and
there in the mainstream feminist project, it has been misrecognized and
underanalyzed as a demographic constituency only (women of color),

I would like to thank Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Ralina Joseph, and Michelle Habell-Palln, as
well as the Signs editorial team and anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and
invaluable feedback on this article. I am also grateful to my writing group members, Vanessa
Au and Katherine Bell, for providing the emotional and physical conditions necessary to nish
this piece.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2012, vol. 38, no. 1]
2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2012/3801-0008$10.00

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72 y Clark Mane

and not as a theoretical or methodological approach in its own right

(171).1 M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1997b) con-
cur that the institutional feminist narrative has extended only token in-
clusion of our texts without reconceptualizing the whole white, middle-
class, gendered knowledge base (xvi). While third-wavers name diversity
as a primary concern of third-wave feminism, these critiques by women of
color and/or antiracist feminists suggest that third-wave feminism has not
sufciently shifted the mainstream feminist project to ensure that this
inclusion of racial difference is fundamentally transformative. This article
seeks to understand how it is that the frequent appearances of race, diver-
sity, and difference in third-wave feminism can simultaneously result in
experiences of displacement by women of color as well as the deection of
scholarship and theorizations that examine racial hierarchy as a constitu-
tive factor in feminism.
Examining the invocations of race in third-wave feminism through
the discursive lens of deconstructing whiteness serves to untangle what
Sandoval (2000) calls a presence-absence (95) of diversity in third-wave
feminism. A close reading of key third-wave texts reveals a set of structur-
ing grammars of whiteness (the way things are said) that allow for the
proliferation of difference in third-wave feminism while simultaneously
containing and sublimating the discomforting dangers of racial and na-
tional intersectionalities in the mainstream feminist project. The four key
syntaxes of whiteness in third-wave feminist texts are the postrace historical
narrative, the postmodern abstraction of women-of-color theories, the at-
tening and proliferation of difference through a long list of interchangeable
elements, and irreconcilable contradiction. An overarching effect of the
four syntaxes is to allow for a resounding presence of race, diversity, schol-
ars of color, and these scholars theoretical contributions. Yet the structur-
ing forms of these inclusions simultaneously enact a containment or func-
tional absence of these same ideas and, in turn, garrison feminism from a
full epistemological reorganization that serious engagement with the inter-
sectionality of gender and race would necessitate.

1
While third-wave feminism cannot be collapsed with mainstream feminism, especially
since third-wave feminism situates itself as a distinct break from what third-wavers consider
the mainstream, I do contend that the use of the wave metaphor demonstrates an intention
to carry on, transform, and take up the torch of a central, if contested, feminist lineage. I
concur with Cathryn Baileys (1997) description of the wave metaphor: to call something a
wave implies that it is one among others in some sort of succession, both similar to and
different from the other occurrences (18). The critiques I cite from women of color and
others may not always explicitly name third-wave feminism, but I intend to demonstrate that
they are (also) applicable to the cases I present.

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 73

The rst section of this article traces these four syntaxes through four
key third-wave feminist texts: Rebecca Walkers To Be Real: Telling the
Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995b); Leslie Heywood and
Jennifer Drakes Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism
(1997b); Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richardss Manifesta: Young
Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000); and Stacy Gillis, Gillian
Howie, and Rebecca Munfords Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Explo-
ration (2007b), a more recent third-wave anthology.2 The second portion
of this article proposes a few key methodological and philosophical inter-
ventions based on a rereading of women-of-color and antiracist feminist
texts in order to (re)open the contemporary feminist moment to the trans-
formational potentialities of intersectional theorizing.

Locating the syntaxes of whiteness

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didnt
exist.
Verbal Kint in the lm The Usual Suspects (1995)

In critical whiteness studies, whiteness has been used as a term to describe

an array of sites and phenomena. It has been characterized as a historically
constructed racial identity (Saxton 1990; Roediger 1994), a structural ra-
cial formation (Omi and Winant 1994), a location of unmarked privilege
(McIntosh [1989] 2011; Frankenberg 1993; Hurtado 1996), and a prop-
erty of individuals or subjects (Harris 1993; Lipsitz 1998). While it is
important to retain the notion of whiteness as a material structural property,
my methodology of reading third-wave texts primarily focuses on whiteness
as a discursive formation, or structuring ideology, and epistemology that
produces, secures, and maintains material inequalities (Carrillo Rowe
2000; Shome 2000; Mills 2008). Specically, my analysis is focused on the
ever-adapting rhetorical strategies and structures of thought that reproduce
whiteness, primarily undercover, as a naturalized and unspoken set of rela-
tions.
As a discursive formation, whiteness has the special quality of lacking
specic xed content in itself; instead, it tends to consist of a set of strate-
gies for sublimating and containing challenges to racial inequality. This
extraordinary ability to deect scrutiny can trouble its interrogation. Raka
2
There are a number of texts I could have selected here, but I have chosen these on the
basis of the preponderance of citations, across a number of third-wave feminist articles, that
identify them as central texts. Thus, my textual sample is more representative than exhaustive.

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74 y Clark Mane

Shome (2000) notes that the rhetoric of deection and evasiveness are a
manifestation of the very problem of whiteness . . . the problem of how
whiteness refuses to name itself, how it always likes to remain hidden,
and how it deters from acknowledging the larger issue of how the every-
day organization of social and cultural relations function to confer benets
and systemic advantages to whites (367). Because whiteness resists inves-
tigation, Peter McLaren and his coauthors suggest that identifying and
naming whiteness is an important counterhegemonic tool with which to
resist the invisibility and unspeakability whiteness attempts to maintain.
They write, labeling whiteness provides a sociopolitical optic through
which the practices that produce structural privilege . . . can be examined
and addressed (McLaren et al. 2001, 204).
Another way to conceptualize the slipperiness of whiteness is as an
epistemologya system of knowingthat can shape perceptions, public
memories, and imaginative possibilities around what is sayable, doable,
and thinkable. In this regard, however, philosopher Charles Mills consid-
ers whiteness to be more of an agnotology (social ignorance), consisting
of racially structured nonknowings (2008, 234), than an epistemology.
The lens of whiteness not only produces perceptions, he notes, but strate-
gically excludes large amounts of evidence and experience of the world
from white consciousness in order to serve white group interests. Thus,
Mills sees whiteness functioning as a set of epistemological strategies that
exclude and manage what is knowablestrategies I call grammar or syn-
taxrather than as a catalogue of knowledge with specic content.
Reading for signiers that circulate primarily by eluding discovery can
make locating the discursive markings of whiteness methodologically chal-
lenging. As Aimee M. Carrillo Rowe (2000) identies, the discourses and
practices of whiteness maintain and advance racist ideologies not only
through what is not said, but also what remains absent (66). Often,
locating whiteness requires reading absences, following traces and ghosts,
and privileging syntax (how something is said) over content (what is said).
Roland Barthes, in Mythologies (1972), identies a number of syntaxes and
gures that work to maintain and naturalize hegemonic systems of power.
He calls these strategies rhetorical forms, which he denes as a set of
insistent gures according to which the varied forms of the mythical signier
arrange themselves (150). Sandoval (2000) conceptualizes Barthess forms
as constituting a rhetoric of supremacy that calls up possibilities and pro-
hibitions for thought and behavior while masquerading as the most seem-
ingly innocuous forms of personal and everyday life (117). Accordingly, the
gures of whiteness act as innocent and natural ways of organizing percep-

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 75

tions, and because of this they have the potential to inltrate and colonize
even progressive discourses, such as third-wave feminism.
With regard to third-wave feminism, then, it is not enough merely to
include race and diversity within the project. From a grammatical stand-
point, the primary questions shift from whether race is included to how
race is included, from whether to how women-of-color scholarship is ne-
gotiated within third-wave feminism. While the discourse of diversity and
multiculturalism may permeate third-wave feminist texts, the grammar or
syntax of how diversity and multiculturalism are introduced into the over-
all text is where feminists need to identify and challenge whiteness.

Women of color as standpoint

Since the third wave deals specically in the domain of antiessentialism
and the discursive disruption of identity categories, it might be useful to
clarify both theoretically and politically at the outset how the monikers
white, whiteness, and women of color circulate in this article. The naming
of whiteness in feminism (and the larger theoretical discussion around the
nature of the subjectivity of woman) has been an issue of contention in
academic feminist debate. For instance, when Carrillo Rowe explicitly
named white women and women of color in her article Locating Femin-
isms Subject (2000), respondent Patrice Buzzanell resisted this naming
because, she argued, [Carrillo Rowes] use of binary categories misrepre-
sents the varied experiences and shifting identities of White women and
women of color and divides all women into two seemingly impenetrable
camps. When she juxtaposes Whites and people of color, she eliminates
the shifting, socially constructed, and negotiable nature of social member-
ship as well as the kind of language that can bring women together in
their ght against the consequences of White privilege (Buzzanell 2000,
83). Buzzanells critique foregrounds a set of useful anxieties around
tendencies toward xity, polarization, and oversimplication in the nam-
ing and locating of racial identities in feminism. However, her call for
multiplicity occurs as a direct response and challenge to Carrillo Rowes
call for feminism to take a greater accountability for whiteness. In this
relational interaction, Buzzanells theoretical move toward multiplicity
ends up functioning strategically to deect and mitigate Carrillo Rowes
racial critique. Thus, politically speaking, we need to ask not only what is
the most accurate or the most theoretically savvy way to theorize racial
and gendered subjectivity but also how and when these subjectivities are
circulating. In what contexts? With what stakes and what political effects?

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76 y Clark Mane

Within this larger discussion, I use the terms whiteness and women of
color to designate standpoints in order to avoid, on the one hand, relying
on the notion of ahistorical binaristic, xed, essential, or intractable identity,
or losing the historical specicity and structural effects of race through an
unmoored multiplicity of identity, on the other. Standpoint theory suggests
that marginalization can provide an epistemically privileged perspective
since marginalized people are often required both to critically navigate
dominant worldviews and to make sense of their alternative and marginal-
ized experiences.3 The ip side of this perspective, as implied by Millss
notion of whiteness and privilege as agnotology, is that privilege can give
rise to power-laden and perspectivally limited epistemologies through the
group-interested exclusion of certain histories, social realities, and witnesses.
It is through these notions that I invoke women-of-color perspectives and
whiteness.
Throughout this piece, I hope to retain three nuances that using the
term women of color as standpoint carries. First, standpoint is achieved
(and contested and constantly under revision and historically contingent;
Harding 2004b). Thus, while the historically contingent ontological status
of women of color may create the conditions of possibility for epistemic
advantage, this critical standpoint is not guaranteed. Second, while the
social location of racially marked otherness creates conditions of possibility
for epistemic privilege in terms of intersectional theorizing, this does not
necessarily foreclose the achievement of an antiracist feminist standpoint
to white women and others.4 Finally, and importantly, this perspective
reminds us of the political necessity of keeping actual women of color
centered in a women-of-color perspective. A primary assumption of this
essay is that if intersectional or diverse feminist theory allows for the con-
tinued marginalization of women of color in terms of publishing, hiring,
and academic authority, then we need to remain vigilant and critical of its
precepts, no matter how seemingly inclusive the theory.

The postrace historical narrative: Racial critique as the origin of

third-wave feminism
The rst syntax of whiteness in third-wave theorizing involves the posi-
tioning of race-based critique and women-of-color feminism as an origin
story. Snyder (2008) suggests in her critical analysis of third-wave femi-
nism that it may surprise many second-wave feminists to learn that third-

3
See Hill Collins (2000a), Harding (2004a), Hartsock (2004), and Narayan (2004).
4
See, e.g., Russo (1991), Thompson (2001), Segrest (2002), and McLaren (2005).

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 77

wavers claim the writings of feminists of color from the early 1980s as the
beginning of the third wave (180), thus marking the claiming of the
racial critique as a site of territorial contestation between second- and
third-wave feminists. But although the four texts I am considering here
frame these authors as origins of the third wave, both the third-wave texts
and the contestation by second-wave feminists mark the women-of-color
intervention as historical and imbue it with the sense that it is something
long past rather than a set of contemporary, extant, and urgent theoretical
considerations for the present. A grammatical analysis of the way the race
critique is framed as historical in third-wave feminism indicates a strategy
of containment more than one of incorporation.
While this critique is often afforded a place of honor or veneration in the
third-wave narratives (for instance, editors will express a sense of indebted-
ness to the antiracist critique of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s), the
narrative structure of history relegates the antiracist critique to the past, with
third-wave feminism happening after this women-of-color critique. Because
the Western historical imagination tends to follow a progressive trajectory,
positing the critique as something that is historical suggests grammatically
that the critiques around race are over (past, achieved, complete).
In three of the four volumes, the editors explicitly claim that the origin
of third-wave feminism resides in women-of-color scholarship (see also Orr
1997; Kinser 2004; Snyder 2008). In fact, as Gillis, Howie, and Munford
describe in their introduction to Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Explo-
ration, the term third wave was originally developed as a form of antiracist
feminism that centralized race and class alongside gender as necessary sites
of feminist inquiry. They document that the rst use of third wave was in
the late 1980s in the title of a planned (but never published) anthology
edited by M. Jacqui Alexander, Lisa Albrecht, and Mab Segrest that was to
be called The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism (Gillis, Howie,
and Munford 2007a, xxiv). In this incarnation, the third wave was meant
to challenge the racism of second-wave feminism, thus linking the concept
third wave tightly with Sandovals conguration of U.S. Third World
feminism (2000, 40). However, Gillis, Howie, and Munford observe that
over the next fteen years, the focus on race and differential conscious-
ness gave way to an emphasis on generational distinctiveness (xxiv).
Thus, the editors note that the third wave had its historical genesis in racial
critique but has since shifted or moved in another direction. The narrative
of the original racial critique that has given way to a new conception
suggests that the third wave is post or after the moment of racial critique.
In the introduction to their anthology Third Wave Agenda, Heywood
and Drake subtitle their historical origins section From the Third World

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78 y Clark Mane

to the Third Wave: Our Debts (1997a, 8). In this section, they also claim
that third-wave theorizing has grown out of or is proceeding from
critiques of the white womens movement that were initiated by women
of color (8). Yet, while claiming that third-wave feminism owes a debt
to antiracist scholarship, the historical grammar suggests a movement
from this previous critique (left in the past) to a new moment called the
third wave (the here and now). They repeat this trope of debt or inheri-
tance in the overview piece they later wrote for Gillis, Howie, and Mun-
fords anthology where they reiterate, Third wave feminist thinking . . .
has been shaped by the racial and ethnic diversity of post-boomer genera-
tions (Heywood and Drake 2007, 117). Like the editors of Third Wave
Feminism, Heywood and Drake differentiate this racial critique from con-
temporary third-wave feminism by describing the women-of-color critique
as a body of theorizing that they borrow from, are inuenced by, and are
indebted to but not as a central part of their contemporary project. There
is a similar structuring in Manifesta, where Baumgardner and Richards
(2000) write that the Third Wave was born into the diversity realized
by the latter part of the Second Wave (77).5
As each text locates an originary moment, debt, or inheritance for
third-wave feminism in the racial intervention into the second wave, these
texts imply that the third wave has both grown out of (as in sprung forth
from) and grown out of (as in matured beyond or progressed past) a
historical expansion of racial diversity in feminism. Rather than an afrma-
tion and incorporation of women-of-color theorizing, the framing of race-
based critique as historical, and thus not a current site of debate, assists in
the deection and containment of contemporary racial critique. Also, by
situating women-of-color feminism as part of an exceptional past moment,
this grammar follows the logic described by Shu-Mei Shih (2004), which
simultaneously allows for what she calls the exceptional particular yet
protects the universal from fundamental change by marking the historic
intervention as singular and nonrepetitive and hence . . . not open[ing] a
path for other[s] (26). To truly integrate women-of-color and antiracist
scholarship into third-wave feminism, there needs to be a more transfor-
mative interaction than a nod to some exceptional canonical writers of

5
Walker, in the introduction to To Be Real, does not explicitly name the second-wave
antiracist critique as an origin story, but she arguably performs this narrative through her own
subjectivity as woman-of-color feminist Alice Walkers daughter. Walker distinguishes her
feminist theorization by stating that it comes from a very different vantage point on the
world than that of our foremothers (1995a, xxxiii). As such, she is both a literal example of
being born into the woman-of-color intervention made in the second wave while also clearly
demarcating third-wave feminism as coming after this intervention.

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 79

history. Ultimately, an inclusive feminism should be regured in such a

way that an anthology claiming to be the next step in feminism would be
considered unthinkable without a critical awareness of the coconstitutive
nature of race and gender, an awareness that would affect both the vision
and the authorship of any such volume.

Postmodern abstraction: Decontextualizing and dehistoricizing

women-of-color feminist theory

The oppositional feminist is both validated and erased, at the same

moment, by virtue of her difference and difference alone.
Mridula Nath Chakraborty (2007, 105)

The second syntax of whiteness in third-wave feminist texts is the post-

modern abstraction and appropriation of women-of-color feminist theoriz-
ing, or what Barthes (1972) calls the privation of history (151). In this
syntactic move, ideas, terms, and concepts of women-of-color scholars are
cited prolically in third-wave texts. However, these ideas are abstracted
and decontextualized from the structural and historically specic condi-
tions of racism, colonialism, and intersectional axes of oppression that en-
abled the production of these theoretical developments. As in Chakra-
bortys epigraph above, women-of-color and antiracist scholars have
identied this attening and abstraction of difference as a problematic in
feminist theorizing (Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991; Moya 1997). For
example, Delia Aguilar (1997) critiques this appropriation and abstraction
for the paradoxical effect of ostensibly recognizing the other at the same
time that is conceals the material conditions underpinning that marginality
(154). In these third-wave texts, this paradox is made ironic by the fact that
the syntactical tools of abstraction, such as fragmentation, difference, and
hybridity, are attributed to women of color themselves. In fact, this post-
modern valorization of abstraction is named as women of colors primary
contribution to third-wave feminism.
This tendency is exemplied in the introduction to Third Wave Agenda.
Heywood and Drake (1997a) write, What third wave feminists seek and
nd in the writing of [bell] hooks, Hazel Carby, Audre Lorde, Gloria
Anzalda, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ntozake Shange, Patricia Hill Collins,
Bharati Mukherjee, Patricia Williams, Ana Castillo, Coco Fusco, Toni
Morrison, and so many others, is languages and images that account for
multiplicity and difference, that negotiate contradiction in afrmative
ways, and that give voices to a politics of hybridity and coalition (9; em-

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80 y Clark Mane

phasis added). In this quotation, Heywood and Drake credit highly inu-
ential women-of-color scholars with providing the language of multiplicity,
difference, and contradiction, yet they do not attend to the structural and
historically specic critiques of racism, classism, and heteronormativity
that produced these theorizations. In another instance, Heywood and
Drake suggest that what is most relevant from Sandovals important
1982 essay on U.S. third world feminism and white feminist racism is
not necessarily dismantling white privilege or racism within the feminist
movement but, more abstractly, an argument for a feminist movement
dened by difference (9). Patricia Pender, a contributor to the volume
Third Wave Feminism (Gillis, Howie, and Munford 2007b), also credits
Sandoval for deconstructing the unitary subject of woman yet does not
mention her broader project of decolonization or US third-world femi-
nism (Pender 2007, 231). In the same volume, Niamh Moore (2007)
credits criticism from Black feminists and third world women with
producing a sense of fracture and fragmentation in the project of femi-
nism (126) and providing a critique of essentialism. In each of these
instances, women-of-color scholars are credited with the ideas of fracture
and fragmentation while the racial, national, and economic specics of
their critiques drop out of the analysis.
What is problematic about this abstraction is that according to the very
authors cited, it is precisely the specicity of race, class, gender, history,
colonization, and geography that creates the conditions that necessitate ne-
gotiating multiplicity and difference, particularly within racially subjugated
subject positions. As such, Hill Collins (2002b) warns that, abstracted from
relations of power, social theories of difference deployed by intellectuals
who are privileged within hierarchical power relations of race, class, and
gender may operate quite differently (64) than those emerging from schol-
ars situated in contexts of historical and structural oppression based on race
and colonialism. The ways theories of difference that have been abstracted
from history may operate differently is the site of investigation for the
next two tropes: the proliferation of difference and the sublimation of con-
ict through irreducible contradiction.

The proliferation and flattening of difference: The list and

the anthology

The solution to pollution is dilution.

Folk saying derived from the labors of Hercules in classical Greek myth,
widely quoted in waste engineering textbooks

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 81

Rather than challenging the racial status quo [in third-wave texts] white
privilege remains intact while the arguments used to defuse the tension that
difference produces have become much more insidious.
Mridula Nath Chakraborty (2007, 103)

The third syntax of whiteness in third-wave feminism derives from and is

intertwined with the previous syntax of postmodern abstraction: this is the
attening and proliferation of difference. Through the deprivation of history,
a syntax of equivalences is enabled: all differences and marginalizations
become theoretically equivalent and thus interchangeable.6 As a result of
this attening of difference, Hill Collins (2000b) notes that socially con-
structed differences emerging from historical patterns of oppression are
submerged within a host of more trivial differences (63).
We see this effect in third-wave feminism through two specic rhetorical
mechanisms that make up the third syntax of whiteness: the list and the
undifferentiated anthology. In the list, each element in a list is given a
weight and value equal to the other elements, just as each chapter in an
anthology is awarded a kind of equivalency. Further, each clause in a list
does not necessarily alter or qualify the other items in a list; they function
independently, in loose relation to one another.
While there is nothing inherently oppressive about the grammatical
structure of a list or an anthology, in the context of third-wave feminist
texts, they tend to enable the citation or inclusion of antiracist critique and
women-of-color theorizations while simultaneously diluting and mitigat-
ing the transformative effects of these ideas. This is similar to the gure
Barthes (1972, 150) calls inoculation, which, as Sandoval describes,
works homeopathically: It provides cautious injectionsin modest doses
onlyof dissimilarity. . . . The outcome is that, by incorporating a small,
tidy portion of difference, the good citizen-subject does not have to accept
its depth or enormity, and thus s/he can remain as is (2000, 119). In the
case of third-wave feminism, rather than injecting small amounts of differ-
ence into a vast ocean of sameness, the list multiplies and proliferates
differences so that no one single difference has to be faced in its depth or
enormity but rather becomes but one avor amid a smorgasbord of
difference. Lynn Lu, working from hookss (1992) notion of eating the
other, suggests that this kind of inoculation demonstrates the desire to
incorporate the essence of the other without being transformed, without
losing ones dominance over it (Lu 1997, 23).

6
See Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Mohanty (2003), Shih (2004), and Kim (2009).

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82 y Clark Mane

The racially inclusive list, wherein race is included in a long list of femi-
nist adjectives or concerns, is a remarkably common occurrence in third-
wave texts. For example, in Manifesta, Baumgardner and Richards (2000)
frame race as an individual adjective that qualies feminism: Im a . . .
power, postmodern, Girlie, pro-sex, Prada, academic, gender, radical,
Marxist, equity, cyber, Chicana, cultural, eco, lesbian, Latina, womanist,
animal rights, American Indian, Indian, international, diva, Jewish, Puerto
Rican, working-class, Asian-American, philanthropic, bisexual, transsexual,
lipstick, punk rock, young, old . . . feminist (50). The grammar of this list
equates lifestyle or fashion choices (Prada, lipstick, punk rock) with the
structural constraints of race, class, and sexuality (Chicana, lesbian, work-
ing class). Juxtaposing and making these markers grammatically equivalent,
Hill Collins (2002b) suggests, reformulates all difference as merely a mat-
ter of style and strips it of political meaning (61). Further, within such
a long list, the relative value or inuence of each classication in relation to
feminism as a whole is diminished. Rather than fundamentally altering the
term feminism, each qualier serves only as an accessory to the main en-
semble of feminism.
Heywood and Drake (1997a) also provide a racially inclusive list vis--
vis types of feminism: Young feminists who grew up with equity femi-
nism, got gender feminism in college, along with poststructuralism, and
are now hard at work on a feminism that strategically combines elements
of these feminisms, along with black feminism, women-of-color feminism,
working-class feminism, pro-sex feminism, and so on (3). Here, not only
is intersectional feminism just one type among many, but the structure of
the sentence equates the various strands of feminism (black = equity =
gender = poststructuralism = pro-sex). Through the equivalencies of the
list, they imply that these are the various avors of feminism that can be
strategically combine[d] to produce a third-wave feminism. Further,
Heywood and Drake suggest a proliferation of more possibilities in their
use of and so on. By the structure of the list, there is no understanding
that these types of feminism may fundamentally alter the meaning of the
other feminisms. Rather they are situated as self-contained, parallel femin-
isms from which we can pick and choose. When black feminism is orga-
nized as a self-contained project that is parallel to, but not synonymous
with, feminism, it is limited in its ability to permeate and formatively con-
tribute to mainstream feminism.
A less careful example of the racially inclusive list in Third Wave Agenda
comes from a self-identied white feminist, Lidia Yukman (1997), who
suggests that we need to hear from numerous different voices to expand
our perspective. Yukman asks, what can we hear from a prostitute, a sui-

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 83

cide, a junkie, an angry woman, a minority voice, even our own voice
(169). Her list not only distances the reader as part of the we who are
not prostitutes, suicides, junkies, angry women, or minorities but also in-
cludes minority among a list of otherwise socially stigmatized categories.
In each of these examples, the integral relation of race to gender or to
the main project of feminism is diluted through a series of equivalencies,
marking the racial critique as only one in a whole range of feminist con-
cerns such as pro-sex feminism, reclamation of fashion and femininity, and
vaguely specied social marginalities including anger and drug addiction.
Through the proliferation of difference, Sue Kim (2009) theorizes, the
Other term is articulated and recuperated as a sign of difference that iron-
ically ends up attening and dehistoricising difference into sameness (13).
By positing all differences as universal and qualitatively similar, Shih
(2004) poignantly argues, theorists are able to reject the conditions of
difference, which are undergirded by the political economy of race, gen-
der, class, nationality, sexual choice, . . . that is, the coimplication of differ-
ence and inequality in a politics of recognition and redistribution (28).
The grammar of the list is replicated in the organizational structure of
the anthology, which appears to be the canonical format of the third-wave
text. While the list includes a series of independent terms, the anthology
includes a series of chapters each written by different authors. Snyder
(2008) describes the third-wave feminist anthology as a collection of
loosely related essays, which she critiques for play[ing] into the lack of
clarity about the nature of the movement (182). Yet, she also acknowl-
edges that the loosely related collections of personal narratives may dem-
onstrate the third-wave aesthetic of an inclusive and nonjudgmental ap-
proach that refuses to police the boundaries (175).
Reading the format of the third-wave anthologies as a syntax of whiteness
reveals another possibility: the structure of the undifferentiated anthology
works like a list, allowing third-wave feminists to simultaneously include yet
dilute and deect race-based critique. Through this format, third-wave fem-
inists can point to (one or two) chapters containing incisive racial critiques
of feminism, transformative analysis, and revolutionary intersectional theo-
rizing; yet, as with the list, these critiques are also segregated into stand-
alone chapters (loosely related clauses) reecting feminist difference. The
problem with this strategy for including differencethe argument I attempt
to make throughout this articleis that difference is included yet contained
at the same time. Chapters of difference stand alone in loose relation to or
with little impact on the other chapters in the anthology. As women-of-
color and antiracist feminist scholars have repeatedly argued, inclusion alone
is insufcient. What matters is not the token inclusion of chapters and voices

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but how difference is theorized, navigated, and understood and the effect it
has on the core project of feminism. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (1994) attests
that the proliferation of texts by women of color is not necessarily evidence
of the decentering of the hegemonic subject. Of crucial importance is the
way the texts are read, understood, and located (7).
Unfortunately, in each of these anthologies, when racial difference is
present as a topic or marker, the chapter, like a term on the list, stands alone
as a representation of diversity, with little inuence on the overall project of
third-wave feminism. A stark example of this inclusion without transforma-
tive impact can be found in even the most theoretically cogent and critical of
the four texts, Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (Gillis, Howie,
and Munford 2007b). In this volume, there are few chapters that are explic-
itly and centrally organized around questions of race. The piece that is most
explicitly organized around race, Chakrabortys Wa(i)ving It All Away
(2007), directly critiques mainstream feminism for the token inclusion of
women of color. Chakraborty foregrounds the need for all feminists, not
just women of color, to produce integrative feminist theory that recognizes
the coconstitution of gender and race, and she contends that third-wave
feminism needs to theorize woman as an essentially racialised category
within congurations of the contemporary nation state (102). Contrary to
the loose collection approach, Chakraborty contends that the practices of
postcolonial and third-world feminism should fundamentally transform the
core project of feminism rather than remain a marginal type or avor of
feminism. However, she points to the continuing ghettoisation of African
and other Third World feminisms (105) that is enabled by the practice of
separating racial topics into specic chapters in anthologies.
Ironically, Chakrabortys own chapter calling for an integrative critique
of the entire project of feminism stands alone among many chapters repre-
senting various differences and is placed in a section titled Locales and
Location, halfway through the anthology. Her piece appears alongside
other essays about potentially different or nonmainstream feminisms: eco-
feminism, feminism in Poland, globalizations effect on feminism, and cy-
berfeminism. By including Chakrabortys article as only one of many differ-
ent concerns of feminism, Gillis, Howie, and Munford allow her critique to
be voiced, yet the effects of her theorizations are neutralized by the syntax
of the anthology, which situates her as but one voice among many.
Walkers To Be Real (1995b) is another example of an anthology with
prolic difference. It includes a number of essays that grapple with race,
including a piece by hooks. However, here too, the syntax of the anthol-
ogy limits the effectiveness of the race-based critique. Walker arranges an
anthology of individual confessional-type pieces, where each is valorized

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 85

primarily for its resistance to or difference from mainstream feminism.

Rather than providing a single theoretical position, Walker locates the
value of the anthology format in its ability to debunk the stereotype that
there is one lifestyle or manifestation of feminist empowerment, and in-
stead offer . . . an endless array of non-dichotomous possibilities (1995a,
xxxiv). However, with an endless array of possibilities on offer, the actual
content of each of these different voices is limited to representing differ-
ence for differences sake.
For instance, volume contributor Veena Cabreros-Sud (1995) identies
with the third-wave notion of contradiction, yet she grounds her sense of
contradiction in the genealogies of her personal and structural position.
She writes, to be young, brown, female, and free is about violent contra-
dictions (41). Cabreros-Sud critiques feminism for not recognizing the
ways in which her postcolonial subjectivity have led her to embrace a
violent ght mentality as empowering and historically necessary. Fight,
ght, ght, dont ever not ght, was our motto. Being a colonial, a slave,
a survivoror the progeny of oneis not easily forgotten (43). As such,
Cabreros-Suds piece calls for an analysis of the structural difference and
historical specicity of certain forms of resistance, including violence.
However, in the format of loosely related and equal chapters in an anthol-
ogy, her arguments are presented only as individual preference and vali-
dated only as one of many possible personal expressions among a number
of equally (un)palatable differences. For instance, this essay is located next
to Naomi Wolf s (1995) confessional piece outlining her desire to reclaim
princess weddings from her own feminist ambivalence around princess
fantasies. Also nearby is Jason Schultzs (1995) angst-ridden piece about
how to be a feminist man and host a bachelor party without strippers.
Placing these pieces on an equivalent plane not only mitigates the im-
pact of Cabreros-Suds critique but ultimately trivializes the survival strate-
gies of those women facing the structural oppressions of race, class, and
imperialism. In the grammar of the anthology, the critiques emerging from
structural inequalities are diluted by articles about personal expressions of
taste by privileged white men and women. Walkers anthology does allow a
multiplicity of voices to be heard, yet it simultaneously relegates the poten-
tially subversive claims to the realm of (endless and equivalent) difference.

Agreeing to disagree: Irreconcilable contradictions

The fourth and nal racial problematic can be described as the third-wave
feminist valorization of contradiction as an irreducible condition of post-
modern life rather than as a dialectical starting point for struggle and

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86 y Clark Mane

feminist reformation. As noted earlier by Yarbro-Bejarano, the issue of

inclusion is not one of the number of diverse texts or authors of color but
of how these texts are read, used, and understood. If put in conversation
with other texts, if used as a starting point of struggle, interventions such
as Chakrabortys can open up the feminist dialogue in critical and transfor-
mational directions. However, this possibility is frequently foreclosed
through a misuse of theoretical notions of contradiction originally ad-
vanced by women of color.
In third-wave feminism, ideas or terms that directly contradict one
another can coexist in the list, or as chapters in an anthology, without
needing to reconcile or struggle with the differences between them. At the
same time, as I have already noted, this tolerance for contradiction is
attributed to women of color.
Certainly Chicana feminist and other third-world women-of-color texts
have foregrounded tolerance of contradiction and ambiguity as a funda-
mental part of a counterhegemonic decolonial project. Anzalda (1987) is
often cited as saying the new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for
contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity (101). What is missing from the
abstracted celebration of contradiction in third-wave feminism is a recog-
nition that women-of-color notions of contradiction have developed out
of necessity because of women of colors positions as colonized, racialized,
gendered subjects who must navigate several conditions of being, often
contradictory. For instance, Dolores Delgado Bernal (2006) suggests that
while Chicana/Latina subjectivities are viewed as always shifting and
often contradictory . . . simultaneously, [they] revolve around concrete
material forms of interlocking oppressions (78). In this theorization, con-
tradictions are not inevitable accidents of the postmodern era but are
created through relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality
in specic geographies and histories of colonization.
Further, for Anzalda and others, this site of contradiction is envisioned
as a starting point for developing consciousness rather than a nal outcome
for a political project. As Rosa Linda Fregoso notes, the more contradic-
tions you nd, the more youve got to speak [and] the more youve got to
struggle (in Chabram-Dernersesian 2007b, 9). Anzalda (1987) herself
suggests that perpetual contradiction is not a way of life (100) but rather
sees contradiction and ambivalence as a starting point for developing
something else (101) or a third element which is greater than the sum of
its severed parts . . . new consciousnessa mestiza consciousness (1012).
However, when abstracted from these historical conditions of produc-
tion, the concept of contradiction and difference gures in third-wave
feminism instead is an irreducible condition to be tolerated, an inevitable

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 87

condition of postmodern life, or a contradiction to be left unresolved. Like

the three other syntaxes, this notion of irreducible contradiction allows
women-of-color and racial critique to be present in third-wave theory, but
contestations to the core project of feminism can be deected through a
third-wave sensibility of agreeing to disagree.
This sensibility permeates third-wave texts. For instance, Heywood and
Drake (1997a) make a stand for tolerating rather than resolving contradic-
tion: We know that what oppresses me may not oppress you, that what
oppresses you might be something that I participate in, and that what
oppresses me might be something that you participate in. Even as different
strains of feminism and activism sometimes directly contradict each other,
they are all part of our third wave lives, our thinking, and our praxes (3).
Rather than seriously interrogating what behaviors feminists might engage
in that oppress others and work to transform those practices and struc-
tures, Heywood and Drake appropriate the concept of contradiction to
suggest that the existence of oppositional texts does not delegitimate,
challenge, or even necessarily engage the other set of ideas. Intentional or
not, the syntax of irreconcilable contradiction serves as an excellent deec-
tion for critiques of racism. Race-based critiques may be included in an
anthology, but according to the logic of contradiction, other third-wave
scholars do not necessarily have to engage with the critique.
Pender, in her contribution to Third Wave Feminism, demonstrates
how her own critical questions about race and imperialism can be neutral-
ized through her subsequent embrace of contradiction. She writes that one
way to read race and diversity in the television show Buffy the Vampire
Slayer is as racially inclusive and an exemplary narrative of transnational
feminist activism (Pender 2007, 233). Yet, through a more critical lens,
she admits that the show can be viewed as yet another chapter in a long,
repetitive story of U.S. imperialism (233). Rather than struggle with
these implications, Pender concludes that both of these readings are ad-
missible, arguing that it would be a mistake . . . to collapse too quickly
the contradictions embedded in Buffys cultural politics (23334) be-
tween feminist empowerment and imperial complicity. While these tensions
should not be collapsed, dismissed, or too easily interpreted, Pender con-
cludes the essay shortly thereafter, leaving unresolved the questions and
contradictions she raises.
In the same volume, Lise Shapiro Sanders (2007) echoes a similar
trend, which she cites as Judith Butlers call to ask ourselves . . . some
exceedingly difcult questions, and to leave those questions open, trou-
bling, unresolved, propitious (13; citing Butler 2004, 192). It makes for
good scholarship and expansive theorization to leave difcult questions

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open and troubling. However, when this idea is realized in third-wave

praxis, the troubling aspect of these unnamed difcult questions seems
to disappear, leaving instead continuous deferral in the name of the un-
resolved.
Along similar lines, Walker (1995a) makes the following appeal in her
introduction: people can disagree and still love one another deeply; peo-
ple can have completely different perspectives and still be right (xxxviii).
While tolerating difference and irreconcilable cleavages is crucial in inter-
personal, familial, and coalitional relationships, which are sustained
through mutual love and commitment, the metaphor stretches thin in
academic practices where critiques of racial exclusion can be dismissed and
marginalized through the escape clause of irreconcilable differences of
opinion or location. In light of the ways in which tolerance of contradic-
tion manifests alongside the list and the loosely related anthology in third-
wave feminism, the third-wave tolerance for contradiction needs to be
more carefully considered. While third-wave authors such as Walker char-
acterize this stance as a way to expand inclusion and voice in feminism, the
foreclosure of dialogue, transformation, and integration enabled through
an agree-to-disagree stance ultimately perpetuates marginalization of the
very women-of-color theories that the third wave uses to authorize its own
stance.

Transmuting grammars of whiteness: Reemphasizing historical

specificity, race-based analysis, and structural critique

A movement that ghts sexism in the social structure must deal with racism.
Mitsuye Yamada (2005, 366)

Our histories and experiences are not just diverse, they are intertwined and
interdependent.
Ann Russo (1991, 303)

All four of these tropesracial critique as past, abstraction, proliferation of

difference, and irreducible contradictionwhile ostensibly expanding the
realm of feminism through celebration of inclusion and diversity, actually
end up foreclosing a fully intersectional feminism through a syntactic
sleight of hand. The proliferation of diversity in third-wave feminism has
the potential to assure and assuage many well-meaning feminists that their
project is sufciently antiracist in ways that seem to preclude the necessity
of further substantive engagement with race and whiteness. But this fore-

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 89

closure is as historically contingent as racial domination is (that is, we can

change this).
For a truly inclusive, intersectional, and antiracist feminism, what third-
wave feminists should have sought and found in the writing of hooks,
Hazel Carby, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzalda, Maxine Hong Kingston,
Ntozake Shange, Patricia Hill Collins, Bharati Mukherjee, Patricia Wil-
liams, Ana Castillo, Coco Fusco, Toni Morrison, and so many others
(Heywood and Drake 1997a, 9) is the recognition of the importance of
race as a historically specic, structural, and relational category that is
coconstitutive with gender. This means moving from abstract notions of
difference to a decolonial approach that grounds third-wave inquiries in
material, historical, and relational analyses. This transformative approach
stresses, according to Alexander and Mohanty (1997b), power, history,
memory, relational analysis, justice (not just representation), and ethics
(xix). What this decolonial orientation has meant for many women-of-
color and antiracist scholars is an attunement to global divisions of labor
along raced and gendered lines, to histories of colonialism and slavery, to
racially charged policies and gendered discourses around immigration, re-
production, and national belonging and citizenship.7
Questions of structural inequality are not irrelevant to the third-wave
focus on popular culture and representation. But to align the third-wave
readings of popular culture with this approach, the analyses need to go
beyond the complexities of whether particular representations are em-
powering for women. Instead, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian (2006) sug-
gests that investigations of popular culture need to attend to the multi-
ple mediations of culture; the complexities of identities in difference; the
machinations of immigrant, racial, gendered, and global economies and
technologies; the problematics of cultural production as well as spectator-
ship; and the coexistence of multicultural, transnational, hemispheric, and
global legacies (9). An example of what this might look like when ap-
plied to the texts in the third-wave anthologies can be illustrated through
a reading of Wolf s (1995) celebration of High Victoriana in her essay
Brideland in To Be Real (39). Wolf suggests that the modern devalua-
tion of female sexuality can be symbolically resisted through wearing of
the Victorian wedding gown, allowing women to take on for a moment
that lost sexual regalness of a time when that great store was placed on
the preservation of . . . female sexuality (39). A decolonial reading
would move beyond the individual experience of empowerment ad-

7
See Davis (1983), Mohanty, Russo, and Torres (1991), Glenn, Chang, and Forcey
(1994), Carrillo Rowe (2004), and Solinger (2005).

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90 y Clark Mane

dressed in Wolf s essay to examine the racial, colonial, and material con-
text of the historical Victorian woman. Decolonial scholars have described
the way the elite Victorian woman, and her image of chastity, renement,
and regality, was made possible (only) through colonization, servant la-
bor, and the symbolic differentiation between the wealthy white imperial
women and the sexualized primitive nonwhite others haunting and titil-
lating the imagination of Victorian England (McClintock 1995; Stoler
2002). Hence, third-wave feminists need to go beyond the question is
this empowering or pleasurable for women? to ask, Which women? Un-
der what conditions? With what racial, classed, and national constraints?
At whose expense?
In conjunction with questions of representation in popular culture are
the intersectional questions of representation and voice in academia. When
investigating our anthologies and texts, we need to ask, who has the access
and authority to represent third-wave feminism? Who has access to the
book contracts, editorships, and academic positions that support publica-
tion and research? Hill Collins (2000b), among others, has expressed
concern that celebration of difference is not leading to structural change
in our institutions: Despite postmodern lip service to decentering, the
intellectuals writing articles, giving papers, populating the editorial boards
of journals and occupying positions of authority within academic disci-
plines seem remarkably similar to those of the past (57). Amber E. Kinser
(2004) suggests that while it is easier for women of color to negotiate
within third-wave feminism than previous waves of feminism, women of
color still struggle to have race-related subjectivities occupy prominent
feminist space (130). When these prominent feminist spaces include insti-
tutional authority, we need to be cognizant of how this shapes our overall
theorizations and trajectories in feminism.
While contemporary third-wave voices contend that the third wave was
originally posited as an antiracist intervention, these anthologies and other
chroniclers of the third wave have recognized that this original vision has
been usurped to include a broader set of goals (Orr 1997; Kinser 2004).
While many cite the planned but never published anthology The Third
Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism, Catherine M. Orr, referencing a
personal conversation with Lisa Albrecht, notes that there was some trou-
ble with the publisher that interrupted its ultimate release (Orr 1997, 30).
While there may have been a number of factors that contributed to the
volumes demise, it should be noted that the original publisher, Kitchen
Table Press, was a mostly volunteer, nonprot, activist press that originated
among women of color (in their kitchens) precisely because of the great
difculty women of color faced in getting their work on topics of race,

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 91

gender, and social justice published (Smith 1989). The point that is cen-
tral to our current discussion of the third wave is the recognition that
while the volume that named the third wave as a project of racial justice
was never published, the anthologies I discuss here were published and
subsequently became the dening voices of the third wave. Cognizant of
the politics of publishing, conference organizing, and institutional posi-
tions of power, a decolonial analysis should ask about the political eco-
nomic factors involved in the naming, and subsequent dening and revis-
ing, of third-wave feminism.
Another case in point: Heywood and Drake (1997a) talk extensively
about race and whiteness in their introduction, analyzing their identities
and struggles with whiteness, as well as discussing fears about racial appro-
priation. And yet they did not expand their analysis of whiteness beyond
personal feelings and frustrations with the inchoate failures of whiteness
(10) to an analysis of whiteness in feminism as a relational and structurally
privileged category, nor did they signicantly expand the authorship or
vision of the anthology beyond a handful of authors who mainly identify
with whiteness. How might a structural analysis of whiteness change what
kinds of topics and problematics they found sufcient to identify as the
third-wave agenda?
Finally, as the anthologies examined suggest, there is a need for a new
form of feminist anthology, not just in terms of authorship and the con-
tents of individual essays but also in structuring the relationship between
the chapters. Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration contains many
carefully written analytical and theoretical essays. Yet the fault, as I pointed
out above, lies in the failure of these pieces to account for one another. We
need to develop alternative models of anthologies that put the individual
pieces in dialogue, hold the authors accountable to one another, and stake
a larger political or theoretical claim that each essay contributes to, devel-
ops, or deepens. As Chabram-Dernersesian (2007b) notes, building an
archive of various oppositional voices is not enough in and of itself. Rather,
she argues, one must go a step further to engage those . . . position-
alities and, from that engagement, offer important social claims, posi-
tions, and practices (12).
Two critical anthologies that stand out as exemplars of this form are
Alexander and Mohantys Feminist Genealogies (1997a) and Chabram-
Dernersesians Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum (2007a). Feminist Ge-
nealogies consists of a series of historically specic, locally grounded essays
that collectively grapple with key theoretical questions about gender and
race, nation, globalization, and capital. While each essay is individually
authored and comes from a specic, irreducible locale, the essays together

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92 y Clark Mane

form a larger theoretical conversation. The collective coherence of the

essays was not coincidental; it was the result of sustained and collective
work by the editors working closely, and in community, with the authors
(Alexander and Mohanty 1997b, xx). They describe this collective and
collaborative process as a way of doing politics, a mode of organizing
that interrupts the more pervasive professionalized production of schol-
arship (xx). They hope, through this model, to move toward a more
collective practice of authorship that establishes the foundation for much
wider discussions (xx).
The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum goes even further in transforming
traditional notions of individual scholarship. The forum arranges the contri-
butions in dialogue with one another, organized by topic or question rather
than by individual author. The format, according to editor Chabram-
Dernersesian (2007b), facilitates broader theory building and analysis by
creating conversation between the contributors. This model enables inter-
textual movements of critical interventions between the theorists, who
often talk back to one another (12). What enables both of these vol-
umes to create a synergistic theoretical conversation between the essays,
besides a deeply engaged editing process, is that each volume stakes a
higher theoretical goal or claim beyond giving voice or representation for
representations sake. Both of these volumes grapple with historically spe-
cic instances of oppression, the coconstitution of gender and race, and
relations of power with the ultimate goal of collective social justice.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the four syntaxes of whiteness I identify and analyze here
the postrace historical narrative, the postmodern abstraction of women-of-
color theories, the attening and proliferation of difference through the list,
and irreconcilable contradictionallow racial critique and diverse voices to
be included while simultaneously being contained and diluted. There
seems to be a sense of anxiety underwriting these moves toward contain-
ment: fear that a complete racial overhaul, not carefully undertaken, might
mean the splintering, displacement, or destruction of the feminist body
altogether (see Buzzanell 2000; Zack 2005). However, inclusion without
integration does not resolve the racial problematic of feminism either.
Rather, I contend that a courageous examination of the structural bar-
riers of race and privilege, access and authority, creates unprecedented pos-
sibilities for coalition and an expansive feminist consciousness. Segrest
(2002) invites us to ask, what if instead of seeing ourselves as inherently
separated, irreducibly in contradiction to one another, we recognize that

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 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 93

these conditions are not inevitable: Neither I, nor you, are born to segre-
gation, separation, domination, subordination, alienation, isolation, owner-
ship, competition, or narrow self-interest. . . . We are all born to belonging,
and we know ourselves as humans in just and mutual relationships to one
another (2). Rather than reluctant tolerance for diversity, Carrillo Rowe
(2008) suggests that we can become radically coalitional feminist subjects
through this notion of belongingbe longing, she urges (26)to one
another: radical modes of belonging hold tremendous potential for trans-
forming who we think we are and how we imagine something called femi-
nism (46). She offers the idea that the clinamen or the inclination of
one toward another should be the basis for feminist community, intimacy,
and awareness (46). Direct structural analysis of how racial hierarchy con-
tinues to inect our feminisms can position feminism as a central player in
intervening into and dismantling such hierarchies. For Alexander and Mo-
hanty (1997b), The challenge lies in an ethical commitment to work to
transform terror into engagement based on empathy and a vision of justice
for everyone. After all, this is at the heart of building solidarity across other-
wise debilitating social, economic, and psychic boundaries (xlii).
Department of Communication
University of Washington

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