Gloria Anzaldúa was a Tejana Chicana poet and a scholar of Chicana/postcolonial feminism, cultural theory and queer theory. Her experience growing up on the Mexico-US Texas border marked her best-known book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . She claimed Central American indigenous ancestry and drew on Nepantla, a Nahuatl term meaning “in the middle” to conceptualise her own experience as mestiza.
Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) examines the situation of women in Chicano and Latinx culture. Anzaldúa discusses several critical issues related to Chicana experiences: heteronormativity, colonialism and male dominance. This book was foundational to the field of Latinx philosophy and contributes to intersectional feminist and queer studies.
Chicanos use nosotros whether we’re male or female. We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse.
Borderlands, page 56
Judith Butler (born 1956)
Judith Butler is a non-binary American philosopher and gender studies scholar whose political activism has centred on LGBTIQA+ rights. Born in Ohio to a family of Russian-Jewish and Hungarian Jewish descent, they attended a Hebrew school where they became interested in ethics and philosophy. Their best-known work is “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990), and its sequel, “Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’”(1993), in which they challenge conventional notions of gender and develop their influential theory of gender performativity. Since the early 2000s, Butler has reflected on the vulnerability of human existence, notably in the so-called war against terror and the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Gender Trouble is a founding text for queer theory and has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship. Its writing style is complex, challenging and daunting for many undergraduates but it remains a must-read.
Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a rigid regulatory frame which congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a ‘natural’ kind of being.
Gender Trouble, page 33
Kimberlé Crenshaw (born 1959)
Kimberlé Crenshawis a civil rights activist and legal scholar known for her use of the term “intersectionality” to describe how individuals possess multiple, overlapping, and intersecting identities that contribute to their position and experience in society. Like Angela Davis, Crenshaw criticizes the white, middle-class perspective of many “first-wave” and “second-wave” feminists, advocating an “intersectional” feminism that considers the experiences of working-class women, women of color, immigrant women, and other overlooked groups.
“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women” (1991) is a key example of Crenshaw’s intersectional thinking, considering violence against women of color from the perspective of both race and gender. Crenshaw shows that the experiences of women of color have been overlooked by scholars focusing exclusively on either gender or race, arguing that both perspectives must be considered together.
Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as woman or person of color an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling.
Mapping the margins, page 1242
Angela Davis (born 1944)
Angela Davis is a leading Marxist feminist theorist, historian, and activist, known for her work on Black rights, women’s rights, and criminal justice reform. Davis was born to African American parents in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, at a time when this southern U.S. city, like many others, was racially segregated. She experienced racism and segregation firsthand, but she was also surrounded by Black activists and community leaders who inspired her to dedicate her life to the fight for civil rights. Davis has become a prominent civil rights advocate not only within the United States but around the world, seeing the civil rights struggles of different peoples as interconnected.
Women, Race, and Class (1981) exemplifies Davis’s intersectional approach to social justice and civil rights by describing in rich historical detail how the movements for women’s rights and Black rights in the United States developed in tandem, though often with tensions and misunderstandings between the two. She criticizes white feminists for failing to consider the intersecting forms of gender, racial, and class oppression experienced by women of color. Women, Race, and Class covers a broad range of historical periods and topics, from Black family life and motherhood under slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the movement for abortion rights in the twentieth century.
When Black and Latina women resort to abortions in such large numbers, the stories they tell are not so much about their desire to be free of their pregnancy, but rather about the miserable social conditions which dissuade them from bringing new lives into the world.
Women, Race, and Class, page 204
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas and political activist. He was raised in a conservative, upper-class Catholic family in central France. His oeuvre primarily addressed the different forms of power and knowledge and how they are mobilized for social control in institutions. His critical philosophy looks into the purported scientific, universal “truths” as the outcome of ethical, political and historical forces. For example, he published histories of madness (1961), clinical medicine (1963) and sexuality (1976).
History of Sexuality (volumes I-IV) is an account of modern sexuality that looks into how the modern fields of knowledge about sexuality are intimately related to the power structures of society. Social control is not only exercised by others (like doctors or psychoanalysts) but by subjects themselves, who have internalized the social norms and self-scrutinize their behavior.
Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.
History of Sexuality, volume 1, page 95.
Jack Halberstam (born 1961)
Jack Halberstam, also known as Judith Halberstam, is a leading gender and queer theorist, known for such groundbreaking studies as Female Masculinity (1998) and The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Halberstam was born in Nottingham, England, in 1961 to a British mother and a Bohemian Jewish father who had emigrated to escape Nazi persecution. His family relocated to the United States in 1980, and he studied at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota. Assigned female at birth, Halberstam adopted the name “Jack” and began using masculine pronouns around 2012, but he identifies as gender fluid—a “free floater” in his words. Since 2017, he has been a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University.
Female Masculinity (1998) exemplifies the accessibility as well as the brilliance of Halberstam’s writing about gender and queerness. The extract chosen for inclusion in this project is taken from the section of the introduction titled “The Bathroom Problem”, and it addresses how the gendering of public restrooms polices and punishes female masculinity and other forms of gender fluidity or gender queerness.
Ambiguous gender, when and where it does appear, is inevitably transformed into deviance, thirdness, or a blurred version of either male or female.
Female Masculinity, page 20
bell hooks (1952-2021)
bell hooks (Gloria Watkins, 1952-2021) was an American cultural critic and writer and a Black feminist activist. She grew up in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky. Her first publication “Ain’t I a woman? Black Women and Feminism” (1981) anticipated intersectional debates and criticized White second-wave feminism. Her prolific work on racism, feminism and capitalism remains relevant to understand contemporary culture, notably in the US.
As book intended for non-academic audiences, Feminism is for everybody (2000, 123 pages) is “a concise, fairly easy to read and understand book; not a long book, not a book thick with hard to understand jargon and academic language, but a straightforward, clear book- easy to read without being simplistic” (p.viii).
Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression.
Feminism is for everybody, page 1
Patricia Hill Collins (born 1948)
Patricia Hill Collins is a prominent theorist specializing in the intersections of race, class, and gender. She was born in 1948 and raised in a Black, working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Building on the work of Angela Davis and Kimberlé Crenshaw, Collins takes an intersectional approach to the lives and experiences of Black women. This approach is evident in her 1990 book Black Feminist Thought, which describes and deconstructs various stereotypes of African American women.
“Shifting the Center: Race, Class and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood” (1994) is a key text for understanding Collins’s intersectional concept of “motherwork”, exploring motherhood not only from a feminist perspective but also through the lens of race and class. Whereas white motherhood is often associated with the private or domestic life of an individual family, Collins notes that motherhood for working-class women of color necessarily involves collective work and engagement with a broader community struggle for survival in the face of racism and class oppression.
What themes might emerge if issues of race and class generally, and understanding of racial ethnic women’s motherwork specifically, became central to feminist theorizing about motherhood?
