| Abstrakt: |
The question that animates this article is what feminists ought to do once they find themselves in the wreckage of internal feminist critique brought on by Women of Color and deconstructive feminism. What I seek to do here is controversial, and this is because the argument I will make, in its simplest form, is in keeping with Flavia Dzodan's provocative words that contemporary feminism "will be intersectional or it will be bullshit." More boldly, my argument also rests on an even more divisive feminist position, especially for feminists appearing in Judith Butler and Joan Scott's 1992 edited volume Feminists Theorize the Political : that feminism needs foundations. While purporting to disavow feminist foundations outright, even deconstructive feminists embrace a form of antifoundational foundationalism, or the foundational commitment to antifoundationalism as feminism's normative and methodological imperative. In place of this faux antifoundationalism, I turn to early Women of Color feminists to advance an unabashed, and far more promising, feminist foundation—a political foundation rooted in intersectional feminist commitment buoyed by a traveling and dialogical epistemology. Advancing this uncompromising definition of feminism is a particularly pressing exercise because, in addition to withstanding internal blows since the 1970s, we find ourselves bearing witness to the culmination of a decades-long external onslaught against the feminist gains of the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade. The intersectional feminism of early Women of Color feminism, I argue, is vital to meeting contemporary challenges such as these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
