philoSOPHIA

What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable. Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

—Sojourner Truth, Ain't I a Woman?

Yet it should be noted that Du Bois approaches both the maternal and the paternal line under the heading of patriarchy. On the one [End Page 19] hand, we recognize here the replication of an old and tenacious sexist kinship discourse, that must be brought into question. On the other hand, part of the value of Du Bois's narrative is its ironic effect, its paradoxical desedimentation of paternity, in particular that form which would appear within a horizon marked in the Americas by the idea of race as unmarked, so-called White paternity. By desedimenting his "mixed" paternity, he raises questions about any so-called pure genealogy […] and ultimately any notion of "pure" origin in general.

—Nahum D. Chandler, X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

The flesh is the concentration of "ethnicity" that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away. It is this "flesh and blood" entity, in the vestibule (or "pre-view") of a colonized North America, that is essentially ejected from "The Female Body in Western Culture" […], but it makes good theory, or commemorative "herstory" to want to "forget," or to have failed to realize, that the African female subject, under these historic conditions, is not only the target of rape—in one sense, an interiorized violation of body and mind—but also the topic of specifically externalized acts of torture and prostration that we imagine as the peculiar province of male brutality and torture inflicted by other males. A female body strung from a tree limb, or bleeding from the breast on any given day of fieldwork because the "overseer," standing the length of a whip, has popped her flesh open, adds a lexical and living dimension to the narratives of women in culture and society […]. This materialized scene of unprotected female flesh—of female flesh "ungendered"—offers a praxis and a theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations.

Hortense Spillers, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book

"Take our differences and make them our strengths"—the poet's intention recalls the black feminist position as trouble. For it refuses to disappear into the general categories of otherness or objecthood, that is, blackness and womanhood, and refuses to comply with the formulations of racial and gender-sexual emancipatory projects these categories guide.¹ At once an experiment and performance, this essay takes up Sojourner Truth's question(ing) as an [End Page 20] invitation to rebel. Heeding a long line of the "unacceptable women," I stage a confrontation between the female figuring of blackness and the very notions of the subject, "object," and the "other" that organize feminist and black and other critical discourses on difference. With this return to the problem of difference, I tackle the current circumstance; that is, how, as deconstruction becomes part of the common...