Downtown Ladies and Black Feminist Thought

The secondary article was an excellent pairing with this week’s reading. Gina Ulysse’s text engages the work of black feminist thought in many ways. It is interesting to note that both pieces were published in the same year, 2007. Ulysse addreses many of the key challenges that Barriteau references in terms of the value of using black feminist scholarship as a theoretical background to explore Carribean perspectives. Barriteau understands that one of the key challenges of Caribbean feminism is “to begin to rethink the processes we can develop and use to ensure that democratic practices define how we create knowledge, and how we expose and avoid replicating the hierarchies of power in the social relations we seek to disrupt” (Barriteau 13). As a black feminist anthropologist and ethnographer, Ulysse is well aware of this challenge as we see her struggle with the way that she wants to represent the women she is researching. She explains that the native Jamaicans are familiar with researchers, because the researchers collect stories about them to build their careers, and although ethnographers often attempt to decolonize the native subjects, many simply reinvent another “savage slot” (Ulysse 96). I would argue that by Ulysse constantly drawing attention to her position as researcher, ethnographer, and native, she draws upon a black feminist theoretical framework because she situates herself on the margins and writes against that structure.

Similarly, another important tenet in black feminist thought is redefining what we accept as knowledge. As Patricia Hill Collins states and Barriteau underscores, black feminist scholarship emphasizes the importance of using personal experience as a means of generating knowledge. While personal experience is a foundation in the field of anthropology, the manner in which Ulysse weaves her own personal narrative into her decades of research is one way in which this text writes against the dominant Western structure. Not only does she present the stories of the ICIs, but she also never loses sight of her position to these women. Like we discussed last week with Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place, Ulysse functions as both regional native/local outsider, subject/researcher. Acknowledging the sometimes contradictory ways that performing both positions involves, is what I believe makes Ulysse’s auto-ethnographic work successful. She does not attempt to silence views that might be problematic to her overall agenda. Instead, she acknowledges these inconsistencies, yet it does not undermine her work as scholarly.

Lastly, as Ulysse notes so poignantly in her explanation of black females in the field of academia, black feminist thought seeks to deconstruct patriarchal relations. Ulysse deconstructs the formation of her work on a micro-level, beginning in academia. She explains that the reflexive process for black females carries its own set of implications: “In spite of Audre Lorde’s warning that silence will not protect us (1984), our historical silences on certain subjects have allowed many to be taken seriously and, in some ways, have sheltered careers. Simultaneously, these survival strategies have also reified gendered ideals and reinforced the stereotype of the black superwoman” (111). Although she indicates that this silence is “another structure of power,” even when black women attempt to erase the silence, it still becomes problematic because those whose voices are heard are the ones who speak the dominant language (like Ulysse). I like the fact that Ulysse points out this contradiction, because black feminist thought is less concerned with having nice and neat answers then it is about illuminating these issues and being okay with not having a perfect solution to every problem.