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The Black Scholar Journal of Black Studies and Research

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Love No Limit: Towards a Black Feminist Future (In Theory)

Brittney C. Cooper

To cite this article: Brittney C. Cooper (2015) Love No Limit: Towards a Black Feminist Future (In Theory), The Black Scholar, 45:4, 7-21, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2015.1080912

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Love No Limit: Towards a Black Feminist Future (In Theory)

BRITTNEY C. COOPER

“We can be, but someone else gets to tell us

what we mean.” – Anne DuCille (1994)1

Ihave decided to start with the past in thisinquiry because it is not at all clear to me that Black feminism has a future. Despite the “citational ubiquity”2 of intersectionality in fields and disciplines across the humanities and social sciences and despite the prolifer- ation of vibrant cultures of Black feminisms on the interwebs, academic Black feminisms still confront a “culture of justification,” in which one is always asked to prove that the study of Black women’s lives, histories, litera- ture, cultural production and theory is suffi- ciently academic, and sufficiently “rigorous” to merit academic resources.3 The pressures wrought by this culture of justification have only increased in the institutional culture of the neoliberal university, where scholars of ethnic and gender studies are always asked to prove the institutional value of their various forms of intellectual labor. Traditional academic strictures themselves require a “dis- placing and supplanting of previous knowl- edge” to prove what is new, novel, and useful about one’s contributions.4 Incessant demands that Black feminist work prove its rigor on one hand and its timeliness and rel- evance on the other place enormous demands on Black feminist scholars to say

something new, even if we haven’t suffi- ciently said everything there is to be said about the “old.”

Frequently, when I am asked in academic contexts to describe my work, I respond by saying, “I am a Black feminist theorist.” Almost without fail, my response is met with looks of confusion, eyebrows crinkling into question marks, and long awkward pauses, as colleagues wait for me to clarify. While it may seem that they are merely asking me to clarify the kinds of questions I theorize about, the telltale signs of confusion about where I place a period suggest more troub- lingly that they are not sure that being a “Black feminist theorist” is actually a thing. This kind of ambivalence does not usually attend to my white feminist colleagues declarations that they are “feminist theorists,” or that they “do feminist theory.” Even if they have to give specifics, feminist theory names a universe of possibility that Black feminist theory apparently does not. Not with a little resentment, I do eventually clarify, but often I let the pause linger. The affective goal of my lingering pause compels other academics to feel, even if fleetingly, the discomfort in learning that the faulty assumption lays with them and not with me. It also gives me a moment to get my mind right.

Despite my own sense that these aca- demic habits of thought largely work in service of silencing Black women, I do want to suggest that Black feminism over the last two decades has fallen into a state of deep inertia around critical political and philoso- phical questions that we have failed to theo- rize. While Black feminist theorists have been bold and diligent in theorizing critical sexualities and representations of race and

© 2015 The Black World Foundation The Black Scholar 2015

Vol. 45, No. 4, 7–21, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1080912

gender within popular culture, Black Femin- ism writ large has failed to think through critically more basic questions like our con- ceptions of freedom and justice. We have failed to fully lay out our own accounts of race and gender, of blackness and woman- hood. We have also failed to attend to some of the underlying philosophical questions raised by Black feminist theorists in the 1980s, such as whether Black feminism needs its own metaphysics. In this essay, I return to some of the questions Black feminist scholars were asking, just as Black feminism entered formally into the academy, to suggest that there is still a significant amount of theoretical and intellectual terrain, that we have not sufficiently tilled. I hope returning to the past reminds us that we have a foundation that is both broad and deep in terms of the kinds of questions Black feminist theory has always asked and that it should be asking today. I don’t seek to offer answers to all of these questions but rather to raise them as a way to map some possibilities for the future of Black feminist theorizing, and to point out some of the habits of thought that we encounter in aca- demic environs that make asking these kinds of questions seem like an untenable and retrograde move. The failure of Black feminist scholars to be vigilant in the work of theory-building in these key areas has con- tributed to our own precarious status in an academic environment, where folks ain’t never really loved us. But these failures are less about a kind of neglect and more about a range of troubling academic habits among colleagues who populate other modes of feminist and gender analysis that create bar- riers for the work of Black feminist theory

production to go forth. In this essay, I look backward, forward, and side-to-side (or back, front, back, and side-to-side as a favor- ite song quips) to assess possibilities for the past, present, and future of Black feminist theorizing.

Let Me Clear My Throat

In the spring of 1987, Black feminist literary critic Barbara Christian published a now classic essay called “The Race for Theory.” She conceived of the piece as an “occasion to break the silence among those of us, critics, as we are now called, who have been intimidated, devalued” by the “race for theory.” She lamented the increasing popular- ity of a certain brand of literary criticism rooted in Western philosophy, whose currency was contained in notions of abstraction, inaccess- ible language, and supposed notions of uni- versality, that were really quite particular. She argued in the wake of this academic shift that “people of color have always theorized––but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic.”5 “Our the- orizing,” she wrote, “is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.” Moreover, she argued that Black women’s theorizing was preoccupied with a specific question namely, “how else have we managed to survive with such spirit- edness the assault on our bodies, social insti- tutions, countries, our very humanity?” And she affirmed that “the women [she] grew up around continuously speculated about the nature of life through pithy language that unmasked the power relations of their

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world.” The displacement and devaluing of Black women’s “theorizing” constituted a brand of what Christian called “academic hegemony.”6

Christian’s ambivalence about the role of Theory, as opposed to “theorizing” which she embraced, was not hers alone but was also expressed by other Black women aca- demics at the time. In these now classic debates about the role of critical theory in the study of Black literature, the most infa- mous of which occurred between Joyce Joyce and Henry Louis Gates in the Winter of 1987 in the pages of New Literary History, there was a real struggle to situate the study of both Black identity and Black feminist politics in relationship to the increas- ing stature of poststructuralism in academic contexts. Echoing this growing anxiety among Black women scholars, Christian wrote:

Because I went to a Catholic Mission school

in the West Indies I must confess that I

cannot hear the word “canon” without smel-

ling incense, that the word “text” immedi-

ately brings back agonizing memories of

Biblical exegesis, that “discourse” reeks for

me of metaphysics forced down my throat

in those courses that traced world philos-

ophy from Aristotle through Thomas

Aquinas to Heidegger … . As I lived among

folk for whom language was an absolutely

necessary way of validating our existence, I

was told that the minds of the world lived

only on a small continent of Europe. The

metaphysical language of the New Philos-

ophy, then, I must admit, is repulsive to me

and is one reason why I raced from philos-

ophy to literature, since the latter seemed

to me to have the possibilities of rendering

the world as large and as complicated as I

experienced it, as sensual as I knew it was.7

A native of the US Virgin Islands, Christian’s critique of “new philosophy” as at odds with her educational experiences in the West Indies pointed to the ways that the advent of Theory (capital T) in the academy was rooted in European and American forms of imperialist knowledge production. Alexander Weheliye points similarly to what he calls the “deracination of post-structuralism” that became “annexed by the U.S. academy in the 1970s and rechristened as ‘theory.’”8

Though in this essay, Christian does not fully develop this idea, she does make space for us to think about the differences between Theory and theorizing and to think Black fem- inism beyond the bounds of the contiguous US nation-state.

Christian considered philosophy so inhos- pitable to notions of Black women’s experi- ence that she defected to literature. This observation is important when we consider the terms upon which Black feminist thought enters formally into the academy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. To date, there are fewer than 10 Black women in the United States who do professional philosophy from a Black feminist/Black women-centered lens.9 In responding to Christian, Black femin- ist philosopher Donna-Dale Marcano, affirms that, despite the fact that she and others like Dotson and V. Denise James are now three decades later, making space for Black women in the realm of academic philosophy, Christian’s work importantly “elucidates the way theoretical frameworks have often worked against Black women in both feminist

Brittney C. Cooper 9

and black literature. Black women become forced to participate in a discourse but always only to the extent that they exercise language and expression of often alien theor- etical frameworks.”10

Given 30 years of hindsight, it is fairly clear which side “won” the race for theory. Indeed, the stakes were high. At the time, Black femin- ist literary critic Hazel Carby observed that “Black feminist criticism has its source and its primary motivation in academic legitima- tion, placement within a framework of bour- geois humanistic discourse.”11 She goes on in what amounts to a damning critique to suggest that

Black feminist criticism for the main part

accepts the predominant paradigms prevail-

ing in the academy, as has women’s studies

and Afro-American Studies, and seeks to

organize itself as a discipline in the same

way. Also, it is overwhelmingly defensive

in its posture, attempting to discover,

prove, and legitimate the intellectual worthi-

ness of black women so that they may claim

their rightful placement as both subject and

creators of the curriculum.

Patricia Hill Collins’ groundbreaking text Black Feminist Thought in many ways con- firms Carby’s assertion, because Collins argued that her primary objective was to “describe, analyze, explain the significance of, and contribute to the development of Black feminist thought as critical social theory.”12 And the signal influence of that text on creating space for Black feminist theory/thought as a field of inquiry in the academy simply cannot be overstated. But it largely rests on the ways that Collins sought

to resolve the supposed antagonism between Black feminist politics and theory. Nearly 30 years later, it is also clear that Black feminism still holds a largely defensive position, one that seems necessitated by the pressure to maintain academic and institutional legitimacy.13

To be clear, I am not suggesting that there have been no substantive developments in Black feminist theorizing in the last three decades. Particularly in the area of critical sex- ualities studies and representations of race and gender in popular culture, scholars like L.H. Stallings, Kara Keeling, Jennifer Nash, Mireille Miller-Young and a range of other thinkers in Black queer studies and Black sexuality studies have greatly expanded our thinking about Black queer identities, pornography, and the range of ways that Black people perform,understandandnegotiate sexual iden- tities and sexualities as systems of power.14

However, I return to the moment of the 1980s and early 1990s, because that is the moment that the discussion about Black feminism(s)’ relationship to questions of Theory were most visible. I wholeheartedly concur with Christian and subsequent scholars that we should not accept Theory as the only acceptable currency by which to do Black feminist work. Because of Black feminism, I understand the theorizing that my mother and grandmother taught me to do as being critical and crucial to my survival as a Black woman of Southern, semi-rural, working-class origins now navigating a middle class, urban, academic life. But I do believe that within academic environs Theory has an important role to play in building fields of inquiry. So while I seek to do theory (lower case t) in other venues like the hip hop feminist blog that I helped to create, in this essay, I’m concerned with how contemporary Black

TBS • Volume 45 • Number 4 • Winter 201510

feminist academics negotiate Theoretical debates that are foundational to our insti- tutional legitimacy.

For instance, Barbara Christian pointed to a real dilemma when she described her aversion to the metaphysics of what she called the “new philosophy.” She rejected a white-male cen- tered Western philosophical account of the metaphysical world, namely what is real. To articulate it the way Ntozake Shange did, “bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma/ i haven’t con- quered yet.”15 If Black women do not accept Western philosophy’s white male understand- ing of reality (metaphysics), then how does Black feminist theory ever articulate its own metaphysics? And does it need to?

Donna-Dale Marcano gets at one of the key metaphysical challenges Black feminists face by considering how the social construction thesis which, for instance, undergirds an ironic rhetorical claim like “all the women are white and all the Blacks are men,” acts dif- ferentially upon categories of race and gender. Unlike in the case of gender, wherein the social construction thesis produces a notion of complexity, because it disrupts the false unity of categories like woman or sex or gender, in the case of race, we are left

not with a description of a complex reality but

rather [with] an insistence upon nonreality. As

such, ambiguities, revelations of exclusions,

and the disruption of race have led to the non-

reality of race where ambiguity of sex or

gender leads to a complex reality that must

be confronted.16

This leads to the long-standing poststructural- ist conclusion that “race” does not exist,

which means “one is left merely to do battle within the metaphysical realm over exactly what reality or battles there are.”17

Many scholars over the years have called out the problem of putting “race” in scare quotes and acting as though its lack of biologi- cal basis means that the ideology of race and racism does not have real material effects. How, then, does Black feminism embrace this complex account of gender identity, in a world where similar social constructionist logics delimit certain forms of complex accounts of Blackness? I say “blackness” because much of the attempt to complicate and complexify “race,” is rooted in forms of antiblackness that often emerge from the work of both white thinkers and other thinkers of color. These thinkers evince a certain “glee,” as Holland characterizes it, about the possibility of “leaving behind” or “getting beyond” the black/white binary.18 What does a Black feminist account of race look like? Is it possible to embrace a materialist account of race, that acknowledges that while race “may not be on the body, [it] cer- tainly is ‘in’ it” without reinscribing proble- matic biologically rooted notions of race?19 I am also thinking here of emerging research in the field of social epigenetics about the ways that prolonged exposure to stress and trauma alters health outcomes for Black people, and perhaps even in extreme cases changes the expression of genes within DNA. This work does not argue that race has a biological basis, but rather that racism has a physiological and genetic effect, meaning that bodies become materially raced because of persistent health and struc- tural inequities.20 Perhaps this is the kind of analysis to which the indefatigable materiality

Brittney C. Cooper 11

of the black female body points, that it demands. How, in fact, can Black feminism continue to love Black women’s bodies, whatever their sex, among theorists for whom Black women’s bodies present such a challenge?

What is the most effective method for dis- lodging a force-fed metaphysics? I don’t have answers to all of these questions, but I recognize their import to a twenty-first- century Black feminist theoretical project. Working out an account of race that accounts for the material lives of Black people is just one way that new Black feminist theorizing can help us dislodge a metaphysics forced down our throats. We must clear our throats of a metaphysics that is alien to how the vast majority of Black women in the global north and south are structurally positioned regard- less of their relative degrees of jeopardy within those structures. Regurgitation of unin- terrogated social constructionist logics is clearly not the answer if the curious case of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman passing for Black, is to teach us anything.

Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That: Black Feminism Interruptus

Black feminist theorists have left many open- ended questions and theoretical provocations from our feminist foremothers unanswered and strewn about on our theoretical land- scape. In addition to thinking through Chris- tian’s metaphysics dilemma, we must also interrogate Hazel Carby’s assertion that “black feminist criticism be regarded critically as a problem, not a solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradic- tions.”21 How does or should Carby’s

rejection of Black feminism as the teleological end of Black women’s intellectual inquiry shape the kind of theorizing we have done, might do, and might need to do?

With someone like Patricia Hill Collins, who has written three groundbreaking works of Black feminist theory, in addition to several other books and articles, few scholars actually spend any time attending to, building upon, disagreeing with, critiquing or expand- ing Collins’ work.22 Instead, for instance, Black Feminist Thought is primarily cited in discussions of race and gender in popular culture with regard to the persistence of “con- trolling images” like “mammies, jezebels and sapphires.” That those formulations have real limitations particularly for Black women’s representation in popular culture in the second decade of the twenty-first century seems to escape notice among all but a very select few Black feminist scholars. We have become complicit in a set of processes that allows one group of scholars to place us on a pedestal, styling black feminism as a foun- dational stepping stone to other more exciting sites of inquiry while another group reduces our contributions to the status of the interven- tion, allowing them to engage in liberal acts of incorporation and inclusion, and then moving on, in the name of progress. But we literally don’t have time for that. There is a significant intellectual cost to not tending to our theoreti- cal ground.

Alexander Weheliye’s recent book Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitcs, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human attempts a kind of rescue mission for Black feminism, drawing Black feminist theorists into the debate he constructs between Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Achille

TBS • Volume 45 • Number 4 • Winter 201512

Mbembe and himself about the operations of Black life within the realms of bare life and bio- politics. Weheliye notes that he draws on “[Sylvia] Wynter’s and [Hortense] Spiller’s work in order to highlight and impede the pre- carious status of black feminism in the academy and beyond, since black feminism has sustained African American cultural theory at the same time as it has grounded the institutional existence of black studies for the last few decades but is nevertheless conti- nually disavowed.”23 He later notes that “because minority discourses seemingly cannot inhabit the space of proper theoretical reflection, [thinkers] like Foucault and Agamben need not reference the long tra- ditions of thought in this domain that are directly relevant” to the work they do.24 The refusal of others to concede that Black femin- ism as a “minority discourse” occupies the space of Theory allows for acts of historical erasure by those with more power.25

Moreover, while Weheliye’s invocation of Black feminism and calling out of Foucault and Agamben is laudable and important, even the language he uses to describe Black feminism as the “sustaining” force of Black academic communities invokes the imagery of Black women being the “backbone” of the Black community. For a Black man to acknowledge this social, institutional, and intellectual positionality matters as an act of solidarity. Yet this move––in placing black feminism on a pedestal––also unintentionally relegates it to the past. Weheliye’s use of Spil- lers and Wynter makes the implicit argument that, in fact, there are Black feminist theorists who are “Theoretical” enough to tangle with the big boys. While I have been deeply influ- enced by Spillers’ work, in particular,

Weheliye’s choice has the perhaps uninten- tional effect of elevating these two women to the status of signature and model Black feminist theorists, largely because they speak most clearly in the languages of psychoanaly- sis and poststructuralism. We should ask whether this is the kind of rescue mission that Black feminism needs.

Another example of placing Black femin- ism on a pedestal-as-foundation can be found in Roderick Ferguson’s formulation of queer of color analysis and critique in his book Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Ferguson writes,

Queer of color analysis interrogates social

formations as the intersections of race,

gender, sexuality and class, with particular

interest in how those formations correspond

with and diverge from nationalist ideals and

practices. Queer of color analysis is a hetero-

geneous enterprise made up of women of

color feminism, materialist analysis, post-

structuralist theory, and queer critique.26

In Ferguson’s formulation of “queer of color critique,” women of color feminisms—and in particular Black lesbian feminism—become the building block of a new mode of critical analysis rather than a critical site from which questions of materialism and capital, ques- tions about nationalisms and state formation, questions about poststructuralism, and ques- tions about non-normative sexual and gender formation can be interrogated.

Other queer of color critics, like José Esteban Muñoz make similar moves. In his book Disidentifications, the late Muñoz writes, “If queer discourse is to supersede the limits of feminism, it must be able to

Brittney C. Cooper 13

calculate multiple antagonisms that index issues of class, gender, and race, as well as sexuality.”27 Pointing to this moment in Muñoz’s work, Sharon Patricia Holland observes that, “by this time in the theoretical game, feminism has solidified as a project that should be superseded, which gives it the status of a relic and simultaneously excises the very contributions of women of color to the production of the very diverse dis- course that queer of color critique is poised to commit itself to.”28 Muñoz’s language of supersession marked a broader move in queer theory “away from feminism [because it] cast feminist ‘ethics’ as moral regulation.” Thus now attempts to speak to the “ethical” are “perceived as being attached to a back- ward feminism.”29 Not only is feminism cast as retrograde because of its particular ethical commitments, but “race and racist practice mire an unfettered feminism in the materiality of the body and the idea of its limit.” More- over, an insistence upon talking about race or Blackness, “is excoriated for its crippling backwardness, since it is embedded in notions of the biological that do not help make the case for better racial feeling.”30

Thus queer theory sees itself as “taking a break from feminism.”31

Ferguson and Muñoz cannot rightly be blamed for antagonisms toward race and fem- inism that are endemic to queer theory. But their work should be called to account for arti- ficially proscribing the limits of Black and women of color feminisms, such that the very questions women of color feminist inquiry has raised for decades about social and cultural formation, nationalisms, political economy and the limits of liberalism are best developed in another arena of critique and

then named something else. To situate Black feminism on the pedestal of foundation serves to render it visible but static, denying it the dynamism of change, growth, argument, and possibility. Black feminism is fixed in time, and in the temporal logics of academic knowledge production, that becomes a death sentence. Certainly, one could argue that the use of Black feminism as a critical building block of queer color analysis proves that Black feminism is a generative site of Theoretical production. However, Muñoz’s use of the word “supercede” suggests that women of color feminisms are a mode of inquiry to be surpassed. It is also legitimate to use the conceptual frameworks of women of color feminism to animate other modes of inquiry, but this cannot be done at the expensive the original projects themselves.

While men of color place Black feminism on a pedestal, non-Black feminists reduce Black feminist knowledge production to the status of an intervention in the broader project of feminism. The current debate over the continued utility of intersectionality is instructive. Writing about the continued cen- trality of Black women to questions of inter- sectionality, Robyn Wiegman argues that “the particularity of black women’s identity position functions as the formative ground for a critical practice aimed at infinite inclusion.” She rhetorically asks: “How can particularity retain the specificity it invokes when the destination it inscribes is to render critical practice not simply coherent but com- prehensive in its analytic capacity and scope?” Wiegman suggests that her questions name “the tension between intersectionality as a commitment to the particularity of black

TBS • Volume 45 • Number 4 • Winter 201514

women’s minoritization and its redeployment as the means to claim paradigmatic mastery over both the experiences of women of color and identity’s historical, social, politi- cal, and psychic complexity as a whole.”32

Here Wiegman poses a false question, propped up by a false assumption. For her question assumes that all work that has already been ascribed to the status of the theoretical, is not also deeply particular. But what feminist theory (as undertaken by white women) has done is to expose the particularity of white male western accounts of knowledge and experience, otherwise known as philos- ophy. Yet, Wiegman charges particularity as a kind of indictment of the theoretical reach of intersectionality. Her cautions about inter- sectional scope-creep pivot on the claim that intersectionality seeks mastery over the account of experience among women of color and of the theoretical account of iden- tity. That kind of rhetoric is shot through with a kind of colonizing, imperial logic, that it is simply unfair to ascribe to the intellectual pro- ducts of Black feminism, particularly since Black feminism’s broader resistance to femin- ism is all about a resistance to being “mas- tered” by a set of frameworks that are not imagined with Black female bodies or (cis and trans) Black women’s lives anywhere in their purview.

To accuse Black feminist paradigms of attempting to “master” everyone else’s experi- ence rather than of attempting to make visible and name our own is to severely misrepresent institutional logics of power. When Black women’s theoretical contributions achieve institutional legitimacy, even if that legitimacy is about exposing institutional logics of vio- lence and power, suddenly, Black women

(the intersectional paradigm) now become “masters.” Or are we accused of doing vio- lence to other women of color?33

Black feminism pays a hefty price in the few places where our theoretical work receives the status of broad applicability. M.T. Nguyen cautions that the “affirmative incorporation of women of color feminisms as a necessary intervention … might also be a problematic teleology for feminist futures.”34 She explains that

interventions are best staged before it is “too

late” and someone is lost beyond rehabilita-

tion. Interventions then must be opportune,

timed to occur within a brief window

during which an intervention is efficacious,

beneficial. Interventions are thus both irrup-

tions of a progressive time and also course

corrections that, incorporated, allow for a

return to it.35

Wiegman’s handwringing about the ways in which Black women have become the central figures of intersectional discourse, even while she acknowledges the import of intersectionality, bare all the marks of a desire to move on from a discussion of Black women, a desire to get past the irruption.36

Black women who point to the continuing problem of racism within feminist analysis–– the most visible of these schisms now occur in online venues––are called divisive and dis- ruptive, and are censured for hindering femin- ist progress.37

It is almost as if intersectional Black femin- ism is treated like those annoying emergency broadcast announcements on radio and tele- vision. “We interrupt your regularly sched- uled programming to bring you this breaking

Brittney C. Cooper 15

news. Your work is racist.” When those emer- gency broadcasts occur, at first, there is annoyance. Then there is alarm. Then a course of action is decided based on how legitimate the cause for concern is. But at the end, the view is always that, barring a real emergency, the announcement was dis- ruptive and temporary and that, at worst, the emergency should be assessed and responded to in order to facilitate a swift return to the reg- ularly scheduled progression of events. Treat- ing Black feminism as primarily an anti-racist intervention within feminism continues to render it as a disruptive and temporary event, to be addressed, responded to, and moved on from, back to the regularly sched- uled course of things. We must resist this framing because it leaves Black feminism in its own suspended state of interruptus wherein our sole contribution to feminist dis- course is reduced to the theorization of inter- sectionality. This leaves Black feminism in a suspended state of animation, there always as a reference of where the field has been, rather than as a guidepost for where we should go.

It’s Our Prerogative. We Can Do What We Wanna Do.

In 1986, Deborah King declared that within Black feminism, “Black women are empow- ered with the right to interpret our reality and define our objectives,” to “continually establish and reestablish our own priorities,” and to “decide for ourselves the relative sal- ience of any and all identities and oppres- sions, and how and the extent to which these features inform our politics.”38 King’s positioning of Black women as the subjects

of Black feminist knowledge production is an important move meant to ascribe to Black women the epistemic authority to name and define Black women’s experiences both within and beyond the frames of oppres- sion. However, in certain debates we have relinquished and indeed outsourced the power to determine the salience of the identi- ties and oppressions that define Black women’s varied realities to the broader more nebulous field of feminist theory. We allow others to create categories of salience, and we allow others to define what is salient about our categories. I use “we” advisedly here. Certainly Black feminism does not move with one voice or only one agenda. It never has. But within academic Black feminism(s), the ambivalence about intersec- tionality in newer scholarship and the embrace of the push to always be saying something new, even when it is clear that we have not fully mined our traditions or thin- kers suggests that we are caught in the aca- demic push for relevance which requires a turn to the new and innovative.39 This places us in the dubious and unenviable pos- ition of being at the whim and fancy of neolib- eral academic notions of progress. That is to say, when those of us who value and work within Black feminist frameworks don’t control the terms of the debate, others deter- mine the value and salience of categories that matter, leaving valuable parts of our work vulnerable to being devalued and dis- carded. For instance, Black feminism must continue to insist that “race is real” in its material effects despite its status as a social construct. We must continue to suggest, as intersectionality originally did, that power matters as much as identity.

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The foundational work of queer Black fem- inist theorists demonstrates what it means for Black feminists to control the terms of the debate. Black feminist scholarship has been progressive in embracing shifting ideas about gender non-conformity and trans* iden- tity, because queer Black feminists like Pauli Murray in the 1940s and the women of Com- bahee in the 1970s laid the groundwork for such a view by challenging the essential nature of these categories. Black feminism presumes that Black womanhood and Black femininity are a co-constitutive project under- taken by a range of female, male, trans*, inter- sex, and gender non-conforming bodies along the gender spectrum. We acknowledge trans* black identities, wherein female bodiedness can constitute a range of gendered subject positions, even as we also acknowledge that female bodiedness is not a prerequisite for womanhood. How do we create a set of theor- etical frameworks expansive enough to theo- rize the structural precarity and political possibility of all Black women’s lives, cis and trans* alike? Continuing to prioritize an explicitly queer framework in future Black feminist inquiry acknowledges that radical Black feminism is a queer enterprise. It does not exist without the intellectual and political labor of Black lesbians and Black gender non- conforming people. A queer Black feminism includes a continuing inquiry into the lives of cisgender, hetero Black women, but forces those women to acknowledge the clear limits of a cis-heteropatriarchal project in their own lives. In other words a queer Black feminism makes space for a range of desires and gender performances, but refuses the power-laden, normativizing imperatives of heteropatriarchy.

The burgeoning Black Lives Matter move- ment that has emerged in the wake of the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 and the recent police killings of Rekia Boyd in Chicago, Eric Garner in Staten Island, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Tanisha Anderson also in Cleveland, John Crawford in Beaver Creek, Ohio, Sheneque Proctor in Bessemer, Alabama, and Walter Scott in North Charles- ton, South Carolina, among many others, raises a number of questions that should also shape our theoretical inquiry. What, for instance, is a Black feminist account of freedom? What is a Black feminist account of justice? What is a Black feminist account of Black life? And given the ways in which queer identity informs the guiding assump- tions of Black feminist theory, how does Black feminism account for questions of reproduction and reproductive justice without rehearsing heteropatriachal notions of productivity? Despite the variety of repro- ductive technologies that enable the con- ception of Black life, Holland reminds us that “racism turns us toward the bare life of procreation.”40 Black feminism, as a place that accounts for the lives of Black people with wombs (whatever their gender identity), must give an account of reproductive justice and the conditions under which Black life can and should exist.

How does Black feminism theorize the configuration of the nation-state, particularly when Black people exist in what nineteenth- century Black feminist theorists might call a “peculiar” relationship to the state? How can US Black feminists respect, attend thoroughly to, and engage Black feminist theoretical work arising from other national and

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transnational locations, works which often critique US imperialism, without obscuring the operations of internal colonial logics that are particularly violent to Black and Indigen- ous people in the settler-colonial US?41

Black feminists accounts of nation must figure out how to decenter the US nation- state, while acknowledging that Black femin- ists both within the US and outside of it, can and should participate in that project. At the same time, US Black feminists cannot theo- rize as though black feminist theorization is unidirectional, but must acknowledge and be guided by the multiple sites of Black femin- ist knowledge production happening through- out the globe.

We must also ask what our intellectual relationship will be with queer of color cri- tique, since as I have shown above, what is now considered the intellectual province of QOCC, might just as “naturally” have pro- ceeded under the rubric of Black feminist inquiry, under other circumstances. To be clear, I am not constructing Black feminism in opposition to queer of color critique, as there are many scholars who find homes in both places. But I am saying that if inherent to queer theory, even queer of color critique, is an account of Black or women of color fem- inism(s) as too morally regulatory and retro- grade, this has implications for the future of Black feminism. If Black feminism is con- structed as the foundation upon which queer of color critique is built, this still constructs Black feminist theory as a discourse of the past, rather than one that helps to map and mark the future. Thus, if queer of color cri- tique is positioned on a continuum in which it constitutes the site of progress beyond the putatively retrograde Black female bodies

that anchor a Black feminist project, then the stakes are too high to cede this territory willingly.

Love No Limit

Black feminists must stop defending our intel- lectual territory. We must stop letting others make us think ours is territory to be defended, and we must make them defend why it is reasonable to encroach upon, dismantle, or otherwise do violence to the space we occupy. Perhaps, we have spent so much time defending the house from demolition by others who have been intent on condemn- ing the house and declaring it unsafe or unfit for habitation that we have not attended to generational wear and tear, ignoring for too long a crumbling foundation, a wobbly struc- ture, and various creaks, leaks and fissures. We must begin to affirm that Black feminism is “a brick house. She’s mighty, mighty.” Still, we can acknowledge when our foun- dation needs work and our structure needs reinforcing. And I hope here, that this work will be seen as an invitation to till new ground, re-fertilize old ground, and shore up and secure wobbly foundations.

We must name acts of intellectual coloni- zation and then stop ceding the terms of the debate to the colonizers. We must no longer concede the logic that demands that our intel- lectual real estate be mowed down and swept up in the linear march of academic and “intel- lectual” progress. We must, in short, stop letting others fuck with our future. I said it, and I mean it. In order to guard against the conditions Ann DuCille named in 1994, where “we can be, but others get to tell us what we mean,” we need to begin to say

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what we mean and mean what we say. We keep losing arguments that we should be winning because we have allowed others to set the agenda. We have allowed others to artificially proscribe the limits of Black femin- ist inquiry, telling us where we have been and where we are, while suggesting that there is nowhere else for us to go. This must change.

Let us love none of these limits. Black fem- inism can and should retain what Abena Busia, Stanlie James, and later Patricia Hill Collins termed “visionary pragmatism,” which at base level constitutes our ethical commitment to liberatory world-making. Denise James argues that “theory as social hope is an identifying marker of Black femin- ism.”42 Because Black feminism rejects the “fundamentality assumption”43 that theory is more fundamental than politics, our range of ethically driven political commitments should continue to inform the theoretical pushes we make. For instance, questions of ethics, history, and politics are frequently cast as excluding questions of pleasure and desire. But if Black feminism sets as a priority an ethical and political commitment to plea- sure, as many scholars like Joan Morgan are doing, then that commitment should inform the sources of our theoretical investigation.

Theory-building has to be part and parcel of our world-making. And the language of “building” and “making” is important because it marks the limits of critique. It is high time we rethought our wholesale invest- ment in the poststructuralist project of decon- struction. Black feminism insists that what we build is far more important than what we destroy. Institutionally, we should look to new work emerging from Black women’s intellectual history and from Black feminist

philosophy as key places to reinvigorate our knowledge production. Finally, a focus on ethics, which should not be equated with moral regulation, keeps us focused on the world we are trying to build, and joins us to a multi-generational project of dismantling systems of white supremacy, heteropatriar- chy, and capitalism. Moreover, an ethical commitment to seeing political and theoreti- cal possibility in Black women’s lives respects the time Black women have spent in service of changing the world and changing insti- tutions. It refuses to let the logics of progress- ive time now come along and do violence to us by situating us in the past, but instead acknowledges the ways that Black women’s visionary pragmatism always encoded a view of Black people as a people of the future. Let us reinvigorate and reanimate Black feminist theory. Let us stop interrupting Black feminism in the process of performing its various sustaining, intimate, political, intel- lectually orgiastic acts of love toward us. Let us remove the artificial limits so that Black feminism can continue loving and seeing value in the lives of Black women and all Black people with no bounds. This is the only kind of future in which we get to live.

Notes

1. DuCille, Anne, “The Occult of True Black Womanhood,” Signs 19, no. 3 (1994): 606.

2. Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (New York & London: Duke University Press, 2011), 240.

3. Kristie Dotson, “How Is This Paper Philos- ophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2012): 6.

4. Barbara Tomlinson, “To Tell the Truth and Not Get Trapped: Desire, Distance, and

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Intersectionality at the Scene of Argument,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 997.

5. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 52.

6. Ibid., 52 and 53. 7. Ibid., 55–6. 8. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus:

Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (New York: Duke University Press, 2014), 9.

9. See Kristie Dotson, “Between Rocks and Hard Places: Introducing Black Feminist Professional Philosophy” The Black Scholar (forthcoming).

10. Donna-Dale Marcano, “The Difference that Difference Makes: Black Feminism and Philos- ophy,” in Convergences: Black Feminism and Con- tinental Philosophy (New York: SUNY Press, 2010) Kindle edition.

11. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Woman- hood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 15–16.

12. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Poli- tics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routle- dge, 2000), 17.

13. While it is true that most fields and disci- plines in the humanities are asked to quantify their academic value and prove their institutional legitimacy, Black feminism and its rootedness in Black communities means that it is far more vulner- able to acts of cooptation and dismantling, because it has never fully moved from the state of precarity.

14. L.H. Stallings, Mutha’ is Half A Word: Inter- sections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth and Queer- ness in Black Female Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007). See also Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading

Race, Reading Pornography (London: Duke University Press, 2014); Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste of Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornogra- phy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

15. Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, (New York: Scribner, 1975), 45.

16. Marcano, Convergences. 17. Ibid. 18. Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of

Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 14. 19. Ibid., 20. 20. See Christopher Kuzawa and Elizabeth

Sweet, “Epigenetics and the Embodiment of Race: Developmental Origins of US Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Health,” American Journal of Human Biology 21 (2009): 2–15.

21. Carby, ReconstructingWomanhood, 15–16. 22. A recent exception is Kaila Adia Story, ed.,

Patricia Hill Collins: Reconceiving Motherhood (Ontario: Demeter Press, 2014).

23. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 5. 24. Ibid., 9. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black:

Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 149. See introduction n.1.

27. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 22.

28. Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 78. 29. Ibid., 57–8. 30. Ibid., 61. 31. Ibid., 75. 32. Wiegman, Object Lessons, 242. 33. Jasbir Puar, “I’d Rather Be a Cyborg, than a

Goddess,” Philosophia 2, no. 1 (2012), 54. Puar argues that intersectionality is mired in “geopoliti- cal” problems, namely that it doesn’t travel well transnationally. Moreover she says the “cherished categories of the intersectional mantra … are the

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product of modernist colonial agendas and regimes of epistemic violence” (54). Here again is the pro- blematic claim that by taking up categories we didn’t create, and seeking to unmask the power relations of those categories through intersectional analysis, intersectionality in fact does violence to other women of color by colluding with “colonial agendas.”

34. M.T. Nguyen, “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22, nos 2–3 (2012): 190.

35. Ibid. 36. See Wiegman, Object Lessons. 37. Michelle Goldberg, “Feminism’s Toxic

Twitter Wars,” The Nation February 17, 2014, http://www.thenation.com/article/feminisms-toxic- twitter-wars/ (accessed July 13, 2015).

38. Deborah King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Mul- tiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist Ideology,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 312.

39. See Jennifer Nash, Re-Thinking Intersec- tionality,” Feminist Review 89 (2008), for an

example of Black feminist scholarship ambivalent about intersectionality.

40. Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 61. 41. Kelly Googan-Gehr, “The Politics of Race

in U.S. Feminist Scholarship: An Archaeology,” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37, no. 1 (2012): 102. Coogan-Gehr demon- strated that within feminist scholarship terms like “women of color” and “third world women,” which Black feminists helped to create in order to form solidarities “have had the unintended consequence of masking speci- ficity, rendering scholarship by and about black women invisible.”

42. V. Denise James, “Theorizing Black Femin- ist Pragmatism: Forethoughts on the Practices and Purpose of Philosophy.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2009): 93. James derives the term social hope from John Dewey who argues that “philosophy is … a social hope reduced to a working program of action, a prophecy of the future, but one disciplined by serious thought and knowledge.”

43. Dotson, “Between Rocks and Hard Places,” forthcoming.

Brittney C. Cooper, PhD is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. Her first book, Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual Tradition is forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. She is co-founder of the popular Crunk Fem- inist Collective Blog, and has been named in The Root 100 list of top Black influencers in 2013 and 2014.

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