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N.Z. Suekama
when something is characterized by a tendency towards some kind of union
Outside of Sex-based feminist theories, and Marxist theories of sex and class, there are Black/Third World feminist theories of Class, Race, and Sex.
Rather than putting bourgeois science at the center of their analysis, many of these theories draw from synthesis of Marxist analysis with various Anti-colonial/Anti-imperial ideologies to produce a "Unitive" theory of gender inequality.
Typically, that means a class analysis and race analysis is essential to these perspectives on gender inequality. They usually disagree with what NZ Suekama calls Immanent and Sortition theoretical models as well as with Unilineal presuppositions of orthodox Marxism
Mainstream feminism fails to account for the specific ways gender relations emerge among non-white populations. This is something Black feminisms have tried to address for decades. Third World feminisms have followed suit. They emphasize a class analysis. Some of these theories include:
"Double Jeopardy" (Frances Beal)
"Coloniality of gender" (Maria Lugones)
"Simultaneity of oppressions"
(Combahee River Collective)
Frances Beal is a former organizer in SNCC during the US-based civil rights (anti-apartheid) struggle.
Because Black men in the civil rights movement often failed to address issues specific to Black women's liberation, Beal pioneered a concept of "double jeopardy" to deal with what it meant "to be Black and female."
Beal helped organize the Black Women's Liberation Committee within the SNCC and pushed the organization's gender analysis forward
"Those who project in an intellectual manner how great and rewarding this [domestic labor] role
will be and who feel that the most important thing that they can contribute to the
black nation is children, are doing themselves a great injustice. This line of reasoning
completely negates the contributions that black women have historically made to our
struggle for liberation. These black women include Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman,
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune and Fannie Lou Hamer to name but a
few.
We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronic experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it."
Beal was as critical of the Black movement as she was of the white socialist/feminist movement for ignoring Black women's particular oppression. This is a common theme in Black feminist history.
For Beal, this oversight ensured that the Labor Movement to "suffered as a result."
Claudia Jones was a Trinidad and Tobago born organizer in the Community Party USA. She was steadfast in addressing both race and gender in the class struggle.
Eventually, she was deported from the US, and proceeded to resume her revolutionary organizing in the UK, where she helped to pioneer Caribbean Carnival, and fought issues around poverty and destitute housing conditions.
Jones was well travelled and was connected with a variety of radicals, from Amy Ashwood Garvey to Paul Robeson, Eric Williams, and Mao Zedong
"The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced.
Historically, the Negro woman has been the guardian, the protector, of the Negro family... As mother, as Negro, and as worker, the Negro woman fights against the wiping out of the Negro family, against the Jim Crow ghetto existence which destroys the health, morale, and very life of millions of her sisters, brothers, and children.
Viewed in this light, it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie has intensified its oppression, not only of the Negro people in general, but of Negro women in particular. Nothing so exposes the drive to fascization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie displays and cultivates toward Negro women."
Claudia Jones was a Marxist-Leninist
Leninism was attractive to a number of Black radicals in her day because it united with the principle of self-determination for colonized people within the nation-state framework.
When applied to feminist struggle, a Black Leninism suggests that in the same way imperialism meant pursuit of Capital in non-Western territories, misogynoir meant further entrenching the manner by which class society relies on sexual exploitation through a particularly racialized division of labor.
Central to this view is the idea that sexual and racial oppression help to reproduce and remunerate workers' exploited position and labor, in order to secure the extraction of value and accumulation of capital in a way that is "mystified" by supremacist ideas of personhood.
In this view, sex is a "mystification" used to sort exploited men and women into labor role so that the process can seem "natural" or "God-willed" and not like a class division.
Central to Marxist theory is the idea that the wages a worker is paid are actually just a sliver of what the boss (capitalist) makes in profit off the worker's labor.
Those "crumbs" are paid so that the worker has just enough to return to work another day, just enough to buy basic necessitities to survive in capitalism.
The Marxist feminist argument is that the Breadwinner's labor cannot exist without (unpaid) domestic labor from the Homemaker. This is because the Homemaker is forced to provide care and nurturance for the Breadwinner and for children.
For Black leftist feminists, no analysis of how capitalism weilds sex to mystify the determinants of value, or how capitalism weaponizes sex to foster a divide in class struggle, can be complete without accounting for race.
Claudia Jones and other Black left feminists were keen on pointing out how slavery and colonialism meant that Black men and women were never exactly sorted into simple Breadwinner and Homemaker positions.
What does it mean when both the Breadwinner and Homemaker's exploited positions are reliant on the labor of enslaved people? This is why the notion of "super-exploitation" became important.
Those positioned in racial-sexual labor divisons are typically either underpaid or not paid at all on top of being faced with added abuses and positioned as racially inferior.
NZ Suekama deems this is a necessary corrective in order to go beyond putting categories of male and female, or the struggle within the home/family, or the Nation-state at the center of analysis, something Frances Beal, Claudia Jones, and others do not adequately do.
Quadruple Jeopardy is about attention specifically to repression of the forms of embodiment and overall social (material/power) relations that have not been "nexed" vis-a-vis the household configuration and its labor inputs
Frances Beal eventually oversaw the development of the Third World Women's Alliance out of the Black Women's Organizing Caucus.
TWWA renamed "double jeopardy" as Triple Jeopardy to emphasize an analysis of imperialism alongside sex and class. This view is similar to that of Claudia Jones.
NZ Suekama argues that another update is needed: Quadruple Jeopardy. For NZ Suekama, this is about attending to how carceral and disabling technologies complicate Triple Jeopardy.
Source: "The first drag queen was a former slave" by Channing Gerard Joseph
NZ Suekama argues that Swann's confrontation with police violence is important for understanding the full scope of repression that Black people in the US were faced with right after the civil war.
Swann and his post-civil war Maryland drag community's pathologization involved police repression.
According to NZ Suekama, it was both Swann's sexual expansivity and his community's atypical "family" structures that were met with hostility.
In the late 1800s, the first documented "Drag Queen" in the US went by the name of William Dorsey Swann.
Swann's self identification and the communities he led can be seen as a precursor to modern ballroom/house culture among Black queer/trans and nonbinary/gnc individuals that crystalized in the mid-20th century.
Charged for keeping a "disorderly house," Swann was put in prison. He was a former slave; he also led early forms of what we now understand to be queer/trans resistance in the Black struggle during the post-civil war period.
In reading Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative, we learn that even male-female relationships among the enslaved were pathologized, most especially for failing to meet bourgeois and white standards in the nuclear family. This is also a consequence of Quadruple Jeopardy
NZ Suekama suggests that Quadruple Jeopardy is a facet of the "good ole boy network" (Patriarchy) of which Sanyika Shakur speaks.
In its Grand style (colonial) and Minor style (neocolonial) manifestations, the patriarchal Nexus can coerce metabolic life-activity that may not be conducive to or could threaten the stability of household production (including super-exploitation) under modernity
The carceral and disabling technologies involved in Quadruple Jeopardy maintain State power
The Combahee River Collective was a group of Black decolonial socialist and lesbian women who authored probably one of the most impactful statements on feminist struggle of the 20th century. Frustrated with racism and bourgeois tendencies in the feminist movement, racism and sexism in the Marxist movement, and sexism/lesbophobia in the Black nationalist struggle, the CRC established an independant political trajectory based in "non-hierarchical" principles and what they called "identity politics."
"Although we are in essential agreement with Marx's theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women."
- The Combahee River Collective
"We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic
systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources.
We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives."
Kimberlé Crenshaw is a feminist scholar who contributed to the legal analysis known as critical race theory. During her academic career, Crenshaw sought to expose the limits of "rights based" approaches to sexual and racial discrimination as they failed to account for the "intersection" of race and sex. Crenshaw is probably the most influential Black feminist of the contemporary period, as her notion of "intersectionality" has been adopted by thinkers across political and ideological tendencies, sometimes in contradictory ways.
Crenshaw uses concrete examples, looking at how courts "frame and interpret the stories of Black women plaintiffs." In her first case study, five Black women plaintiffs has their lawsuit rejected because the legal antidiscrimination framework could only address instances that either affected Blacks or affected women, never the experience of Black women specifically.
Still, Intersectionality, as a critique of academic feminism, anti-racist policy, is situated in the realm of what NZ Suekama refers to as neoliberal "Progressive Reason."
Crenshaw's analytic can be used to bring concerns with the interpenetration of sexual, racial, class domination --- to the limits of the "problem-reaction-solution" that Sanyika Shakur theorizes of Statecraft under Grand Patriarchy
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter decade (2010s), which culminate in the Floyd-Taylor uprisings of 2020, conservatives in the US have repackaged decades of backlash against what was once called "multiculturalism" as now a bias against Critical Race Theory, especially Intersectionality.
Unfortunately, due to the legacy of a linear stagism in Marxism, many socialists have joined into an anti-feminist campaign within their own organizations, as they believe that the Unitive model is actually an "additive" or reductive model
Jewel Crow is about understanding how the State expressions of Transmisogynoir in particular and antiblack transphobia more generally to conserve Grand Patriarchy and Minor Patriarcy through non-State participation across classes
Jewel Crow synthesize a legal analytic with a class struggle/anti-imperial analysis and use it to reveal struggles that even Black feminism thus far seldom considers adequately
Pauli Murray was a minister, lawyer, and feminist engaged in the struggle against Jim Crow. They coined the term "Jane Crow" to describe the specific ways US apartheid/segregation impacted women.
NZ Suekama sees Crenshaw's legal analytic through the Jane Crow lens. This means that the weaknesses of the antidiscrimination framework had roots in an older strategy by which, under Jane Crow (segregation), fascist/apartheid violence was ignored.
NZ Suekama decided the Jim Crow/Jane Crow pairing needed an accompanying lens, and therefore coined the term "Jewel Crow" to describe the ways that fascism, capitalism, and patriarchy condition both legal and extra-legal violence and exclusion against Black trans, queer, nonbinary people, especially trans Black women.
* TW - mentions of SA, Transmisogynoir
Several times, Frances Thompson went to jail or was arrested for "crossdressing." This is something happening to QTGNC people today, around the world, such as in postcolonial states like Ghana and Nigeria (#EndSARS).
Frances Thompson was a formerly enslaved, physically disabled Black trans woman from Memphis. In the year 1866, her community was torn apart by racial violence. Very common in the post-civil war era, as US fascism sought to undermine the effects of slave rebellion and Reconstruction, lynch terror was always a feature of life in the South and around the country.
Along with lynch mob violence, was sexual violence, especially those directed at Black women. Frances Thompson brought her story and that of other women in her community to the court, but doubt was cast on her claims. This was also very typical of how the legal system responded to Black women under apartheid conditions (a pattern that continues today in the form of the legal gaps that Crenshaw's intersectionality tries to address). But Frances Thompson's trans womanhood was cast as dishonest in a particular way.
In fact, the weaponization of Frances Thompson's sexual expanse to cast doubt on the truth of her advocacy helped to fuel the wider campaigns in the South by which fascists sought to discount any claims about white supremacist lynch violence.
Very regularly, Frances Thompson was not only harrassed, but accused of running a brothel. To this day, non-white trans women in particular are uniquely impacted by anti-prostitution laws.
For more on NZ Suekama's understanding of Transmisogynoir, check out "Femme Queen, Warrior Queen: Beyond Representation, Towards Self-Determination."
In "Dispatches from Among the Damned: On the History and Present of Trans Survival," NZ Suekama suggests that because the 2020 rebellions involved destruction of property and came in the wake of a near-decade of visibly queer/women-led anti-cop organizations, contemporary anti-feminism is aimed at conserving the nuclear family and sexual labor divisions with State and non-State participation in order to help protect the private property system should future Black rebellions come up
Citing George Jackson's theorizing of "fascist counterinsurgency," NZ Suekama sees Jewel Crow as a central component to both the neoliberal reforms and conservative policies that characterize postcolonial & civil rights era Statecraft
The emphasis here is on the collaboration between State and non-State actors.
Maria Lugones is a decolonial feminist scholar who sought to intervene in Western feminism by building on Quijano Anibal's notion of a "coloniality of power."
Prioritizing a Third World critique, and inspired by Black and other non-white feminisms, Lugones theorizes a "coloniality of gender."
Her work has had an immense impact on decolonial feminisms, including on Sylvia Wynter.
""In a theoretico-praxical vein, I am offering a framework to begin thinking about heterosexism as a key part of how gender fuses with race in the operations of colonial power. Colonialism did not impose precolonial, European gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing."
Attending to the philosophical content of "modernity" alongside its arrangement of class relations is important for Anibal in order to better understand the ways racial and sexual oppression involve dynamics specific to the Eurocentric context. Lugones agrees, as does Sylvia Wynter and a host of other decolonial thinkers.
Quijano Anibal's notion of "coloniality":
Modern society, associated with human history from the rennaissance onward, is not just defined by colonial and bourgeois institutions.
Modernity is also defined in a particular, now globalized conception of the Self and external world shaped by changes that occurred for Europeans during colonial encounter.
Therefore, a material analysis must also involve a metaphysical or ontological and epistemological analysis as well.
For, NZ Suekama, the fact that orthodox Marxists want to avoid dealing with coloniality, all while also desiring to reclaim the State means that even for a decolonial Marxism, there are risks posed for certain populations, especially non-cis/non-heterosexual peoples of the Third World
NZ Suekama's observes that currently, decolonial feminism finds itself stuck between class reductionism or overly-metpahysical analysis. But, she urges everyone to go beyond this dichotomy, to learn from both emphases, and to find syntheses that can best aid in the struggle for liberation.
*Tw - mentions of transmisogynoir, misgendering
NZ Suekama argues that idealist maneuvers are not inherently useless to the class/decolonial struggle. Citing York and Mancus' "Critical Human Ecology," we learn that many "idealist" critical traditions actually began in Marxism.
All that we know about Mary Jones is from legal records and news/media sources regarding her arrests, trial, and charges.
All of these sources associate her supposed sexual anatomy/behavior and supposed economic activities with animality, monstrosity, criminality
Due to this, it becomes necessary for some Black (trans)feminists to use poststructural and postmodern analyses to try and illuminate the ideology latent behind these textual presentations, in order to bring potential clarity where gaps in information lack it.
One of the earliest known Black trans women on record in the US is Mary Jones. She was arrested, tried, charged in 1836 for larceny. In her own words, Mary Jones reported she had always dressed as a woman amongst "people of my own Color," especially in New Orleans. She also reported that it was women in her life who had encouraged her to dress in women's attire.
News articles claimed, however, that during the daytime, Mary Jones ran the streets of New York dressed "as a man" while at night in the "rig of a woman." They also gave the impression that her gender/sexual expanse was specifically aimed at aiding her in her thievery among white men seeking prostitutes. Images of Mary Jones depict her dressed in women's attire, but feature the title "the man-monster."
Building off Saidiya Hartman's notion of "critical fabulation," NZ Suekama suggests a "transectional fabulation." That is what she does in the text "To The Ones Who Can Fly: A Message from the Whirlwind" which speculates that due to a noted overlap in African spiritual traditions and sexual expansivity, Hoodoo myths about flight could also be refering to sexually expansive Africans who resisted slavery
All of their approaches have different origins, areas of focus, conclusions, points of overlap and points of divergence.
Importantly, their attention to non-Western conceptions of personhood have been used to illuminate subversive social forms as well as social realities outside the Kinematic.
*TW - mentions of SA
Oyewumi's perspective challenges falsely universalist perspectives within feminism about the centrality of sexual oppression to all human social relations.
She looks at numerous Yoruba customs, myths, and linguistic conventions in order to make her case.
She insists that African people must study our social realities in a way that is grounded in the dynamics specific to each African context.
This "worldsense" is deeply connected to spiritual relationships, not biology. When it comes to leadership and authority distributed vis-a-vis age, this has to do with a conception of spiritual power which declines through elders from the ancestors, and to the ancestors from divinities and deities bound up with the physical realities, and to these immanent divinities and deities from an ultimate source or creator (Olodumare).
For Spillers, being forced to labor in an "unwomanly" fashion although "proper" womanhood was relegated to the domestic sphere in a white bourgeois society, is what allowed for the production of alternative, subversive gender relations for African enslaved women, relations that continue into today from outside the purview of white bourgeois standards of gender.
In Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe, Spillers is looking at how narratives about the body and behavior reinforce the reproduction of a given dominant order.
Terming these narratives an "American Grammar Book," Spillers reveals how labels put on Black women during slavery inflect racialized notions of "female flesh." She speaks of this as an "ungendered" position where sexual anatomy holds a numerical value for the enslaved, making Blackness "fungible" like a commodity.
Spillers' intent was to track the history of what racists called "Black Matriarchy," illuminating how enslaved African people in the US survived and resisted through the ungendered position that "female" slaves' labor offered to the plantation economy even as such labor was explited.
She would conclude the text with encouraging Black "males" to look towards possibilities for a metaphorical "female within," basically calling Black men to analyze their own ungendering in solidarity with Black women's labor struggle.
Wynter calls these nature-nurture conceptions of self "genres" of being human.
Wynter sees the metaphysics of "coloniality" as the dominant genre.
Therefore, she argues that race, class, sex oppression function on behalf of Genre
NZ Suekama uses Genre as a concept to understand how atomized views of human traits and the reinforcement of overall systems of bourgeois, colonial, patriarchal relations are interpenetrated with biology, but not determined by biology.
Stanley connects decolonial metaphysics to revolutionary thinkers like Fanon, and to Black Power and anti-colonial struggles, citing Che Gosset
"Self-determination" typically focuses on a metaphysics of the self that is defined by individual rights or national sovereignty granted through the State and capitalism.
Eric A. Stanley traces the notion of "gender self-determination" to Critical Resistance, a prison abolition and feminist organization in 2008.
This defines the "self" in a decolonial metaphysics, rather than in the typical definition of "self-determination."
Stanley argues that a decolonial metaphysics "opens space for multiple embodiments" and that it is "antagonistic" to the politics of Western modernity
Relations between Stonewall rebel Miss Major and rebels of the Attica Uprising; or between Sylvia Rivera and the Young Lords Party; or between the Black Panthers and Street Trans* Action Revolutionaries are the 20th century roots of Gender Self-Determination struggle
NZ Suekama argues that resistance from figures like Romaine-La-Prophetesse (Ayiti), Ahebi Ugbabe (Igbo), Kimpa Vita (Congo), Queen Nzingha (Angola) are early antecedents of Gender Self-Determination struggle.
Source: "Gender Self-Determination" (TSQ, 2014)
A major example of Gender Dysconsiousness is the claim that "homosexuality is unAfrican."
Gender Dysconsciousness
is, for NZ Suekama, a global problem in which whiteness is assumed the face of LGBT+ issues
NZ Suekama uses gender dysconsiousness to synthesize the legal concerns in Black liberal feminism with metaphysical critiques from decolonial feminist thinkers.
But NZ Suekama interprets those concerns via Sanyika Shakur's synthesis of materialist Black feminist thought.
In this way, "gender dysconsciousness" is an embodied consequence of the 'good ole boy network' (how Grand Patriarchy and Minor Patriarchy relate).
NZ Suekama coined the term "gender dysconsiousness" to describe the state of mind when racial and class inequities in trans/queer rights, representation, identities, etc are taken at face value or taken as a given.
This builds on Joyce E King's notion of "dysconscious racism" to describe an "uncritical habit of mind" towards racial inequities in the post-civil rights US context.
To fill in these gaps, NZ Suekama looks to more robust unitive analyses of patriarchy (Quadruple Jeopardy, Jewel Crow, transectional fabulation, Gender self-determination, genre, gender dysconsciousness).
Her perspective attends to the concerns of both materialist and metaphysical interpretations at once.
Black and Decolonial feminist theories strive to account for race, sex, and class in a "unitive manner."
Some prioritize materialist approaches (anti-imperialism, labor, law/policy) and others prioritize metaphysical approaches (coloniality, world-sense, genre)
Each of them go beyond the linear trajectory in Marxism and feminism which falsely universalize European history.
But each lack certain more nuanced theories that can specifically address transfeminist concerns