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"Even feminist analyses of power wade through the swamps of patriarchy trying to find their roots, when everyone knows that the more of a swamp's mud you accumulate, the deeper into it you sink..."
- Minna Salami, Sensuous Knowledge, p. 143
- Minna Salami, Sensuous Knowledge, p. 143
One of the things I love about @MsAfropolitan's book is its invocation to rethink power from women's perspectives. It also provokes some fundamental questions for me about the ways in which standpoint theory and black feminist thought narrate both positionality and epistemology.
I find myself asking: What does it mean, really, for us to speak of women's knowledge? Is it possible to imagine women's knowledge as hermeneutically sealed and separate from "male perspectives" in patriarchal societies? (For me, the answer is an unequivocal "no"..)
What happens when we admit, for example, that "women's perspectives" are always already suffused with a masculine episteme...because that's how power works? For me, this suggests that even the best efforts to "center women" must necessarily involve a patriarchal reference.
Ironically, I would argue that such an acknowledgement involves other elements of feminist critique, such as the ability to acknowledge complexities beyond simple binaries, the ineluctability of the paradoxical.. what I am thinking these days of as the "both-andness of reality".
Or perhaps even more accurately -- "the both andness of realities" -- which is a nod to @ashoncrawley's call to remember the plurality of ontological realms.. the queer social fact that we are always traversing multiple worlds.
Traversing, co-creating, inhabiting worlds. But I would argue, too, that these worlds are inextricably linked. And so, the question of what it means to "center women's perspectives" on the matter of power opens up a space for acknowledging how our worlds both collide and overlap.
This also reminds me of a critique that was recently shared with me regarding the practice of naming whiteness in critical race work. The objection was that doing so "centers whiteness" and that such centering reinforces white supremacy..
I wonder about the paradox of believing that one can both acknowledge a system of power and yet, somehow, also believe that not naming the system, its contours and beneficiaries is an effective method for dismantling it..
Returning to the idea of "centering women" -- I wonder, too, if this is in and of itself a patriarchal construction. Can we even know what "womanhood" might mean without reference to patriarchal linguistics and epistemology? This is not so much a critique as it is a conundrum.
