• DOI:10.1086/494730
• Corpus ID: 144201941

African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race

@article{Higginbotham1992AfricanAmericanWH,
  title={African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race},
  author={Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham},
  journal={Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society},
  year={1992},
  volume={17},
  pages={251 - 274}
}

• E. Higginbotham
• Published 1 January 1992
• Sociology
• Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

PT-P HEORETICAL DISCUSSION in African-American women's history begs for greater voice. I say this as a black woman who is cognizant of the strengths and limitations of current feminist theory. Feminist scholars have moved rapidly forward in addressing theories of subjectivity, questions of difference, the construction of social relations as relations of power, the conceptual implications of binary oppositions such as male versus female or equality versus difference-all issues defined with relevance to gender and with potential for intellectual and social transformations.l Notwithstanding a few notable exceptions, this new wave of feminist theorists finds little to say about race. The general trend has been to mention black and Third World feminists who first called attention to the glaring fallacies in essentialist analysis and to claims of a homogeneous "womanhood," "woman's culture," and "patriarchal oppression of women."2 Beyond this recognition, however, white feminist scholars pay hardly more than