Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances 9780822389200

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POWER LINES

Aimee Carrillo Rowe

POWER LINES On the Subject of Feminist Alliances

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DURHAM AND LONDON

2008

© 2008 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland & Cone Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Typeset in Carter

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book

Duke University Press

gratefully acknowledges the support of the University of Iowa, which provided funds towards the production of this book.

TO MY MOTHER AND HER MOTHER

—to all of those who have loved across power lines

CONTENTS

acknowledgments

ix

preface: Color in My Lines xi introduction: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances 1 1

Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation 25

2

Bridge Inscriptions: Toward a Methodology of Feminist Alliance 47

3 ‘‘Women’’ on the Inside: Whiteness, Heterosociality, and

the Subject of Feminist Alliances 93 4

Zero-Sum Feminism: On the Interface between ‘‘Feminism’’ and ‘‘Alliances’’ 129

5

Power Lines: Toward a Feminism of Radical Belonging 179 epilogue: Pilgrimage 199 appendix a: Solicitation Letter 201 appendix b: Interview Questions 202 notes

205

works cited index

243

227

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a living and breathing manifestation of transracial feminist alliances; it has emerged out of conversations and through the generous support of allies, whose faces intimate and humanize institutions. The early vision for Power Lines emerged during my doctoral work at the University of Washington under the wise and passionate mentorship of Susan Je√ords, Raka Shome, David Allen, Tani Barlow, Nancy Hartsock, Saraswati Sunindyo, John Stewart, and Thomas K. Nakayama. The vision unfolded over the course of my tenure at the University of Iowa, where I received generous support from both my colleagues and the administration. I am deeply grateful to Daniel Gross for the profound insights that arose, and continue to arise, from his close reading of my manuscript and his and Carla Wilson’s deep connection to my life; to Claire Fox for her confidence in the project and her steady encouragement; to Naomi Grayser’s reassuring presence; to Mary Trachsel for her close reading; to Takis Poulakos, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Bridget Tsemo for pushing me to be clear. I thank the members of poroi (David Depew, Thom Swiss, Barb Biesecker, John Nelson, Russell Valentino) for inviting me to expand my theoretical horizons and to members of the Nonfiction Writing Program (Angela Balcita, Kerry Reilly, Heal, Eula Biss, Bryan Goedde, Angela Autry) for encouraging me to cultivate my writing voice. I am grateful for the generous support of the University of Iowa’s O≈ce of the Vice President for Research, Jay Semel and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies Research Seminar Stipend, the Department of Rhetoric, poroi, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. My community and my family are the breath that gives life to all that I create. In gratitude to my partner, Michaela Walsh, for her lyrical theorizing and warm meals, and to my mother, Alicia Rowe, for continuing to grow with me. My long and deep alliance with Sheena Malhotra has provided the clearest manifestation of transracial feminist alliances that I know, as has the web of allies who’ve helped me to name what we do: Kimberlee Pérez, Cricket Keating, Rebecca Clark, Francesca Royster, Laila Farah, Vivien Ng, Lourdes Torres, Amira de la Garza, Tammy Ho, and Julia Johnson, with special thanks to Ann Russo, Mab Segrest, Aída

Hurtado, and Becky Thompson for their insightful comments on the text. Thank you, Alessandra Madella and Diane Crosby, for your tangible research support. I thrive in the cariño I gain from my mentors-inspirit, Valerie Myer Eagle Heart and Becky Ramon. I thank Ken Wissoker for sharpening the focus of this vision, especially for helping me distinguish between the ideas that were just for me and those I could share with my readers. Gratitude to Courtney Berger for your attention to each detail and to Justin Faerber for the incredible balance between precision and poetry in your editorial eye. Thanks to the women of the study, without whose stories this conversation would not have been possible.

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

Color in My Lines

I hate that question. Squirm when people ask me. Even when I ask myself. The question I must ask because if I turn from it, it tracks me down in the fading light of dusk. The color line. Who am I between all these worlds? Who am I and why am I writing this book? Who are you when your ancestors have convinced the world of their whiteness? I come from such a long line of vendidas that somewhere along the way someone forgot what, or who, was being bought and sold. Not the kind of forgetting where something is just not important enough to remember, so it slips your mind. This kind of forgetting is more active, even strategic. It is the kind of forgetting that comes from knowing more about what you are trying to become than who you are leaving behind. Its power is that it comes with a wage that compels you to devalue what’s lost because you believe that you need to belong to a certain kind of future—the wages of whiteness: economic, cultural, and psychological well-being. The privilege of belonging to this future comes at the price of betrayal to that past. It is the kind of forgetting you do to recover from trauma, memories too painful or shameful to be of value, so you push them away. It’s the kind of forgetting not remedied by little interventions— string on your finger, Post-it on the refrigerator, note pinned to your chest. To remedy this kind of forgetting, you have to drop into the worst of the wound. Like the vulture, you learn to find nourishment among the blood and tissue and debris, reckoning with a body misshapen and contorted by the messy work of forgetting. You learn to dwell among the disorderly bodies swept to the side of the road. There you learn to listen. That which can be bought can also be returned, rejected, found by the buyer to be inadequate to the task for which it was purchased. There, in the worst of the wound, la vendida becomes la devuelta.

G G G

The only light we need is the midmorning sun coming through the glass doors, hitting golden walls. Andrea’s is the kind of place where the more you look, the more you see: small Aztec figurine pipes arranged in a semicircle, photos of her with her husband and their child, driftwood piled up in the corner, a poster of a brown woman sitting high up in a tree looking at the crescent moon. The place smells like cornmeal, cheese, and chile, hot and smoky and brick red. Her nieces and nephew and daughter are doing their own thing, occasionally popping up among the adults. On the cd Lila Downs is singing that refrain, ‘‘Y la justicia, sale sabrando.’’ Andrea’s mom, Toni, is showing my mom how to spread the masa over the soft corn husk with the back of a spoon. This is the kind of thing Toni knows from growing up in a Mexican community in east Los Angeles. So di√erent from my mom’s childhood, most of it spent in Catholic boarding school since her parents were so busy. They made lots of money in the vegetable business. As I see it, Toni’s teaching my mom what is her birthright, but that has been lost to her. Such small joys. Women joining to make a meal. Andrea and I are already smearing masa. We like to do it with our hands. When I come home, Andrea plans these tamale parties. We’ve been best friends for twenty-seven years now, since she was eleven and moved in up the street. It was summer then, and I tried to convince her I was an alien. ‘‘See my blue skin?’’ I twisted toward her, lifting my shirt to show my bathing suit stomach. When she tells this story she says she thought I was weird, but she liked it. I learn to be Mexican from Toni, Andrea’s mom. And others, too. Aunt Mati, from Mexico City, and Uncle Eddie, who went there to find her. Annetta, who became a world-class baton twirler. And my mom, too, but I don’t think she sees it that way. But with Toni it’s di√erent. Maybe it’s because of her awareness of ancestry. Maybe it’s because I spent so much time in her house when I was thirteen and seventeen and thirty-three and all the years in between. Slumber parties with mtv all night, mornings with co√ee and Danishes, scrambled eggs and bacon. Toni sits in her Mexican identity like she is resting into a well-worn sofa. I see it in her daily visits to her aging mother, the ease with which she slips into Spanish, how she knows all the Mexican films, music, and

xii

COLOR IN MY LINES

plays, how she laughs every time the grandchildren put the whoopee cushion under her butt. Maybe it’s because with Toni it’s assumed that being Mexican is a good thing, a source of pride. It’s not so much that she and I talk about all of this. It’s more the way I can call her if I need a recipe. It’s more the gifts that she gives me every Christmas: one year it’s the twisting ancestry of a Mexican family tree in Rain of Gold; then it’s the hand-carved wooden serving spoons. This year a ceramic tile of the indigenous symbol for the rain-cross, an image local to the desert region of our hometown. Here we know the importance of praying for rain. I see in Toni what would be lost to me otherwise. I don’t know if she knows it, but she helps me hear the rhythm of what my people have learned to forget. Here at the tamale party we’re all gathered together. I like when my mom and I hang out with Andrea and Toni. My secret hope is that my mom will hear this rhythm, too, and remember. This is the first Christmas since my dad’s passing. I came home to keep my mom moving through the holidays. She likes to keep her life so full of love and distraction that she doesn’t have time to mourn—her friends stop by, she delivers communion to people who can’t get to mass, she plays guitar every Friday with her women’s folk group. We’ve come here because of the particular warmth of this dining room. Because as soon as you step into this house, your rhythm slows down. No one has deadlines. No one is afraid they won’t get enough. No one is worried about what the neighbors might think. Andrea yells at anyone passing too fast in a car, ‘‘Slow down!’’ Usually they don’t, but I do. And my mom is slowing, too. I think she’s slowing, or is that just what I want to think? She’s telling this story: ‘‘We were flying standby on military flights for our honeymoon.’’ Her soft golden hands are pulling masa across a husk as she speaks. ‘‘And we kept not getting on. So we ended up staying in Alabama long enough that we had to do laundry.’’ I love these stories. They help me to re-member myself, as if I am weaving a tapestry of memory from these bits and pieces that are her words. I lean toward her as I reach for another corn husk. I’ve never heard this one, but there’s a familiar rhythm to my mom’s stories. ‘‘There’s a sign on the door to the laundromat that says, ‘Whites only.’ I say, ‘Frank, I can’t go in there!’ ’’ She’s performing herself, looking at us with wide eyes.

COLOR IN MY LINES

xiii

My stomach is tight. She is telling a story about race, that’s what’s di√erent. My breath gets shallow and I am looking, listening. ‘‘And Frank says, ‘Why not?’ ’’ she pauses, working toward the punch line. ‘‘And I say, ‘Because I have colored things in here!’ ’’ She sits back from the table like she does at the end of a story. She tilts her head back just slightly, smiling at us through softly lidded, mischievous eyes. She knows how to get people to laugh. But she’s missed this time. The air is too still. The punch line lies flat in the middle of the table, no one is moving to pick it up, and it hits me: she has spent all these years making white people laugh. G G G

Dream: I’m walking down a road past homes, large, but not ostentatious. I am looking at the beach, which I can see through an empty lot, when I notice two white men sitting there on beach chairs, chatting and sharing a drink as if they were on their own patio, not in the middle of an empty lot. I think it is a beautiful piece of land. I imagine it would be perfect for the ‘‘commune’’ my friends and I dream of building one day. There is a river on one side, the Pacific on the other. Jumping the river, I greet the men with a smile, fully aware that I am stepping into their space. ‘‘Nice piece of property! Are you gonna build a house here?’’ They are doing it as they can a√ord to, they tell me. A little at a time. I wonder how much the land cost and if there is more. I walk toward the water, approaching a woman facing the sun setting into the sea. Her frame is silhouetted by the bright orange exchange of light and water. I notice her hair, how it touches the small of her brown back, how it is black until her shoulder blades, then fades to burnt orange. The beach is quiet, except for the waves crashing close to the ocean’s edge, pounding the line between water and earth. I greet her in Spanish. ‘‘Don’t speak to me in Spanish,’’ she replies over her shoulder, turning her head only enough that I can see the silhouette of her profile. But I do: something like ‘‘discúlpame ’’ escapes my lips. I am caught o√ guard by her refusal of my overture, so I don’t have the presence of mind to correct myself. She says it again, this time a sharpness rising in her tone, ‘‘Do not speak to me in Spanish!’’ Something on the water’s edge catches my eye, pulling my attention xiv

COLOR IN MY LINES

from her. I bend to pick it up. I look at what I am holding: a money clip stu√ed with dollars and a U.S. passport. It’s my passport! I wake with a start, alone and unsettled. Mechanically, I steam milk for my co√ee, turning these images over in my mind. The black roots of her hair, the white men on their plot of land, my passport. In her bleached hair, I see my mom’s vigilance about protecting her skin, covering her neck with hats and scarves to keep the sun o√. How the woman turns away from the language that would mark her, as my mom leaves behind her name, how she recoiled at my gift, Borderlands—a book I thought captured ‘‘us’’ so aptly I wept when I read it. ‘‘I’m not angry like Gloria!’’ she insisted. I feel the same frustration with both of them for resisting these marks, for rejecting the overtures I presume would unite us, I imagine, in resistance. The milk foams to the top of the mug. ‘‘Who am I to mark them? Who am I to judge what they have done for their own survival?’’ My mind starting to spin, my stomach churns with a new color of shame. ‘‘Why is my waking filled with such arrogance?’’ And even now I’m wondering, who am I to write my mom in this way? Why do I tell you these stories, and not the other ones? How we drove cross-country together talking about all these hard things: sexuality, race, our family, how my choices to be di√erent scare her. Why not tell you about how the two of us ride waves together in the ocean whenever I come home? How she wears that funny rainbow-splotched bathing cap? How I can’t stop laughing when I see it bobbing in white wash as she tumbles toward the shore? How I would do anything for her? G G G

Who am I and why am I writing this book? I am Aimee Carrillo Rowe. A queer woman of Mexican, Anglo, and Franco descent, raised in a middle-class military family in southern California. That land, my mom’s people say, was once ours. ‘‘Now I have to pay to park on this land!’’ Papa would say of Malibu, Santa Mónica. The Marquez ancestors from Jalisco were the first to arrive in northern Mexico through a Mexican land grant, awarded to soldiers who foughts valiantly against the Spaniards to decolonize their country. How ironic that the honor would be remembered as a ‘‘Spanish land grant’’ by the COLOR IN MY LINES

xv

next generation, when it was actually an anti-Spanish land grant. Filipa Marquez would marry Eusebio Carrillo, who probably came from Guadalajara. Three ‘‘Eusebio Carrillos’’ came north to what is now California at that time, Uncle Eddie tells me. I know lots of Mexicans who will say, ‘‘We’re Spanish.’’ Refer to the red-headed grandmother, cherish the light-skinned children. Anything to move us further from the face of our own conquered truth. You don’t really believe them, but you say it to save a certain kind of face: ‘‘Look at that beautiful baby, so fair!’’ You know the story and the shame that drives it. What does it mean to cross color line? To lose that accent, color, name? To work with diligence to perform the unaccent, the uncolor, the unmarked self, the unself. At times these performances are enough—for an hour, a day, even for a lifetime. Sometimes it’s enough for generations to come. In the visual landscape of mainstream culture it appears that many ethnic whites have crossed. Many Irish have done it. And Russians, Italians, even Jews—for the most part. Or perhaps for as long as they let you. But the Mexican case is more conflicted, complicated by how color changes across our mestiza/o bodies, by how we were here first, by the Chicano movement, which o√ered us an alternative: brown pride. G G G

Pride was something that came after my mom. Brown pride was something that came after my mom married my dad, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Rowe. The night they met, he led her to the window for a look at his red ragtop Porsche. ‘‘What a turn-o√!’’ she always says when she tells the story. He pursued her for five years, even ate olives from between her toes in a fancy bar. She married him anyway. She married him and was transformed. She would never have to worry about racism again. She tells me how freed she felt when she got rid of that name: Alicia Carrillo. Now she is, to most of her friends, ‘‘Lee Rowe.’’ I didn’t used to, growing up, but now I cringe when I hear it. I didn’t used to, growing up, because I didn’t think about race then. And now that I do, her friends all seem so white to me. These white women who love me. For all my life, they have taken me in like a daughter. And I go there and soften in their arms. And even as I do, I feel the undertow of the color xvi

COLOR IN MY LINES

line tugging me down. I see their hands more than I should, how they curl around each other’s shoulders, darkening spots on soft cream skin. My mom doesn’t have those spots. Toni doesn’t. But the white women do. And I’m checking my own hands to see if do. Or if mine will be dark enough to withstand the harsh Califas sun, like those who were here first. I’m always looking at my own hands to see if I’m becoming them, to see if I see in myself what I see in them. We meet at dawn to hike up Mount Rubidoux, near my house. I hear them calling her, ‘‘Hi, Leeee!’’ They’re already at the base of the trail; we are still piling out of the car. ‘‘Aimee!’’ they are circling me with soft arms and breasts and bellies. ‘‘How have you been?’’ My words flee my mouth like pidgins, escaping the dark tunnel of my throat. If they really want to know the truth of it, how I am has to do with color and language and things I fear we can’t talk about in that moment. Do they see the color of my mother? Are they curious why I took her name? Do they even wonder? They don’t ask. And I haven’t told. It is this not seeing—this not asking, and my own not telling—that feels so white to me. It’s this fractured seeing—my selective presentation of self and their recognition of the fragments of me that make sense to them—that feels so white to me. It’s that who I am here is too tiny a sliver of who I want to be. And even though I want there to be more between us, I can’t seem to find the language to fill out the dark side of the sliver. I love them, and they all seem so white to me. And when I’m with them, I reckon with the fact that the whiteness I see in them is just a reflection, a projection, of my own. G G G

Last summer, as it turned out, would be my last opportunity to work things out with my pop before he passed over. After thirty-six years of fighting about sexuality, race, politics, the pill, parties, musician boyfriends, then girlfriends, whether ‘‘corporate elite’’ is an appropriate term when speaking of global politics—suddenly the conversation ends. It ends under fluorescent lights, him sinking into a hospital bed with white pressed sheets, me watching his swollen face for a final reply. But when the conversation was still alive, he loved to tell the story of our beginning, his and mine. He told this story when we had friends COLOR IN MY LINES

xvii

over for dinner. He told it to my friends at my graduation. He told it when he was feeling especially connected to me. How while he was in Viet Nam, I had learned to use the baby walker. How when he came home, he thought it a good idea to take his daughter out for a little walk. How I wobbled o√ the sidewalk, placing my walker in the street. How I began to move away from him, my legs swinging in strides too big, too bold, for my size. How he picked me up, placing me back on the sidewalk with a firm warning, ‘‘No!’’ Then me looking up at him, setting my jaw, placing my walker back in the street. Moving away from him again. ‘‘I knew I was beat!’’ He’d always finish the story this way. Sometimes I thought I could see tears in his eyes when he spoke this punch line. What must that return have been like for him? How to begin to assess how his comings and goings contorted our family, and countless others ravished in the wake of U.S. empire? Last summer. I am with him in the late afternoon, the sun sinking, casting long copper shadows through his bedroom window. He’s sitting up in bed doing a crossword puzzle in his T-shirt and underwear, his long legs crossed at the ankle. We both like to work in our beds. ‘‘Do you think of yourself as someone in an interracial relationship?’’ I know I’m asking him a bold question. His eyes are meeting mine over the top of those cheap half-glasses he gets at the Thrifty, his gray hair sticking up like an old stu√ed animal, or Albert Einstein’s. ‘‘What?’’ his voice is flat. Disinterested? Defensive? Firm? Does he really not understand what I’m asking him? I repeat the question, except maybe ‘‘race’’ is one of those inappropriate terms. ‘‘Do you ever think of yourself as in an intercultural relationship?’’ Unblinking, his gaze doesn’t falter, ‘‘No!’’ But the word comes out with an inappropriate force as he sits up, the newspaper falling over his legs. In that minute, he’s looking right through me and I’m still meeting his gaze. Then he looks away. Straightens his papers. When we get locked in that gaze, I’m scared and I’m fierce and I know it. Know it in my stomach and my breathing, in the solid way my feet are meeting the floor of his room. And I know I am hearing the rhythm of his forgetting, of our collective forgetting. G G G

Who are you when your ancestors have convinced the world of their whiteness? And who do you become when you betray this conviction? xviii

COLOR IN MY LINES

Who am I and why am I writing this book? I am a woman who is split by categories, by worlds and words. The color line is my spine. On one side golden hands are moving masa across corn husks; on the other side soft cream hands are moving to hold me. On one side of my back I carry la Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, La Malinche; on the other, Mother Mary and Eve. On one side are brown women, black women, women who know the taste of their color, sometimes salty, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter like poison. On the other side are white women. Some know the taste of color from the tongues of their lovers, or from the mouths of their friends. But many are numbed to the taste, more accustomed to the metallic tang of privilege. The color line is my spine. Sometimes it aches with the collision of color lines—when it’s the light, bright güera baby they boast about, when the love between women fails because the color line splits them, as I struggle to write my-self-in-community with integrity. Sometimes I imagine this spine is as a string of pearls, moving to a synchronized rhythm of blood and bone. Sometimes I can breathe in the face of these fears, create a sense of belonging that allows me to stand with pride, shoulder to shoulder with my sisters. It takes years of daily practice to hold this body together. And I know there are others like me. Las mestizas, las vendidas, the race traitors, the halfies, those who tremble at claims to authenticity. People who are brown and black and Native by blood or by belonging, but who look white. Whose hues are read in ways we cannot predict, cannot control—by white people as the color of ‘‘one of us,’’ by people of color as the color of dominance. But there’s a limit to skin color politics. There’s the color of the body, and then there’s the color of the commitment that burns like hot blue flame in our hearts. How will we, the ones you can’t tell about, make ourselves known? Even as the white world assumes our sameness, the dark color of our politics burns inside of us. Our work is to turn ourselves inside out. To locate ourselves through our loyalty and our bravery and our willingness to fight for radical visions. Our work is to risk privilege, to stain the color of our skin with the fluids of our hearts, to squeeze our hearts and leave the handprints on our bodies. And so we write. We read and we write and we continue to work it through and we organize. And so we write, to name a place for ourselves. COLOR IN MY LINES

xix

INTRODUCTION

On the Subject of Feminist Alliances

Power lines are those heavy cables carrying vital bits of data that gain relevance as they connect people across time and space. These lines of contact have become vital not only to how we live, work, and love, but also to relations of domination and resistance in the (post)modern world. Power lines take on di√erent forms for di√erent purposes. Sometimes they are weighty wires scooping up and down, up, down, connected by high and complicated webs of steel. Sometimes their thin dark wires are connected by tall brown creosoted poles, like so many totems of development, lining dirt roads in rural third world spaces. Sometimes power lines run underground, invisibly transmitting power from place to place—lighting up our homes, powering our computers, mechanizing our maquiladores. Power lines criss-cross the globe. Power lines are manmade circuits through which people are joined and power is transmitted. They are intentionally constructed. Without our recognition they do the invisible work of enabling the messy connectivity of lives.∞ Like so many webs criss-crossing the globe, feminist alliances are also power lines that connect us to one another and to circuits of power. We build alliances to link our lives together, to transmit power, and potentially for the purpose of transforming power. Through their mindful construction, these alliances function as sites where ‘‘power over’’ may be remade as ‘‘power with’’ and ‘‘power to’’ (Albrecht and Brewer 1990). What is required for such mindfulness is the recognition that the lines of intimacy, trust, and collaboration that we build with others are embedded in power. We too easily assume that whom we love is not political, is not something that we choose, is not a function of power. Belonging is something that just is. ‘‘Despite intense and frequent disavowal that whiteness means anything at all to those designated,’’ George Lipsitz observes (1998, viii), the insistence that race does not matter is belied by relational choices. Whites make virtually every major life decision around issues of race: whom they or their children may love, where they might work or go to school, what neighborhood they live in, who their friends

and colleagues are. These lines that connect us to others are not neutral; they are neither natural nor innocent. Alliances are the interface between intimacy and institutionality. The institutional function of our belongings is often di≈cult to detect precisely because we tend to experience these connections a√ectively—in our bodies and hearts. This intimacy obscures the potentially regressive conditions they produce for nonallies, those who fall outside of the purview of concern. What makes the life, or its loss, ‘‘grievable’’? Judith Butler (2004b) asks. If academic feminists are to build alliances designed to redistribute power, we must reckon with the ‘‘power’’ component of the lines of contact we build with others. We must reckon with the ways in which power relations are reproduced and potentially rewritten within these intimate sites of our belonging because our loyalties produce and are produced by a range of possible material and political conditions. This reckoning entails scrutinizing the modes of power and empowerment that drive our a√ective ties, and which those ties make possible. With whom do we build alliance and for what purpose? What kind of power is transmitted through those connections, and whose interests are served? Feminist alliances, especially those that span lines of power, are not automatic. They cannot be assumed, but must be consciously made— they must be ‘‘fought for’’ (Visweswaran 1994). The history of feminist struggle over questions of di√erence teaches us nothing if not that feminism itself is a site of political contestation in which power relations are reproduced along lines of race and class, nation and sexuality.≤ Feminist e√orts to build inclusive and transformative alliances often fail. Sometimes such alliances, like power lines, fray at the points where too much wear has occurred. Sometimes hot wires are exposed through their plastic covers. Sometimes we touch these hot wires and get burned; unsightly scars mar our skin. When it becomes easier to turn away than to touch the blemished interface between us, isolation and anger, pain and defensiveness keep us from our own healing. We stand in the early years of the twenty-first century in a world woven of so many webs of injustice. We inherit this legacy of centuries of colonial expansion. The power lines that connect us stand as conduits of the unevenness of colonial modernity. Who has power, and through which lines do they secure it? What do they use it for? How do we build power lines that connect us to others in, through, and for justice? How do we conduct power that allows all of our lives to thrive—not just 2

ON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

mine at the expense of yours? How do colonial ideologies blind us to the pain and joy and complexities in the lives of others? How do we navigate these dangerous territories that power lines span? This book works these questions, not for concrete answers, but to build connections; its impulse is to touch the blemished interface between academic feminists of di√erence.

THE POLITICS OF RELATION

On the Subject of Feminist Alliances My argument is that whom we love is who we are becoming, that the duo power/knowledge must also account for the politics of love. Power and knowledge gain traction at the sites of a√ective investment in which power is distributed, transmitted, between and among those who are constituted through belonging. I unpack the theoretical grounds and implications for this claim throughout the book, paying particular attention to the possibilities such a vision entails for transracial feminist alliances in the first chapter. I mean ‘‘love’’ not necessarily in the narrow sense of lovers, or even friends, although I mean those relations too—I mean ‘‘love’’ in the more expansive sense of whose lives matter to us.≥ Whose well-being is essential to our own? And whose survival must we overlook in order to connect to power in the ways that we do? Because questions of whom we love are inseparable from the politics of subject formation, belonging is political. The sites of our belonging constitute how we see the world, what we value, who we are becoming. The meaning of ‘‘self ’’∂ is never individual, but is forged across a shifting set of relations that we move in and out of, often without reflection. The goal of this project is to render tangible the political conditions and e√ects of academic feminist belongings to gesture toward deep reflections about the selves we are creating as a function of where we place our bodies and with whom we build our a√ective ties. I call this placing a politics of relation. It moves theories of locating the subject, a politics of location, toward a relational notion of the subject, a coalitional subject. This becoming, I propose throughout the chapters that follow, gives rise to the subject of feminist alliances. This theoretical project finds its traction in the study I undertake of feminist alliances between white women and women of color in the academy. I call such alliances transracial to acknowledge my assumption ON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

3

that deep connections across lines of di√erence are a transformative source.∑ The trans also taps into contemporary theoretical debates of racial, gender, class, and nation formation informed by poststructuralist and performative theories of the subject.∏ Transracial feminist alliances are expansive. They provide the basis for shared experience and meaning from which we are excluded if we stay within our own racial ranks. In this sense, the racial becomes transformed within such alliances. ‘‘Transracial’’ is a term that strives to braid U.S. third world (with its emphasis on the racial) and postcolonial feminist theory (with its emphasis on the trans) within a U.S. academic context, in an e√ort to mobilize the political insights that arise across geographical locations to rethink localized encounters from a di√erential theoretical framework. The trans draws upon the recent feminist work on transnational feminist alliances, which gestures toward the vitality of such alliances in transforming lives and building radical theory and praxis, but as of yet tell us little of the struggles that go on behind the scenes. Transnational feminist alliances are not automatic. Solidarity cannot be assumed, but must be fought for. But how do we fight? With whom? For whom? Against what? The study of transracial feminist alliances asks when they work, why they fail, and how the close observation of their formation provides the theoretical and political ground for a collective vision of subjectivity. Building on the work on feminist alliancesπ and the conditions that enable and constrain them,∫ I argue that alliances are a√ectively charged sites of connection in which intimacy and power become entwined. This connection, between intimacy and power, is one that is so subtle that we tend to overlook it. Yet it is precisely within sites of intimate connection where the big work gets done, where the important decisions get made, where power is transmitted. Who is present and who witnesses those moments (Haraway 1997)? While transnational and multiracial feminist alliances are often referenced within third world and antiracist feminist theory,Ω little sustained attention has been paid to what, exactly, we mean by these terms and how we put them into practice. Most texts, in and of themselves, testify to and perform the kinds of interventions such alliances make possible. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, for instance, introduce their edited collection, Scattered Hegemonies (1994), with the recognition that the work they have done in collaboration with their ‘‘close allies’’ has been an enabling condition for the transformative project they undertake. ‘‘In particular,’’ they note, ‘‘our understanding of the issues of gender and 4

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geopolitics has been transformed by our work over the years’’ with a host of allies—from friends and colleagues to the Asian Women’s Shelter to representatives of an academic journal—to render palpable the imperative of ‘‘the transnational links’’ they advocate in their collection in forging a progressive feminist agenda (2). Such gestures direct us to a vital departure from the self-reflexive move of situating the individualized feminist researcher, in that they call attention to the collective practices that are ‘‘crucial’’ to ‘‘feminist thinking, working, and writing.’’ While these writings underscore the importance of building transnational feminist alliances and the essays point to some of the conditions that enable and constrain their formation, they are not designed to directly encounter the relational conditions under which transracial work emerges and/or fails to do so. How should we conceptualize such alliances? How do we put them into practice? What are the conditions under which they arise? How do we navigate the stumbling blocks to their formation? The enduring quality of their alliances—that the transformative work they conducted took place ‘‘over the years’’—provides a potentially productive departure from previous theorization of coalition politics. Lisa Albrecht and Rose Brewer outline a temporal distinction, in their edited volume Bridges of Power (1990), between alliance and coalition: while coalitions refer to ‘‘groups or individuals that have come together around a particular issue to achieve a particular goal,’’ alliances function through a ‘‘new level of commitment that is longer-standing, deeper, and built upon more trusting political relationships’’ (3–4). A politics of relation seeks to move beyond strategic and temporary work of coalition formation, such as we find in Bernice Johnson Reagon’s ‘‘Coalition Politics’’ (1998), to consider the politics of becoming at stake in more sustained feminist praxis that must be built on trust and maintained with honesty, accountability, and commitment. Gloria Anzaldúa writes in Albrecht and Brewer’s collection that alliance work is ‘‘the attempt to shift positions, change positions, and reposition ourselves regarding our individual and collective identities’’ (Anzaldúa 1990, 219). Such shifts and repositionings are at stake in the movement beyond some of the current fault lines over racialized di√erence within feminism. An alliance analytic seeks to render intelligible the political e√ects of our enduring a√ective ties on who we imagine ourselves to be and the feminist futures we are inscribing. ‘‘We seek forms of segregation and phobic forms of organizing social reality that keep the fiction of those ON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

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[heterosexual and white] subjects intact,’’ Butler explains (2004a, 333). But to ‘‘submit to an undoing by virtue of what spectrally threatens the subject, in order to reinstate the subject on a new and di√erent ground’’ is to place the subject at the edge of the abyss of her self-knowing and then to nudge her in the direction of the other. What is at stake in this placing? Framing subject formation as a function of belonging—as opposed to a self-knowing individual or a subject constituted through fixed identities—allows for such ‘‘repositionings’’ to arise. It ushers in such ‘‘undoings.’’ It holds feminists accountable for the relational choices they make and the political e√ects of their a√ective investments. Alliance work compels us to reflect upon how we position ourselves and are positioned spatially. When Joanna Kadi writes that ‘‘every space lets you know who is welcome and who is not’’ (2003, 541), her reflection arises from her location in the U.S. academy—the ‘‘feminist’’ graduate classroom. Kadi is not alone among women of color who have called attention to the di≈culty of academia as a site of struggle, erasure, and feminist betrayal (see, e.g., Bannerji et al. 1992, Córdova 1998, Lee 2000, Mabokela 2001). Rhetorical gestures that erase the particularity of these struggles∞≠ or that seek to naturalize the whiteness of U.S. academia as an inert space, as opposed to a site of contestation and complicity, become complicit in the uneven racialization of academic feminism, a process I consider in chapter 3. As contemporary U.S. academic feminism negotiates its own institutional power, the terms of this negotiation must be situated within a frame of racialized di√erence. Robyn Wiegman assesses the paradoxes of power and resistance in her introduction to the edited volume Women’s Studies on Its Own, noting that ‘‘the inaugurating critique of institutional power that founded feminism’s academic intervention now exists in contradiction with the contemporary production of both academic feminists and their proliferating objects of study’’ (2002b, 2). The increasingly institutionalized forms in which academic feminism emerges, primarily within women’s studies departments, but across traditional academic disciplines as well, has compelled many feminist practitioners to grapple with its new-found power (Aisenberg and Harrington 1988, Crowley 1990, Guy-Sheftall 1998, Wiegman 2002a). ‘‘If feminists have achieved positions of power, and if feminist arguments have achieved a certain cultural weight,’’ Diane Elam (1997, 56) asks, ‘‘how is feminism to deal with this phenomenon?’’ Elam’s question reverberates across contemporary academic feminist discourse as feminist knowledge forms 6

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and sites of production gain cultural currency within the academy. The emergence of autonomous women’s studies programs and more recently, departments and Ph.D. programs, has provided an institutional home in which academic feminists may work in unprecedented spatial and institutional proximity to one another and mentor a still growing undergraduate and graduate student body. The rise in women’s studies majors and the formation of doctoral programs provide the conditions for (some) academic feminists to secure not only shelter, but institutional power as well. While this ‘‘success’’ would seem, at first glance, to provide a fruitful setting for progressive feminist work to get done, how to manage and productively deploy such power, as Elam’s question suggests, is no straightforward task. Academic feminism, many of its authors suggest, is in crisis, not only as a function of its contradictory relationship to power, but also of the destabilization of its object of study.∞∞ As academic feminism gains cultural currency across various registers of higher education, the relationship between feminist thought, the category ‘‘woman,’’ and the women’s movement becomes tenuous at best, generating an ‘‘increasing uneasiness, among many feminist scholars, sometimes overt despair, over the future of academic feminism’’ (Wiegman 2002a, 18). Questions over feminism’s future turn out to be inextricably bound to its present and past. E√orts to define its roots in social movement history (as the ‘‘academic arm of the women’s movement’’) signal the ambivalence that arises at a series of (inter)disciplinary disjunctures: between an e√ort to reinvigorate the leftist politics constitutive of the field formation and a nostalgia for an imagined pure space of radical feminist inquiry; between feminist-of-color critiques over white feminism’s exclusions and white feminism’s investments in its own gender-based marginality; between oppression and privilege, silence and voice, accountability and innocence. This ambivalence animates academic feminism’s relationship to race politics as questions of racialized di√erence arise forcefully, if all too infrequently, within this conversation.∞≤ The racialized bodies of women of color and third world feminist epistemologies materialize as specters, haunting the academic feminist project by rendering palpable its limits, contradictions, and vulnerabilities, its exclusions and unsavory political (and indeed a√ective) investments in various modes of domination. While these critiques constitute a major contribution to feminist thought productive of academic feminism’s crisis, postmodernism and ON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

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professionalism—as opposed to, or extracted from the politics of racism, (neo)colonization, and white supremacy—are most frequently referenced as the sources of feminism’s crisis. Certainly, postmodern incursions into the field have contributed to this object crisis through an insistence on undermining truth claims and the coherent subject, even as the professionalization of the project potentially generates competition among academic feminists and an academically driven imperative that frames the conditions of our labor. But racialized di√erence functions as a subtext to all of these debates, haunting the academic feminist project, demanding an accounting—a reckoning with power that few privileged feminists are willing to undertake. As such, feminists of color are positioned to respond to, as opposed to wield, power, as they make such demands of white feminists. ‘‘Chicana writers emulate the cries of La Llorona,’’ Edén Torres writes, ‘‘testifying to a state of perpetual marginality, su√ering the loss of something precious, and crying for justice or demanding redress for past wrongdoing’’ (2003, 242). Whose feminism has become institutionalized? And how does this privileged status frame the conditions for the emergence of an academically located third world feminism? How does the unevenly racialized terrain of academic feminism shape third world feminism’s object of critique (often white women or hegemonic feminism), as well as its reception? How does this terrain shape the conditions of possibility for transracial alliance formation? Chapter 4 explores the interconnections among the racialized terrain of academia, alliance formation, and the emergence and institutionalization of academic feminism. Who counts as an ally turns out to be a function of institutional power for many white women and since women of color tend to have so little of it, they are often rendered intelligible not as allies, but ambiguously described as ‘‘friends.’’ For such white women, feminism tends to be gender-exclusive. Yet for other white women, alliances with women of color are central to their lives and, by extension, to the feminist projects they generate. For women of color, alliances with white women are necessary and often productive, yet sometimes incommensurate with the feminism they seek to manifest. Transracial alliances among di√erently marginalized women of color broaden and complicate the scope and intersections constitutive of their feminisms, displacing any simplistic ranking of oppressions or unified notion of women of color, demanding self-reflexivity and an accounting with their own relative privilege. The positionings and repositionings formative of feminist subjectivi8

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ties, then, constitute and are constituted by the institutionalization of academic feminism. Feminist knowledge forms emerge out of (and, in turn, give rise to) these collectivities—whether segregated or integrated; testifying, lamenting, or atoning; solipsistic or reckoning. It is the ties that bind us that must be more fully understood if we are to generate ‘‘a common knowledge base, something more than television perspectives or single-issue alliances’’ (Shanley 2000, 206). My e√ort here is to apprehend this feminist crisis from a relational perspective to provide a point of entry to theorizing processes of feminist knowledge production and institutionalization as a function of racialized and heterosocial belongings. This move seeks to displace the individualistic articulation of the subject of feminism—a move that renders the forms of segregation and modes of accountability for this institutionalizing process invisible—to an alliance perspective designed to unearth the a√ective processes through which institutionalization adheres within the context of our daily practices. To theorize the connection between intimacy and institutional power is to attend to the uneven and potentially transformative e√ects for the subjectivities that are formed within this conjuncture. Alliances serve as the point of entry to theorize coalitional subject formation (Sandoval 2000), as opposed to the other way around. While identity is often conceptualized around the ‘‘I’’ as we make claim to being (‘‘I am . . .’’), alliances are conceptualized around the ‘‘we’’ as we make claims to belonging. This is not to suggest that the ‘‘I’’ disappears, but rather, that the ‘‘i’’ is multiple, shifting, and contingent upon the relational sites into which she inserts herself. These choices frame the experiences she encounters, how she interprets them, and the options she deploys for transforming them. As such, a politics of relation opens up new spaces for conceptualizing subjectivity, consciousness, agency, and experience in ways that move us productively through debates that often become mired over issues of identity and exclusion. The critiques of the racialized politics of such debates is that the political ground upon which women of color articulate their feminisms is often dismissed or undermined as essentialist.∞≥ Such criticisms tend to rely on individualistic notions of identity and consciousness, experience and agency, which are challenged by an alliance analytic. A politics of relation seeks to retain the political edge of these concepts, while putting them into motion as collective negotiations. A politics of relation moves us from a binaristic vision in which white women and ON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

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women of color are neatly divided (and eternally opposed) to one in which feminists are joined (or divided) over politics and, by extension, through shared (or segregated) experience. Politics, experience, consciousness, and subjectivity emerge as mutually constitutive moments in the ongoing process, or circuit, of alliance work. A politics of relation, theorized more fully in chapter 1, opens us to the necessity of retaining experience as an analytic resource, even as we put experience into motion and place it deeply within specific contexts of racialized, classed, and (hetero)sexed belongings. A politics of relation seeks to move beyond the individualistic foundations of location to provide a point of entry to theorize experience and agency as collective processes. If experience is something that a subject undergoes, she always comes to know the meaning of that experience within the modes of interpretation she cultivates within the collective. Experience itself is raw and meaningless, absent of interpretation (although such an absence could never be achieved). Indeed, it is impossible to ‘‘have experience’’ outside of the realm of interpretation. The broader cultural forces in which we are situated provide a vital layer of meaning through which we come to know experience. But as we make sense of our experiences, we turn to those we love and trust for guidance, and we provide this for others. Alternatively, the very occurrence of that experience is a function of belonging. For example, a white woman is more likely to gain experiential access to racism when she cultivates intimate ties with people of color (Frankenberg 1996). The range of options available to the subject—for experience, interpretation, and agency—arise out of the collectivities into which we insert ourselves or are inserted. Tracking the conditions that enable this range of options provides a point of departure to theorize coalitional subjectivity. Stuart Hall (1996b) views social location in relation to systems of meaning as the terrain that frames the range of possible points of entry into that system. The ‘‘gateway’’ through which a subject enters the market, Hall argues, determines how s/he ‘‘participates in the process’’ because the circuit ‘‘locates us di√erently—as worker, capitalist, wage worker, wage slave, producer, consumer, etc.’’ (1996b, 40). The gateway through which one enters any system of power relations, then, circumscribes the potentialities for how one will be positioned in relation to it. Just as Hall posits location as providing a range of options for how one might be located within an economic field, I argue that how we insert ourselves in commu10

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nity produces a range of options not only for what kinds of experience become possible (experience), but also for how we come to understand those experiences (consciousness), and how we seek to transform, challenge, and resist the conditions which produce it (agency). A politics of relation, then, entails understanding agency, experience, and consciousness as collective and interrelated moments within a circuit. How should we account for the relationship between these interrelated moments? Paula Moya argues that experience is the necessary but insu≈cient source of consciousness formation—that there is a ‘‘nonarbitrary experiential connection between being oppressed and the development of la facultad ’’ (2002, 89). Moya assumes a direct relationship between social location (the nexus of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability) and identity (ideological constructs formed through experiential and epistemic components) (2002, 13, 36–39). Thus women of color are more likely, due to their experience of multiple forms of oppression, to form radical consciousness. As in Hall’s analysis, then, social location, encoded on the body, determines breadth of potential sites for identity formation such that individuals whose bodies expose them to various forms of oppression are more likely to form resistive identities than those individuals whose bodies are likely to provide them with experiences of privilege. In both cases, however, the individual remains the site of theorizing these connections among experience, consciousness, agency, and location. How does such a frame enable us to account for the di√erences among women of relative privilege who form a radical consciousness and those who remain invested in maintaining that privilege? Is it possible for subjects to cultivate a consciousness, a set of experiences and modes of agency that run counter to the social forces constitutive of their location? Can white women form a woman-of-color consciousness? Is it possible for a Chicana to form a black feminist consciousness? Can a straight white man form a queer lesbian-of-color consciousness? And, more important, under what conditions might we form collective, intersectional, and counterhegemonic consciousness? What experiential conditions and forms of collective action might ensue? I undertake these questions suggesting that our capacity to forge connections across power lines creates the conditions of possibility out of which we may respond to them a≈rmatively. A politics of relation o√ers a frame to foreground the conditions under which our a√ective investments emerge, as well as the fissures and fault ON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

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lines that constitute feminist di√erence. For such a frame to render visible, or otherwise tangible, the relational practices conducive of transracial feminist alliances, it must provide a relational approach to the politics of speaking and listening. Framing this political conundrum associated with the problem of speaking for others (Alco√, ‘‘The Problem of Speaking for Others’’) not exclusively as the responsibility of the speaker—isolated from the hearer—but rather as a relational dynamic, embedded in power, refigures questions of accountability at the heart of these debates. It takes relational work to learn to hear and speak across power lines, and this work potentially reconfigures the terms of subalternity. My e√orts to theorize these conditions drive chapter 4. Subalternity has been theorized as a condition of absolute marginality: ‘‘By subaltern I mean those removed from lines of social mobility’’ (Spivak 2004, 531). This articulation of subalternity arises through the incapacity of the Western/Northern subject of privilege to hear, listen to, or cultivate the cultural and anti-imperialistic lens through which to render the inscriptions of the subaltern intelligible. Such a frame productively exposes the politics of accountability in claims to transparent representation (Spivak 1988); it also too easily inscribes the subaltern as some abjected subject, or object, who lives halfway around the globe, who may too easily remain removed from our a√ective experiential fields. This spatial and a√ective divide creates the risk of romanticizing the subaltern: we hope that if/when we encounter her, we will be able to hear because of all of the work we have done to ‘‘unlearn our privilege’’ (Spivak 1990). I pose subalternity not (primarily) as a description of subjectivity, or lack thereof, but rather as an ongoing relational process in which we engage on a daily basis, particularly if we are dedicated to oppositional political and feminist praxis: subalternity as verb, not noun. In transracial alliance we are constantly negotiating how to productively speak and listen across power lines. There, at the limit of language, we encounter that divisive subtext which the text cannot speak (I am afraid of black women, white people will inevitably disappoint me, Latinas are really white people, queers are perverts, straight people are less evolved . . . ): that knowledge or experience or anger or vision which cannot be accommodated by the rules for belonging to ‘‘civil’’ society. How do we begin to rewrite this limit? The writings of women of color provide a way in. Audre Lorde (Lorde 1984) teaches us to learn to hear the rhythm of one another’s anger. ‘‘En qué voz?’’ María Lugones asks (2003, 45), and ‘‘anchored in which plane’’ and for what purpose . . . 12

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and ‘‘do I trust myself to you?’’ ‘‘If there is a hesitation with which I speak,’’ Joanna Kadi writes, ‘‘it is because I am surrounded by spaces filled with my silences. If you want to hear me, listen to my silences as well as my words ’’ (2003, 541). Aída Hurtado warns us of the ‘‘tricks of whiteness’’: the ‘‘pendejo game,’’ she argues ‘‘will allow me to gain intimate knowledge of your psyche, which will perfect my understanding of how to dominate you’’ (1996, 135). Or Trinh’s mimicry of white woman’s sincerity: ‘‘Despite my rhetoric of solidarity, I inwardly resist your entrance into the field, for it means competition, rivalry, and sooner or later, the end of my specialness’’ (1989, 86). These are the questions and promptings of subalternity that are most productive for us to ask from a perspective of academic feminist alliance formation, because these are the demands being made by and of us. These questions place us squarely in the work of alliance building in which our subjectivities risk criticism and require transformation. In order to enter into transracial alliance we must be prepared to productively engage such questions and promptings. We must be prepared to listen and speak di√erently. Sherene Razack pushes us beyond the mind/ body, reason/emotion dichotomies in the direction of ‘‘instinctual immediacy.’’ She calls us to forgo the ‘‘quest for knowledge, that is to definitively know, either through the heart or the mind, and instead, question one’s point of departure at every turn’’ (1998, 53). Transracial feminist alliances call us out on multiple fronts: the politics of our communication practices, our visions of ourselves and of others; our very ontologies are all at stake, moving toward a posture of vulnerability, responsibility, and deep and compassionate curiosity about how we got to where we are—a willingness to see and know and feel in radically new ways.

STONE REFLECTIONS

On the Relational Politics of Theory Production What might a politics of relation mean for our feminist methodologies or for the production and reception of knowledge? This is the primary question driving chapter 2 and the impetus to position myself-inrelation, which compels the narrative preface. The movement across theory, criticism, and storytelling marks my e√ort to reflect on a politics of relation across modes of inscription. My reflections arise from my ON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

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own experience in community, in conversations with other people—in bodies and in books. Like stones you pick up on the beach and carry in your pocket until they get warm, these musings occur close to the body. When theory and experience connect, the collision creates sparks to light a path that casts new shadows. These reflections warm the spaces within theory: theory is a creation of the body, of experience, and of belonging. The notion of building theory from experience is established, if contested, within the realm of feminist and cultural studies. The epistemological claim of standpoint theory is that where one stands in relation to society determines, or frames, how one will interpret the world.∞∂ It is this question of ‘‘determination’’ that remains contested. Some theorists go so far as to say that the relationship between experience and consciousness is causal.∞∑ Others say that where one enters a circuit of power frames the range of experiences and interpretations one can have within that social field (Hall 1996b). Some suggest it is a productive point of departure for our theorizing (Bannerji 1992, Smith 1987), while others raise concerns that to rely on experience as the unexamined ground of our theorizing is potentially dangerous (Scott 1998). This project seeks to extend these debates in a few ways. My assumption is that experience cannot not inform our theorizing. And to act as if it doesn’t—by arguing explicitly against the political viability of experience-based theorizing or by implicitly erasing our relationally constituted subject positions as knowledge producers—obscures not only the role of the interested author, but also, and more important for the current task, fails to acknowledge the alliance function of the text. How does one situate oneself within the text? The problems of locating the subject have been noted: the ‘‘mantra’’ of race, class, and gender is not su≈cient; ‘‘navel gazing’’ is counterproductive; rendering the continental author transparent is an exercise of epistemic violence, a blatant reassertion of privilege; a failure to interrogate the ‘‘standpoint, motivation [and] direction’’ of one’s white identity (hooks 1990, quoted in Keating 1995, 902).∞∏ These critiques are vital as they underscore the limit point of atomistic approaches to authorizing politics, but they do not provide us with a writing practice that transgresses this limit. The contribution I seek—as performed through narrative preface and theorized as a bridge methodology in chapter 2—is to recast the speaking position of the author on the other side of individualism. To locate her beyond a list of identity categories, which may or may not tell us much, 14

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to consider how I might be framed as a subject formed through belongings to a series of communities ushers in a host of new questions. If selfreflexive collective practice (Mohanty 2003) is formative of decolonization—what, then, is the relationship between the self capable of such reflexivity and the collective productive of this subject? As a subject of belonging, my work is to recognize that where I place my loyalties, the ways in which I fit in and stand out, the moments I can speak and those in which I cannot—the accumulation of these moments is who I am becoming. In this sense, theory production is a collective project. Ideas and experiences, values and interpretations always take place within the context of our relational lives. Whom we love becomes vital to the theory we produce and how it might be received. The text is neither produced nor received in isolation. Others are involved. This relational move of situating the author is especially salient for me since I have no home in identity: I have never been easy with claims of ‘‘I am. . . .’’ I am, if anything, an inauthentic, queer Chicana. A Chicana falsa.∞π ‘‘But many Chicana writers,’’ Edén Torres writes, ‘‘from Gloria Anzaldúa to Michele Serros, are trying to create such a space, where you can express a kind of cultural nationalism and still make room for the mixing of cultures’’ (Torres 2003, 56). What does it mean, then, to theorize the politics of relation constitutive of the Chicana falsa author? George Sanchez has argued that the field of American studies would benefit if it engaged in a decentering practice: to take Latina/o studies seriously would be to cultivate a new centering practice for resistive knowledge production.∞∫ Following Sanchez’s de/recentering move, as he displaces (Anglo) ‘‘America’’ to center ‘‘Latin America’’ as the point of departure for theorizing ‘‘American studies’’—I propose decentering individualistic notions of self as author and absent, disembodied, unmarked author. I favor centering a coalitional subject as a series of contingent moments of (non)belonging, a Chicana falsa as a relational point of departure for such theorizing. The conditions of (non)belonging that shape both my institutional location and my movement within and among di√erently racialized communities enable me to write a politics of relation as a process of marking the power relations constitutive of this location and its inherent mobility and transitivity. The centering practice I undertake, as chapter 1 argues, draws its strength from the politics that di√erential belonging enables. Drawing on Chela Sandoval’s (2000) notion of di√erential consciousness, I ask: ON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

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how is power transmitted through our movement across di√erent sites of belonging? The risks of such a project are aptly noted in Rachel Lee’s skepticism of academic women of color ‘‘dwelling in multiple sites’’ (2000, 86)—an ‘‘extraterritorial roving’’ that enables ‘‘the progress narrative Women’s Studies wishes to create for itself ’’ (89). Lee’s sense that feminist pedagogy should grapple with ‘‘how women of color figure in the present teleological crises of Women’s Studies’’ (90), however, need not be displaced by the gesture of centering the politics at stake in shifting belonging. This is not to counter her powerful claim that ‘‘guerrilla action must begin to seize territory or dissolve’’ (99), but to suggest that we must work from the interstitial places where we can secure some institutional power, and to acknowledge that sometimes it is productive to disengage from those sites of violence. It is also to acknowledge (not necessarily to romanticize) the flexible knowledge forms that arise from our capacity to move across discursive registers, political communities, and ideological formations. Indeed my own institutional positioning, simultaneously inside and outside of women’s studies, creates the conditions of possibility for me to strive for such an intervention. What might be gained from centering a contingent location, a politics of relation, especially if that is where I stand now? I would suggest that such a centering reveals some of the slippery components of racial identities and the investments that drive the politics of our relations. As Chicana falsa, you are a canvas for other people’s imaginations and relational needs. You become an open text upon which others may inscribe themselves in relation to you, may project themselves through you. White to accommodate the Anglo need for sameness: ‘‘How did you get so tan?’’ is a question you hear in the dead of winter. Brown as you slide in next to your brown sister, ‘‘This house smells like beaners!’’—of beans boiling on the stove, tortillas, oil. White to the black folks who don’t know you, yet. And always that feeling of di√erence in unmarked space. If every space lets you know who is welcome and who is not, somehow you feel this fact from a young age. From the first memories of being swallowed by the big yellow bus to the awkward silences at academic parties when someone asks you what your book is about and, even though it’s your book, somehow they know more about the topic than you do. Even though it’s your book, your words fail you within this context. How do you name the liminal space you occupy? How do you explain that you imagine this liminality to

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hold tremendous promise for all of us in reimagining who we are becoming? Becoming in alliance? All this shifting and sliding can be unsettling. From such a (non)location, grids of positionality jam: ‘‘The aim of the positionality model was to open a window on local resistance in the name of change,’’ writes Brian Massumi (2002, 3). ‘‘But the problem of change returned with a vengeance. Because every body-subject was so determinately local, it was boxed into its site on the cultural map. Gridlock.’’ The question, then: ‘‘How does a body perform its way out of a definitional framework that is not only responsible for its very ‘construction,’ but seems to prescript every possible signifying and countersignifying move as a selection from a repertoire of possible permutations on a limited set of predetermined terms?’’ (3). And what of the shifting, relational body in motion across contingent sites of belonging? What of the nonpresent potential to vary, not only in motion, but also in between? How does a body perform positionality in relation to an ill-fitting definitional frame that hangs on her frame like big brother’s hand-me-downs?

A STUDY OF / TOWARD FEMINIST ALLIANCES

The impetus for this study emerges from those moments of belonging and nonbelonging, and the tensions that arise from multiple and often antagonistic belongings, that arise in transracial alliance. As Chicana falsa, I often find myself as a bridge between women of di√erence. As Donna Kate Rushin writes in ‘‘The Bridge Poem’’ (1981, xxi), doing so involves paving the way for understanding, empathy, and ideally political solidarity among disparate groups: I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks To the ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friends’ parents

Out of this lived experience of bridging—mother to daughter to students to friends, queer to straight to trans to questioning, white women to women of color to women in the middle—arises both a recognition of where each finds herself in relation to the other and a desire to mend

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the antagonisms. Especially as the divide between white women and women of color has been so profound within feminist theory and activism, and as Chicana falsa, I often find myself straddling their lives, I thought it would be useful to speak directly to feminists about what this divide looks like from here. I draw my research for this study from a series of face-to-face communication interactions with a variety of self-defined academic ‘‘feminists.’’∞Ω Between 1999 and 2001 I spoke with twenty-eight women: ten women of color and eighteen white women.≤≠ They shared with me stories of their academic careers, alliances, feminist struggles, and identifications. Their stories gesture toward points of connection and contestation among feminists across power lines. They bump up against the uneven terrain posed by academic life for white women and women of color and a range of di√erently enabled and constrained tactics and theories on feminist survival within the academy. I ponder their stories in an e√ort to point to the conditions under which transracial feminist alliances can productively function and, more often, the conditions under which they fail. By failure I do not mean an end to be avoided, a source of moral judgment of self and other, or as the negation of ‘‘success.’’ Rather, reading failures becomes a methodology for locating the various fault lines and limit points that frame our feminist projects—the crises productive of our feminist futures. Failure gestures toward the various limit points faced by any progressive project. In the case of failed transracial feminist alliances, this study seeks to reveal such limit points. I analyze the failed moments of transracial feminist alliance within these stories in order to locate the points of disconnect, as well as the moments of potential intervention. This study is not meant to produce knowledge under a representational model assumed and promoted within the social sciences. My analysis of these conversations with twenty-eight women is not meant to transparently reflect what is happening among feminists of di√erence within academic life. It is, rather, a rhetorical analysis. This is not to say that I don’t seek to draw connections between what these women shared with me and broader conversations occurring in the fields of women’s and cultural studies. My e√ort is to work with their specific stories in relation to contemporary feminist and cultural studies debates to map some of the contours that give shape to the racialized fault lines informing the mutually productive relationship among academic feminist theorizing, institutional life, and the relational practices in which 18

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these women engage. My approach strives to tease out these connections without reverting to universalizing claims that, in turn, reify the categories that my theorizing seeks to problematize. I draw on several techniques in these e√orts. First I frame my analysis of these women’s responses as a series of self-stagings—representations of self and other in community—as opposed to claims to the ‘‘real’’ or revelations of truth. How is this woman revealing, or crafting, her story to me at this time? Who does she think ‘‘I’’ am? How does she frame the various players, including ‘‘herself,’’ in her account? I take up these questions in chapter 2. Second, my attention to the singularity, as well as the identitybased overlaps and ruptures, in these women’s stories aims to invite readers to identify, or to disidentify, with the women in the accounts. To the extent that readers are able to find their own faces in these accounts, the work of the text operates not through the formation of a truth paradigm, but one based on (dis)identification, or (non)belonging. As such, the interventions I seek within and between accounts aims to provide alternatives to the variously positioned readers of the text. I strive to render these accounts with compassion, to provide an opening and a passage through the problems posed by racialized di√erence within academic feminism. Finally, by weaving the women’s narratives with feminist and cultural theory I strive to place their stories in conversation with contemporary issues and debates that define the contours of feminism. And for all of these e√orts to displace essentialist logics, to avoid the pitfalls of truth claims, to reflexively unravel identity categories and my own positionality—I fail as I encounter, at every turn, the limits of language. The women of this study contacted me in response to a mass email (see Appendix A) I sent out seeking ‘‘self-proclaimed academic feminists’’ who would be willing to talk to me about ‘‘how race, national origin, ethnicity and class function in feminist alliance formation.’’ Explaining that ‘‘the specific focus of my study is power balance or imbalance among feminist academics,’’ I hoped to draw feminists who shared my interest in addressing how di√erence functions to unevenly privilege feminists and divide us from one another, and also locating ways to ‘‘balance,’’ or bring us together. Two years later, as I sit down to write this book, to share my ideas and observations with others (possibly including those women who participated in the study), my interest in this examination of power remains. My hope now is that the openness and honesty and generosity with which these women shared their ON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

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lives with me are a gesture of our shared interest; they placed themselves vulnerably in my hands so that we might do some work to move us somewhere we are not. As one white feminist shared at the close of our conversation, ‘‘I think that you’re trying to get to these issues and so I’m trying to be as honest as I can because, like I said, I think we aren’t being honest about those things. I may look stupid or foolish, but I trust you to do it in a way that will help.’’ My intention is to meet vulnerability with vulnerability, honesty with honesty, generosity with generosity, but much of what I have to say is di≈cult, challenging, uncomfortable —both for me and for those who encounter my work. These women’s positionalities are suggestive of the relational practices through which racialized di√erence becomes institutionalized within the academy. Their positionalities map perhaps too neatly onto their institutional locations: the white women tend to hold positions of institutional authority (deans, chairs, professors, administrators), while women of color tend to hold junior and subordinate positions (junior faculty, lecturers, graduate students). This is not to say that counterexamples do not exist of academic women of color who hold tremendous institutional power; of white academic feminists who are marginalized. The exceptions among these women are one African American woman who is the chair of her department, a Chicana who is a full professor, and two white women who are graduate students. But for the most part, the institutional cartographies of their lives arise within the institutional constraints shaping feminist presence within the academy. The racialized institutional map of their biographies calls into question the color-blind rhetoric through which the academy seeks to articulate itself. The tangible experiences they share reveal some of the relational contours of the racialized, gendered, and (hetero)sexed terrain of academia. Both the content of stories shared by white women and women of color and the discrepancies between their stories signal the structures of racialized institutionality. My interactions with women of color intimate institutional racism as a tangible factor that shapes their daily experiences. Their experiences range from students acting out in their classes and using institutional means to sanction them; to white feminists fetishizing, betraying, tokenizing, or sabotaging them; to white men exoticizing or erasing their racialized sexualities; to men of color treating them as potential lovers, mothers, or daughters of subordinate status. ‘‘As an African American woman,’’ an assistant professor explains, 20

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‘‘I don’t think that most whites see me as a sexual being.’’ White feminists, alternatively, provide widely positive accounts of their academic advancement: supportive colleagues in key positions, finding appropriate outlets for their work, most facing little or no struggle advancing in their careers. Several women describe their relationships with white men in familial terms, relating the connection between this relational status and their own institutional advancement. ‘‘I adored him,’’ one feminist says, ‘‘and he really adored me and we just, you know, he’s like a father figure, and he so he really helped me a lot. And so I think I was chosen for a number of reasons that weren’t purely academic.’’ Chapter 3 analyzes these di√erently racialized relational moments in relation to the inauguration of feminism’s subject and its ensuing institutionalization. I undertake the mutually constitutive relationship between feminism and alliance in chapter 4. The assumptions of inclusion that constitute feminism make the institutionalized oppression women of color encounter, often in relation to white feminists, doubly di≈cult to navigate. Not only do such experiences produce dissonance around the ideals that feminism promises, but also because of the di≈culty feminists of color often experience in their e√orts to mobilize institutional support (Anzaldúa 1990). If many of these white women gain institutional currency through their a√ective ties to white men, the a√ective distance that characterizes their relationships with women of color may present institutional challenges for the latter. Adrienne Rich’s notion of ‘‘white solipsism’’ resonates with the accounts of several white women regarding their relationships with women of color: ‘‘I believe that white feminists today, raised white in a racist society, are often ridden with white solipsism—not the consciously held belief that one race is inherently superior to all others, but a tunnel-vision which simply does not see non white experience or existence as precious or significant, unless in spasmodic, impotent guilt-reflexes, which have little or no long-term, continuing momentum or political usefulness’’ (1979, 306). While Jacqui Alexander entreats us to forge our feminisms through our ‘‘yearning’’ for one other (2002, 91), Rich’s argument underscores the absence of such yearning—a white female view of women of color as neither ‘‘precious’’ nor ‘‘significant.’’ The experiences of marginality that women of color experience, both within their relationships with white women and within the uneven sociopolitical relations that constitute them, recede from the view of white women or arise ‘‘spasmodically’’ and laden with guilt. As such, no critique can be heard, no active enON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

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gagement can arise, for there is no a√ective tie through which to conduct the transformative work, to remake the subjectivities at stake in this production. In this sense, the subalternity of women of color within feminist contexts is not a function of the absence of voice, or compelling arguments, or beautifully written theory, poetry, and prose. It is a function of nonbelonging to and with white women. It is a political failure, first and foremost, not of the intellect, but of the heart. The flip side of women-of-color accounts of the pain they experience due to institutionalized racism is white women’s limited capacity to articulate how racialized di√erence animates their academic lives. As we broached the topic of racism in the academy, sometimes they appeared defensive and other times they diverted the conversation, performed through a series of nonverbal gestures and verbal content. For instance, nonverbal gestures (like stuttering, laughing, crying) and verbal content (such as denying the connection between the whiteness of their institutions and their own feminist practices) inflected their communication. I reflect on this nonfluency around racialized di√erence in chapter 2. The lack of diversity in their intimate spheres, it seems, leaves many white women at a loss for how to communicate ‘‘race.’’ This lack may become a source of discontentment and potential (self)victimization. ‘‘I have to be in a one-down position because I haven’t been able to also make it a good environment for people of color,’’ one woman protests as she cries. I unpack such moments for their recentering dynamics as well as the potential for a more progressive posture to emerge. The move to tears can become a moment of possibility for hearing di√erently. Anzaldúa writes of the possibilities that accompany such arrebatos: ‘‘When two or more opposing accounts, perspectives, or belief systems appear side by side or intertwined, a kind of double or multiple ‘seeing’ results, forcing you into continuous dialectical encounters with these di√erent stories, situations, and people. Trying to understand these convergences compels you to critique your own perspective and assumptions’’ (2002a, 547). Judith Butler explores the possibility for alliance that opens with the arrival of grief; that mourning the loss of someone brings us to fundamentally question not only who ‘‘you’’ are, but also who ‘‘I’’ might be: ‘‘On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well’’ (2004b, 22). This questioning opens us to glimpse the tie that binds us, that space in between, the bond. In this sense, disorientation is productive. In the pages that follow, I invite readers to encounter their own faces 22

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within the accounts shared by the women of this study, or perhaps in my own. Locating a face,≤∞ not as a totalizing gesture, but as a moment of overlap or disjuncture, strives in the direction of an ethical singularity on the other side of feminist innocence. The degree to which we can find bits and pieces of our own stories, here reflected and refracted through multiple tellings, provides a point of entry into a series of movements across power lines. Who will be included in the circuits of power we conduct? What kind of power will we transmit and whose interests will be served? How will our intimacies inflect our institutional practices, the selves we are becoming, and the feminist futures we may anticipate? A series of questions ensue that seek to move us in the direction of each other—a direction in which we are already moving. If such a movement provides some semblance of a map, a cartography of belonging, then we stand to gain a richer understanding of how our placement in community is making us. Who and with whom, then, do we wish to become?

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1. BE LONGING

Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation

I am writing to you from my girlfriend’s pu√y red chair perched by the window, looking out over the lake as fall blows into Iowa, now my ‘‘home.’’∞ Except when I refer to ‘‘home’’ from here, I mean California. But when I refer to ‘‘home’’ from there, I mean right here. I belong in these places. I belong to and with people here and there. And I long for each in its absence, and neither is complete without the other. And it’s more than these two. There’s also Seattle, the rainy state where I worked on a Ph.D. and delivered my sister’s son beside my brother-in-law. Then there’s Connecticut where I lived by the sea and worked hard and sometimes joyfully for a year. I am not ‘‘the same’’ here and there. In each I long for the other. This chapter aims to provide a glimpse at what is at stake in a politics of relation. The theoretical frame I outline gestures toward what is possible when feminists of privilege≤ account for their investments in and complicity with domination. In this sense, the frame I outline under the rubric of ‘‘be longing’’ is, in many ways, inconsistent with the logics of exclusion and segregation that arise in the following chapters. This disjuncture marks the fragmented location of the Chicana falsa, of the bridge called my back, of the abyss between what constitutes the deeply embedded structures of racism that constitute our daily lives and the sketch of what is possible as we attend to the institutional intimacies of this dailiness. It speaks to where we are, even as it gestures toward what might be possible. In many ways it underscores the power of hegemonic belongings to interpellate subjects to remain complicit with the strictures of segregation and the a√ective, material, and political consequences for doing so. This chapter fills out the argument that whom we love≥ is political. The sites of our belonging constitute how we see the world, what we value, who we are (becoming). The meaning of self is never individual, but a shifting set of relations that we move in and out of, often without reflection. I aim to render palpable the political conditions and e√ects of our belonging to gesture toward deep reflection about the selves we are

creating as a function of where we place our bodies, and with whom we build our a√ective ties. I call this placing a politics of relation. It moves theories of locating the subject to a relational notion of the subject. It moves a politics of location from the individual to a coalitional notion of the subject. The chapter title plays on the notion of interpellation. Louis Althusser’s well-known parable (1998) of a cop hailing someone, ‘‘Hey, you there!’’ reveals this function of power. The subject must respond to the hailing because she recognizes that it is she who is called. Whether she chooses to run from the police o≈cer, or turn to face her; whether she complies or rebels, who she is constituted in her recognition that she has been hailed—her recognition of that she is the subject of this hailing. ‘‘Be longing’’ seeks to provide a potentially resistive hailing, or what Chela Sandoval (2000) calls ‘‘reverse interpellation.’’ ‘‘Be’’ and ‘‘longing,’’ phrased as two words, placed beside each other, not run together, phrase a command that disrupts, and thus renders visible, the terms that inform ‘‘belonging.’’ The command is to ‘‘be’’ ‘‘longing,’’ not to ‘‘be still,’’ or ‘‘be quiet,’’ but to be longing. This being is a command to which we are already responding. We are always already being hailed by our various (be)longings from the moment of our birth, from those moments well before our births: moments of conquest and settlement, of miscegenation and antimiscegenation, of mixing and blending and resistance. We tend to overlook the ways that power is transmitted through our a√ective ties. Whom we love, the communities that we live in, whom we expend our emotional energies building ties with—these connections are all functions of power. So the command of this reverse interpellation—signified by the empty space between ‘‘be’’ and ‘‘longing’’—is to call attention to the politics at stake in our belongings, to attend to the ways in which our being is formed through our longings, and to envision alternative modes of interpellation. How might our subjects be constituted if we were hailed by the needs and demands, struggles and joys, of those whose lives and loves are excluded from the realm of our a√ective economies (see Butler 2004b, Gross 2006)? This work is to reverse, or better, to multiply the sites of power that hail us, urging us to consider the ways in which power becomes intelligible through a politics of love. This shift∂ gestures toward a frame in which we imagine the subject as engaged in a continual process of placing herself at the edge of her self and leaning and tipping toward the others to whom she belongs, or with whom she longs to be—or those 26

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others who become her. Jean Luc Nancy (1991) calls this tipping the clinamen in his e√orts to think the relationship among the limits of community, the failure of communism, and the formation of the ‘‘individual.’’ He writes: ‘‘One cannot make a world with simple atoms. There has to be a clinamen. There has to be an inclination or an inclining from one toward the other, of one by the other, or from one to the other.’’ The clinamen evokes the moment in which poetry ‘‘swerves’’ from its structured path (Thom Swiss, personal communication, December 9, 2003); the path from which the subject would potentially swerve is that of the lone traveler, the individual. In its most radical form, this swerve would entail unmooring the subject from the individual, framing her becoming as always already structured through the various communal sites into which she is inserted and inserts herself. There is no subject prior to infinitely shifting and contingent relations of belonging which temporarily define the contours of her being. A politics of relation∑ may be understood through the metaphor of a body in motion: this body ‘‘does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation’’ (Massumi 2002, 4). As with the body, the subject does not arrive at its becoming once and for all through its stagnant signification within a particular moment in time, although salient moments may stand out as particularly punctuated. Rather, the subject arrives again and again to her own becoming through a series of transitions—across time and space, communities and contexts—throughout the course of her life. She may be known, then, not through her fixity within logics of the mythic ‘‘I,’’ but rather by virtue of her own variation. Belonging is the condition of possibility for this variation (Segrest 2002). A politics of relation is not striving toward absolute alterity to the subject, but rather to tip the concept of subjectivity away from individualism and in the direction of the inclination toward the other so that being is constituted not first through the atomized self, but through its own longings to be with. Belonging precedes being. I seek an alternative to a notion of identity that begins with ‘‘I’’—as does the inscription ‘‘I-dentity,’’ which announces itself through its fixity: ‘‘I am . . .’’—to a sense of ‘‘self ’’ that is radically inclined toward others, toward the communities to which we belong, with whom we long to be, and to whom we feel accountable. Perhaps ‘‘positionality,’’ with its multiply placed ‘‘i ’s,’’ is a more appropriate signifier.∏ This is the BE LONGING

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space I seek to name in the following section of this chapter, to be revisited in the third section. I think of it as di√erential belonging— shifting the terms of interpellation from the individual subject to the spaces between them. These belongings may be multiple, shifting, and even contradictory (in terms of the norms they produce, the politics that drive them, the conditions for loving they request, or demand): family, neighborhood, friends, allies, colleagues, social groups, lovers, nations, transnations. These sites of belonging are political as they operate in relation to power: with and through, as well as against, in resistance to, and possibly in directions that redefine and redistribute it. The inclination in the final pages of the chapter is to think more fully the latter. There I consider stories and theories from those who live that potentiality.

TOWARD A FEMINIST POLITICS OF RELATION

Location, Speaking, Belonging Tell me / Whom you love, and I’ll tell / You who you are. —Creole saying, quoted in Lazarre 1992, 132

In this section I argue that the politics of location frames ‘‘location’’ through articulations of identity in which the relational conditions productive of that location are erased. As such, the role and conditions of belonging, as well as the potentially critical agency involved in its constitution, get overlooked. This erasure gives rise to and reifies an individualistic approach to location, eliding the subject’s production through the various modes of belonging into which she is interpellated—to whiteness, to other women as lesbian, and to U.S. citizenship, for instance—without interrogating the conditions that enable, or would potentially disrupt, those communal sites which hail our a√ective investments. The analysis in this section seeks to render these conditions visible, or otherwise palpable, in order to enable the formation of critical agency, in the form of new modes of accountability for one’s location. To do so I untangle the ways in which location, speaking, and belonging function as mutually constituative processes. Adrienne Rich’s work on the politics of location (1986) is a productive point of entry to theorize this limit. Her work has influenced much feminist and critical theory by providing a pivotal intervention 28

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into the political conditions of theory production (see Mohanty 2003). I turn my gaze to a set of conversations that have emerged in the wake of Rich’s politics of location manifesto in an e√ort to reveal the ways in which belonging emerges within the text and/or subtexts of this discourse as a condition of possibility for thinking location and as conditioned by the politics of speaking. While the debates surrounding the politics of location extend well beyond those accounted for here, my interest in the transformative possibilities of transracial feminist alliances entails a focus on the threads through which white women and women of color are potentially (dis)connected from/to each other. The move I seek to make, from location to relation, entails centering belonging as a point of departure for naming and imagining location, as opposed to an e√ect of location. This is a politics of relation, for it raises questions of accountability and imagination in the direction of social change. In ‘‘Notes on a Politics of Location,’’ which appeared in her 1986 book Blood, Bread, and Poetry, Adrienne Rich interrogates her positionality as a white, Jewish, lesbian feminist from the United States. The piece provides what Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) would call an ‘‘accounting’’ for Rich’s privilege, which serves as the previously overlooked and invisible experiential grounding of her theorizing. Rich’s gesture aims to enable a transracial feminist solidarity by critiquing exclusionary conditions of subject formation and thus to denaturalize their universalizing e√ects on her feminist theory production. To achieve this e√ect, Rich investigates her own location from below—which standpoint theory tells us provides a more complete picture of power relations because the oppressed are not deluded by their own investments of power. Given her privileged positioning, how did Rich come to this ‘‘view from below’’?π What relational conditions produced such a knowing to enable her to acquire this vantage point? Here I suggest that these questions, unasked and unanswered by her text, signal its disjunctures. That is, in spite of her e√orts to position herself as a coalitional subject, Rich fails to locate location within community. In this way, she does not hold herself accountable to the allies who enabled her self-reflexive vantage. So ultimately, ‘‘Notes on a Politics of Location’’ constructs Rich’s identity as ‘‘enlightened white feminist’’ as an individualized location. In failing to interrogate the relational conditions out of which her seeing arises, Rich undercuts the coalitional impetus of her self-reflexive gesture. In ‘‘Notes’’ Rich vividly maps her own body, its geographical and BE LONGING

29

historical location, and states that it is a ‘‘body that has more than one identity’’ (1986, 215) as she strives to map out the specificity and confluences of a politics of location. She writes: ‘‘To locate myself in my body means more than understanding what it has meant to me to have a vulva and a clitoris and a uterus and breasts. It means recognizing this white skin, the places it has taken me, the places it has not let me go’’ (215–16). These bodily markings and the multiple axes through which she names her location work against the universalizing tendencies of whiteness. I return later to this question of where the white skin takes the person who bears it and the spaces from which it displaces her. But for now I wish to call attention to communities to which Rich holds herself accountable and those that she seeks to challenge. Rich’s e√orts to mark the specificity of her white feminist positionality respond to the many critiques of white feminism that had already emerged by this time from a host of feminists of color. Notably, the editors of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981), challenge white feminists to grapple with their own oppressions and privileges in order to address the issues dividing women over race, class, and sexuality ‘‘head on.’’ In marking the specificity of her white female body Rich unsettles the universality of white femininity, produced over and against the particularity of the racialized bodies of women of color. The specificity through which she marks her body articulates its particularity in such terms that the bodies of women of color are exposed, and yet reveals the privilege that its white particularity acquires: from her well-nourished bones and strong teeth to the control she exercises over her body—from her choice to type to her freedom from rape and forced sterilization. Her text thus ironically performs a double gesture of both asserting and displacing Rich’s privilege. On one hand, she delivers this speech across the United States and abroad and her discourse becomes widely celebrated, which may be understood as a function of her privilege (see Wallace 1989). On the other hand, she breaks the unspoken code of white belonging by specifying the relationship between her whiteness and that privilege. Her positionality as white woman serves as a means, then, for her to undercut that very authority. In 1988 Wallace was a participant—along with bell hooks, Stuart Hall, Coco Fusco, and others—in a symposium titled ‘‘Third Scenario: Theory and Politics of Location Symposium,’’ held at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham, England. The symposium was dedicated to the 30

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interrogation of Rich’s notion of ‘‘location’’ within black and third world film (Akomfrah 1989, 5). Wallace begins her talk by expressing her anger at having ‘‘been asked to speak within a framework defined by a white feminist who has probably exercised more power than any other in the United States in determining the essential reading list for Afro American and Third World feminist literature, a list which neither includes nor mentions my own work’’ (Wallace 1989, 43). In this way Wallace marks the politics of her own location as one that is constituted through subalternity in relation to the (de)legitimizing speaking practices of feminist knowledge production. Returning to the question of Rich’s engagement with feminists of color in ‘‘Notes,’’ Wallace argues that Rich’s Blood, Bread, and Poetry serves a ‘‘gatekeeping’’ function through its exclusion of her own works, as well as those of other women of color such as bell hooks (Wallace 1989, 48). Her reaction to this exclusion is ambivalent, given that she has ‘‘always read Rich with great pleasure and self-recognition. So it breaks my heart, although no more than it breaks my heart to read any text produced by the West’’ (49). By drawing attention to the gatekeeping function of academic publishing, Wallace reveals the connections among location, belonging, and the politics of speaking: that speaking place for black women is limited to writing novels or ‘‘personality profiles for women’s magazines,’’ but there is no space for those who wish to speak as black feminist intellectuals. Indeed, her argument culminates in the paradox produced by convergence between the moment of her highest public visibility with that of her ‘‘prefoundest [sic] silence and powerlessness’’ (51). Further, her response to Rich’s exclusions is a complex mix of anger and sadness, illuminating how a√ective investments in some sense of recognition, or being seen as worthy of belonging, becomes intricately involved in questions of location and representation. Wallace’s criticism, as well as the contents of Rich’s text, then, suggest its failure to position the author in conversation with women of color, even though the piece does implicitly address some of the challenges issued by women of color. Her failure to centrally reference the work of women of color not only marginalizes their voices, but also fails to render palpable how their work speaks to her, not to mention how her relations with these women have moved her. Rich’s ‘‘Notes’’ does not reveal questions of her own belonging in relation to women of color: Does she belong to/with women of color? Does she long to sit at the table with women of color, hold and be held by women of color? While the bee buzzing around her as she writes BE LONGING

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in solitude intimately interpellates her reader, this intimacy does not extend to the conditions that shape her belonging. The absence of transracial alliances potentially produces solitude for feminists of privilege, such as Rich, who betray the conditions of belonging that interpellate them. Imagine the solitude of a tiny boat too far from shore, to apprehend Chela Sandoval’s reading of Roland Barthes in relation to Franz Fanon. Barthes is a decolonial theorist who defies colonial belongings in his e√orts to respond to the ‘‘ongoing and defiant demands of the colonized’’ (Sandoval 2000, 87). As such he provides a point of entry for privileged subjects to form a coalitional consciousness that aims to redistribute power, but his schema founders within the individualistic logic to which he remains bound. The leap that Barthes is unable to make is from his individualized location as ‘‘renegade scholar’’ of the West to a subject of belonging to or with the ‘‘colonial other’’ to whom his work strives to be accountable. Thus Barthes produces his figure as a mythologist, an ‘‘individual practitioner [who] can only act alone, isolated, and in despair’’ (Sandoval 2000, 113). This failure is productively understood, not as an ‘‘idiosyncrasy’’ of Barthes, but rather as a function of ‘‘structures of accountability’’ that are the condition of possibility for theory production. Like Barthes, Rich gestures toward the transformative possibilities of a√ective ties across lines of power as a point of entry into examining her own blind spots. She writes from the perspective that ‘‘movement for change lives in feelings, actions and words. Whatever circumscribes or mutilates our feelings makes it more di≈cult to act, keeps our actions reactive, repetitive: Abstract thinking, narrow trivial loyalties, every kind of self righteousness, the arrogance of believing ourselves at the center’’ (1986). Rich names her desire for rupture, a way out of the ‘‘repetitive’’ and ‘‘reactive’’ modes through which her consciousness is confined. And this confinement evokes questions of belonging within the confines of whiteness, heterosexuality, U.S. citizenship, and other alienating modes that demand ‘‘trivial loyalties, self righteousness, and arrogance.’’ Like Barthes, Rich’s text positions her as seeking a way out of the constitution of colonial subjectivity, but fails to tender her movement beyond her own location as ‘‘individual practitioner’’ acting ‘‘alone, isolated, and in despair’’ (Sandoval 2000, 113).∫ ‘‘Notes’’ produces her attachment to her own sense of self as individual that arises in absence, or a lack of passionate engagement with others, to reinscribe her location in the very terms she seeks to overturn. As Sandoval notes, 32

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this is no personal or idiosyncratic failure on her part, but rather a function of the ‘‘material apparatus of theory production’’ inscribed within the politics of seeing, knowing, being that undergirds Western thought. It is a loss also inscribed within the politics of (non)belonging. This reinscription, then, signals the failure to theorize coalitional consciousness as a profound sense of loss—sensuous loss—faced by the first world theorist who seeks to disembark from the colonial constraints of her belonging, but who remains stranded on the shores of her limited imagination. A tiny boat is fragile so far from shore. bell hooks’s (1989) commentary at the ‘‘politics of location’’ forum opens up this possibility for coalitional subjectivity. She foregrounds her critical agency as one who chooses marginality, not as a site of abjection, but as one of radical critique that refuses assimilation, even as she negotiates with power: ‘‘Within complex and ever shifting realms of power relations do we position ourselves on the side of colonising mentality?’’ she asks. ‘‘Or do we continue to stand in political resistance with the oppressed, ready to o√er our ways of seeing and theorising, of making culture towards that revolutionary e√ort which seeks to create space where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible?’’ (15). Here hooks reveals the contradictory hailings that constitute her location—of the ‘‘side of the colonising mentality,’’ on one hand, and the side of ‘‘political resistance with the oppressed,’’ on the other. The ‘‘or’’ within the passage suggests that these interpellations tug at her in contradictory ways, or that there is a forced choice for hooks between standing with the oppressed or with the oppressor. In the following section, I work toward a di√erential mode of belonging in which such binaries might be disrupted to allow the cultural worker to move among and across these various positionalities and loyalties. The radical possibility that hooks sees in ‘‘standing with the oppressed’’ o√ers ‘‘ways of seeing and theorising’’ that creates space for ‘‘unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing where transformation is possible.’’ Here hooks shifts the terms of privilege, signaling a redefinition of power and resistive belongings, or reverse interpellation. Placed in conversation, the texts of hooks and Rich speak to one another. Placed in mutual belonging, such conversations hold tremendous transformative potential for grappling with these di≈cult issues of speaking, listening, and being heard, across power lines. Yet the spatial and a√ective divides that constitute the production of these texts leave BE LONGING

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each voice alone, and thus the visions that they hold are not tapped to their fullest potential. The questions that remain include (How) do alternative modes of belonging challenge hegemonic forms of speaking/ listening? Can locations be rewritten by challenging dominant modes of belonging?

CARTOGRAPHIES OF BELONGING

A√ect, Power, Accountability As we develop more complex, nuanced modes of asking questions and as scholarship in a number of relevant fields begins to address histories of colonialism, capitalism, race, and gender as inextricably interrelated, our very conceptual maps are redrawn and transformed. —Mohanty 1991a, 3

In order to articulate a shift from location to belonging, I want to plot a few points on the map of belonging by tracing some of its constituents: an a√ective component, which is spatially situated; the conditions and e√ects of belonging, thought through questions of power, including reimagining power; and accountability as a function of belonging. I do not necessarily examine these points sequentially, but they are part of the fabric of belonging from which to weave a framework for naming a space of clinamen. Feminist and cultural studies literature provide the threads of this fabric from which to weave some strands of belonging as a terrain for the use, ‘‘ab-use’’ (Spivak 1992), and reworking of power and identity, a theme to which I return in chapter 5. The politics of relation are spatially and temporally bound: where we place our bodies, how we spend time, the mundane and significant events that give texture to our lives all give rise to our becoming. Elspeth Probyn, in her book Outside Belongings, theorizes belonging as a mode of a√ective community-making in ways that help us think subjectivity in geographical terms. She locates queer sexuality and desire within specific geographic locales in an e√ort to rethink the self and identity. She illustrates her theorization of proximity, or the ‘‘drawing of new frontiers,’’ recalling the connections that become possible in the summer months in Montreal when the balconies of her neighborhood thaw and people reemerge to garden, to live life on the outside for a while. She considers how the balconies signify ‘‘a certain movement as di√erent 34

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and distinct elements are brought together, if only momentarily.’’ Power lines are redrawn within these various points of contact: ‘‘Lines of class, gender, sex, generation, ethnicity, and race intermingle as people hang out’’ (Probyn 1996, 5). The balcony is/represents a site where ‘‘an ongoing inbetweenness’’ becomes palpable, revealing the ‘‘necessity of getting at the minuteness of movement that occurs in the everyday processes of articulation’’ (6). The balcony in Probyn’s work provides a point of entry into the spatial and a√ective components of belonging that are continually unfolding and often mundane. The balcony of the summer months becomes a site in which spatial proximity acts upon people living di√erence in community. Various lives brush up against and become visible to one another. Coming out/side—after long months of interiority, imposed on warm bodies by cold climates— evokes an a√ective impulse to reach beyond one’s self in the direction of the others all around: long-lost strangers, the thrill of coming out/side, of risking rejection in striving toward the mundane intimacy of seeing and being seen. Probyn’s attention to the palpable and embodied dimensions of belonging signals the potentiality at work in the compelling a√ect that constitutes our ties to others. This move serves to reframe subjectivity at the edge of the skin, tipping in the direction of the other, occupying the clinamen. ‘‘Belonging,’’ for Probyn, is a ‘‘sociology of the skin’’—a ‘‘heightened sensitivity to the sensibilities, to being captured by other manners of being and desires for becoming-other’’ (5). Belonging is that movement in the direction of the other: bodies in motion, encountering their own transition, their potential to vary. Probyn’s question ‘‘Why it is that skin should end at our individual bodies?’’ asks us to expand Massumi’s (2002) frame of bodies in motion to imagine its continuation in conversation/contact with so many others. The space of radical in-betweenness evoked by the hyphen that Probyn inserts between ‘‘becoming’’ and ‘‘other’’ (dis)places subjectivity within the process of becoming inclined in the direction of otherness. Belonging is about where you long to belong, whom you want to nestle beside at the end of the day, whom you call when you are in pain, or who accompanies you in ritual—in signifying practices that give life meaning, if by no other means than to call mindful attention to the awesome beauty of now. It is a concept that permits us to imagine life beyond our own skin because what is foregrounded is a space of ‘‘yearning to make skin stretch beyond individual needs and wants’’ (Probyn 1996, 6). BelongBE LONGING

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ing, then, helps us imagine identity, subjectivity, and a sense of self that goes beyond the (interiority of the) self, that strives to connect, that yearns to live on the skin and in contact/community/communion/ communalism/communismΩ with others. This inclination toward another involves seeing others to whom we belong as inseparable, not separate, from us. This yearning to belong is grounded in politics. Belonging, in and of itself, is neither resistive nor oppressive. One can belong to or with a skateboarding group, a white man, a radical community of color, or the Ku Klux Klan and feel the desire for connectivity. Around any of these sites of belonging a sensitivity to the sensuous sensibilities of belonging may be evoked. A sense of national belonging often evokes military patriotism, while corporate belonging evokes competition; belonging to whiteness evokes a sense of entitlement that the world is our oyster and heterosexuality arises through its moral supremacy. Because subjectivities are forged through numerous and at times conflicting responses to these various hailings, it becomes vital to interrogate the conditions and e√ects of inclusion within multiple sites of belonging. The ways in which hegemonic discourses hail us as subjects can thus be rethought through belonging: not only in terms of how power hails us, but also the ways in which power may be hailed by us as a resistive reinscription. Both gestures—the ways in which ideology interpellates subjects and di√erential belonging as subjects hailing ideology—are mapped to belonging. I trace the former here, and the latter in the final section of the chapter. Interpellation may be read as a function of hegemonic belonging. What often gets overlooked in the framework of identity (or location, as above) are the ways in which dominant identity categories interpellate subjects through regulatory practices that essentially condition belonging. From the perspective of identity, one is merely white or female or heterosexual, or all three, and this identity conditions one’s standpoint in various ways that must be interrogated (see Frankenberg 1993). But in thinking belonging, these identities are placed into motion and the terms and the e√ects of inclusion/exclusion come into sharper focus. And with these come the possibility for the formation of critical and collective modes of agency, as well as new demands for accountability. To map this cartography of belonging I turn to two intertwined discourses of hegemonic belonging: whiteness and heterosexuality thought here not primarily as identities, but as modes of belonging. This shift aims to reveal 36

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the often overlooked conditions of belonging that these forces impose, as well as their e√ects on resistive and/or transformative a≈nities. My interest in these forces arises from my own shifting notions of belonging across time and space. Once, I strongly identified with white and heterosexual belongings. Racial assimilation is a big part of it: all of us striving to gain power by fitting in, by putting those who hold power at ease by being like them, by belonging to them. I identify with Cherríe Moraga’s account of her ‘‘mother’s desire to protect her children from poverty and illiteracy’’ (2000, 43) through my own experience, that my mother ushered us into Anglo cultural belongings, although we were not really at risk for either poverty or illiteracy. Yet the sentiment that the ‘‘wolf was always at the door’’ lay like a heat wave over our suburban home in Riverside. My increasing awareness of white longings for inclusion-as-safety in an otherwise unsafe world of scarcity was accompanied by my desire for intimate belonging to and with women. The latter grew, and grows, with the help of my friends, like Rebecca who showed me how my heterosexual privilege excluded and erased her. I never realized that as the popular white male academic held the door open for me, it slammed in her face. I never realized how I participated in slamming doors on other women, let alone my best friend. But she taught me that, through wretched moments in which our rage got played out on each other. Rage that is now consolidated and redirected as love. One of the central preoccupations of the critical study of whiteness is to name and specify the particularities of whiteness to reveal how it secures its power through its seeming universality. Whiteness defines the norm within racial registers against which the other is defined, and thus always secures power through its unmarked positioning within the field of race. As Ruth Frankenberg writes in her founding text within this field, White Women, Race Matters: ‘‘Naming ‘whiteness’ displaces it from the unmarked, unnamed status that is itself an e√ect of dominance’’ (1993, 6). How might we rethink such e√ects, as well as the normalizing processes through which they are produced, through cartographies of belonging? One move that some scholars within this field are making is to call attention to social processes through which white privilege is maintained. Aída Hurtado notes the paradoxical ‘‘oxymoron’’ of ‘‘white solidarity’’ when she states, ‘‘Ultimately, white privilege depends on its members not betraying the unspoken, nonconscious power dynamics socialized in the intimacy of their families’’ (1996, 149). White solidarity is a social practice that interpellates not only white people, for, as George BE LONGING

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Lipsitz illustrates in his reference to Clarence Thomas, ‘‘one way of becoming an insider is by participating in the exclusion of other outsiders. An individual might even secure a seat on the Supreme Court on this basis’’ (1998, viii). By drawing attention to the intimate practices of whiteness as a set of exclusionary social practices, Hurtado’s and Lipsitz’s insights expose the intimate structures of whiteness, not only as an identity to which one reverts or aspires in order to gain racial privilege, but more important, a set of regulatory practices to which one must submit in order to establish oneself as insider. They reveal those exclusionary practices to which we submit in order to belong. ‘‘Willful ignorance,’’ Jane Lazarre (1996) calls it. In this sense, we must understand whiteness as a mode of belonging in order to dismantle the force of its privileging and marginalizing tendencies. This reading reveals an underbelly of whiteness that may be exploited by those who seek to challenge its juridical apparatuses. If the hegemony of whiteness is contingent upon both whites and people of color abiding by its norms, and striving to belong within its ranks— then what happens when we begin to challenge these norms and seek alternative, counterhegemonic sites and modes of belonging? How do we assess the resistive or recuperative e√ects of such transracial identifications as passing for white, assimilating to whiteness for people of color, or for white slumming across racialized, classed, and heterosexed barriers?∞≠ I return to this question in the next section, but now I wish to make the point that belongings in which we become accountable to power can produce a space of alterity, a space of resistance, and spaces that disrupt these hegemonic forms of belonging. Belonging, then, is intimately tied to power. It is an a√ective force that can be used to reproduce and/or to challenge whiteness as a hegemonic form. But whiteness does not exist as a field of force in a sociocultural vacuum. Indeed, whiteness intersects with other normalizing discourses of belonging: heterosexuality, middle-classness, Christianity, nationalism, masculinity, ablism. Each of these intersections needs more scholarly attention in order to more adequately map the production of normative privilege and how it wields power to hail subjects into hegemonic forms of belonging. Heterosexuality and other structuring forces of privilege share with whiteness their seeming invisibility to those who reap advantage under their protection. As Adrienne Rich points out in her well-known essay, ‘‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’’ (1986), which appears in Blood, Bread, and Poetry, feminist scholars do not even see that 38

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they are reproducing the normalcy of heterosexuality in their exclusive treatments of gender that erase sexuality. Heterosexuality becomes a compulsory mode of interacting with people. Its invisibility undermines our agency: we cannot alter what we cannot see. Monique Wittig (1992) echoes Rich’s observation when she writes of ‘‘the straight mind,’’ which ‘‘cannot conceive of a culture, a society where heterosexuality would not order not only all human relationships but also its very production of concepts and all the processes which escape consciousness as well’’ (28). This straight mind also blocks our vision of various and shifting modes of belonging that queer gendered norms of belonging. Because such processes are invisible to the heterosexual mind, they function as a normalizing force that tells us who we can be in relation to others, and whom we can rightfully belong to and how. Rich points out that such forces tell us to, and with, whom women must belong (men), as well as those to whom women may not belong (other women). Compulsory heterosexuality positions women to compete with one another for male attention and approval. Thus the desire to belong to and with men functions to discourage communities of belonging to and with other women. How many doors will we slam on our ‘‘sisters’’ in our e√orts to see and be seen by men in power? As with whiteness, heterosexuality conditions women’s accountability to men, which demands that we not be accountable to each other. If, as Audre Lorde (1984) writes, women fail to meet the challenges that face us as women seeking to forge alliances with other women, it is a failure of the imagination. Compulsory heterosexuality disciplines our imaginations. It teaches women to decode one another’s bodies as sites of competition and comparison, as opposed to compassion, community, and belonging.∞∞

DIFFERENTIAL BELONGING

The di√erential mode of consciousness functions like the clutch of an automobile.—Sandoval 2000, 58

Above I argue that the presumption of belonging that undergirds dominant identity formations such as whiteness and heterosexuality erases the choices that we make around our belongings, which are constitutive of our identities. This erasure fixes identity, however unintentionally, in individualistic terms: ‘‘I am.’’ The transformative possibilities of a poliBE LONGING

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tics of location are limited by such oversights. The absence of critical interrogations of the conditions of possibility for hegemonic modes of belonging produces two erasures critical to forging resistive or transformative modes of belonging: agency and accountability. Individualized notions of location undermine agency by positioning the scholar/ critic/activist as always already belonging to a group, failing to call attention to the ways subjects negotiate the hegemonic hailings and/or counterhegemonic a≈liations that she per/forms. This move, in turn, displaces critical interrogations of accountability that condition belonging by skipping over this phase of the process of identity formation. Whiteness and heterosexuality, for instance, interpellate subjects to and through the privileges of belonging to these identity groups. Here I wish to pose an alternative mode of interpellation—di√erential belonging—to call attention to the ways in which we are already constituted in and through often overlooked modes of belonging, and also to suggest a resistive command. Chela Sandoval writes of ‘‘di√erential’’ forms of resistance, or consciousness, which weave between and among oppositional ideologies and, unbound by any one particular ideology or an adherence to consistency, gain power through the tactical agency enabled by their fluidity. As such, di√erential resistance strives for a power reversal: it is ‘‘the citizen-subject who interpellates, who calls up ideology’’ (Sandoval 2000, 31). This reversal gives way to a series of productive displacements that move the gesture beyond the logic of a mere reversal to open up spaces for the formation of oppositional consciousness through a series of movements across ideological positionings. The ‘‘di√erential,’’ like the movements across contingent belongings, ‘‘represents the varying; its presence emerges out of correlations, intensities, junctures, crises’’ (58). At such points of contact among converging and competing intensities, junctures, and crises is forged a subject of belonging capable of radical, and largely untapped, modes of resistance. Sandoval’s analogy for di√erential consciousness is the clutch in an automobile, the mechanism that permits the driver to decide, from moment to moment, how the engine’s power is used. When you use the clutch, you momentarily disengage and then reengage the gears, crucial to the car’s movement and your ability to engage the power it makes available. It is this movement across ideological positionings that I wish to draft to belonging. Di√erential belonging, like di√erential consciousness, allows us to move among di√erent modes of belonging without feeling 40

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trapped or bound by any one in particular.∞≤ The point is not to be correct, consistent, or comfortable. We need not, or cannot, be the same person everywhere—in di√erent communities, on di√erent occasions, at di√erent times in our lives. We may move among various stages of belonging throughout our lives: across lines of sexual orientation, ‘‘men’’ may become ‘‘women,’’ ‘‘straight’’ people ‘‘queer,’’ these movements across time and community remaking subjects-in-relation. Many cross lines of class, national boundaries, racialized communities, places of work, the language communities that hail us, each movement rendering our becoming-other as our relational needs shift over time and across space. And as we move among these sites, the contradictions and crises that arise are most instructive of our becoming. Sandoval’s schema of the four modes of consciousness that women of color traverse∞≥ provides a point of entry into the imaginary of di√erential belonging: assimilationist, revolutionary, supremacist, separatist. Each mode of consciousness, translated into conditions of belonging, suggests a way of being together, a way of structuring social relations. For instance, we find ourselves negotiating assimilationist sites, perhaps in mainstream academic settings; revolutionary belongings among anti-globalization activist communities; supremacist encounters among a specific writing group we create based on the particular contours of identity, experience, and knowledge production and in which we seek to valorize those particularities; and separatist belongings that structure our desire to hang out exclusively with others similarly marginalized (at a queer bar, in a woman-of-color working group). Note, also, that these modes of belonging are framed, via Sandoval, through subordinated knowledges/ belongings, and yet as we will see in the chapters that follow, much of the segregated and supremacist modes of belonging arise within hegemonic frames of belonging. This is to suggest that di√erential belonging requires an inversion, or reversal, of power relations in order to constitute the transformative conditions of di√erential movement. In di√erential belonging, coalitional subjects recognize the lessons that come from moving among these various modes of belonging. While each mode of belonging provides a vital component to our growth and the formation of our politics, becoming stuck in any of them or seeing them as mutually exclusive can be counterproductive. The di√erential logics and a√ective ties that operate within each of these modes of belonging may contribute to the coalitional subject’s well-being, but these logics and a√ective ties may become debilitating if they too narBE LONGING

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rowly circumscribe the possibilities that we are able to imagine. For instance, the appeals to humanism within assimilationist and revolutionary belonging might be deconstructed within a supremacist or separatist space, but deconstruction may not be the most compelling political strategy within the former contexts. It is precisely the movement across these modes that allows us to be politically productive. Separatist belongings can nurture the work coalitional subjects do when assimilating; supremacist belongings can provide insights into our revolutionary belongings, and so on. Coalitional subjects may engage in more than one mode of belonging at the same time, and the emphases on di√erent modes of belonging will shift throughout our lives. For example, a Chicana friend of mine came to see me deliver an earlier draft of this chapter to a group of my colleagues, most of whom were white men. ‘‘Why do you work with these people?’’ she asked me afterward (in a site of segregated belonging), over drinks. Part of the answer is that here I have some power and I’m using it in alliance with others to mobilize third world feminism to ‘‘revolutionize’’ the modes of belonging through which the group adheres. Part of it, I reflect to her, is that in learning to talk to these white male academics about my work I am learning to talk to my father. Her work is di√erent. She is coming out, leaving her husband and their Chicano community: ‘‘What I need right now is to talk to other Chicana dykes.’’ We all have work that is urgent now, and new work that will present itself when this work is done. New modes of belonging become appealing or necessary—they interpellate us—as our work clarifies itself. Di√erential belonging works through a recognition that resistive work must be done on a variety of fronts to respond to both the political exigencies and opportunities of our institutional lives and the relational needs that arise from our intimate belongings. In this moment over drinks, these fronts intersect and inform one another. Di√erential belonging calls us to reckon with the ways in which we are oppressed and privileged as we move across sites of belonging so that we may place ourselves where we can have an impact and where we can share experience that will shape the community’s consciousness. The key to di√erential belonging is that you do not have to be someone, in terms defined by identity politics, in order to do the political work that di√erential belonging entails. The conflation between identity and politics is unnecessarily limiting as an isolated mode of belonging. While separatist and supremacist modes of belonging are vital to sus42

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taining and enabling certain forms of political work, a politics based entirely on identity will remain fraught with internal conflict as well as insulated from wider transracial connection that can infuse our politics with a necessary engagement with di√erence. As we engage in di√erential belonging and the consciousness that arises from movement across communities and contexts, for instance, women of privilege can build a more radical feminist vision as they forge belongings in communities of di√erence. Ann Russo, who identifies as an antiracist white feminist, writes, ‘‘For many years as an active feminist I thought issues of race and class were important to deal with in the women’s movement. Yet,’’ Russo continues, ‘‘until I began to work and hang out with women of color, I did not fully understand the enormous ramifications of multiracial groups of women developing feminist theory and working together for social change’’ (1991, 297). Ruth Frankenberg, whose work is largely responsible for ushering in the current wave of critical whiteness studies, echoes Russo’s account: ‘‘By going where Estée went, meeting who she met, part of the time living [in her community] . . . my worldview, my sense of self and other, of history, identity, race, class, culture, were remade’’ (1996, 12). Alliances across power lines enable such transformations to become possible. Russo and Frankenberg describe their shifts as not merely intellectual but also affective, palpable, and experiential. The meanings we make alongside those we love, particularly across lines of di√erence, allow us to remake our assumptions and widen our vision of the political field. This is true not only for white women building alliances with women of color but also for variously positioned women of color building alliances across internal lines of di√erence (such as class, nation, sexuality, spirituality). By rendering visible the conditions and e√ects—both oppressive and liberatory, and more often both—of belonging, the multiple sites and communities to which we belong or don’t belong become apparent. This awareness pushes us to consider the political, social, and spiritual e√ects of our choices and practices of belonging. This is not to suggest that belonging is merely free-floating and that we are free to choose our belongings outside of the bounds of power. As Visweswaran warns, ‘‘Not all identities are equally hybrid, for some have little choice about political processes determining their hybridization’’ (1994, 132). Likewise our belongings are conditioned by our bodies and where they are placed on the globe. And yet, the point of di√erential belonging is to call attention to the multiple paths we may travel in our circles of belonging, BE LONGING

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and to consider the implications for each on the others. It is not to be bound by the regulatory practices of any particular group nor by the need to remain consistent or pure, but rather to take a risk and move in the direction of multiple others. As in becoming other. Transracial feminist alliances provide a site for this move of di√erential belonging. Women of color have called attention to feminism’s whiteness for the past two decades, yet relatively few white women have seriously wrestled with the implications of these critiques as laying the groundwork for a ‘‘more possible’’ (Lorde 1984, 184) feminism.∞∂ As Moraga’s words about white women’s lack of longing for the presence of women of color reveal, belonging figures centrally in this struggle (1981, 33). Russo’s and Frankenberg’s accounts of the transformative e√ects of their forging deep a√ective and political ties with women of color demonstrate this point. For these women their lives, their identities, their relationships to whiteness, their a√ective investments in relations of domination and resistance have been altered.∞∑ The presence of transracial alliances often anchors a process of transformation that goes beyond intellectual understandings of power and privilege and moves into the realm of embodied knowing. What is at stake in such intimate forms of knowing is twofold: power is remade within such relations, and transracial belonging becomes a vehicle for walking a healing path of awareness. As Albrecht and Brewer write in their introduction to Bridges of Power, ‘‘We believe that the boundaries of doubt, pain, and fear can be overcome. If we are to successfully mediate these boundaries, it is critical that we listen and respect each other, learn about our di√erences, and make ourselves vulnerable’’ (1990, 6). Here we come full circle to the politics of speaking, alliance formation, and location—a constellation reworked within the speaking and listening practices constitutive of transracial feminist alliances. For as Judith Butler reminds us (2004b), our speaking practices are necessarily remade through the crises we experience in the face of being ‘‘confounded’’ by the presence of the other. This instability opens us to glimpse the ‘‘tie’’ that binds us, that space in between, the bond. In this sense, disorientation is productive, ‘‘For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you,’’ Butler writes. ‘‘I cannot muster the ‘we’ except by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you,’ by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this

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disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know’’ (49). The critical and intimate work that arises in transracial feminist alliances potentially transforms how power functions between and among women as the language that separates our stories, our worlds, ‘‘must break up and yield if I am to know you.’’ In a gesture that displaces her ongoing antihumanism, Butler reckons with the humanizing work that arises in seeing belonging as a process through which the ‘‘human comes into being . . . as that which we have yet to know.’’ This means reconsidering what counts as value, particularly within the choices we make around belonging. Mab Segrest’s meditation in ‘‘Of Soul and White Folks’’ raises the question that perplexes folks doing work on whiteness and antiracism: ‘‘Why should anyone give up such privilege?’’ (2002, 158). Her response is that the vehicles of domination through which white power is secured take a toll on the soul so that ‘‘whites lose comfort of the nonmaterial kind: ease, well being, consolation, help, solace, and relief. In acquiring hatred, whites lose feelings and practices of love’’ (159). The business of therapy serves as a BandAid to cover over the broader social and political forces through which such alienation of domination occurs. Such forms of recovery locate damage within the individual: not the subject of belonging, but rather the isolated, alienated individual who is charged with illness and must seek the courage to individually conquer it. The battle over wider issues of social justice, then, often takes place through individualized outlets: drug use, alcoholism, stress-related illness, eating disorders, and sexual abuse (Segrest 2002, 160). Segrest calls such diversionary practices an ‘‘anesthetic aesthetic’’—a psychic mechanism of dissociation through which we distance ourselves from the pain that arises from our perceived separation from and domination of others. Aesthetics, Segrest explains, is a branch of philosophy concerning judgments of beauty that is derived from the root aisthesis, to perceive. The prefix an- signifies blocked perception, or ‘‘insensibility . . . the loss of sensation without a loss of consciousness’’ (164).∞∏ This suggests that feminists of privilege have a stake in decolonial and antiracist work. It is not work to save the other, but rather, as Segrest compels us to consider, to save our own souls. This move entails wresting the subject from the individual, knowing from possessing, love from benevolence.

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CONCLUSION

Toward New Spaces of Belonging As we consider new ways of imagining feminist belonging that reconfigure norms of whiteness and heterosexuality, it is important to see the intersections between these forces as they constitute our daily lives. By exploring the connections between whiteness and heterosexuality, we can begin to untangle the di√erent layers that constitute identity categories in ways that seek not to reify their meanings but to reveal the daily practices and a√ective ties through which such categories emerge. Transracial belongings are precarious and present their own challenges, even as they are transformative. Segrest shares her own fear of living in between when she writes: ‘‘But I am afraid of isolation, of being caught between the white-valued world I want to leave behind, not part of a colored world, no world yet created to hold us all, truly, as ‘beloved friends’ ’’ (1985, 174). Like the ‘‘glitches in the structures of accountability—who one talks to, and writes for and with’’ (Sandoval 2000, 202)— that leave Barthes a ‘‘renegade scholar’’ of the West, Segrest names here the place between worlds into which she potentially slips as a white ‘‘race traitor.’’∞π I do not mean to glorify the life work of these two commentators, or to downplay the power of the disciplinary forces of whiteness and heterosexuality on our own choices of belonging. Rather, we can consider what is to be learned from the women who have forged before us and see that radical modes of belonging hold tremendous potential for transforming who we think we are and how we imagine something called ‘‘feminism.’’ This is the aim of a politics of relation: placing location within the clinamen, the inclination of one toward another, as the basis for community, intimacy, and awareness.

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2. BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

Toward a Methodology of Feminist Alliance

‘‘I have to confess all those identity issues are unclear to me,’’ Andrea o√ers as our interview comes to a close. After an hour and a half of her candid responses to my questions, I’m still a bit awed by her expansive presence. The way her long body comfortably fills her black leather chair, the ease with which she speaks and listens, her raven hair and onyx rings. The sum of these pieces instills the room with her understated power. I’ve managed something like, ‘‘I wonder if you could comment on how you perceive me—my identity—and maybe how that gets played out in what you’re willing to say, or what you withhold.’’ ‘‘I don’t know if you’re Chicana,’’ she continues, the steady rhythm of her words gaining momentum. ‘‘I don’t know if you’re half-Chicana, half white. I don’t know if you’re white. I don’t know if you’re straight or lesbian. All I know is that you’re a grad student, and you’re a friend of, or a student of Kum-Kum, and I know Mike.∞ So on the basis that you know very good people, I have not held back.’’ ‘‘Well, I sort of more or less assume you’re like me. Um, it might make a di√erence with an obvious woman of color. Whatever.’’ I feel thrown by Jennifer’s response; it feels curt, o√-handed, and I don’t know where to go next. But she has been warm, gracious, and candid, if brief, in her responses. I wonder if she’s from the South, where my grandmother is from. Even though she exudes a confidence that I’m drawn to, something about her feels so tiny. Is it her small frame, her flowing blond hair, the high pitch of her voice? She seems so naïve about power. This fluorescent-lit hotel room, where we’ve been sitting for hours now, feels too small. I want some distance from the interview; I feel myself fleeing from something I’ve yet to name. I wish there were an open window so I could get more air. ‘‘Whatever?’’ I’m thinking, ‘‘What does that mean?’’ But I say nothing. I still can’t get used to the fact that so many white women express the same assumption: ‘‘You’re like me.’’ Somehow I thought this work, this woman-of-color alliance work I was doing, would make me di√erent. But I say nothing.

I o√er these vignettes both in a gesture of locating the author (to mark my ambiguous racial location in these conversations, my complicity with whiteness as a structuring relational force) and to o√er a critique of

the individualistic assumptions upon which discourses of location rely. How might the researcher’s e√orts to position ‘‘her-self ’’≤ be reinscribed through a politics of relation? How does she render subjects who are active participants in the rhetorical production of their ‘‘selves’’? And how does she begin to account for the multiple sites of alliance that connect and divide subjects to/from one another? I work these questions through the metaphor of ‘‘bridge inscriptions’’: to strive to connect through writing. Bridge inscriptions: to write a text that seeks the possible within the impossible tensions of power and privilege, knowledge production and (un)knowing. ‘‘To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded’’ (Anzaldúa 2002a, 5). Part of this work entails moving (in and) out of safe spaces, those that feel like ‘‘home,’’ to allow ourselves to be ‘‘stripped of the illusion of safety’’ that accompanies belonging to what feels familiar (Anzaldúa 2002a, 5). Bridging entails creating openings, passageways, connecting with others to transform power relations. How do we approach research contexts, which are laden with di√erentials of power, desire, and interest, with a genuine dedication to the formation of radical community? Where are the possible sites of intimacy, and how does intimacy within such contexts enable and/or challenge the wider institutional contexts that give rise to it? And how do we inscribe such gestures even as we are embedded not only within the constraints imposed by power, but also within the circumscribing force of language? Such questions circulate within contemporary conversations among critical and feminist ethnographers eager to theorize viable methods within a decolonial frame beyond researcher investments in innocence (John 1989, Stacey 1988, Visweswaran 1994). James Cli√ord (1997), for instance, proposes a shift in how anthropologists conceptualize the relations between researcher and subject—characterized by a move from rapport to alliance, an interest ‘‘in the situations where an ethnography of initiation is giving way to one of negotiation, where rapport is recast as alliance’’ (41).≥ How might we distinguish between these ethnographic imperatives? The risk of an ‘‘alliance’’ methodology is that it surfaces as another ruse to erase the researcher’s complicity with neocolonial relations of knowledge/power. George E. Marcus warns of the ‘‘ironic entanglement’’ between complicity and rapport: the former is the often unspoken condition of possibility for and ‘‘evil twin’’ of the ‘‘figure of 48

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rapport’’ that haunts ethnography’s most self-reflexive e√orts at sharing power with our subjects. ‘‘Imperialist nostalgia’’ is how Renato Resaldo characterizes the mourning and passing of ‘‘what they [anthropologists] themselves have transformed’’ by virtue of establishing an insider status within (post)colonial sites and communities, the relational condition for establishing rapport—anthropology’s mise-en-scène (quoted in Marcus 1998, 115). The risk of betrayal and the ‘‘delusion of alliance’’ is particularly acute, indeed ‘‘inevitable,’’ in feminist research settings in which the ethnographic encounter ‘‘depends upon human relationship, engagement, and attachment’’ (Stacey 1998, 22–25). Virginia Dominguez asks us to consider the value of ‘‘rescue projects,’’ based not on a category of identity, but rather on a ‘‘di√erent criterion of value— namely, genuine love, respect, and a√ection’’ (2000, 365). Within the frame of the civilizing Enlightenment mission constitutive of colonial modernity, Dawn Rae Davis warns, the politics of love becomes entwined with two interrelated projects of knowledge/power: knowing and its attendant extension, possessing the other as the ‘‘placeholder of marginality,’’ while imagining this knowledge/possession through a sentimental frame of benevolence (Davis 2002). To resuscitate feminist love, she calls for a ‘‘new commitment by which the ability of not knowing reconstitutes the will to know so that a feminist beholding of the Other woman is a witnessing of the impossibility of her appearance in the context of anything demarcated as knowability’’ (155). This impulse—to decouple knowing from possessing, benevolence from feminist love—locates its necessary rejoinder in the politics of feminist accountability: the imperative to ‘‘become fluent in each other’s histories’’ (Alexander 2002). Thus ‘‘not knowing’’ becomes an ethical frame and an a√ective gesture that constitutes the clinamen within the research encounter by attending to and resisting the impulse to discursively and a√ectively colonize others, even as the imperative to know the histories that give rise to the other, and particularly the uneven, converging, and diverging histories that constitute the spaces between subjects at work in our research settings. In what follows, I strive to instantiate these gestures—to demarcate an ethnography of rapport from alliance, to untangle the politics of love from the politics of benevolent possession— by attending to the noninnocent politics of feminist knowledge production, even as I draw inspiration (breath) from the a√ective impulse and accountable interface between di√erently located subjects that characterizes bridge work. Such shifts are at stake in a bridge methodology: from BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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rapport to alliance, innocence to accountability; from individuality to coalitional subjectivity, transparency to the flawed e√ort to inscribe selfreflexively the self-stagings of our participants in relation to our-selves and each-other. What ‘‘mantra’’ of race and class, gender and sexuality might I o√er to begin to inscribe the contours of the ‘‘i’’ that arises between Andrea’s and Jennifer’s accounts? Such e√orts to inscribe our-selves-in-reflexiverelation, or those selves staged by our subjects, ring hollow within a gridlock of identity categories. A politics of relation calls our attention to the production of a self ceaselessly decentered by the relations continually giving rise to her location. Who ‘‘i’’ am to Andrea has more to do with the ‘‘good people’’ I know than my identity; for Jennifer ‘‘i’’ emerge through my perceived similarity to ‘‘her.’’ What theoretical and political investments give rise to these responses, and to my investment in them? The ‘‘i’’ that emerges across these and other conversations arises at the interstitial spaces between conversants as each stakes out her positionality in relation to the other. A bridge methodology generates a cartography of these emergent selves—the subjects of self-reflexivity and self-staging, always performed for the benefit, or recognition, of another (Butler 2004c). A bridge methodology seeks out the interstitial spaces between and among subjects; among subject and researcher and the potential communities they share; among subject, researcher, and the institutional sites of power they occupy. In the following pages I roam the relational expanse that arises at these interstices in an e√ort to sketch alliance work within the constraints of ethnographic exchange. I begin by inscribing a potentially productive dynamic among the forms of labor engaged by bridge ethnographers: homework, bridge work, and fieldwork. This constellation blurs the boundary among these ethnographic moments to compel us to interrogate the relational conditions under which we choose (or are chosen by) our fieldwork. The following section considers academia as a field for feminist inquiry, reflecting on the contours of this study and the relational contacts that arise within my conversations with the women of this study. Next I reflect upon the relational production of my location as it moves and slides across conversations and the disjunctures between corporeality and conversational content that give rise to such ambiguities. Finally, I seek openings within a bridge methodology to consider how subjects maneuver voice and silence, verbal and nonverbal communications, as a function of their racialized belongings. 50

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HOMEWORK, BRIDGE WORK, FIELDWORK

My aim in this section is to move the self-reflexive impulse within critical and feminist methodologies beyond their foundations in individualism (i.e., the researcher looking back at, or locating, her-self) to consider the shifting politics of relation that arise within the field through which the researcher comes to imagine and inscribe her-self within the ethnographic text. To do so requires reflection on the relational dynamics of our becoming that compel us to occupy particular fields. We take up this work, I suggest, to place ourselves in contact with those people who are somehow essential to our becoming. To elide the relational needs that interpellate us to these fields is to inaugurate the alibi of the disinterested researcher and to produce her as a lone individual whose subjectivity is somehow constituted prior to, or outside of, the encounters compelled by her research. ‘‘Detachment is neither a natural gift nor a manufactured talent,’’ Cli√ord Geertz writes in his initial foray into anthropology’s ensuing reflexive turn. ‘‘It is a partial achievement . . . [that] comes not from failing to have emotions or neglecting to see them in others, . . . [but] from a personal subjection to a vocational ethic . . . to combine two fundamental orientations toward reality—the engaged and the analytic—into a single attitude’’ (quoted in Marcus 1998, 111). Geertz ventures out to the edge of the anthropological envelope, only to be folded back in, hailed by the guarantee of the epistemic frame inscribed onto the figure of rapport (Marcus 1998). If detachment is a ‘‘partial achievement,’’ approaching the abyss contained within the fable of rapport gestures toward the stakes veiled within this figure. To acknowledge its power over the anthropologist—perhaps that his or her own salvation, not theirs, is at stake in these ethnographic encounters—would potentially undo the project’s authority. Would potentially undo the anthropologist. This compels us to interrogate what is at stake in our interpellation to and by certain groups, cultures, geographical sites to conduct our research. Why is the researcher hailed by the relational configuration at work in any particular field? And how might we approach this question if we frame the field not merely as a site of intellectual interest, but rather as set of relational unfoldings constitutive of her becoming? Such a move gives tremendous power to our subjects, compelling us to imagine them not merely as subjects (or objects) of study, but as allies. It is to reconfigure fieldwork as bridge work. To grapple with the conditions of this BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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hailing, however, requires us to return home to investigate the politics and histories constitutive of our subject locations at any given moment as a function of the communities that constitute home for us.∂ Why do we want to study Native communities, or women workers in Barbados, or artistic expression in Bali? What compels so many in the ‘‘first world’’ to study ‘‘primitive’’ others? What is it we are seeking to recover in our own struggles with culture and identity, empire and innocence in their stories? What of myself-in-relation lies in my inscription of Andrea’s ‘‘raven hair’’? In that of Jennifer’s ‘‘tiny frame’’ or my desire to ‘‘flee’’? If we could begin to unpack and reflexively inscribe the layers of meaning that lie in these interstitial sites of our becoming, what would we learn about ourselves, others, and the politics of relation and of representation at stake in the production of our texts? As we rethink the troubled relationship between the field and home (D’Amico-Samuels 1991, Gupta and Ferguson 1997, McCarthy Brown 1991), the move would compel us to cast these as competing and shifting sites of belonging and becoming and, in turn, to reflexively negotiate the politics of relation that constitute these sites—on the other side of innocence. In spite of our best feminist e√orts to self-reflexively engage in nondominant research and inscribing the researching self within the text, we may find that we collapse into identities we may seek to subvert in the fields we occupy (such as U.S. American, white, ruling class). Jayanti Lal encounters this conundrum in her research project, in which she seeks to ally herself with women factory workers in India. In spite of their allegedly shared identity as ‘‘Indian women,’’ Lal is consistently confounded in her e√orts to conduct her research that empowers these women. Her inspired text reveals the fault lines of simplistic, nostalgic, or innocent notions of sameness that might constitute a shared identity. Lal concludes that identity is inadequate to apprehend the positionality of the researcher ‘‘because one is constantly being situated into it by the micropolitics of the research interactions and the macropolitics of societal inequality’’ (Lal 1996, 197). Illustrating this fault line, Lal describes how a male manager humiliates a woman worker as he calls her into the interview room to exhibit a ‘‘slow’’ worker. Particularly troubling is Lal’s (in)capacity as ‘‘native’’ researcher to achieve ‘‘insider’’ status. Such a movement across power lines would entail ‘‘a search for positionality ‘outside the text’—a position,’’ Lal firmly concludes, ‘‘that is politically irresponsible, empirically impossible, and epistemologically indefensible’’ (197). Such failures signal the heterogeneity/unreliability of iden52

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tity categories (such as ‘‘Indian woman’’) as the basis for alliance, the limitations we encounter in terms of building something that looks like an accountable relationship with subjects, and most crucial in the context of a bridge methodology, those placed on alliance possibilities across power lines in many research contexts. The work, then, is to move productively through the politics of failure to adopt a posture that absorbs failure into a process of remaking self, home, and field. Read from an alliance perspective, Lal’s ‘‘failure’’ not only signals the limitations placed on alliance politics in research contexts but may also signal a potentially productive turn home to engage in an ‘‘accounting’’ (Anzaldúa 2002a). Kamala Visweswaran urges ‘‘the acknowledgement of failure through an accountable positioning, one that . . . takes us homeward rather than away’’ (1994, 99). Within such a turn failures arise as pivotal moments signaling the soft spots that arise as we push on the limits of representation, wherein the epistemological foundations of knowing the other become inseparable from the constitution of the self in a (post)colonial frame.∑ What is required in the face of ‘‘failure,’’ then, is not a more rigorous adherence to the same or a flight to the field, but a (re)turn to home. If the logics of ruling out of which we operate (re)surface in spite of ourselves, it is the sources of those logics we must examine. Gayatri Spivak’s insight that the ‘‘places where we would begin to question’’ lie within the risks we take as we swerve from our path suggests that our e√orts are to shift the logics of our inquiry. ‘‘We are not looking for a perfect analysis,’’ she o√ers, ‘‘but we are looking for the mark of vulnerability which makes a great text not an authority generating a perfect narrative, but our own companion, as it were, so we can share our own vulnerabilities with those texts and move ’’ (1990, 27, emphasis added). It is the movement, in and of itself, that is a productive response to our encounters with ‘‘failure.’’ If ‘‘feminist failure’’ is a function of the countless betrayals we enact in our e√orts to build solidarity among women, and if ‘‘ethnographic failure’’ encounters its limit in the politics of libratory representational practices, then the move home to investigate the politics of our locations provides a productive rejoinder to the conjunction between the two. Home—neither reified, nor isolated. Home as a formative site of belonging. Third world feminists inscribe such a vision of ‘‘home.’’ Visweswaran finds inspiration for feminist ethnographers in the self-investigative ‘‘homework’’ of these feminists, prompting her to ask: ‘‘Why is it that BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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despite recent critiques of place and voice in anthropology, we have yet to turn to our own neighborhoods and growing-up places?’’ (Vismeswaran 1994, 104). Solidarity work among feminist allies requires that we engage in what Cherríe Moraga describes as a ‘‘heartfelt grappling’’ with the conditions of our own marginality and privilege (1981, 29). ‘‘Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression,’’ she writes, ‘‘without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place’’ (29). This grappling circumvents the danger of ‘‘deal[ing] with oppression purely from a theoretical base’’ (29), opening us to ‘‘frightening questions: how have I internalized my own oppression? How have I oppressed?’’ (30). Coming to terms with one’s own oppression becomes the basis for both connection with others (‘‘If . . . anyone were truly to do this, it would be impossible to discount the oppression of others, except by again forgetting how we have been hurt’’) and for dismantling our privileges (‘‘Because to remember may mean giving up whatever privileges we have managed to squeeze out of this society by virtue of our gender, race, class, or sexuality’’ [30]). This homework entails a poetic engagement that ‘‘enfleshes’’ our theorizing with our bodily experiences and our deepest fears and desires. If ‘‘we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry’’ (Moraga 1981, 30), we have not truly done our homework. This kind of grappling marks the entire genre of women-of-color and antiracist feminist theory and activism that flows in the wake of This Bridge Called My Back.∏ Why should the work of building an alliance methodology be any di√erent for feminist ethnographers? What does this particular mark of our vulnerability look like, and what kind of movement might it enable? The (re)turn home is not intended to suggest some kind of ‘‘retreat’’ from the politics of alliance building or representation (see Alco√ 1995). Rather, this turn entails a critical examination of the histories of inclusion, exclusion, and (un)safety that constitute ‘‘home’’ for each of us and for those excluded from our homes: ‘‘one can return home after realizing that home is a place never before seen’’ (Visweswaran 1994, 109). It entails making home ‘‘unhomely’’ (see Jacobs 1996). What, then, is the connection between ‘‘home-’’ and ‘‘bridge’’ work? And how do these projects constitute ‘‘field-’’ work? Anzaldúa argues that bridge work entails a movement out from our ‘‘home’’ spaces to allow ourselves to be ‘‘stripped of the illusion of safety’’ (Anzaldúa 2002a, 54

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5). It would seem that her injunction to move away from ‘‘home’’ is at odds with Visweswaran’s that we turn ‘‘home.’’ Yet the contexts and conversations out of which they write share an impulse to generate a decolonial imaginary as a function of transracial feminist alliances. Each theorist implores di√erent audiences (‘‘women of color’’ and ‘‘anthropologists’’) toward transracial alliances.π Likewise, Visweswaran seeks to mobilize the kind of self-reflexivity that emerges within the relational practices that constitute the formation of ‘‘women of color’’ and antiracist feminist identity. Her ‘‘homework’’ entails an historical excavation∫ of her own mixed-race, crosscultural, white/Indian/American identity as constitutive of her desire to do fieldwork in India. This excavation renders palpable the impulse for her ethnographic inquiry. She is mindful to re-member the desires, fears, and fantasies of ‘‘home’’ as she grapples with the ‘‘trickster’’ impulse that drives her project, always vexing her desires to connect with and speak for the Indian women she encounters in ‘‘the field.’’ The ‘‘fields’’ we choose, her homework instructs, are those in which we seek to find ourselves. This recognition helps us come to know ‘‘home’’ as ‘‘a place never before seen,’’ for in the process of self-investigative historical genealogy we come to ‘‘home’’ as a site fraught with contradictions and tensions, nostalgia and disappointment, wrought through an impossible melding of violence and love. That is, we seek ‘‘fields’’ in which we might find and through which we might remake ‘‘home.’’ And, as such, ‘‘home’’ forms the basis of the ‘‘fields’’ we choose, or which choose us. This recognition, in turn, constitutes those we encounter in the ‘‘field’’ not merely as subjects, other to ourselves, but rather as allies, constitutive of our becoming. The formation of a homework/bridge work/fieldwork constellation entails unearthing the intersections and overlaps between our own oppression/privilege and the conditions of those with whom we seek alliance. Jacqui Alexander’s description of this relational labor exposes the alliance function of the heartfelt grappling that is a process of becoming a ‘‘woman of color.’’ She writes that ‘‘To become women of color we would need to become fluent in each other’s histories . . . to cultivate a way of knowing in which we direct our social, cultural, psychic, and spiritually-marked attention upon each other. We cannot a√ord to cease yearning for each other’s company’’ (2002, 91). Our becoming is a relational process, an alliance-based inquiry. It arises neither from obligation nor fetishization, but from a yearning for one another that is BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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expressed through holding ourselves accountable to our intersecting, divergent, and power-laden histories. It is a labor of love that takes place in compassionate conversation, historical investigation, and relational excavation. Bridge work, in which we take responsibility for engaging in the need to become fluent in one another’s histories, is a form of ‘‘engaged action—compelling us at the deepest, spiritual level of meaning in our lives. It is how we constitute our humanity’’ (Alexander 2002, 97). The becoming that Alexander associates with the formation of ‘‘women of color’’ is a politicized relational practice that transgresses the limits of identity to hail a range of potentially resistive subjects. I don’t wish to erase power lines by suggesting that ‘‘we are all women of color now.’’Ω But to center the positionality of the Chicana falsa and the relational conditions that produce her entails locating the relational practices of ‘‘woman of color’’ identity formation as a point of departure for a bridge methodology. That is, one need not be ‘‘woman of color’’ to engage in the relational practices that become her. As my stories of Andrea and Jennifer suggest, this ‘‘being’’ for an ambiguous subject like me is never an accomplishment, always a striving toward an alliance practice.∞≠ To view such bridge practices as constitutive of a feminist methodology would mean rendering palpable the yearnings that compel us as di√erently located feminists. For many women of color the relational work of alliance/identity formation arises out of necessity and survival, while for feminists of privilege, whose survival needs are often obscured by the privileges they enjoy, the process of unlearning individuality, separation, and segregation becomes vital in engendering the desire to know others (Segrest 2002). Moraga accounts for some of the problems of women-of-color exclusion as the absence of this desire on the part of white women: ‘‘So often the women seem to feel no loss, no lack, no absence when women of color are not involved; therefore, there is little desire to change the situation’’ (Moraga 1981, 33). So long as the grieving for this absence remains deactivated, social change, which always requires a degree of investment, will not occur. The yearning of which Alexander speaks, particularly one that interrogates the risks of benevolent possession, is an acquired impulse for feminists of privilege. This relational work entails unlearning our ‘‘collective conditioning’’ of forgetting ‘‘that every comfort of our lives is acquired with the blood of conquered, subjugated, enslaved, or exterminated people’’ (Anzaldúa 2002a, 540). It is a labor of love: of love, because ‘‘love inspires re-membering’’ (Alexander 2002, 95). The labor of this re-membering calls for us to record (from 56

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the Latin, to pass again through the heart) the furies and su√erings of a people. This labor of love, this bridge work, is the engaged action through which we constitute our humanity. The relational conditions that inform these writings are central to the project of theorizing a politics of relation and, by extension, a bridge methodology. These conditions may shift over time and across space as each author engages in di√erential belongings. Their writings reveal the sites of belonging that are compelling to them at the moment of inscription: Anzaldúa seeks to widen the circle of allies to include people who are not women of color; Visweswaran investigates the conditions of her familial belonging to investigate her impulse to do fieldwork in India; Lal seeks alliance with Indian women factory workers; Alexander engages other women of African descent living in the United States. Each conversation is compelled by a yearning; each yearning arises from the author’s desire to constitute her humanity, to decolonize her imaginary. To translate these relational practices into a bridge methodology, it is from this nexus between self-excavation (homework) and yearning for others (bridge work) that we may come to our most honest articulation of the impulses that constitute our fieldwork. When Deborah D’Amico-Samuels concludes that ‘‘the field is everywhere’’ (1991, 83), we are wise to consider carefully the potential implications for an alliance methodology at stake in her claim. It seems that the primary motivation for maintaining a circumscribed notion of the field is to preserve and police institutional and disciplinary boundaries. As James Cli√ord writes, ‘‘The [anthropological] community does not simply use (define) the term ‘field-work’; it is materially used (defined) by it’’ (1997, 55). Those for whom the field becomes too loosely defined will be disciplined through such sanctions as job loss, lack of funding, and disciplinary homelessness. These disciplinary apparatuses keep rigorous and radical investigations in check and bind us to outdated concepts that may no longer serve our interests. How might the formation of a bridge methodology be informed by D’Amico-Samuels’s injunction? First, it would suggest that we consider the cyclical relationship among home-, bridge, and fieldwork, not necessarily as linear steps that take us to and from a discrete and localized site of investigation, but rather as a set of interrelated relational moments of an unfolding process in which we are constantly immersed. And have been since the moments of our births. Second, it would open us to consider the multiple sites in which we might engage others in bridge work in the process of our BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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fieldwork. In this sense, the impulse to engage others arises not from an impulse to discursively colonize the other, but to become fluent in one another’s histories to build wide and deep connections across power lines. Finally, the homework that we do in order to become viable allies also reveals to us the conditions of our own relational needs.

FIELD, BRIDGE, HOME, UNIVERSITY

Sketching a Bridge Methodology What has my homework taught me? My lessons have something to do with being split by worlds and by words. My identity unrest, the split among women, the fork of my tongue—these forces pull me out into deep waters like an undertow. Their tug rises and falls with the tidal cycles of the moon. My body tires, my lungs seek more air, I spit up salt water. A hand reaches out, I stretch to meet its grasp. Sometimes the hand is soft cream; sometimes rough with the calluses of work in the fields; dark or light; dark and light. The undertow of racism within the sea of feminism—its own middle passage—belies the glassy surface. Many have su√ered its deadly undertow. Many more will su√er. My homework brings me to this bridge work. Build bridges with women of color; build bridges with white women. Under what conditions might the sea of feminism generate smooth waters for feminists of di√erence? What can I contribute? If this bridge called my back straddles power lines between women of color and white women, the field that compels me at this juncture is the U.S. academy. I want to build bridges with these women in the places where we live and work. These women, who are the primary authors of feminism in this country. If I could contribute something to bridging these women, what kind of academic feminism might be possible? The contours of this study seek to unsettle relations at work in critical ethnographic or feminist inquiry: among home and field and university; among topic and methodology and social relations. The topic of this study (feminist alliances) is intertwined with its method (bridge inscriptions) and its site of study (the U.S. academy) is also the primary site of feminist knowledge production and reception. The question of bridge work becomes inseparable from that of fieldwork, and because this study is situated in the academy, my fieldwork took place in what 58

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might be loosely defined as my workplace, blurring its distinction from homework. This quandary of creating boundaries around the moments of the home/bridge/field is to suggest the fluidity of the relationship among them: that for me the question of who I am becoming is inseparable from the alliances failed, forged, and formulated within this project. The ongoing questions of identity and belonging that inflect my being have compelled me into this particular field of academic feminism, to this particular focus on racialized di√erence, and into these particular connections with the women of this study. Each woman, every woman, and the messy overlaps among them have taught me something of myself in relation, of who I am becoming. This section traces the contours of the study I conducted among academic feminists in an e√ort to sketch a bridge methodology. A ‘‘sketch’’ is a rough draft, an imprecise copy, a humble attempt to gesture toward what might be possible if we could cultivate a bridge methodology. Some points that I trace below: how my movement among homeand bridge work brought me to the field of academic feminism; the practice of reading space as social relations; the practice of reading subjects’ stories in relation. Home/Bridge/University/Field G Since my entry into graduate school in the late 1990s, I have experienced the racialized divisions among academic feminists so palpably because these women divided were my friends and mentors. White women, women of color, mixed race women confided their struggles to me. By virtue of these informal connections, I was already conducting this ‘‘fieldwork’’ through my positionality, my becoming-in-community. These relations inspired me to create a research program that would reverberate and intensify the frequency of these informal conversations. So over a two-year period from 1999 to 2001 I conducted personal interviews with twenty-eight academic feminists: ten women of color and eighteen white women. Based on my informal conversations and my reading of feminist and cultural studies literature, I designed a series of questions about their academic careers, alliances, feminist struggles, and identifications (see appendix B). I used these questions to frame the interviews, but I also allowed the conversations to meander according to whatever history, relational ties, or personal connections I shared with the interviewees. The women contacted me in response to a mass email (see appendix A) I sent out seeking ‘‘self-proclaimed academic feminists’’ who would be BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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willing to talk to me about ‘‘how race, national origin, ethnicity and class function in feminist alliance formation.’’ In our conversations I sought to draw out the meanings of critical terms such as ‘‘feminism’’ and ‘‘alliances,’’ as they manifest in these women’s own life experiences, while at the same time expressing my own meanings for these terms through the questions I asked and the information I shared. I transcribed the interviews and then organized them thematically two di√erent ways. First, I identified recurring themes (such as ‘‘transracial alliances,’’ ‘‘white space,’’ ‘‘(hetero)sexual attraction,’’ ‘‘reading me,’’ ‘‘definition feminism,’’ ‘‘definition alliances’’) and created separate documents for each theme. I developed each theme within these documents, entering excerpts from the transcripts with my reflections and initial analysis. These themes served as the bases for the first draft of each chapter. To write the next draft I returned to the transcripts and took detailed notes on each interview, creating a separate document for each in which I entered longer excerpts and organizational notes. Field/University/Reading Space G My conversations with these women are inscribed in time and space. They arose in my travels across the country in o≈ces, hotels, and homes; bagel shops, co√ee shops, and bars; at colleges and universities and conferences. The unevenness of these settings across time and space provides me with a di√erent set of information for the di√erent women with whom I engaged.What I may or may not have been able to observe about this person was at least in part a function of where we happened to encounter each other. Mindful of how space is socially constructed,∞∞ I found myself scrutinizing how women arranged their homes or o≈ces, what kinds of spaces were available to them, and how these factors gained meaning to me. Their bookshelves told me with whom they were in conversation; their photographs revealed the faces that comprise their memories and constitute their imaginings of those relations they held to be most dear; their decorations revealed their travels and desires, their work, play, and fantasies. In each case I analyze below, it also becomes apparent that feminist theory serves as a primary mediating discourse in assessing the politics of these relations. I became curious about how objects provided a window into each woman and how she might emerge in relation to me, and I to her. In Donna’s o≈ce I noticed many photographs of her with lots of people— friends and family, I imagined. I saw no face that resembled mine; her 60

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photos included all African American faces. I wondered how she read nonblack women, if she had white or Latina allies; I wondered how I’d bridge the power lines I imagined between us. My grandmother was raised by a black nanny in the South; her mother belonged to the Daughters of the Revolution: the erasure of African ancestry within Mexican culture, our histories converging through violence, human ownership, shame, elision. Was I su≈ciently fluent in her history—or perhaps, more accurately, in these tensions through which our collective history converged—to gain her as an ally in spite of our visible and historical di√erences? My knowledge of black feminist thought and my experience with black women served as the basis for a momentary bridge language to emerge between us. The movement in this excerpt, in which Donna describes how black men responded to her cutting o√ her long hair, illustrates such a moment: D: I was just a ‘‘goddamned mean bitch to do that.’’ And that’s not true,

‘‘huh?!’’ [laughing]. It’s all about my hair. A: Have you seen Angela Davis’s essay on the fro? D: Noo! A: It’s in Names We Call Home. I could get you a copy. D: Oh, that is the essay in which she is sort of lamenting the fact that it became a ‘‘fashion thing’’— A: —yeah— D: —into a fashion statement. A: Yeah. D: Yeah, and I picked that up. You know there was, a lot of people just outright looked like her. There were models who looked like her. Had her thing shaped in a fro. And something was wrong with this picture— A: —where they had, like, pictures of her that were like criminal mug shots. And then the models would sort of be posing like—[with serious facial expression] D: —yeah, exactly! Exactly, I saw that. I saw the layout and I saw her face on it. I was really glad.

Our conversation had moments such as these, in which it jumps to life, which interrupt a series of more awkward exchanges, particularly early on. These unfold in what follows. This lively interaction is toward the end of the interview; I am becoming more confident, my words more fluent, and my facial gesture performs, for an instance, the black-femaleness embodied in the potent figure of Angela Davis. Donna has ceased BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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explaining race to me, hedging her critiques in deracialized language, speaking to me like a white woman. In this interchange we interrupt each other and finish each other’s sentences, evoking—for me—a sense of intimacy and recognition. For her? How can I know? She remains unknowable to me, even as we reach toward each other through this embodied encounter over black women’s hair. Something of the upward inflection in her tone when she says, ‘‘exactly!’’ felt like connection, the eruption of a moment of converging history, like transracial bridging. Whatever knowledge, consciousness, and embodied notions surrounding the politics of black women’s hair—from reading Davis and others and my encounters with other black women about their hair—provided me a point of entry into the cultural context without which Donna’s experience with her hair would have been unintelligible.∞≤ This kind of exchange across lines of di√erence becomes possible when the groundwork for conversation is cultivated through the labors of love constitutive of becoming women of color prior to such moments. The cues we gather about another from the spaces she occupies, and our capacity to engage and analyze those cues, may serve as part of that groundwork. Bookshelves, photos, how we decorate our space—the bridges and desires these objects suggest. Shari had mostly texts by white feminists and authors in her field and only a few books by women of color. Her walls contained no photographs, but were decorated with colorful Native American art. I felt a disjuncture between her bookshelves and the images on her walls. With whom was she in conversation and to whom did she belong? I wondered. Jo Carillo’s poem passed through my thoughts as I sat in her o≈ce. I looked it up when I got home.∞≥ Carillo writes: Our white sisters radical friends love to own pictures of us walking to the fields in hot sun with straw hat on head if brown bandana if black in bright embroidered shirts holding brown yellow black red children reading books from literacy campaigns smiling —‘‘When You Leave, Take Your Pictures with You’’

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Shari’s objects spoke to me of an appropriative relationship to ‘‘culture’’ so constitutive of, although not necessary to, the formation of ‘‘radical’’ white female subject. My relation to her was thus constituted through these objects and the meanings I had come to associate with them. These associations arose less from my positionality as a woman ‘‘walking to the fields in hot sun’’ than from my own investments in such images, in my own self-image as ‘‘radical friend’’ that was remade through my engagement with This Bridge, and multiple other encounters. This awareness of my own, and perhaps Shari’s, investments in white feminist innocence arise from my third world feminist education through authors such as Carillo. It is a cultivated dis-ease. Thus my critique of this ‘‘white sister, radical friend’’ arises not from a space of intellectual or a√ective distance from Shari, but of empathic critique inspired by both my connection to and identification with her and my Latino and Native cultural ties and alliances. My construction of ‘‘Shari’’ is not meant to essentialize white women within this (neo)colonial inscription of ‘‘white sister, radical friend.’’ Rather, decoding the meanings of such objects to their owners involves an investigation of the social and cultural relations that inflect those meanings, which vary across white women. For instance, in Robyn’s account, a Native friend had gifted her with sacred objects: ‘‘She was an artist,’’ Robyn recalls, ‘‘and I have a drawing that she made for me and she gave me an eagle feather, which is, you know, a really big thing in her culture.’’ Distinctions such as these in the quality of relationships white women cultivate with Native women, with other women of color, provided a glimpse into the heterogeneity of white women-in-relation— the possibility that the designation ‘‘white sisters, radical friends’’ could be spoken not as parody, but in earnest, by women of color. Field/University/(Inter)Related Subjects G The feather perched on the woman’s desk, then, may signify a whole range of possible (dis)connections with others. A bridge methodology may entail a careful consideration of objects and conversations, and the interplay between them, for they reveal social relations constitutive of very di√erent subjects because the presence or absence of certain objects reflects and refracts the stories people tell, and those stories may arise across conversations. Visweswaran (1994) has argued that the stories that are told, and those that are withheld, may be read as strategic deployments of feminist subjectivities, the assertion of agency within the uneven field of power at BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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work in the ethnographic encounter. I would add that we read these stories in relation—that is, within the context of convergent and conflicting accounts from others. Thus the strategic component through which subjects deploy their feminist selves may be resistive, but they may also be regressive. For instance, Shari’s stories about her Native American boyfriend may be a strategic positioning of her-self through this intimate relationship with and knowledge of Native life and culture. Her story was later contested, however, by another woman, who cast the a√air in a critical light—the relationship was perceived by Native women, she explained, not as alliance, but as transgression. Thus the story of connection between the white woman and the Indian man may be multiply inflected according to various authors, and the original author (Shari) does not retain authorial control over the rhetorical construction of her subjectivity in relation to her lover, in relation to the community, in relation to me. Such converging and conflicting stories provided a strange and random sense of perceptual triangulation within which I could read my own limited access to ‘‘the subject’’ with and against the perceptions of others. Academic feminist life, as within any cultural system, is interconnected through overlapping social relations that may be said to constitute a field. Particularly among academic feminists we are gathered, however tenuously and sometimes antagonistically, under the sign of ‘‘feminism’’ and the institutional arrangements that constitute and stem from this arrangement. In this way our alliance bases are generative; in this way our alliance bases are exclusionary; in this way our alliance bases provide the relational context for who ‘‘we’’ (as researchers and as subjects) are becoming. That is, how we position ourselves in community opens up countless encounters with others who are also joined in community. Power lines, these webs of connection open us outward, again and again, in the direction of others. But the contours the web takes on are a function of whom we know and how. Such stories, in which my capacity to ‘‘know’’ one woman was framed by the accounts of other women, would arise spontaneously, unprovoked, and almost magically over the course of this research. I did not stage such encounters, expose anyone’s name, or ask after someone whom I’d interviewed. But I often found myself in conversation with one woman about another as a function of mutual belonging: ‘‘Do you know So-and-so?’’ Sometimes such coincidences produced profound or unsettling insights. For instance, I had spoken with an African Ameri64

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can woman, Marsha, extensively about her tenure struggles. She had reported that her white feminist colleagues in her department found her ‘‘aggressive’’ and ‘‘intimidating,’’ in spite of the fact that she worked very hard to build ‘‘collegial’’ connections with them. Later I spoke with a white woman, Emily, who was a colleague of Marsha, working in another department. In the course of our conversation Emily came to reckon with the fact that she had no women-of-color allies, a reckoning that compelled her to consider how she might cultivate such ties. She said that there was a woman of color whom she’d like to get to know better: ‘‘I’ll see her at conferences and she just hugs me and gives me a kiss on the cheek and I don’t really know her that well, but I just feel that she exudes this positive spirit that I just love. I would love to get to know her better. But it’s, I like that. I like that a lot!’’ (She laughs.) Emily was describing Marsha. Emily’s stated longing for transracial connection with Marsha and the ‘‘aggressive’’ depiction of Marsha shared in her own account tug at each other. The methodological questions that arise here involve reading how racialized di√erence arises as the desire for bridging and the betrayals that constitute di√erently situated subjects. ‘‘Marsha’’ emerges as a figure, multiply written: through her own account of how she is read by her white female colleagues as ‘‘scary,’’ through Emily’s exuberant framing of her as a ‘‘positive spirit,’’ through my own encounters with her and other black women who share similar accounts of being either rejected or desired by whites, through the work of feminist scholars who have excavated the production of black femininity (see Collins 2000, Hammonds 1997). These accounts, in turn, frame or produce the figures of the white women whose subjectivities emerge over and against that of Marsha and other women of color: Emily stages her ‘‘self ’’ as desiring di√erence, while Marsha frames her colleagues’ relationally fragile and institutionally powerful white femininity as a function of her racialized femininity.∞∂ These competing and complementary racialized texts expose something of the relational binds placed on women of color and the relational conditions productive of white femininity that constitute the field of academic feminism. The di√erent a√ective investments in community and the potentialities of transracial alliances di√erently frame the grids of intelligibility through which these subjectivities emerge. What constitutes ‘‘feminist’’ and ‘‘community’’ varies across interviews. Laura, a colleague at the same university, mentions Marsha’s department several times as eviBRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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dence that she works at an inclusive, feminist institution. ‘‘There’s an incredible atmosphere of welcoming in the feminist community,’’ Laura says. ‘‘I’m a part of the community in making people like me feel welcome in a place like this.’’ In terms of institutional resources and access, Laura’s and Marsha’s uneven accounts of this ‘‘feminist community’’ raise questions. What constitutes a ‘‘feminist’’ atmosphere? What are the dangers of universalizing a ‘‘feminist community’’? What are the conditions of privilege and marginality that accompany the institutionalization of feminist belongings? Their accounts produce the same institutional site (Marsha’s department) simultaneously as dangerous (racist) and as a safe zone (feminist). While Marsha struggles to secure tenure there, Laura reports that her ability to teach in that department positively ‘‘a√ects [her] tenure’’ and provides an atmosphere in which to ‘‘become close friends as well as wonderful colleagues.’’ Such encounters, as well as the institutional contexts in which they arise, reveal the multiple, relational, and spatially situated ways in which the self and the subject may emerge within research settings. How I came to ‘‘know’’ each woman arose largely from what was spoken between us. But to limit what counts as research material to this narrow slice of meaning that arose would overlook so much rich material for how I came to know: such as that which was not spoken, or edited from the text; the cues provided by material space and how people choose to arrange it and move within it; insights provided by others that conflict with or rewrite these rhetorical stagings; how these women read me, and how that a√ected what they shared in our conversations.

READING ME, SHIFTING ME

On the Politics of Alliance in Research Contexts How is the researcher’s location relationally constituted within research contexts? Under what conditions might such relations be forged beyond the innocent frame of ‘‘rapport’’ in the direction of responsible alliance formation? That is, how do we resist and transform relations of ruling so stringently at work in research contexts within the limited contact available within such encounters? Lal (1996) discusses her struggles to build solidarity with women factory workers in India as she moved across various ‘‘thresholds’’ of belonging. Diane Nelson describes (1999, 32) how she strove for ‘‘fluidarity’’ as she navigated her 66

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‘‘gringa’’ identity in Guatemala by forming ‘‘solidarity’’-based ‘‘friendships’’ with locals over time. In her interviews with white women Ruth Frankenberg (Frankenberg 1993) deployed a ‘‘dialogic approach,’’ offering information both about herself as a subject inscribed within racism and her analysis of systemic and interpersonal forms of racism as in an e√ort to break the ‘‘color- and power-evasive’’ silences that constitute white on white social relations. These women developed such strategies with the intention of intervening in power relations: relations of neocolonial domination in India and Guatemala and relations of white privilege and supremacy in the United States. In each case the positionality of the researcher is a factor that must be negotiated: Lal’s insider/outsider status as ‘‘Indian woman’’; Nelson’s context-specific ‘‘gringa’’ identity; and the shifting ‘‘i’’ of Frankenberg’s white feminist location (see also Frankenberg 1996). A Chicana falsa, the politics of my location are never those upon which I can rely. Like Lal, who stumbled over her lack of control over how she was positioned in relation to the women factory workers with whom she sought to build alliance, I had no control over how my body signified in my interviews with academic women. In an e√ort to learn more about who ‘‘i’’ was in these relational moments, I closed many interviews by asking the women, ‘‘How are you reading my identity and how does that a√ect what you are willing to say to me?’’ Constantly confused by my own shifting positionality and how my racial ambiguity constitutes the home-, bridge, and fieldwork of this study, I was curious to find out who they thought I was, how their readings shaped our conversations, and how such readings might o√er insights into the relational positioning of the researcher striving for a bridge methodology. By and large, white women initially read me as a white woman, although some expressed some racial confusion and one thought I was Spanish. ‘‘You won’t have any trouble [in academia],’’ a black woman told me after sharing her experience of students throwing papers back in her face, ‘‘You a white girl!’’ Black women tended to read me as white; one thought there was ‘‘some Latina in there.’’ And brown women— Chicanas, a Native woman, a South Asian woman, and a Filipina— encountered me as Latina, woman of color, mestiza, and/or ally by virtue of my transracial belongings. ‘‘You are a light-skinned Chicana,’’ said Angela, a Filipina, citing my name, facial features, and the topic of my research as evidence. ‘‘I don’t know if you’re white, Chicana, or racially mixed and I don’t really care,’’ responded Andrea, tired of idenBRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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tity politics. She met with me because of who I know—political allies we share made me an ally of sorts. ‘‘You’re my long lost cousin,’’ said one Chicana with whom I have since become friends. Those who commented on it assigned various interpretations to my sexuality. Many commented upon my skills (or lack thereof) as an interviewer/ethnographer. How are we to interpret the politics of my location, then, if the (in)visibility of my ‘‘identity’’ shifts and slides across each encounter, or even over the course of a single encounter? What are the various investments at work in these assignations to my identity and my investigation of them? It seems that in the bridge work that becomes possible in the field, questions of sameness and di√erence in terms of identity, belonging, and ideology are at stake. If my body signifies ambiguously, my racialized self emerged through my discursive positioning within these conversations. The topics of interest (racialized di√erence, white privilege, feminism, institutional power, and alliance formation) work against the logics of white belonging, which is largely forged through ‘‘white solipsism.’’∞∑ The very nature of these discussions, then, violated the relational conditions of white belonging. In spite of my potential transgression of these conditions, the majority of white women initially responded that they read me as white (‘‘You’re like me’’), but on further reflection expressed uncertainty over my racial designation. This racial confusion may suggest not only the ambiguity of my embodied racial markings, but perhaps more important, the tensions at work in our relational contact: the disjunctures between the content of our discussions and the meanings they assigned to my ambiguously (un)marked body create a potentially productive tension. Out of these tensions arise relational possibilities and problematics. In this section I trace some of the comments women made about my identity, and then untangle some of the contradictions that may have arisen out of these tensions. What does it mean that white women tended to see me primarily through expressions of similarity and not di√erence? I explore this question deploying the power-evasive nature of whiteness observed by Frankenberg (1993) as it manifest itself relationally to consider the politics of white belonging and the possibilities for cultivating more radical forms of belonging within our research settings. In spite of the identity frame provided by my question, white women would often divert questions of identity and power in favor of the particularities of my personality (a good listener, sympathetic, trustworthy, fair). Deborah re68

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sponds to my question as follows: ‘‘Um, OK, that’s fun. I guess, I mean, I’m reading you as sincere, as sympathetic, thoughtful graduate student’’ (she laughs). The pause and her laughter, her comment ‘‘that’s fun,’’ signify Deborah’s e√orts to make light of a potentially threatening question. These moves reframe the hard edges of questions of identity, di√erence, and the politics of speaking as a conversational game. Her next move also manages the threat of identity and di√erence by rearticulating ‘‘identity’’ in favor of more benign personality traits (sincere, thoughtful, sympathetic), decoupling her ascriptions of ‘‘my identity’’ from power relations. The emphasis on my graduate student status underscores my lack of institutional power, particularly in relation to her professor status. Given the broader context of our conversation (racial di√erence, identity, painful betrayals, and disappointments among feminists), her response defies conversational flow in favor of power-evasive white belonging. Her responses hedge the more threatening and context-appropriate question of my racial identity in favor of the particularities of my being that she likely found reassuring. While such moves contain di√erence (i.e., that intersections of power get reduced to the particularities of personality), Deborah’s (re)articulation of ‘‘identity’’ may also be read as a potential intervention, or moment of translation between power evasion and power attention. Deborah’s comment exposes some of the raw materials of our bridge work, which may be untangled: the topic of identity, race, feminist alliances; the discomfort she (and other white women) demonstrate in discussing it; the intimacy formed through all that she shared with me of her life, particularly regarding this topic, so often unspoken by, yet apparently so highly relevant to these white women. These components provide a point of entry into cultivating a powerattentive intimacy. Deborah’s move arises at the end of an intense conversation in which she allowed herself to become quite vulnerable as she shared her painful failures in alliances with women of color. She cried during this conversation as she spoke openly about her connections and disconnections with her women of color colleagues. She asked me to shut o√ the tape recorder and I listened, reassured her, and acknowledged that these are very di≈cult and painful topics and experiences. In moments such as these, the boundaries between the topic and the interview process became blurred as Deborah engaged in a heartfelt grappling with her relations, while I sought to support her in that grappling BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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and continue to push, pull, and draw her with me into a deeper reflection. If the subject is always produced, as Judith Butler argues, through certain kinds of foreclosures, which are maintained through racial and heterosexual forms of segregation, then the intimate relational encounter with those sites of otherness may generate ‘‘the possibility of the unraveling of the subject itself ’’ (Butler 2004a, 333). Thus the limits through which the boundaries of the subject, foreclosed through a demarcation between self and other, become destabilized through a politics of relation attentive to the conditions of belonging productive of that boundary. Deborah’s response foregrounds the relational strategy (support) that enables her to press up against this boundary, while it elides the moments of our encounter (push, pull, draw) through which she becomes undone. Her emphasis on my sincerity, sympathy, and subordinate status foregrounds the components of my identity in which she may have found comfort in the face of her own vulnerability as each of these tropes of belonging enable her to negotiate her-self as a stable subject over and against me as a relatively contained, or subordinated, site of di√erence and as a singular subject-in-communion with her. The specificity of these components suggests that an important piece of bridge work is the particular, the personal, the intimate—these gestures that enable us to bump up against the limits of our subjectivities. The work of becoming and undoing in relation, then, entails a weave of the universal (the structural, power relations, racial identity) and the singular (the face, the intimate, the unrepeatable, that which escapes inscription) (see Nancy 1991, Spivak 1999). It would be inadequate, however, to rest in this analysis for it capitulates to power-evasive intimacy, skirting the more di≈cult work of the power-intimacy tension productive of alliance formation. Alliance work entails holding and intensifying the tension between intimacy and power, which may require recentering power directly. In the next turn of the conversation, I name whiteness in a departure from power-evasive intimacy. ‘‘Do you read me as white?’’ I ask. Deborah’s reply evokes a complex web of racial identity and belonging as a function of positionality as researcher: D: Oh sure. A: And how does that a√ect what you say? D: Um, [pause], I mean I was thinking about that when I was talking

about the African American women, and I was real hesitant to talk

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about that stu√. Um, but I know that you know the literature through [she names a mentor of mine]. Um, I was asking myself, ‘‘OK, would I say this to a black interviewer?’’ And um, I’m gonna think about the fact of her being as critical as a black interviewer. Um because a black interviewer would be harder to say some of those things to, um, I think, um. God, I’m such a spill-your-guts person, you know? [laughing and crying]. Because I know [your mentor], I’m gonna give both sides of the story . . . if it would have been a black person who I felt was similarly one-sided, I think I would have been more guarded. . . . Your race is complicated too.

Deborah’s comment meanders through some ambiguities and tensions, racist assumptions and vulnerabilities, as she teeters uneasily into power-attentive communication. The certainty with which she responds to the question of my white identity (‘‘Oh sure’’) unravels throughout the course of her reply as she concludes, ‘‘Your race is complicated too.’’ A series of forces collude that compel her to simultaneously ‘‘complicate’’ my identity and assert that a ‘‘critical black interviewer’’ would be ‘‘equally one-sided’’ (as she?), even as she reclaims her trust in me. She cites my area of study (my knowledge of ‘‘the literature’’), my allies, and the possibility of my whiteness, or more importantly, my nonblackness, as her reasons for ‘‘giv[ing] both sides of the story.’’ While my positionality is ‘‘complicated,’’ my nonblackness functions as su≈cient grounds to assure a form of objectivity (an ability to see ‘‘both sides’’) of which a black interviewer would be incapable (‘‘similarly one-sided’’). Her logic relies upon a binaristic racial logic (black/white) in which whiteness is produced as nonblackness and her white positionality is privileged as unbiased (‘‘I’m gonna give both sides of the story’’) over and against blackness (subordinated as ‘‘one-sided’’), even as this logic is belied by her reference to the ‘‘similarity’’ of the one-sided tellings that a black and a white person would provide. These reasons provide the warrant, or the relational conditions of possibility, through which she overcomes her ‘‘hesitancy’’ to enter into a process of unraveling, to discuss the tensions in her relationship with her colleagues, based on the assumption that I would treat her fairly (or at least ‘‘give both sides of the story’’) because I am nonblack. That is, my whiteness, although ‘‘complicated,’’ is su≈cient to reassure her that I will tell her ‘‘side of the story’’— that is, that I will su≈ciently identify with her to conduct a ‘‘fair’’ reading. She also reads my positionality through the makeup of my allies, who

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factor in because of the ‘‘literature’’ she assumes I know by virtue of the work my mentor does. In this case, as with others I examine below, my location as the ‘‘researcher’’ is largely a function of her (and my) belongings. Deborah, like most of the white women I met, read my racial identity as close to her own and as often defined over and against overt blackness. Other white women responded in similar ways, as with Jennifer’s assumption ‘‘you’re like me’’—that is, I’m not an ‘‘obvious woman of color’’ (emphasis added). And Heather: ‘‘[small laugh] That’s interesting. You’re like me, except younger [laughs]. Which makes it easy.’’ The comment ‘‘You’re like me . . . which makes it easy’’ suggests that at the disjuncture between spectral similarity and other signifiers of racial dissimilarity (such as a topic that breaches norms of white belonging, my name, any visual dissimilarities, and knowledge of my identity or belongings), Heather prefers to privilege the similar over the foreign, sameness over di√erence, in decoding my location. Even as the sameness she perceives may allow her to bridge these di√erences—to talk very openly about challenging issues of racialized di√erence—the risk is that likenesses override or erase the productive potential di√erence possible in transracial bridging. In turn, this erasure risks eliding the privilege through which the sameness-based, power-evasive intimacy is established. In my conversation with Heather just prior to this exchange, she said that she is only aware of her identity (as a straight, middle-class white woman) when relating across di√erence. As such, her claim that I am ‘‘like her, except younger,’’ renders age the only salient di√erence between her social location and mine. In this regard, she is able to (re)establish a sense of authority in terms of age or rank, as did Deborah when she evoked my ‘‘graduate student’’ identity. If her authority, or sense of herself as a coherent subject, was challenged or unsettled by the uneasiness of such frank discussions of di√erence (note her laughter and the lack of fluency with which she speaks), Heather discursively reestablishes authority through her reference to my relative youth, while simultaneously eliding the potentially more dangerous forms of di√erence that might constitute our belonging. For if Heather’s awareness of her privileged identity is invoked only in the presence of racialized others, my white femininity functions to erase her identity—or at least her awareness of her identity—through the reassurance of sameness it pro-

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vides. This move, then, reasserts power-evasive intimacy, working against the potential for power-attentive intimacy that arose over the course of the conversation. While at times I challenged this move, as with my interaction with Deborah, I often felt awkwardly silent at such turns. My silence at such moments fed the power-evasive conversational flow, allowing me to become white-in-relation through my complicity with white modes of belonging. This is to suggest that the constitution of the coherent subject produced and imagined by Heather and Deborah in relation to me is contingent upon segregated belongings, manifest through an a√ective investment that inscribes me through sameness. Their resistance to recognizing components of my racial di√erence in relation to them generates an imperative of sameness that conditions our belonging in an unconscious e√ort to shore up their self-recognition as white women. This relational dynamic of subject constitution gestures toward the processes through which the subject of feminism is inaugurated and (re)secured through a series of ongoing relational encounters that are deeply invested in the suppression of di√erence. I develop this argument more fully in the following chapter, but for now it bears noting that the white subject’s coherence is contingent upon the spatial and a√ective foreclosure of di√erence: this strategy leaves white women with a ‘‘clear sense of the di√erence and distance between the local (defined as self, nation, and Western) and the global (defined as other, non-Western, and transnational)’’ (Mohanty 2003, 518). That is, even in the spatial and a√ective proximity of di√erence, the white subject may find her-self so deeply invested in the erasure of power that she constitutes the ‘‘other’’ in her own likeness so that she may remain invested in her vision of her-self as coherent subject. Unlike the power-evasive communication styles of these white women, women of color tended to respond to questions of identity, whether mine or theirs, in terms that explicitly name identity axes as a function of mapping power: race and gender, and often class, sexuality, and nationality were evoked. Only one woman of color responded to the question of my identity through power-evasive expression. While ultimately it is possible to read Amanda’s figuration as linked to power, her response reveals of her ambiguous relationship to whiteness more broadly, and its specific manifestation in my positionality. ‘‘How am I reading you?’’ she retorts in response to my question, laughing loudly. ‘‘Well, I mean you seem very easy going. You appear trustworthy. . . . I appreciate your

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assertiveness in making sure that we had this meeting.’’ As with the white women above, Amanda’s response skirts questions of structurally situated identity categories in locating me as subject. Her repetition of the question and her laughter, like Deborah’s and Heather’s, suggests a level of discomfort with my question and the individualized qualities she assigns to me (‘‘easygoing,’’ ‘‘trustworthy,’’ and ‘‘assertive’’) individualize location, decoupling identity from social power. Indeed, Amanda spent much of the interview sliding around questions of racialized di√erence in favor of individualistic qualities and personal di√erence. The only person I interviewed who works in the sciences, Amanda’s responses trace her figure not through a ‘‘woman of color’’ consciousness that I encountered in other women of color, but rather through discourses of white belonging, power evasion, and assimilation. Amanda’s negotiation suggests there is no necessary connection between ‘‘woman of color’’ as a social location and ‘‘woman of color’’ as an identity, or consciousness (see Bannerji 1992, Frye 2000, Moya 2002). The conditions of Amanda’s academic belonging (predominantly white and male, with little room for conversation around ‘‘di√erence’’) seem to be much more constrained than those of other women of color in terms of race and gender than those of other academic women, perhaps compelling her to manifest power-evasive, or white, modes of belonging. This suggests a nonnecessary link between the production of a coherent subject vis-à-vis any essentialized identity. Indeed, the convergences between Amanda’s response and those o√ered by Heather and Deborah suggest that the encounter with otherness, di√erence, or a foreclosed sense of sameness evoked throughout our conversation may destabilize the subject Amanda has carved out for herself within a segregated social/institutional set of relations. This is not to suggest that Amanda registers no sense of herself as a woman of color. Her acknowledgment of this identity unfolded over the course of the interview as my gestures to open a power-attentive space for her views on race to emerge met with her own history to generate a site of belonging that, I think, departed from the racially segregated and male-dominated modes of belonging constitutive of her academic subjectivity within the sciences. Also counterposed were the components of my identity to which she has access: my spectral whiteness and my academic institutional location as a researcher are disrupted by the racialized topics and experiences on which I sought to engage her. Her response to the question of my identity arose late in the interview, at

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which point she had loosened up, laughed, and begun to communicate in increasingly power-attentive ways. As if testing the relational waters, she begins to acknowledge the function of power, race, gender, and community in her accounts. In this turn of the conversation, Amanda’s loud laughter performs the kind of ‘‘assertiveness’’ she ‘‘appreciates’’ in me. This assertiveness, defined against the ‘‘passivity’’ she encounters among the (white) people in her current environment, provides a subtle racialized frame through which Amanda positions her-self through the dissolution of her blackness, and the constitution of her subjectivity within whiteness. She explains that ‘‘racially’’ she has ‘‘toned down’’ to fit into her academic position. She ‘‘came from an environment that was predominantly African American to a very white environment,’’ and reasoned that ‘‘racially, [she had] probably toned down a whole lot.’’ This passage suggests that her power-evasive communication strategies are relationally contingent and actively acquired, a process, she goes on to explain, that was mediated through her alliance with a white woman who ‘‘helped [her] a lot with how to operate in this environment as far as dealing with passive people and being a little more professional about things.’’ This alliance provides the relational context in which she remakes her identity through ongoing engagement with, and privileged communication practices of, her more ‘‘passive’’ friend. Amanda explains that this alliance enabled her to become more ‘‘professional’’ in ways that facilitate her capacity to associate with her white, predominantly male colleagues. Alternatively, the degree to which she retains her ‘‘assertiveness’’ is indicative of her capacity to retain and express her relational blackness ‘‘and other things racially, especially.’’ If ‘‘assertiveness’’ is an indicator of ‘‘racial things,’’ then her ‘‘appreciation of my assertiveness’’ suggests that she experiences some component of our connection as a racialized belonging. Amanda’s account suggests that the question of racialized belonging may be as much a function of modes of interaction (i.e., passivity versus assertiveness) as of visible signifiers of racialized di√erence. The ascription of my whiteness has no essential meaning that transcends the different relational experiences of di√erent women of color, but is mediated through these women’s relational encounters with various manifestations and political postures assumed by the whites who people their experience. Michele connects her reading of my positionality as ‘‘white girl’’ to two salient factors of transracial feminist alliance formation: her

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alliances with other antiracist white women and her cues to me, as a white woman, regarding how to enact transracial belonging: No, you’re a white girl. Do you know [Jacqueline] Rowe? No, but anyone who says, ‘‘I don’t see color, I don’t want to deal with it.’’ I don’t want to deal with somebody who says that. But someone who lives as though we shouldn’t have to see color, we shouldn’t need to see color, that the world isn’t built around color. [My partner] is like that and I think [Jacqueline] is like that. And so the reason it’s going to be good for you to be an academic, you’re not going to be like those people [who ‘‘don’t see color’’]. . . . I think the neat thing about other scholars coming up and filling the ranks is we can get a critical mass of progressive people. And I think that’s the key.

Thus for Michele my identity as ‘‘white girl’’ immediately resonates for her with another ‘‘white girl’’ of the same surname. Her assignation of white to my identity does not presume racist exclusions or power evasive interactions commonly associated with white liberalism (‘‘I don’t see color, I don’t want to deal with it’’). Michele establishes the possibility of progressive white identity in her accounts of the antiracist struggles in which she has engaged with her colleague and her partner. The disparate meanings possible, then, for the category white woman in Michele’s formulation is instructive in the formation of a deessentialized white femininity: a white femininity articulated through white liberalism, on one hand, and a white femininity belonging to the ‘‘ranks’’ of the ‘‘critical mass’’ she envisions, on the other. In this excerpt Michele a≈rms the possibility of an antiracist white feminist identity, gestures in the direction of the relational performance of such an identity, and envisions the transformative possibility held within it. Antiracist whiteness is formulated through her equation of three white women who engage in antiracist feminist belonging— Jacqueline, her partner, and me. So while she positions me as a ‘‘white girl’’ within a conversation in which white women have been allied with racism, she simultaneously disarticulates my ‘‘white girl’’ identity from racist white femininity. She accomplishes this move by positioning me in relation to her white antiracist community, connecting me to the antiracism she associates with her friend and her partner. She articulates the conditions of such belonging by demarcating a fine line between colorblind liberalism (‘‘I don’t see color’’) and through antiracist relational praxis (‘‘someone who lives as though we shouldn’t have to see color’’). 76

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The ‘‘as though’’ of the latter is pivotal to Michele’s vision for antiracist belonging, for it demarcates that which is from that which is possible. Mindfully walking this line between the politics of the ‘‘real’’ and the politics of the ‘‘possible’’ is constitutive of this transracial bridge work. In this sense, Michele’s account is instructive: she ushers me toward the white identity with which she can productively engage by outlining the relational and political conditions of belonging that would enable me, as a white woman, to form an alliance with her. While for Michele her connections with antiracist white women enable her to bridge to me as a white woman, for other women of color my connections with their allies provided such a bridge. In the following examples, two women of color diverge over the viability of identity politics (‘‘woman of color’’ identity as the basis for bridge work), yet converge over notions of alliance formation as the basis for bridge work. Cheryl foregrounds my ‘‘Latina identity’’ in conjunction with our shared alliance-base as her rationale for connecting with me, while Andrea expresses a preference for shared alliances, not the politics of identity, as the basis of her candor in our interaction. In response to the question of how she is ‘‘reading me,’’ Cheryl admits: C: Well, I have to be honest that when you first emailed me, I thought,

‘‘Aimee Rowe. Who is this white woman?’’ [laughing]. ‘‘What’s she up to here?’’ A: What’s going on? C: And then I realized, there is a Latina identity there, so maybe she has some sense of what goes on for women of color. . . . So I need to mentor this person by giving her some of my story. . . . And really I think that a lot of the way I read people at this point in my life has to do with who they hang out with and who they know. I mean, it helped that you had talked to [a white lesbian who is her ally] first and that you know [a queer man of color who is her ally], and that kind of stu√, because it’s validating. And I do think that matters. So who you know and the way they respond to you and talk about you.

Cheryl allays her initial suspicion of my ‘‘white woman’’ identity through her recognition of my ‘‘Latina identity.’’ Her misgiving (‘‘What’s she up to here?’’) may arise from the disjuncture between her assumptions about white women’s power-evasive communication and the impulse to converse about racialized di√erence that underlies my initial contact letter. The question that underlies her response is: why would ‘‘this white BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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woman’’ be emailing me to talk about ‘‘how race, national origin, ethnicity and class function in feminist alliance formation’’? (see appendix A). Her initial response to this disjuncture is to recalibrate my identity (I become Latina for her), which means that she may trust that I ‘‘have some sense of what goes on for women of color’’ and that she should, as she says, mentor me by giving me some of her story. Once she establishes this initial point of contact, however, Cheryl shifts her point of reference to a politics of relation to ‘‘validate’’ her decision to bridge with me. This move, from identity to alliance, both confirms and complicates the politics of identity. While the overlap in our alliances may confirm her assessment of a shared woman-of-color identity, the transidentity makeup (the multiplicity of racial, gender, and sexual identities) of these alliances opens the horizons for di√erence-based bridge work. Cheryl had been vocal in our conversation about the importance of di√erence-based alliances as a relational space that opens her to an increased awareness of intersections of power, describing how her alliance with a white lesbian reconfigured her black heterosexual identity. This move underscores a point of consideration for a bridge methodology. That is, as we calibrate the identities of our subjects, accounting for the politics of belonging (theirs and ours) is vital understanding both to the connection between us and ‘‘who they are.’’ To conceptualize Cheryl’s identity, for instance, as a ‘‘black heterosexual woman’’ may provide a glimpse into the politics of her woman of color consciousness, but the depths of her di√erential consciousness have been cultivated largely through her alliance with a white lesbian. Additionally, as with Michele, who read me as a ‘‘white girl,’’ the politics of relation are at work in the capacity of women of color to bridge to white researchers since the imaginary for what’s possible has been forged through prior connections that span power lines. If Cheryl chose to trust me because of our shared identities and allies, Andrea’s account eschews the politics of identity in favor of the politics of relation. Although my identity is more closely a≈liated with Andrea’s Chicana identity than to Cheryl’s African American identity, this shared identity does not become the relational ground for my connection with Andrea as it does for Cheryl. Recall her comment: I have to confess that all those identity issues are unclear to me. I don’t know if you’re Chicana. I don’t know if you’re half Chicana, half white. I don’t know if you’re white. I don’t know if you’re straight or lesbian.

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All I know is that you’re a grad student and you’re a friend of, or a student of [a woman of color ally], and so, and I know [a queer man of color]. And on the basis that you know very good people, I have not held back.

Like Cheryl, Andrea expresses some confusion over ‘‘identity issues,’’ which are ‘‘unclear’’ to her. Neither can she pin down my identity (I may be Chicana, half Chicana, white, straight, or lesbian), nor does she really care to. Over the course of the interview, she has expressed her feelings of discontent, disappointment, and betrayal in her identity-based alliances. Out of these failures within her experiences with identity politics arise a more transracial alliance-based approach to bridge work (the allies we share are non-Chicanas who are bound by politics). Thus in her assessment of my identity, the most salient issue for her is not our shared Chicana identities, but rather, our mutual alliances: ‘‘All [she needs to] know’’ is that we share allies whose politics she trusts. These shared connections are condition of our initial belonging, laying the vital groundwork for her opening up to me, creating a necessary condition of possibility that I may become fluent in her history. As she says, ‘‘on the basis that you know very good people, I have not held back.’’

READING SILENCES, DECODING NONVERBALS, PARALINGUISTIC SHUTTLING

Intimate Subtexts A bridge methodology attends to the interplay among variously situated agents that constitute the script of the subject’s account, thus continually decentering the subject by locating her positionality within shifting, contingent, and strategically deployed power relations. If the presence or absence of transracial connections signals multiple positionalities within a single identity category, how the subject inscribes herself within the conversation is equally important. This section explores how the women with whom I spoke also reveal and deploy themselves in the verbal, nonverbal, and extraverbal components of their communication. My analysis suggests that the communities to which we belong inflect how we communicate about power. Those women engaged in transracial feminist alliances speak with a degree of fluency about issues of racialized di√erence, antiracist consciousness, and con-

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nections across power lines. For white women engaged in segregated alliances, alternatively, the capacity to speak about race and power is often garbled, contradictory, or confused. A bridge methodology attends to the (in)fluencies that inflect our own and our subject’s speech as a point of entry into theorizing the relationship between belonging, communication, and self-staging. Kamala Visweswaran provides an important intervention into feminist ethnography in her work to read silences. In a well-known chapter, ‘‘Betrayal: An Analysis in Three Acts,’’ in her book Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (1994), she locates strategic silences deployed by her subjects as they strive to stage themselves within the ethnographic interview context. Her intervention sensitizes ethnographers to the importance of reading not only what is present within the text but also that which is absent—and the dynamic interplay between what is spoken and that which strategically is omitted. In this section, I seek to push Visweswaran’s contribution beyond the potentially binaristic pairings (‘‘presence/absence,’’ ‘‘voice/silence’’) to examine communication gestures that qualify neither as silence nor as voice, nor as an interplay of silence and voice. The communicative gestures I trace here may be described as nonverbal, extraverbal, or paralinguistic. Attending to these gestures provides a point of entry into how the subject of feminist alliances is oriented toward community and the conditions of belonging productive of her becoming by sensitizing us to the boundaries through which she consolidates and imagines her-self within and/or across various power lines. Within the context of transracial feminist alliances such gestures may be understood as a function of transracial fluency (or lack thereof). If whiteness is a relational process forged through silence, absence, and solipsism, then white bonding arises through an absence of discussion about racial di√erence. As Ruth Frankenberg so carefully documents, ‘‘in a racially hierarchical society, white women have to repress, avoid, and conceal a great deal in order to maintain a stance of ‘not noticing’ color’’ (1993, 33). Here I argue that whiteness functions as such, not strictly as an identity associated with white people, but as a relational practice that constitutes ‘‘white people’’ and integrates/assimilates (certain) ‘‘people of color.’’∞∏ Alternatively, women-of-color relationality is forged through an emphasis on transracial fluency: cultivating a fluency in one another’s histories and a set of relational practices that challenge us to speak to these histories constitute the relational practices of this 80

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becoming. This ‘‘fluency’’ entails an excavation of the various components of privilege and marginality that constitute our social locations and the conditions of our belonging. Framing whiteness and color not exclusively as identities, but as relational practices and disciplinary apparatuses, then, foregrounds the different types of fluency that arise across contexts. If whiteness is a relational practice that functions largely through the performance of racial silences, or power-evasive communication, what happens when these silences are breached by power-attentive communication? And if the formation of women-of-color identity is a relational practice that entails cultivating fluency often confined within racial boundaries, what happens when such e√orts arise across them? In each case, and for di√erent reasons, the fluency of the conversation may be challenged. In this section I seek to trace these disjunctive communicative moments in an e√ort to theorize the challenges posed by, as well as the conditions of possibility for cultivating, transracial fluency. Methodologically, this work entails a reading of the embodied performance of our communication practices as a function of transracial fluency. This reading practice entails a close reading of communicative moments that arise in excess to the encounter: those of incoherence and uncertainty, caution, animation, and agitation. My conversations with white women reveal three themes that evoke such communicatively excessive moments: white identity, white privilege, and transracial feminist alliances. Toward the beginning of each interview, in our discussion around career advancement, I asked, ‘‘What aspects of your own identity do you think may contribute to your ability or di≈culties in rising through the academic ranks?’’ Conversations about the struggles and/or positive experiences they encountered throughout their career histories were the context out of which this question and the following responses arose. Because these responses arise from di√erently racialized institutional experiences, they reveal di√erent degrees of fluency with regard to identity and power. Women of color tended to respond with fluency to questions about their identities as a function of institutional positioning. Consider Cheryl’s response: ‘‘[chuckles] OK, well, I’m black and female [laughs]. There it is, and I think it contributes both ways.’’ Cheryl’s easy laugh and the sparse language she deploys to name her identity as it ‘‘contributes both ways’’ to her career advancement suggest that she has internalized these connections between identity and power, coming to a clear understanding as to BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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their relationship to her lived experience: ‘‘There it is.’’ These gestures suggest that blackness and femaleness constitute the conditions of her academic inclusion/exclusion in ways that acknowledge her awareness of the privileging and marginalizing functions of these categories within the process of her subject formation as an academic feminist. White women, alternatively, would often respond with personal traits, eclipsing the intersection between identity and power. For instance, Emily responds, ‘‘I think, um, [talking softly] I’m a workaholic and a perfectionist.’’ Her softened tone and verbal hesitation suggest her reluctance to reflect upon the connections between her identity and her career advancement, avoiding the question of white, heterosexual, and/or class privilege. My follow-up question contained a list of identity categories, asking how the interviewee’s ‘‘race/whiteness,’’ gender, sexual orientation, and ‘‘class positioning’’ might be at play in her experiences (see appendix B). This framing overtly links identity to social power, transgressing the terms of white belonging, thus positioning many white women within a communication context outside of their primary relational mode. The encounter with this outside creates verbal, nonverbal, and paralinguistic disjunctures that arise within their utterances as they strive to regain a sense of themselves, I would suggest, as coherent subjects. Deborah responds to my follow-up question: ‘‘Hum, it’s so, huh, yeah, I’m white, huh, huh, huh, whatever that means. And uhh [pause]. What were the other categories I’m supposed to deal with?’’ Her verbal skills seem to escape: her reply contains no coherent content, just a series of communication fillers: ‘‘huh’s,’’ ‘‘yeah’s,’’ and pauses. Amira de la Garza (2004) refers to such moments as paralinguistic skirting— the deployment of such extraverbal gestures to avoid the more di≈cult work of grappling with the connections between identity and privilege, or perhaps as a marker that such grappling is taking place, marking a series of disjunctures within the subject. Deborah’s final question (‘‘What were the other categories I’m supposed to deal with?’’) suggests both a lack of fluency in the aspects of her own identity and a level of defensiveness that arises out of this failure to know. Her framing in which she is ‘‘supposed to deal with’’ these categories places me in a power-over position that, in turn, positions her as subordinate and by extension undermines the privilege about which she is so reticent to speak. This reversal becomes important in the following chapters as white women often find feminist-of-color critiques as encounters to be avoided, as opposed to resources that women of color bring to an alliance. It also 82

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bears noting that Deborah and other white women tend to reestablish their power over me, as described above, emphasizing my subordinate age and/or institutional status. Such influencies∞π arose across interviews with white women, often erupting in di√erent communication forms, such as paralinguistic shuttling, changing the topic, and/or contradictions across the interview. The latter arises in my conversation with Jean. Like Emily, she responds to the question of her identity and ‘‘career advancement’’ by describing personal characteristics. In response to my follow-up question she denies any knowledge of identity issues: ‘‘Maybe I’m not very self-reflectant, because I don’t think I know too much about my identity [laughs]. But that is also my age.’’ While she acknowledges her relative illiteracy around identity with a sense of self-investigation (‘‘maybe I’m not very selfreflectant’’), her suggestion that this knowledge gap may be a function of age/generation stages her ignorance through a discourse of innocence. She goes on to rescind this statement about generational ignorance suggesting, ‘‘We were thinking about questions of identity, but maybe not calling it that.’’ She also contradicts her alleged ignorance about her identity in a long discussion of her personal encounters with the work of liberal feminist authors: depression among middle-class white women and their struggles to both to be equal to men but also to be attractive to them. Jean then returns to her original ignorance, which she then deconstructs: A: It’s [the term ‘‘identity’’] not triggering that, neither of these questions

is triggering— J: —Yeah, right, ’cuz I don’t think of my identity as having aspects, you

see? [laughs] A: Right. J: And that is part of white privilege.

Here Jean makes another self-reflexive gesture, framing her lack of understanding around the ‘‘aspects’’ of ‘‘identity’’ as a function of her ‘‘white privilege.’’ Her more casual tone ( ‘‘ ’cuz’’), her laughter, and her solicitation of my agreement (‘‘you see?’’) may suggest her vulnerability at this exposure, or perhaps a sense of relief that accompanies letting go of the relational e√ort it takes to maintain these contradictions. After several turns in the conversation, she finally acknowledges the ‘‘aspects’’ of her identity I’d asked about: ‘‘OK, I am white. General northern European strands in my background. I am heterosexual. Ah [pause]. I am middleBRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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class, what else? We talk about class, from a privileged background.’’ Her response to my explicit request that she discuss how she identifies ‘‘in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality’’ echoes Deborah’s influency. Her communication is tentative: her reply evokes a list-like quality peppered with a pause, a stutter, and a question. Thus over the course of this sequence, Jean moves between fluency and nonfluency, between reckoning and skirting questions of identity and privilege, as she negotiates her relational subjectivity in a conversation that works against its coherency. This influency, however, is not a necessary condition of white femininity. Some white women, antiracist in their feminist politics and relations, evoke identity categories on their own accord. As Robyn reflects on her recent experience on the job market, she says, ‘‘Part of it is gender, but also age, age discrimination. . . . I think social class, class presence, presentation of self . . . I think size discrimination and also the fact that I smoke. So I think all these things are sort of codes for lowerclass identity, which I think, do sort of mitigate in the interview process.’’ In this case, Robyn anticipates my question regarding the connection between career advancement and identity, which I had not yet posed to her. She was merely describing her experience on the job market and questions of identity seem, to her, an inseparable component of that experience. The transracial relational conditions out of which Robyn’s fluency arises are prevalent themes throughout our conversation. She describes how she ‘‘prefers’’ to build alliances with women of color, who are ‘‘just savvier’’ on issues of power and resistance than most whites. Attending not only to the spaces between voice and silence (such as paralinguistic shuttling and conversational flow), but also to the relational conditions that give rise to these communication interactions, Robyn’s fluency in terms of identity bears witness to the importance of transracial feminist alliances in cultivating a language that bridges power lines. If white feminist fluency in conversations addressing identity and power is connected to transracial feminist alliances, the topic of the presence, or more commonly the absence of such alliances, are also a potential a source of influency. As I explore in greater detail in chapter 4, most of the white women in this study do not forge alliances with women of color because of the disparities in institutional power between them. Our conversations provide a relational context for their encounter with this absence, an uneasy realization explicitly marking their complicity with segregated belongings. My question ‘‘In what 84

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respects are your allies similar to and/or di√erent from you, especially culturally?’’ provides a point of entry into this topic. The responses of many white women construct this absence within the communicative frame of paralinguistic skirting. As Judith says: [Pause] Most of them are, most of them are similar. Probably. I mean, I think that whiteness is just such a [sigh], such a prevailing part of all this. I do have, I do have friends, allies, who are African American women, who are di√erent than me. They think about the work [voice trails o√]. Um, you know having them as allies forces me to think of things di√erently, where ordinarily I don’t. Um [pause], I have one good Asian American, Chinese American woman, who’s been a friend for a long time.

The paralinguistic disjunctures Judith encounters at this turn in the conversation may revolve around the definition of ‘‘alliances,’’ a theme involving power and relationality. Judith’s pause, sigh, and verbal disjunctures signal her reluctance to admit that ‘‘most of [her allies] are similar.’’ She evokes whiteness, describing its power as ‘‘just such a prevailing part of all this,’’ in a gesture of self-reflexivity, or awareness, of her constitution through white belonging, even as the agency assigned to whiteness within her reference seems to place accountability for its segregating e√ects outside of her realm of control. In this sense, she both acknowledges the ways in which whiteness interpellates her as a white subject, even as she sidesteps accountability for this process. Judith’s paralinguistic skirting suggests that her encounter with this awareness may be uncommon or uncomfortable, an unsightly component of her subject position that is foreclosed to her. Her attempts to shore up this foreclosure by o√ering a list of women of color, whom Judith describes as ‘‘friends’’ and ‘‘allies,’’ suggest contradictory meanings. On one hand, she is clear on the fact that the presence of these women in her life ‘‘forces [her] to think of things di√erently.’’ Yet the list-like quality of her account, her verbal uncertainty (‘‘probably’’), and the breakdown of the intelligibility of her speech undercut the clarity of this statement. These disjunctures gesture toward the processes through which Judith maintains her coherence as a white subject, even as she presses up against its constitutive boundary. As our conversation continues, it becomes clear that she has a very close and deeply transformative tie with an African American woman, and at this point in the conversation, she regains her fluency, even though BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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the conversation still centers on race and power. It seems that the presence of an experiential basis upon which to draw enables Judith to step into a subject position that she may more fully embody within this transracial conversational context. So why does she initially say that all her allies are ‘‘similar. Probably’’? Why does she skirt the question of transracial alliances? Several white women demonstrated similar communicative disjunctures around the presence of a close woman-of-color ‘‘friend’’ who somehow does not register as an ally. This disjuncture is a function of how women of color (fail to) become intelligible to white women as allies. This failure is a function of white belonging and white feminist views of power and alliances, which, once broached within conversation, expose some uneasy contradictions within their senses of themselves as feminists. I explore these conditions more fully in chapter 4. Reviewing the transcripts of my conversations with women of color, I found it di≈cult to locate moments of influency. This makes sense, given that the topic of our discussion is salient to their daily experiences and that third world feminism is a project designed to account for the power relations at work in these experiences. That is, the subject positions of women of color are constituted not in opposition to, but through, the discourse of race, gender, and power circulating in the interviews. Here Angela describes a ‘‘fucked-up’’ situation in which her women’s studies department brought in her woman-of-color cohort. ‘‘They brought in a lot of international women, which is the code word for ‘women of color.’ But once we were there, and with our di√erent subject positions. . . . It kind of like fueled our directions in terms of, you know, really looking at race, gender, and sexuality and just being able to call women’s studies on its incredible racism.’’ In Angela’s representation of herself and the other women of color in her story, experiences of simultaneous forms of oppression ‘‘fuel’’ the ‘‘directions’’ their work might take, which, in turn, provide a context in which the women become fluent within the language of power as a vehicle, or interpellative process, constitutive of their own subject formation as women of color. Within the context of the tangible oppression (‘‘incredible racism’’) to which they found themselves subjected, the cohort cultivated a voice (‘‘it fueled our directions’’) in relation to white women and their particular hegemony within women’s studies. Toni King and her coauthors (2002), speaking as ‘‘African American Women in Higher Education,’’ evoke the kitchen table as a ‘‘site of restoration and revolution’’ which is a ‘‘black girl-to-woman rite of pas86

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sage where earning a place at the table signals acceptance into womanhood. Like women before us, we sit around the kitchen table, talking deep—planning, strategizing, and healing each other’s wounds’’ (405). That is, power-attentive communication practices constitute ‘‘women of color’’ as subjects: the work of becoming women of color is a process of actively cultivating fluency around issues of racialized di√erence. Likewise the fluency around di√erence displayed by the women of color with whom I spoke suggests they have invested in the emotional, intellectual, and relational labor of ‘‘grappling with the source of [their] own oppression’’ (Moraga 1981, 29). Angela’s account gives rise to a community cultivating a third world feminist critique—‘‘really looking at race, gender, and sexuality’’—from their embodied and institutionalized locations of otherness vis-à-vis the white women and white women’s studies (their ‘‘di√erent subject positions’’). The seamlessness between third world feminist literature, the relational experiences of women of color in the academy, and Angela’s capacity to fluently analyze her community’s experiences points to the work of becoming women of color through a collective grappling with salient points of oppression. This account animates converging moments of a politics of relation constellation: subjectivity, belonging, intersectional critique, experience, fluency. If woman-of-color becoming is a collective process of cultivating racialized fluency, the shared experience of racism becomes a vital component of the conditions of belonging. It would seem to follow, then, that this fluency may be challenged in mixed-race interactions in which power and critique form the content of the exchange. Reviewing the transcripts, I came to realize that women-of-color fluency seemed to be challenged when my interviewees perceived me as white and we were talking about such themes that tend to be excluded by the power-evasive conditions placed on white belonging. Early in my conversation with Donna, for instance, her paralinguistic approach is pedagogical, even guarded or possibly defensive, which inflects her speech with nonfluency.∞∫ The following excerpt is her response to my second question, a follow-up to her account that white men received more mentoring than she did. I asked, ‘‘Why do you think they did that?’’ to which she responded: The other part, I think, was, had to do with race. It had to do with this, uh, that they just didn’t perceive me in the same way. And just, um, I mean, that’s just the way it is with minorities. You sort of, you tolerate

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their preference. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to go out of your way to further their career. So, you know, I don’t feel that barriers were [in] place in my life. At the same time, I don’t feel that I was given any sort of extra boost by people.

Donna’s paralinguistic style becomes compromised as she gingerly approaches the topic of race. She deploys deracialized codes to explain the (white) ‘‘perception’’ of ‘‘minorities’’ to me (a ‘‘white woman’’). She deploys paralinguistic skirting to carefully navigate her construction of various sites of racism. While she has just stated that she has not been mentored to the degree that white men have, she is reticent to admit that this discrepancy has ‘‘to do with race.’’ This reticence arises in her use of verbal fillers (‘‘the other part,’’ ‘‘I think,’’ ‘‘uh,’’), which function to soften the critique embedded within her experience. She avoids loaded terms like ‘‘racism,’’ ‘‘stereotypes,’’ ‘‘white supremacy,’’ and ‘‘people of color’’—any of which would directly describe her experience in a language of women-of-color feminist critique—carefully selecting whitecoded words (‘‘minorities,’’ ‘‘tolerate,’’ ‘‘preference’’). She skirts issues that would transgress white belonging, framing the white gaze in neutral terms (‘‘they just didn’t perceive me in the same way’’) and her resistance as ‘‘tolerance [for] their preference.’’ These comments serve to elide white responsibility for racism, culminating in a phrase suggesting that the problem of racism resides in people of color (‘‘that’s just the way it is with minorities’’). Above I discuss how my knowledge of black feminist thought provided an opening in my conversation with Donna, who seems to read me at this point in the interview as white. My question obscures my own awareness of racial politics (I ask, ‘‘Why do you think they did that?’’ in response to her account), a power-evasive question that presumes and produces my innocence of racism through a lack of awareness of why she might think that white men are more privileged than she. And she responds in kind. She speaks to me in terms that mystify, mitigate, and/or downplay the racialized and racist nature of her experience. Thus she conforms to the communicative constraints of white bonding that my question invites, or commands. But as the interview unfolds, our conversation becomes increasingly racialized, or racially fluent, until the moment of our connection over African American women’s hair. In that exchange my recognition of the racialized and gendered meanings attached to African American women’s hair a≈rms 88

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her empowering experience of having cut hers o√, and she responds with enthusiasm (‘‘exactly!’’) for the first time in our conversation. That exchange arose after a series of conversational turns, in which the conversational flow between us becomes increasingly fluent and the content of her stories becomes more vivid and emotional. I want to suggest, then, that racialized and/or white belonging within research contexts is as much a function of racially coded bodies as communication processes that underscore and/or obscure race politics. Without paying attention to the paralinguistic level of our communication interactions, not only do we lose sight of the nuanced nature of these power dynamics, but also we reify identities and conditions of belonging that are constantly unfolding within the context of the relational practices at work in the interview. It would be too easy to say that because I am a ‘‘white’’ researcher, my white privilege precludes me from building a transracial connection with a black subject. I do not wish to deny that there is truth to this notion or to suggest that white or any other form of privilege may merely be overridden by gaining fluency in the cultural politics faced by others of di√erent social locations. Yet I want to suggest, as Alexander underscores, that to ‘‘become women of color we would need to become fluent in each other’s histories’’ (2002, 91). This becoming is both a function of taking responsibility for doing our ‘‘homework’’ so that we can arrive with some capacity for fluency, and also a relational practice of enacting bridge work within our communication practices. Because this ‘‘becoming women of color’’ is often performed by racialized bodies, my ambiguously marked body coupled with my (white) question placed Donna within a (white) research setting in which her fluency as woman of color was compromised by her need to adapt her experience to the apparently white relational parameters of our conversation. If Donna’s case suggests that white belonging constrains the fluency of women of color discussing racism, Maya points to her struggles to reconcile a painful experience of racism with a fluent critique of operations of power within the discursive constraints imposed by the interview context. Maya provides an account in which the chair of her department, a white feminist, Amanda, attempts to treat everyone ‘‘equally’’ in departmental hiring practices. Because this liberal strategy presumes a level playing field, she explains, it actually works against Maya because of her ‘‘alien’’ status. This discrepancy produces in Maya a sense that there is, for white women, BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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an anger toward women of color who put you in that position of having to take a risk. And it’s like, I think, you know, it happens once too often and you get burned. And you’re like, ’cause I do think, I sense sometimes with di√erent people, with like, like I was telling you. I feel sometimes like, who I am with my Ph.D. having to work in the o≈ce? What is that? Why? What happened? Why do I still perceive it as a favor done for me?

Maya’s experience underscores two components of her shifting racialized and classed location as an upper-middle-class ‘‘third world woman’’ now living in and trying to secure employment in the ‘‘first.’’ First, she deconstructs the myth of meritocracy within her chair’s logic, while attempting to avoid positioning herself as seeking ‘‘special treatment.’’ Amanda’s ‘‘feminist’’ e√orts to create a ‘‘fair’’ work environment put Maya at a disadvantage, but naming the terms of this unfairness is a complex task: Maya cites an ambiguously located subject of ‘‘anger toward women of color,’’ an unnamed (white feminist) ‘‘you’’ who has to ‘‘take a risk.’’ The white feminist subject paralinguistically disappears at the moment she becomes the object of Maya’s critique. Maya’s account suggests that the constraints of white belonging extend beyond the immediate relational context of the interview. While she does not hedge her commentary in this context because of my perceived whiteness, Maya explains that she was aware of negotiating the assumptions of an imagined community of white readers as she made her communication choices in framing issues of race and power. She feels ‘‘comfortable’’ speaking to me about issues she faces as a woman of color (‘‘like I was telling you’’), yet she feels constrained by her desire to speak persuasively to the larger ‘‘white’’ audience who would read her account. The relational openings that arise between us (as ‘‘researcher’’ and ‘‘subject’’), then, may simultaneously be constrained by a broader set of ‘‘listeners’’ privy to our conversation. Another layer of reading Maya’s nonfluency underscores the dissonance she faces with competing facets of her identity: class privilege ‘‘there’’ and downward mobility ‘‘here,’’ the ongoing project of woman-of-color subject formation, the ‘‘feminist’’ identity she and her chair (at least partially) share. This dissonance arises in a contradictory staging of the subject—on one hand, in terms of entitlement as a ‘‘Ph.D. having to work in the o≈ce,’’ and on the other as ‘‘still perceive[ing] it as a favor done for [her].’’ This tension, productive of her subjectivity as ‘‘third world feminist’’ living in the 90

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‘‘first,’’ draws our attention to the emotional and communicative work entailed in shifting subject locations, in being done and undone by multiple, uneven, and competing sites of belonging.

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Toward a Methodology of Feminist Alliance This chapter has argued for a constant navigation among bridge work, homework, and fieldwork in the research process as a set of strategies, reading practices, and self-reflexive moves for cultivating a bridge methodology. I strive to move among these points of a bridge methodology constellation by excavating the politics of relation which bring me to and frame my shifting location within this project, the moments of relational opening and closing that arise within my interviews as a function of racialized belonging, and by reading such moments against the larger relational backdrop of these women’s lives and my own. This impulse arises out of the e√ort within my broader project to theorize the coalitional subject, to expand a politics of location to a politics of relation. How might we create the conditions of possibility for alliance formation within research settings, always already steeped in relations of ruling? If such a politicotheoretical intervention may be imagined, I have only begun to brush some preliminary strokes of it here. And this sketch is incomplete and replete with imperfections. I have tried to resist homogenizing, essentializing, generating an inscription that claims to divine the psychic interiorities of my subjects, although I know that such moments have erupted on the page. I have tried to balance calling white women on their complicity with white belonging, even though I have participated in and benefited from it. I have tried to keep women of color voices and experiences central to my analysis, even though I find that I continually recenter white women. Nonetheless, with each inscription I have tried to enact alliance with the women of this study and to build bridges among the various constituencies these women may ‘‘represent.’’ Bridge inscriptions are messy, incomplete, perhaps disillusioning. I cross this bridge and mark it here within this inscription. I look back to see the faces of those whose stories I mark. Some have continued to walk with me, from others I have strayed. From this side they appear small and faded, grainy like an old photograph. I stare long, strain to hear the tone of voice, reach to evoke my BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS

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body’s (dis)comfort, to remember the nuance of what passed between us. I replay their voices, retrace intonations, envision gestures. A glance that hardens or softens. Lines curling up around the edges of eyes, others curling down, encircling the mouth. Face in hands, shoulders gyrating up and down, tape snaps shut. Still. Except the clicking of my keyboard.

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3. ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

Whiteness, Heterosociality, and the Subject of Feminist Alliances

‘‘My career advancement has been pretty smooth, really,’’ Carol explains to me. I sit across the desk from her in her eighth-floor administrator’s o≈ce. Late afternoon sun pours in through large windows, softening the wrinkled corners of her soft brown eyes. I’ve been asking about the connection between her academic ‘‘success’’ and her ability to forge alliances with white men in positions of power. Her response comes as no surprise, really. Carol’s sense of her own academic mobility aligns with that of most of the other white women I’d spoken to and that of an emerging class of privileged academic feminists. ‘‘They needed a woman,’’ Carol concludes, gesturing toward an explanation, then falls silent. ‘‘I think that’s with white women,’’ Rita responds, without hesitation, to my question—how does she navigate (hetero)sexual attraction in her alliances with white men? ‘‘I think black figures get viewed di√erently,’’ she continues, then pauses. I imagine she is assessing how to put it to me—her alliances with white men have been vexed, her stories, as with those of other women of color, will soon reveal. At last Rita interrupts her own silence: ‘‘That’s jungle fever, rather.’’

The space between the ‘‘woman’’ in Carol’s account and the ‘‘jungle fever’’ that characterizes Rita’s might be understood as a feminist abyss (see Elam 1997), an unbreachable di√erence, a chasm so wide and deep that it threatens to swallow feminism whole, even as it gestures toward a site of possibility and accountability for the conditions productive of white feminist hegemony within the academy. In both accounts the reference is iterated either as a self-evident truth or as an unspeakable or unspoken condition, followed not by an explanation or interrogation, but by silence. It is this unspoken place between di√erently situated academic feminists and the relational conditions that produce this difference that remain largely unspoken and, by extension, undertheorized within feminist thought. This chapter seeks to map the contours of this chasm between ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘jungle fever’’ as I consider the interplay

among alliances, subject formation, and the institutionalization of feminism and women’s studies in the U.S. academy. I argue that an alliance account of feminism’s institutionalizing processes reveals the intimate and daily operations of power that animate the lives of academic feminists, constituting not only the di√erentiated bounds of their lived experiences, but also the uneven terrain productive of the institutional locations that Carol and Rita occupy. While feminism’s institutionalization has been theorized as an achievement of ‘‘women’s’’ knowledge production—that is, ‘‘women’’ producing knowledge for and about ‘‘women’’ —and while this production has been criticized for its racialized, classed, and (hetero)sexed exclusions, little attention has been paid to the function of alliances within this process. The following accounts begin to unearth the constitutive role of alliances, particularly those between white men and di√erently situated women, in the subject formation of academic feminists and the institutional terrain in which they operate. Transracial feminist alliances are not the explicit focus of this chapter. My focus, rather, on alliances between powerful white men and academic feminists is designed to achieve two interventions. First, it underscores the (de)racialized and heterosexed relational conditions productive of what has come to be known as ‘‘the institutionalization of women’s studies’’ by calling attention to the alliance work vital to the inauguration of the universalized subject of feminism through the particularities of white and heterosocial forms of belonging. The second, which flows from this, is to denaturalize the relationships among the multiple and at times competing hailings placed on feminist subject positions by virtue of their a√ective investments in unevenly empowered academic communities and modes of power. In short, to map the conditions of possibility for transracial feminist alliances entails attending to the institutional politics productive of white women and women of color’s uneven access to institutional power, which, in turn, compels attendance to the alliance politics through which the institutionalization of feminism arises. White men—as power holders within academia, particularly at the historical moment in which feminism becomes institutionalized—are central to this process. Because the racialized, gendered, and sexed histories giving rise to the relational spaces between white women and white men di√er from those arising between women of color and white men, as Aída Hurtado persuasively argues, ‘‘gender subordination, as imposed by white men, is experienced di√erently by white women and by women of Color’’ (1996, vii). ‘‘It is 94

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this di√erence,’’ Hurtado continues, ‘‘that has produced much of the disunity in the women’s movement from its inception in the nineteenth century to the present’’ (vii). Thus to understand the uneven power relations between white women and women of color, we must attend to how each group is di√erently subordinated by white men. Di√erent modes of gender subordination are, in turn, deeply entwined with and productive of unevenly distributed privileges that shape the institutional access and forms of power available to white women and women of color. Interrogating di√erent feminists’ accounts of their alliances with white men, then, provides a point of entry through which to interrogate the institutionalization of feminism, not as an achievement, but as an ongoing relational process. Much has been written about the institutionalization of feminism.∞ Responses to academic feminism’s emerging legitimization and ‘‘professionalization’’ range from hand-wringing to nostalgia to ‘‘breast-beating,’’ from critical and deconstructive assessments to struggles over essentialism to the formation of new estrangements and alliances. An enterprise that was dubbed by those on its inside as the ‘‘theoretical arm of the feminist movement’’ (Graul et al. 1972) encounters its limits at a series of disjunctures: over the coherence of its object of study (Brown 1997) and ‘‘women’s’’ relation to ‘‘gender’’ (Auslander 1997, Wiegman 2002c), how to address its own power (Elam 1977) and remain true to its activist roots (Zimmerman 2002), and, perhaps most crucially, how to come to adequate terms with its racist and (trans)nationalist exclusions.≤ Special issues and edited collections deploy a series of metaphors that seek to capture the precarious relationship between women’s studies and its institutional location: women’s studies is characterized as a project on the ‘‘edge’’ (Scott 1997) and ‘‘on its own’’ (Wiegman 2002a), even as an ‘‘impossibility’’ (Brown 1997); as a discipline, an interdiscipline, a field, and a ‘‘(non)field’’ (Lee 2000). While these extensive debates signal a lively and potentially productive struggle among feminist practitioners striving to create progressive institutional sites to house feminist pedagogy and research, the function of alliances in this process has yet to receive adequate attention. Mapping the chasm between ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘jungle fever’’ reveals not only the very di√erent relationships to the academy that di√erently racialized and (hetero)sexed academic women occupy, but also the relational contours productive of the institutionalization and ensuing universalization of particular women (and, by extension, knowledge forms) over and ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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against ‘‘others.’’ These accounts, then, gesture toward the risks entailed in producing feminism’s institutionalized status as an accomplishment as opposed to a relational practice: an ongoing series of encounters in which legitimacy, intelligibility, and belonging are unevenly negotiated by di√erently positioned women. In the direction of the latter Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Evelynn M. Hammonds o√er a careful assessment of women’s studies’ ‘‘success,’’ foregrounding the ‘‘institutionally fragile’’ nature of the project—particularly ‘‘black women’s studies,’’ which, GuySheftall suggests, ‘‘probably has almost no institutional strength’’ (1997, 39). This commentary draws attention to the potentially multiple manifestations that ‘‘women’s studies’’ might take and the uneven institutional terrain that characterizes this multiplicity. Whose or which articulation of ‘‘women’s studies,’’ then, may be said to have secured power? How has this process of institutionalization emerged vis-à-vis the production of ‘‘women’’ as a category of analysis? And how has this production, in turn, unevenly empowered di√erently positioned women who might di√erently animate both this category and the project of ‘‘women’s studies’’ as the subjects and objects of its inquiry? In an e√ort to work these questions I consider the double meaning of the ascription of an ‘‘inside’’ as it potentially characterizes the production of academic women. If ‘‘women’’ constitute an institutional imperative to the emergence of women’s studies, then the relationship between the production of this category and the institutional access available to those who animate it may be assessed by apprehending the interplay between these mutually productive metaphorical interiorities. The ensuing analysis suggests that white women like Carol, who ‘‘succeed’’ in their e√orts to access academia’s inside, are often those who become intelligible to white male power brokers as ‘‘women.’’ So the relational conditions productive of Carol’s ‘‘success’’ (‘‘they needed a woman’’) evoke the coproduction of a simultaneous interiority: ‘‘women on the inside’’ (women whose bodies, performances, and relational choices authenticate the category) become ‘‘women on the inside’’ (those who gain institutional access to institutional centers of power). For women of color such as Rita (for whom ‘‘jungle fever’’ characterizes her relational conditions with white men) the path to the ‘‘inside’’ is often obscured, if not foreclosed altogether.≥ While racialized bodies are necessary to the production of ethnic studies and diversifying women’s studies, women of color remain marginalized as their femininities are exoticized and relatively inassimilable. This chapter concerns the making of ‘‘white women’’ and ‘‘women of 96

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color’’ within processes of academic feminist institutionalization. To apprehend the connection between subject formation and the institutionalization of feminism, I focus on themes of ‘‘career,’’ ‘‘institutional access,’’ and ‘‘successes and struggles’’ shared by the women of this study. Their accounts are framed in response to my questions over the relationship between institutional access and alliance formation. How, I wondered, do di√erently situated women navigate alliances with powerful white men, and how do such alliances mediate their institutional access? Academic life is racialized and heterosexed in ways that unevenly position white women and women of color vis-à-vis white men in positions of power. The accounts o√ered by women of this study suggest that power flows from white men to white women who adequately perform, or strive toward, idealized notions of white femininity. Because the transfer of power is constitutive of these alliances, I cultivate the term ‘‘heterosociality’’ to depict this relational constellation.∂ Their accounts suggest that white women imagine their relational ties to white men in intimate terms, and while this intimacy is variously represented as a site of struggle or pleasure or confusion or all three, it is also constitutive of the acquisition of institutional power. I explore this dynamic in the following section. The formation, women of color, arises not through compliance with white heterosociality, but more often in resistance to it. Women-ofcolor accounts of interactions with white men suggest a disjuncture between the white male imaginary of them as ‘‘women of color’’ and the presence of such women, allegedly as peers, within a liberal academic frame. Such interactions underscore the agency asserted by women of color as they navigate gendered, racialized, and heterosexed encounters that produce their sexualities through a series of negations or approximations of idealized (white) femininity: alternatively desexualized or overly sexualized, as objects of domination or abjection, and as ‘‘palatable’’ to the white male gaze. And because di√erently racialized women of color negotiate di√erent modes of subordination vis-à-vis white men, the trope of ‘‘sex’’ takes on multiple meanings across their stories, even as these particularities become elided in the cultural production of white femininity over and against racialized femininity. Rachel Lee’s claim that she ‘‘was not born a woman of color, but made so, here—meaning . . . at [her] home institution, UCLA’’ (2000, 85)∑ underscores the institutional needs of white women’s studies as constitutive of her formation as ‘‘woman of color.’’ The final section of this chapter seeks to extend Lee’s ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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insights by analyzing the self-stagings through which these women of color cast their subjectivities in relation to white men.

A FAMILY AFFAIR

Whiteness, Heterosociality, and ‘‘Women on the Inside’’ White privilege is transferred and maintained through intimate ties that span spatial bounds from the immediate to the dispersed: from families to workplaces, from neighborhoods to cities, between nations and across the globe. White privilege is transmitted among whites through the institutions designed to protect and maintain it: from legal systems to educational access; from hiring to lending to publishing practices. Whiteness may be understood, then, as a set of relational practices that circulate through institutions for the transmission of power. Whiteness is productively understood as ‘‘property’’ in which subjects invest, generating what George Lipsitz (1998) calls a ‘‘possessive investment in whiteness.’’∏ Public policy and popular culture conjoin to suppress the contradictions between the construction of United States as a ‘‘color-blind’’ nation and the largely unspoken cultural codes through which white privilege is bestowed and perpetuated. Thus the cultural and the material intersect through the (re)production of whiteness as a site of ‘‘investment’’ in which white identity formation is figured through historicities of asset accumulation, especially for those who are ‘‘white’’ and those ‘‘people of color’’ whose positionalities invigorate notions and institutions of white supremacy (such as Ward Connerly, Dinesh D’Souza, Condoleezza Rice). Possessive investments in whiteness are carried through institutional structures, such as laws and regulations, which organize the conditions of belonging through which white privilege is transferred among social subjects. Thus alliances and institutional structures work in symbiotic relation to conduct white power: alliances serve as the intimate sites where these structures get played out. Investments in white privilege are overdetermined by multiple vectors of power/privilege. Gender and ethnicity, race and national origin, sexuality, ability, and institutional location, among other forces, intersect with whiteness to unevenly produce its materiality.π Alliances function as the interface between the intimate and the institutional, providing social channels through which power is unevenly transmitted to di√erently situated social actors and groups. The relational production 98

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of identity and di√erence is a function of the disparate distribution of intimacies through which power is unevenly transmitted. The transmission of privilege, then, is executed through multiple and intersecting instantiations of intimacy, which condition our belongings: whiteness and heterosexuality; investments in class, language, and culture; nationalism, regionalism, ablism, and ageism. The emergence of white men as the primary power brokers within institutional contexts such as the U.S. academy arises out of historical possessive investments in whiteness, as white men were exclusively empowered as property owners by the nation under liberal democracy. This arrangement positions ‘‘other’’ groups (white women, men of color, women of color) as di√erently subordinate in relation to white men. The conditions of subordination arise from the relations organized through nation-building legal structures: white men could exchange wealth among themselves, exclusively hold U.S. citizenship, and own property; they could own black men and women, forcibly displace or execute brown men and women, control the movement and familybuilding processes of Asians; whites and people of color could not legally marry, so white power could not be transferred across racial lines; white women could secure power over men and women of color if they acquiesced to white male supremacy (Lowe 1996, Newman 1999). Thus the capacity of di√erently subordinated groups to access institutional power is mediated through their relations with white men. Based on this assumption, Hurtado (1996) builds a relational theory of gender subordination: the di√erences between white women and women of color are productively understood through their di√erent relationships to white men. White women are subordinated by white men through familial intimacies, while women of color are rejected by white men (see also Lorde 1984). Understanding these di√erential relations that white women and women of color occupy vis-à-vis white men provides a point of entry to explore why women of color don’t ‘‘unite with the white feminist movement when many of the political and economic goals promoted by this movement would obviously benefit them’’ (Hurtado 1996, vii). Thus, while the formation of alliances with white men is the central focus of this chapter, its aim is to reveal the competing and converging forces that enable and constrain transracial feminist alliances. This section tracks the intimacies at work in the former as I consider how white women discuss the production of their subjectivities within a ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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post–civil rights context in which building women’s studies becomes an institutional imperative. A≈rmative action and the academy’s investment in di√erence-based programs, such as women’s studies, serve as the institutional context in which the ‘‘need’’ for ‘‘women’’ to increasingly occupy and take positions of authority within the U.S. academy arises. This context produced the institutional need evoked by Carol in the opening vignette: a need marked by a particular historical moment in which political struggle (the women’s movement) becomes institutionalized within the academy (as women’s studies, through a≈rmative action). If Rachel Lee’s woman-of-color subjectivity is produced by the institutional need to diversify women’s studies, white-women subjectivities are also produced by the institutional need for ‘‘a woman’’ necessary to the production of women’s studies, particularly at the historical moment of the invention of women’s studies as a field formation. The inauguration of this ‘‘woman,’’ then, may be traced through the relational and institutional conditions productive of this identity category. Here I argue that the institutional intimacies through which ‘‘woman’’ emerges are conditioned by white and heterosexual modes of belonging, as white women build familial ties with white men in power. This intimacy is figured through the trope of the white family, a narrative of belonging that provides both a real and imagined site in which possessive investments in whiteness are executed. The legal structures that organize family building, such as marriage and inheritance, were designed to enable whites to accumulate and exchange property within the intimate site of the family. This family structure, however, spans beyond the literal site of family building to mediate intimacies that arise within the workplace, particularly at a historical moment in which women and men find themselves as coworkers in new and unprecedented ways. These white women’s stories suggest that the trope of the family served as an organizing relational principle for conducting crossgender, white-on-white intimacies within the academy. To learn how they negotiated institutional access in the academy, I asked my participants a series of questions about their careers and the relative challenge that ‘‘career advancement’’ posed for them.∫ While many white women described barriers that they faced as women and as feminists, several intimated having an ‘‘easier time’’ because they are women and/or feminists. Carol’s career advancement was ‘‘pretty smooth,’’ she suggests, evoking the institutional context in which women’s studies first gained its status. ‘‘[The white male administrators] 100

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needed a woman.’’ While any number of subjects could potentially be interpellated into this position of ‘‘woman,’’ the particular contours of intimacy through which Carol’s femininity emerges produce this category in familial terms. Reflecting on her close tie with her dean, ‘‘[He was] just the best man,’’ she muses. ‘‘He was brilliant . . . and I adored him, and he really adored me and we just, you know, he’s like a father figure and he really helped me a lot. And so I think I was chosen for a number of reasons that weren’t purely academic.’’ Carol’s candor provides a point of entry into the relational and power dynamics productive of her selection as one who would stand in for the category ‘‘woman.’’ In her account Carol emerges through a familial frame positioned as the daughter in relation to his ‘‘father figure’’ status. This familial tie, in turn, provides an intimate channel through which power is transmitted across power lines as Carol surmises that she ‘‘was chosen for a number of reasons that weren’t purely academic.’’ Her remark underscores the flow of power enabled by the inherited structure of white family building: within racial lines and across gender lines. This particular nexus of power transmission marks the intersection between white and heterosexual modes of belonging emerging at the particular historical moment of the formation of women’s studies and (white) women’s inclusion in the academy.Ω The exigency for gender equity generated by the women’s movement reconfigured terms in which power flows, compelling white men to share power with ‘‘women.’’ The homosocial transmission of power ‘‘between (white) men’’—in which women serve the symbolic function of ‘‘cementing the bonds of men with men’’ (Sedgwick 1985, 26)—may be productively revised to account for the politics of relation that arose at this historical juncture in order to accommodate political demands for gender equity. The familial model evoked by Carol marks one of the intimate routes through which this revision of power transmission arises between white men and white women. I characterize this process as heterosociality. As with homosociality, heterosocial power is exchanged through intimate bonds wherein ‘‘woman’’ serves a symbolic function through which those bonds are cemented. In Carol’s account, the heterosocial tie she forms with her dean circulates through a cultural imaginary of ‘‘woman,’’ sutured to white masculinity through the a√ective charge felt and imaged as familial intimacies. Carol describes her own subject position through the figure of ‘‘woman’’—bound to, and simultaneously subordinated by ‘‘white man’’—as she projects herself into the role of his daughter. Thus the ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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bond between them is cemented through the tra≈c in women, here configured not as an actual third person, but rather as an idealized trope, (white) ‘‘woman,’’ which gives her positionality in the relationship meaning, value, and its appealing intelligibility. Those ‘‘not purely academic reasons’’ for which Carol was ‘‘chosen,’’ then, might be productively understood as unfolding in the unspoken conditions of belonging imposed by the confluence of whiteness and heterosexuality, which gives rise to the materialization of the idealized figure of ‘‘woman’’ that Carol ‘‘is chosen’’ to approximate. While homosociality exposes how power functions through male same-gender desire, heterosociality seeks to reveal the symbiotic relationship between gender subordination and white/heterosexual privilege necessary to the power exchange it inheres. Carol’s framing marks this double gesture in its simultaneous references to the transmission of power (her ‘‘smooth’’ career advancement) and her characterization of her subordinated status within the familial arrangement. Her dean is the ‘‘choosing’’ subject in Carol’s account, positioning her as the subordinate object of his action; her dean is the ‘‘father figure,’’ positioning her as the subordinate daughter. Each of these gestures frames her subjectivity subtextually in relation to and as an e√ect of his subjectivity, agency, and choice. Nancy, like Carol, has ‘‘successfully’’ navigated academic teaching, research, and administration, although Nancy comes from a workingclass background, while Carol has always been ‘‘upper-middle-class.’’∞≠ Nancy also feels she was selected as a ‘‘woman’’ to service the needs of women’s studies: ‘‘Well, probably [my success is] because I’m a woman and connected to women’s studies. It was really my avenue into administrative things. . . . I think that gave me access to the academy in ways that I wouldn’t have had, if I hadn’t had that connection. . . . If I weren’t a woman, that wouldn’t have happened.’’ As with Carol’s account, Nancy casts her subjectivity as ‘‘a woman’’ within the institutional context in which that ‘‘connect[ion] to women’s studies’’ provides her with an ‘‘avenue to administrative things.’’ The institutional need for ‘‘a woman’’ produces her subjectivity through the lines of privilege that this need makes available and through the grids of intelligibility by which she is rendered ‘‘woman.’’ Thus the women whose subjectivities arise at this heterosocial juncture secure power through the tra≈cking in the figure of ‘‘woman,’’ whose idealized femininity they approximate. Unlike Carol, who saw her dean as a father figure, Nancy does not iden102

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tify a particular familial figure. For her, ‘‘white male administrators’’ are configured as a group who serve as the audience in relation to whom ‘‘she’’ emerges as a ‘‘contradiction’’ at the disjuncture between (idealized) ‘‘woman’’ (subordinate) and ‘‘feminist’’ (resistive). She emphasizes her bodily inscriptions in the following excerpt to frame her performance of ‘‘woman’’ as a point of reference through which she di√erentiates herself from other white women. ‘‘This is not how I think they perceive all white women,’’ Nancy begins, ‘‘but I think they often perceive me as kind of a contradiction.’’ This contradictory reading, then, is the relational quality that inscribes her white femininity over and against the gendered/racialized performances of other (potential) ‘‘women.’’ ‘‘They know I’m a very strong feminist,’’ she continues, but I’m also very feminine. I mean, I remember once when I was at [a university], I hadn’t been there very long, and I had very long nails, and nail polish. And someone made a comment to me that they saw me in a meeting and here I had, you know, blond hair and nails and a very coordinated outfit and so they didn’t expect much to come out of my mouth. And then when I talked, [laughs] I guess I made some sense.

The detail with which she specifies some of the tropes of white femininity, which in her account hold an appeal to the men with whom she worked, signals both the content of the ‘‘successful’’ performance of the category and also the self-consciousness with which she accomplishes it. She frames herself as ‘‘very feminine,’’ her figure produced as such through her appropriately adorned corporeality: her ‘‘very long nails, and nail polish,’’ her ‘‘blond hair,’’ her ‘‘very coordinated outfit.’’ These tropes of white femininity—such as long nails, nail polish, blond hair— are contingent for their signification upon the particularity of her universalized/idealized corporeality. Not only are signifiers of whiteness (skin tone, facial features, hair texture and length) necessary to this production, but also those that di√erentiate among white women’s signifying practices (bodily size, movement, ability, dress, mode of interaction). In Nancy’s account, her white femininity emerges over and against that of other white women whose gendered, embodied, and heterosexed performances serve as the backdrop against which her performance of white woman succeeds. This relational becoming suggests that heterosociality is a mode of belonging unevenly available to white women, conditioned by their capacity to tra≈c in the figure of woman to cement their ties to white men. As with Carol’s account, familial ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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relations mediate this di√erence and women of color emerge (at my prompting) as the backdrop against which these ‘‘comfortable’’ relations emerge. ‘‘Do you think that they maybe have any specific expectations around white femininity?’’ I ask, ‘‘Like, within that context?’’ N: I don’t know about expectations, but I think there’s just a continual

level of comfort. A: That white men might be more comfortable with white women than women of color? N: Mmm-hmm [nodding]. Because it’s more of what you’re used to, at home. A: Right. There is something, it seems, about the proximity in terms of white women and white men are supposed to be part of a heterosexual union— N: —Right, we’re already used to inhabiting the same world.

Nancy’s candid response reveals the importance of white male ‘‘comfort’’ in the production of the category ‘‘white woman.’’ This comfort arises through relational practices marked by their proximity, where heterosociality gains traction through shared social space: white men and women ‘‘inhabit the same world.’’ The ‘‘home’’ functions as the metaphoric space through which Nancy’s intelligibility as ‘‘woman’’ is rendered, gesturing to the trope of idealized woman (figured through the comfort of ‘‘home’’) in which the heterosocial exchange tra≈cs. ‘‘Because it’s more of what you’re used to, at home,’’ she o√ers. Her account circulates through her investment in maintaining a ‘‘continual level of comfort’’ for white men, even as it displaces and universalizes the internalized white male gaze, cast through the ‘‘you’’ who is ‘‘used to’’ white woman’s presence within the domestic sphere. The nexus of white and heterosocial relations through which power is transmitted in these stories, then, invites white women to invest in their paradoxically intertwined privilege and marginality. The power they gain within these exchanges is contingent upon their remaining complicit with their secondary status. White heterosociality circulates through the tacit agreement to invest in white male power (their ‘‘comfort’’ remains central, as does positionality in the place of the father) as a condition of gaining power. The figure of ‘‘White Woman’’ is often deployed, writes Hilary Harris, to ‘‘absolve White Man from any specific historical debt or burden or guilt that he might reasonably be expected to feel’’ (Harris 2000, 195). The feminisms that become possible within this social con104

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tract, then, are circumscribed by the familial order that conditions these alliances. Audre Lorde maps the terms of this contract in her analysis of the ‘‘pitfall’’ of seduction through which it circulates: ‘‘White women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. . . . For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools [than for women of color]’’ (1984, 118–19). This dynamic structures Carol’s and Nancy’s alliance accounts as the interface between the intimate (their appropriate signification within a familial constellation) and the institutional (thus heterosociality is understood as the condition of possibility for their institutional advancement). The ‘‘pitfall’’ within this dynamic, Lorde warns, is that ‘‘it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace’’ (119). But the a√ect with which these women convey their accounts suggests not that they experience these dynamics as a ‘‘dangerous fantasy,’’ but rather as a source of comfort or pleasure that is inseparable from the attachment to, or a√ective investment in, power. The a√ective components of these alliances render invisible the power relations through which they circulate. Carol ‘‘adores’’ her ‘‘father figure’’ dean, and Nancy dwells on the details of her ‘‘contradictory’’ positionality as simultaneously soft and strong. Thus their capacity to resist this containment function remains absent from these texts. Rather, their posture within these a√ective and institutional systems suggests a possessive investment in white femininity. This is not to say that these women are duped by power; their accounts do acknowledge power imbalances. Rather it is to suggest that white heterosociality may be experienced and intimated as pleasurable by some white women—a pleasure, it seems, derived from the convergence between (hetero)sexual and social power. This a√ective investment is uneven across white women’s accounts. Consider another of the subjects I interviewed, Jean. Jean’s depiction of her academic life, like Carol’s, gains traction within a familial structure, but that depiction is characterized by an ironic self-staging that provides her with an a√ective distance that gestures toward critique. After a number of years working part-time, Jean, whose background is white and working-class, has worked in administration and as a women’s studies director. ‘‘During ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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my time before I was director [of a college] . . . I worked with a number of white male deans and I used to complain that they were treating me like a housewife,’’ Jean explains. ‘‘I was supposed to be thrifty. That was my job. . . . The only things housewives are supposed to do is be thrifty ’cuz that’s their only power in life.’’ Her account lacks the sentimentality that characterizes Carol’s and Nancy’s, for Jean ironically portrays this power imbalance through the familial trope of the ‘‘housewife.’’ She constructs her agency as the author of this label, her self-designation underscoring the compromised nature of ‘‘woman’s’’ power within a familial frame circumscribed by white heterosociality. Her role as ‘‘housewife’’ is to ‘‘complain’’ in response to the men’s/husband’s sexist expectations that her only ‘‘power in life’’ is to be ‘‘thrifty.’’ Jean’s selfrepresentation simultaneously acquiesces to and resists the ‘‘seduction’’ of white heterosociality through her sarcastic rendition of these gendered and (de)racialized intimacies. While the ironic awareness of her self-depiction o√ers a critique of power in the telling, she does not stage her-self as actively resisting or rewriting her role in this script. Her retrospective irony, then, evokes a complex and contradictory set of hailings constitutive of the category, white woman, within this domestic frame: to gain a degree of power as white woman she self-consciously acquiesces to her domestic placement as ‘‘housewife’’; the white family provides her with the security of a middle-class status even as it undermines her gender empowerment; her white privilege is conditioned by her gender subordination. So far my focus has dwelled upon the convergence between whiteness and heterosexuality as modes of belonging that give rise to the politics of relation that enable and constrain the alliances between white women and white men. Here I want to consider the nonnecessary relationship between sexual identity and these relational dynamics. If, as Nancy’s account suggests, the familial imaginary is circumscribed by white belongings, is it also contingent upon heterosexual identifications? Under what conditions can ‘‘lesbian’’ become intelligible as ‘‘woman’’ within a heterosocial frame? The account of another of my interviewees, Judith, suggests the potential divergences between identity and identification. While she identifies as an ‘‘out lesbian,’’ she also self-consciously deploys tropes of white femininity as she navigates a space both within and outside of white heterosocial belongings. Like Carol and Nancy, Judith has enjoyed a smooth career path and has been active in administration: ‘‘My experience at [that university] was just gorgeous,’’ she explains. ‘‘I 106

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loved my time there as an assistant professor, and I loved my courses. Tenure was relatively easy for me.’’ The ease with which she maneuvered her institutional positioning as a function of white heterosociality confounds potential limitations placed on her as a (white) lesbian, suggesting a nonessential relationship between lesbian identity and heterosocial identifications. In response to my questions about how she was able to navigate her relationships with white male administrators, she initially resists the notion that ‘‘heterosexual attractiveness’’ is a ‘‘theme for [her].’’ Yet, as our conversation continues, Judith shares some contradictions in her performance of her ‘‘out lesbian’’ white femininity that resonates with Nancy’s self-staging. ‘‘I like to wear fingernail polish,’’ Judith divulges, ‘‘I like to wear makeup. And so I’m going to do whatever I want to do.’’ While her ‘‘out lesbian’’ identity would seem to trouble her relationship to white heterosociality, her capacity to appropriate traditional notions of white femininity enable her to merge this potential divergence. Her self-depiction, like Jean’s, foregrounds her agency in navigating her own career advancement as a lesbian within white heterosociality: she’s ‘‘going to do whatever’’ she wants to do. That is, she does not feel the need to choose between identity and identification. She does not eschew tropes of white femininity that she associates with ‘‘heterosexual attractiveness’’; rather, she tra≈cs in these tropes within her figuration as institutional subject under the rubric of white heterosociality. Their accounts suggest that while all these women emerge as ‘‘white women’’ within a heterosocial frame, the relational conditions under which they do both converge and diverge. How might these divergences enable white women to emerge in nonuniform, heterogeneous ways, particularly modes that may provide points of entry to the formation of antiracist subjectivities through an investment in transracial feminist alliances? The di√erent relational conditions under which their subjectivities emerge generate fissures within a potentially monolithic group: white women. These di√erences may be traced as white women variously express investments in and resistances to white heterosociality, creating fissures that potentially enable transracial feminist alliances. How do these various levels of investment in white heterosociality differently position white women as potential allies to women of color? Does a possessive investment in white femininity preclude an a√ective and/or political investment in transracial feminist alliances? Judith’s navigation between her ‘‘out lesbian’’ identity and her appro‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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priation of white femininity provides a point of entry into these questions. Unlike the other women depicted above, Judith did not recount her relations with white men in familial terms. The relationship that permeated much of our discussion, rather, was her long-term friendship with an African American woman. Her preoccupation, not with white heterosocial belongings, but rather with this transracial site of belonging, suggests a potentiality for white lesbian disidentifications with white heterosociality. Lesbian desire poses a troubled relationship to family for queer women, which may provide a point of entry for such women to cultivate transracial identifications (see Moraga 2000, Segrest 1985). This is not to suggest that Judith rejects white heterosociality or the privileges that it enables, but rather that this form of sociality neither occupies her consciousness nor a√ectively compels her to the same degree that it does for other white women. It also suggests that white women can and do make relational choices as they variously navigate the compelling constellation of white heterosociality. This emphasis on relational agency suggests the importance of holding white women accountable for the a√ective investments constitutive of their subject formation and the institutional arrangements that flow from them. If my e√ort to chart this heterogeneity calls into question the conflation between white woman and compulsory heterosexuality and/or whiteness, it should not erase the fact that most of the white women of this study can and do ‘‘successfully’’ navigate white heterosociality. As with the stories shared by Carol, Nancy, and Jean, several white women accounted for their career advancement as a function of either their gender and/or a≈liations with women’s studies. Emily, a professor who describes herself as a visible researcher and respected teacher, explains: ‘‘[I am] one of like five women in the department. So in some ways it a√ords me a lot because there’s a sense . . . that [white men] want to know what the woman has to say.’’ Deborah, also a professor who describes herself as highly visible in her field, depicts gender as ‘‘a twoedge sword because there are all kinds of ways in which, you know, you are discriminated against and put . . . down because of being a woman.’’ She continues, ‘‘Um, on the other hand, because I’ve been successful publishing, everyone wants their token woman, so I get to be, you know, everyone’s token woman, so I get invited to do, you know, everything.’’ The pervasiveness of such stories suggests the paradoxical positioning of white femininity within a frame of white heterosociality: that gender subordination is built into the system through which white 108

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power is transmitted across gendered boundaries. White femininity’s proximity to white masculinity through familial ties creates the conditions of belonging that structure these a≈nities. By fulfilling certain visible, relational, and sociopolitical functions particular white women are granted a legitimate, albeit marginalized and tokenized, place within the white patriarchal institution of academia. This is not to downplay or disregard the struggles white women face in academia. Rather, white heterosociality provides a relational account for the crisis over (white) feminism’s ‘‘success’’ within a context that remains largely hostile toward the presence of (white) feminists. Feminist theory and criticism continues to document (white) women’s positioning in subordinate and ‘‘supportive roles’’ in their personal and academic lives (Aisenberg and Harrington 1998). Further, ‘‘antifeminism’’ is so commonplace in the academy that feminists are organizing to document ‘‘antifeminist harassment’’ as a ‘‘new form of mistreatment that is related to, though di√erent from, sexual harassment’’ (Clark et al. 1996). How do we square feminism’s institutional success with these ongoing struggles? White heterosociality seeks to account for these tensions by providing a relational view of the formation of ‘‘white women’’ that is contingent upon a power/subordination paradox. The ‘‘supportive roles’’ they are asked to assume and the sexual harassment to which they are exposed reveal the limit points of white heterosociality—not as anomaly, but as excessive gestures within its regulatory function. White heterosociality emerges at the interface between the intimate and the institutional to provide a set of relational practices and expectations that serve a pedagogical function—teaching, in a sense, white men and women how to interact within an institutional frame. In its appropriation of familial ties, white heterosociality puts into motion a set of rituals and signifying practices, institutional benefits and compromises, which frame the relational conditions under which white women emerge as institutional(ized) subjects and through which they are authorized to represent feminism within the academy.

REVERSING REJECTION

Racialized Femininities and Heterosociality This section builds on Hurtado’s reflexive theory of gender subordination (1996) to place the conditions of ‘‘rejection’’ productive of women ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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of color subjectivities within a dynamic and historically situated system of power and resistance. Hurtado argues that while white women are subordinated by white men through seduction, women of color are subordinated by white men through rejection. Women of color are figured not as the mothers and lovers, daughter and mothers of white men, as Hurtado so aptly points out, but of men of color, who are also subordinated by white men. In relation to white men, then, women of color emerge through subordination characterized by white male rejection. The accounts o√ered by women of color provide a point of entry into the nuances of the rejection dynamic. While rejection may be read as a subalternizing discourse that positions white men as rejecting subjects over and against women of color, these accounts tend to reverse these subject/object positionalities as women of color cast themselves as rejecting subjects that materialize through their rejection of white men, ‘‘re-versing,’’ as I term it, the terms of rejection posed in Hurtado’s theory. As such, the racialized femininities of women of color materialize through their references to them-selves as active agents within a dynamic of white heterosociality, even as this system is based largely on their exclusion. This ‘‘reversal’’ of rejection arises in their ‘‘versings,’’ or selfstagings, through which they depict their encounters with white men, not in terms of longing, disappointment, or an investment in power, but through third world feminist critique. Thus they assume authorial roles in relation to the subalternizing scripts of rejection to forge resistive subjectivities.∞∞ This move marks a double play on ‘‘reversal’’: first, to denaturalize the subordinating scripts of rejection that characterize the relationships between white men and women of color by calling attention to their constructed quality (as ‘‘versed’’ by these women); and second, to reverse the direction of rejection (in these accounts, women of color reject white men, not the other way around). While these reversals are rhetorically empowering and theoretically insightful, they do not necessarily remake, let alone reverse, the material conditions of power relations between white men and women of color. These are stories of resistance through which women of color actively cultivate themselves as agents in relation to and resistance of social scripts that would belittle or demean them. As such, they mark strategies of resistance, even as they elucidate the relational conditions through which women of color remain outsiders within the U.S. academy. If tropes of white heterosociality at work in the previous section

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(home, family) serve a signifying function within the formation of racialized femininities, their meanings are historically specific to various relations of white male ruling. While some women of color find their roles as lovers, wives, and even mothers and daughters of white men, their role in relation to the white family is troubled by institutions of racialized and gendered control such as slavery, colonization, indentured servitude, domestic work, child care, and sexual labor (see Espiritu 2000). Further, each of these forms of labor or colonial rule shape the racialized femininities of di√erently located women of color differently. The white ‘‘home’’ within the U.S. context is historically a site of white male control over the sexualized and racialized bodies of women of color, the latter positioned within the ‘‘home’’ as slaves and domestic workers or outside of it as laborers, sex workers, or colonial subjects. The vexed space of ‘‘home’’ constitutes an uneven and often contradictory relationship to proximity between white men and variously positioned women of color. Thus, proximity itself must be understood as both spatial and a√ective. Women of color historically occupy di√erentiated spatial proximities in relation to white male centers of power, creating di√erent levels of daily negotiation with white men. For instance, house slaves often resided within the homes of white men, subjecting them to immediate and intimate violence, while field slaves lived in separate units; Native women, Latinas, and Asian women were often spatially distanced from the white home—forcibly dispatched to reservations, extricated to or from their home countries, their territories annexed to accommodate white colonial occupation and expansion. Thus the relationships between white men and women of color is historically more often characterized by spatial distance, although some women of color work within the spatial proximity of the white home. This spatial proximity creates intimate and often violent conditions in which these women of color learn to negotiate the boundaries between a√ective proximity and distance within shared space. Further, while these spatial proximities are highly managed through the erection of borders, boundaries, and gated communities, they are often contested, open to scrutiny, and may be recalibrated as civil rights and decolonial struggles reterritorialize traditionally segregated spaces through legal, political, and cultural reform. While the relations between white women and white men, then, may be understood through a convergence of spatial and a√ective proximity

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(Greyser 2007), the relations between women of color and white men are more often characterized through a divergence of spatial and a√ective proximities. These historicized and spatialized conditions of (non)belonging, in turn, frame the relational conditions of contemporary academic life for women of color. The shared institutional space they coinhabit with white men is overdetermined by these vexed histories of uneven spatial and a√ective proximity. The women of this study draw on these histories as they frame their encounters with white men in the academy. Their stories underscore this tension between spatial and a√ective forms of proximity as they negotiate the ‘‘color blind’’ logic of the academy, wherein they join the ranks of white men, presumably as peers. ‘‘Where are Latinos . . . in academe?’’ Tatiana de la Tierra (2002, 360) asks. ‘‘Scrubbing toilets or not there at all, though some of us are trying, against odds, to Be Somebody, Get Somewhere, Graduate.’’ De la Tierra’s comment underscores what Patricia Hill Collins (1998) describes as the ‘‘outsider-within’’ social location, in which black feminists and other insider/outsiders occupy ‘‘border spaces’’ defined by their unequal power relations. Collins’s concept complicates the politics of belonging, distinguishing between ‘‘substantive’’ and ‘‘formal’’ citizenship: while the outsider-within is formally included within the inner sphere of privileged sites of power, she is substantively excluded, since the politics of representation constitutive of her inclusion cannot be accommodated by the social text of that site. This epistemic violence requires her silence and the erasure of her history, struggles, culture, and identity. These latter scripts remain hidden from the privileged class, with whom the outsider-within communicates via public transcripts, providing incisive critiques of power in the form of private transcripts that the outsider-within deploys to mobilize and edify her people in the face of domination (Scott 1990). The black female domestic worker serves as Collins’s figure of the outsider-within: ‘‘Such women gained intimate knowledge about White middle-class family life,’’ she explains, ‘‘but biologically could never become full fledged members of the middle-class White ‘family’ ’’ (Collins 1998, 6). This border knowledge is power for Collins, in that it empowered these black women to recognize the ideological operations of domination through the stories white people told, not as fact, but as the ‘‘knowledge produced by members of an elite group and circulated by that group to justify and obscure unjust power relations’’ (7). 112

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The figure of the outsider-within provides a point of entry into analyzing the rhetorical positioning of the women of color of this study, who themselves are positioned as outsiders-within in academic settings, particularly vis-à-vis their negotiations with white men in power. For it seems that while the stories above suggest that white men and women could draw on their relational histories as family members to cultivate a politics of relation that would accommodate, circulate, and consolidate white and heterosexual power within the academy, the stories of women of color suggest that the vexed histories of spatial and a√ective proximity that characterize their relationships to the white family position them more as outsiders-within than as insiders within the heterosocial conscriptions of belonging constitutive of the white family. Thus the analysis below provides a point of entry into the rhetoric that constitutes the private transcripts through which women of color carve out agency within contexts of epistemic violence and paradoxical (non)belonging within the academy. They do so by telling stories of their encounters with white men—a topic already out of place within the public transcript constitutive of white belonging—with a sense of irony or humor, measured criticism, and self-reflexivity. It remains important to underscore that these re-versals of power relations with white men inscribe women of color with a particular form of power—their critique —that by definition remains excluded from the public transcript, and hence does not alter power relations where they take place, but potentially seeks to do so through theorizing and recalibrating the hegemony of white and heterosocial belonging within the academy in works such as Collins’s, in which she seeks to underscore the powerful insights that outsider-within positionality make available. Thus, in order for the reversals shared by these women to re-verse power relations within their sites of academic production, a radical rearticulation of the conditions of academic belonging would be needed. The stories I unpack below complicate any easy notion of rejection or outsider-within status as these women of color negotiate the uneasy terms of their inclusion within the academy. The uneasy positionality that women of color occupy vis-à-vis white men arises within a context of white heterosocial belonging, from which they are largely excluded, and yet which they still negotiate through a variety of strategies of complicity and resistance. While many acknowledge that women of color who look white may acquire power within a white heterosocial frame, only one woman among those I interviewed, Maya, frames her ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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own positionality as gaining heterosocial privilege by virtue of her capacity to approximate a ‘‘palatable’’ femininity. As Maya explains, her positionality in relation to her white male mentor secures its meaning by signifying ‘‘within the general vicinity’’ of white femininity. Many women of color describe their encounters with white men in terms that underscore a complex dynamic that tacks between rejection and heterosocial transmissions of power. That is, some form of institutional exchange occurs through discourses fraught with desire, domination, and resistance, although the relational terms imposed for engagement are often dehumanizing. Women of color are positioned vis-à-vis white men ‘‘primarily as workers and as objects of sexual power and aggression. . . . [Thus] the sexual objectification of women of Color allows white men to express power and aggression sexually, without the emotional entanglements of, and the rituals that are required in, relationships with women of their own group’’ (Hurtado 1996, 15). Recalling that the possessive investments in whiteness position the white family as a channel through which power is transferred, legal structures—such as immigration, antimiscegenation, property, and inheritance laws—were formed to ensure power would not flow to women of color. Thus while white women intimate their alliances with white men through tropes of familial intimacy, women of color accounts arise from this history marked by its lack of ‘‘emotional entanglement.’’ While their accounts echo the objectifying relational dynamic depicted by Hurtado, women of color do not position themselves as objects or victims. Rather they cast them-selves as active and resistive agents. The a√ective distance that characterizes their interactions with white men is one of the primary rhetorical strategies through which they re-verse the terms of rejection. Unlike many white women, women of color frame their femininities not through their investment in white male intimacies, but in terms that accentuate their rejection of these terms, a lack of interest in engaging white male desire. These rejections, read as re-versals, underscore disengagement as an alternative mode of di√erential belonging to the engagement compelled by familial intimacy within the stories of white women. If di√erential belonging functions like a clutch—the mechanism that allows the driver to engage and disengage the gears of the automobile for the transmission of power (Sandoval 2000)—then a close examination of the dynamics of dis/engagement provides a vital component to a politics of relation. The degree and a√ective quality of engagement that characterizes many white women’s 114

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accounts of alliances with white men obscures both their investments in privilege and their complicity with their own subordination. Alternatively, the capacity of women of color to alternately engage and disengage their relations with white men provides them with both an a√ective distance and a shifting frame of analysis. This di√erential belonging, then, generates a more nuanced critique of power. The relationally resistive subjectivities that we encounter in the following stories are pedagogical in terms of marking out the terrain for resistive belongings. A prevalent theme among women of color is an ambivalent relationship to academia, which requires that they engage in di√erential belongings within and across relational sites. Rita, who is quoted at the start of this chapter, is an assistant professor who identifies as an African American lesbian from a working-class background. Her account initially disengages her own positionality within the frame of her critique, as she places herself not as an object within the signifying system she names, but outside of it, as theorist. Like several other women of color, Rita’s ambivalence permeates her account of academic life. Through stories in which she considers leaving academia, struggles as a graduate student and single parent, holds multiple jobs at a series of institutions, and endures ‘‘intense racism,’’ the ‘‘academy’’ materializes as a fraught site in which her subjectivity is enduring, resourceful, and in these ways powerful. In response to my question about how (hetero)sexuality operates in her relations with white men in the academy, Rita responds, ‘‘I think that’s with white women. I think black figures get viewed di√erently [pause]. That’s jungle fever, rather.’’ Her immediate reply displaces her positionality within heterosociality, equating this relational dynamic with the normative positionality of white women. Her response eschews the specificity of her navigation within this system, retaining its focus on the category of ‘‘black figures,’’ which, she suggests, materialize against the standard of white femininity: ‘‘black figures get viewed di√erently ’’ from the ‘‘white women’’ who signify within the hegemony of white heterosociality within academia. To account for her own positionality as a black woman, Rita provides an alternative register to white heterosociality— ‘‘that’s jungle fever, rather’’—to account for the relational matrix that gives rise to black femininity. This register suggests unstable or fitful expressions of desire inspired by the excess of the ‘‘jungle’’ as a primitive site that resides on the edge of signification, a site unrestrained by the rituals and emotional entanglements associated with white women. Rita’s ongoing displacement of her own figure within this relational ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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system retains her agency through her refusal to subordinate her positionality within the signifying relations she authorizes. The slippage within her account between ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘figures’’ underscores her framing of black femininity as a social construction—as a ‘‘figure’’ as opposed to a person, as a ‘‘figure’’ of speech, as ‘‘woman’’ decoupled from the gendered and racialized sphere wherein ‘‘woman’’ signifies as ‘‘white woman.’’ Her theorization of ‘‘black figures’’ as gaining meaning within a savage register resonates with black feminist thought, such as hooks’s analysis of the cultural production of black femininity as ‘‘sexually available and licentious. Undesirable in the conventional sense, which defines beauty and sexuality as desirable only to the extent that it is idealized and unattainable, the black female body gains attention only when it is synonymous with accessibility, availability, when it is sexually deviant’’ (hooks 1992, 65–66). As such, Rita provides an outsider-within critique of power, even as she writes her own agency within and against the violent social text in which her ‘‘figure’’ is rendered intelligible. As our conversation continues, Rita unpacks what she means by ‘‘jungle fever’’ relationality. ‘‘What do you see going on with that?’’ I ask, in response to her comment about ‘‘jungle fever.’’ She narrates a situation in which she unwittingly ‘‘gains [the] attention’’ of her white male colleague. ‘‘I’ve never seen it as sexual. Well,’’ she continues, ‘‘I was going to tell you about an incident involving a man.’’ Her disavowal of ‘‘sexual’’ nature of the incident retains the distinction between the relational formation of ‘‘white women’’ and ‘‘black figures’’ as she strives to retain her ‘‘feminist principles’’ within a ‘‘compromising’’ situation: We were walking down the hall and he does our schedules and I was really happy with my schedule and I stopped to thank him. He’s a man I find generally despicable, although we often agree. We have sat on committees and often on committees we will agree. So we’re walking down the hall and I thanked him for creating my schedule in this odd way I had asked him to do and I was really happy. I’d been asking for it for a while and he has generally been ignoring it, I guess, or not paying enough attention. Anyway, he gave me exactly what I wanted. He put his hand on my arm and didn’t take it away and I couldn’t tell if it was a platonic touch or not. I’m sure he knows better. He used his body to dominate my body. I felt very slimy. I compromised my feminist principles. I didn’t say anything. I just smiled and tried to get away.

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While the distinction she maintains between the ‘‘sexual’’ and ‘‘jungle fever’’ provides both a partial account for his lack of restraint and by extension authorizes her within this telling, Rita still reports feeling ‘‘slimy’’ and ‘‘compromised’’ by her participation in the encounter. This tension signals a series of paradoxes—between voice and subalternity; between belonging and rejection; between rejection and re-versal. This tension within her account arises at the disjuncture between speaking positions available to her within a ‘‘jungle fever’’ register. On one hand, she retains authorial control of her own narration: its framing, the characters who inhabit it, the scene and the actions. Her framing of the ‘‘incident’’ as ‘‘not sexual’’ reinscribes the terms of my question (heterosexual relations with white men) in terms that underscore the ‘‘domination’’ that ensues, not in terms of mutuality, pleasure, or desire, but rather as an execution of bodily force following the execution of a ‘‘favor’’ and an expression of professional gratitude. Rita characterizes theirs as an ambivalent relationship, one that vacillates between collegiality and rejection (‘‘He’s a man I find generally despicable, although we often agree’’). This instability resonates with her ‘‘jungle fever’’ depiction as her invisibility (‘‘he has generally been ignoring it, I guess, or not paying enough attention’’) is suddenly, violently displaced by his dominating gesture (‘‘He used his body to dominate my body’’). On the other hand, whatever relational placement into which she is inserted within this rubric of violence and desire is contingent upon her subalternity, which leaves her without recourse within the moment of the encounter: ‘‘I felt very slimy. I compromised my feminist principles. I didn’t say anything. I just smiled and tried to get away.’’ This moment of her subalternity might be understood within a historical frame of resistance and complicity constitutive of black feminist sexualities. Evelynn M. Hammonds explains that black feminists inherit a legacy of silence, a ‘‘politics of silence’’ set into motion by early black feminists in their e√orts to appropriate ‘‘proper Victorian morality to demonstrate the lie of the images of the sexually immoral black woman’’ (Hammonds 1997, 175). This legacy retains silence among black women around their own sexualities, undermining their ‘‘ability to articulate any conception of their sexuality’’ (175). This is not to say that black women cannot and do not speak out and name their sexualities. Indeed, Hammonds goes on to cite such leaders as blues women and black feminist theorists such as Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, and Jewelle Gomez to recognize black women’s agency in the context of this legacy of ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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silence. But in historicizing black women’s silence around their own sexualities, Hammonds provides a productive lens for reading the contradictions and silences in Rita’s story. If black academic feminists are ‘‘engaged in a process of fighting to reclaim the body,’’ and that body is ‘‘still being used by others to discredit them as producers of knowledge and as speaking subjects’’ (177–78)—then at this moment in which Rita’s body is ‘‘dominated,’’ she momentarily loses this battle over her body as the white man who controls and determines her schedule ‘‘dominates her body,’’ as her words escape her, as she wonders if she has ‘‘compromised her feminist politics.’’ Yet her narration draws upon this legacy of black feminist thought as she reclaims her agency by re-versing his rejection—both in the inscription of her own story and in her selfstaging as actively choosing to move in and out of the relationship. Rita locates agency in rejecting the heterosocial framing imposed by my question through her di√erential movement between voice and silence, belonging and rejection. Like Rita, Donna is an African American assistant professor who relationally positions her femininity outside of the realm of white male desire. She locates an alternate means to refuse her inscription within white heterosociality, emphasizing her rejection of white women’s e√orts to discipline her body. In response to a question of whether ‘‘sexual attractiveness’’ relates to her ability to negotiate white male spaces, she responds: No, not for me. But, you know, I think that almost everybody can and probably does use it, consciously or unconsciously. To be honest with you, as an African American woman . . . I don’t think that most whites see me as a sexual being. . . . I think that unless you’re a black woman that conforms to white standards of beauty [pause] then you may be able to do that. But no, for me, I don’t think that’s ever been, you know, something.

In other words, Donna feels that her black femininity precludes her from such access. While her overall posture is one that places her identity ‘‘as an African American woman’’ outside of the realm of white heterosociality (‘‘I don’t think most whites see me as a sexual being’’), she allows for multiple positionalities that black women might take up by pointing to those who ‘‘conform to white standards of beauty’’ as ‘‘be[ing] able to do that.’’ This account resonates with Rita’s sense that white femininity functions as the standard against which black femininity is assessed within a white heterosocial frame, producing the hetero-

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geneity of the latter as it approximates or departs from the homogeneity of the former. The heterogeneity Donna evokes within this movement across modes of black femininity is also apparent in the uncertainty she implies when she grants that ‘‘almost everybody can and probably does use [femininity], consciously or unconsciously.’’ Her account frames black women’s agency through the multiplicity of relational strategies through which ‘‘black women’’ emerge in relation to white masculinity, even as she suggests that for some ‘‘African American women,’’ such as herself, ‘‘using it’’ holds little or no appeal. In this rejection she foregrounds her resistance to the e√orts of her white female friends to ‘‘discipline her’’ about her ‘‘large’’ size, explaining that her ‘‘size is attractive’’ within the ‘‘black community.’’ The white women in her story, then, seek to whiten Donna within a signifying field not only of whiteness, but within a field overdetermined by heterosexuality and gender, bodily ability and control. Donna’s agency emerges as she rejects these signifying demands white heterosociality would place on her body to approximate white femininity, privileging the ‘‘black community’’ as the register through which her femininity signifies as ‘‘attractive.’’ This gesture re-verses the terms of rejection as she articulates her ‘‘size’’ not as a site of her failed e√orts to approximate ‘‘white standards of beauty,’’ but as a function of her refusal to be ‘‘disciplined’’ by the white women in her story. Additionally, the privileged status through which she inscribes the ‘‘black community’’ foregrounds her belonging there as she successfully navigates the nexus of desire she encounters in that context. Each of these relational gestures forge Donna’s agency as she dis/engages across sites of belonging in empowering ways. Her agency, which she cultivates through di√erential belonging, marks the limits of white feminist investments in logics of assimilation wherein women of color are encouraged to fit in to a white feminist norm (Newman 1999). Women of color such as Donna resist these e√orts as they disinvest from white feminism, forming a radical critique of white feminism that gestures toward productive feminist futures. As these women of color navigate various histories of colonial control and the normativity of white femininity, they re-verse the rejections that would potentially silence them as they account for their engagements in di√erential belongings that allow them to move in and out of sites of alliance, rejection, and ambivalence. The compromising incident Rita

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shares, and the disciplining of Donna’s body in her account, signal the ways in which racialized femininities are subjected to various modes of domination at the level of the body. Rita’s positioning is slotted within sexualized and racialized histories of dominance in which her body becomes intelligible to this white man not as potential family member but as a site of corporeal subjection. Another of the women I interviewed, Andrea, shares a story that resonates with Rita’s, in which a white male administrator metaphorically positions her as a sex worker. Andrea is a Chicana from a working-class background who, at the latter part of a career criss-crossed with institutional relocations, is now a full professor and has worked for a time in administration. In our conversation about her relations with white men in power, she described a situation at her first job. She was at a reception for new faculty where she was ‘‘trying to avoid the guy taking the photographs because they had hired two black, one Chicana ([herself]), and one Asian American women’’: Andrea: [I] turned around and found myself with the president of the

university, and he started this stupid conversation about how the first time that he’d ever met a Mexican woman was a prostitute in Tijuana. I’m looking at this guy like, ‘‘What the hell am I supposed to respond to this?’’ This is my first job— A: —You’re twenty-nine years old— Andrea: —and he’s the president of the university, and so I just changed the subject. So it wasn’t like any specific thing, it was just like these totally inappropriate things that would come out of their mouths that would make it perfectly clear what they were thinking or whatever. And it’s just amazing to me.

Andrea re-verses this rejection through a series of verbal and nonverbal gestures: the irony with which she weaves the story, the poise with which she casts her own character over and against the ‘‘inappropriate[ness]’’ of the white man/men in her story, her discursive re-versal of the institutional power dynamics. Andrea’s re-versing is parodic as she renders her tale of the reception through caricature: a cameraman pops up to photograph the minority hires; she tries to avoid getting caught on film with food hanging out of her mouth; the president’s gauche e√orts to make conversation with her. Andrea emerges as the protagonist who gains power through her capacity to maintain her composure in the midst of a colonial encounter in which the white male subject becomes undone by her presence. The 120

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epistemic and sexual violence at stake in her telling are simultaneously pervasive and sidelined as she subtextually delegitimizes his stereotyping gesture as tactless. In this way her framing re-verses the power dynamics at work in the story through her rendition of the president’s ‘‘inappropriate’’ actions and her face-saving gesture (‘‘I just changed the subject’’). Her critique of the university’s e√orts to appropriate her racialized femininity is underscored through her understated reclamation of civility. At this reception in which she would be awkwardly positioned before the camera in the slot of performing monkey, her story renders the white male administrators as out of place—failing to accommodate the terms of civilized belonging. So while her narrative resonates with the abjected relational terms of rejection, in which woman of color emerges as sexual laborer in relation to ‘‘white man,’’ her inscription reverses this script to reveal the absurdity upon which it is based in the first place. The discrepancy between spatial and a√ective proximity that characterize this encounter, in which ‘‘Mexican woman’’ meets ‘‘white man’’ on relatively equal terms, provides an account for the president’s ‘‘inappropriate’’ behavior. Unable to reconcile these competing relational forces, the president draws upon an abjected register of Mexican femininity as ‘‘prostitute’’ to decode her presence. Andrea’s ironic telling reveals the incisive critique available within the private transcript of the outsider-within as she parodically marks this limit point of the liberal academy’s color blind logic, thus rearticulating assimilation and tokenization. As Rita and Donna suggest, some women of color can and do ‘‘use it’’—that is, gain heterosocial privilege in relation to white men by approximating white femininity. White heterosociality, then, is not necessarily characterized by white male rejection for women of color. Maya, a South Asian assistant professor of ‘‘resident alien’’ status, emerges as such a figure in her relationship with her mentor: He’d play me up more as the ‘‘brilliant student’’ [saying], ‘‘I love your writing,’’ rewarding me in front of the class with [homemade food]. . . . That was supposed to be incentive for people to write better. . . . From that moment on, I became the person that he gave opportunities to. He gave me [a] chapter to write; he paid me for it.

Her account frames the relationship within heterosocial terms as she gains institutional status through her privileged positioning. Maya occupies a normative status in this relational context as her mentor ac‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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knowledges her as the ‘‘brilliant student’’ as ‘‘incentive’’ to other students to ‘‘write better.’’ This status immediately translates into material gain: ‘‘From that moment on’’ he ‘‘gave opportunities’’ to her. What conditions of possibility give rise to Maya’s racialized femininity circulation within a white heterosocial frame? The account suggests Maya shares an a≈nity with her mentor, that he encourages her and shares power and resources with her. Thus their alliance is inflected not by rejection, but by an a≈liation steeped in intimate gestures (such as sharing homemade food with her). The heterosocial exchange at work in her account suggests that, unlike white women such as Nancy and Carol, Maya cannot and does not count on heterosocial privilege. She describes her relationship with her mentor as ‘‘special,’’ and the a√ective tie that binds them runs deep. Maya explains that her mentor had been married to various international women of color, and that these intimacies may have recalibrated his heterosocial orientation such that Maya becomes intelligible within the realm of the (intercultural/international) family. Maya’s account resonates with Donna’s and Rita’s claims that women of color who ‘‘look white’’ can ‘‘use it’’; Maya describes her femininity as ‘‘palatable’’ to whites and her ‘‘attractiveness to white men’’ as ‘‘within the general vicinity’’ of ‘‘physical acceptability.’’ Maya contrasts her mentor’s ‘‘rewarding’’ treatment of her to his ‘‘somewhat harsh’’ treatment of her friend, Lata. While both women are from the same country of origin, Maya’s femininity gains its status over and against Lata’s. In her e√orts to account for this di√erential treatment, to translate how their femininities di√erently signify in an Indian context, Maya describes Lata’s marginalized femininity as ‘‘equivalent [in the U.S. context] to outspoken angry black woman—confident and outspoken.’’ Maya’s normative femininity, then, emerges against the racialized backdrop of Lata’s rejected femininity, revealing not only the unevenness of the category ‘‘Indian woman,’’ but also the configuration of one trope of black femininity (the ‘‘outspoken angry black woman’’) as the negation of white heterosocial desire. Maya’s account underscores the subtle and powerful ways the colonial legacies that international women of color inherit enable and constrain the formation of transracial feminist alliances. Alexander and Mohanty (1997) warn that the privileging of di√erently racialized femininities over and against the rejection of others potentially functions as ‘‘acts of racial fragmentation aimed at separating women of color from each other.’’ Not only in relation to Lata, but also to the other women of 122

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color of this study, Maya’s ‘‘third world’’ femininity may emerge as ‘‘(di√erently) less threatening than African American women to white women [and men], who often preferred our [third world] ‘foreignness’ rather than our racialization in the U.S.’’ (xiv–xv). Her mentor’s preference for her ‘‘foreignness’’ potentially pits Maya against U.S. women of color and Lata as he draws upon the rhetorical power of Maya’s model minority status as ‘‘incentive’’ to mobilize his other students. Yet Maya provides no indication that her relationship with her mentor challenged her alliance with Lata or other women of color. Perhaps she is not aware of any fragmentation; perhaps her alignment with privilege in this instance makes potential divisions more di≈cult to detect; perhaps none of my questions prompted her to discuss it, or maybe her connection with Lata enables them to productively address this imbalance. Maya’s ability to build collaborative connections with her mentor and with Lata, and to reflect upon the potentially contentious nature of these ties in her conversation with me, suggests her capacity to move in and out of these di√erential sites of belonging and to bridge among them. If white heterosociality is a mode of belonging that di√erently positions these women of color in relation to white men, racialized femininities also manifest di√erently as women of color build ties with men of color. Hurtado’s (1996) relational theory of gender subordination, which figures women of color as the mothers, lovers, and daughters of men of color, provides a point of entry into understanding how differently located women of color emerge in such relations. While some women of color reference familial ties between themselves and men of color, this theme was neither prevalent nor did these ties translate into the transmission of power—a theme so prevalent within the stories of white women. This absence suggests that the concept of ‘‘heterosociality’’ fails to account for the experiences of institutional mobility shared by these women of color. If, as I argue above, heterosociality seeks to account for the interface between heterosexual intimacies and the transmission of power, this convergence does not arise within the accounts of women of color. Hurtado’s relational theory explains that the subordination of men of color under white supremacy shapes the familial ties between women and men of color more for purposes of survival than for the transmission of institutional power. Possessive investments in whiteness systematically undermine the possibilities for economic and political advancement of people of color, preserving the propertied functions of family building for whites. This legacy of domination conditions the ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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alliances between women and men of color in the academy by highly constraining the resources available for transmission. Thus while these alliances are organized through heterosexual and patriarchal belongings, the transfer of power at work in white heterosociality is minimized by the white supremacist structure in which they arise. As such, the possessive investments in power that compel white women to comply with their roles within the white family hold little sway for these women of color. The a√ective distance these particular women of color achieve in their alliances with men of color, in turn, empowers them to o√er incisive critiques of these power relations. A Filipina assistant professor in my study, Angela, gives an account of the ‘‘family ties’’ that characterize the ethnic studies department where she worked that suggests some of the relational constraints imposed by her positionality as ‘‘daughter.’’ She describes the familial configuration of her former department as so ‘‘debilitating’’ she had to leave the department. ‘‘I don’t think those two people [the chair and his wife/their colleague] are ever going to forgive me for leaving. Because it basically showed that there wasn’t this big happy family . . . that they had been telling everybody existed.’’ The marital bond between the chair and his wife frames the couple as parental in relation to the other members of the department, positioning Angela as the ‘‘Asian daughter.’’ She describes the inevitable ‘‘hierarchy’’ that characterizes the ‘‘Asian family,’’ versing her agency through her ongoing rejection of this configuration, both within her family of origin and her departmental ‘‘family’’: Especially within any Asian family there is a specific hierarchy that has to happen, and I’ve spent my whole life fighting that hierarchy, so that was constantly my reaction to it. But definitely, [a mentor] was trying to help me through this, because she really wanted me to stay. I remember her telling me, ‘‘You are being perceived as a bad daughter.’’ . . . That was why the pressure was so much on me to be disciplined. Literally within the discipline, as they perceived it, as Asian American studies, but also as a Filipina daughter. I always thought to myself, and I wrote a lot about it in my journal at that time, they should have talked to my dad first!

Angela’s account self-consciously inscribes a slippage between the ‘‘disciplining’’ to which she is subjected as ‘‘a Filipina daughter’’ and the ‘‘discipline, as they perceived it,’’ of Asian American studies to expose the conflation between the intimate and the institutional formative of 124

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this relational arrangement. She draws on the forms of resistance she has learned in her family of origin ‘‘her whole life’’ as a relational resource that empowers her to reject this institutional family. The irony with which she frames this slippage and the resonances between ‘‘families’’ of origin and of institution paradoxically empower her as underscored with her admonition ‘‘they should have talked to my dad first!’’ Angela constructs her agency against the backdrop of the other women in her story, who are subordinated by the institutional family— subjected to sexual harassment, and strapped with the majority of the departmental labor.∞≤ Positioned as ‘‘family’’ to men of color, also racially subordinated, heterosexual relations do not necessarily become heterosocial for these women of color. Angela describes the gendered division of labor within the department as one in which women do the ‘‘grunt work,’’ while men administer and orchestrate the kind of work conducted and legitimized there. Thus while those white women who successfully signify within the white male ‘‘family’’ tend to gain institutional access, the family tie in Angela’s account relegates these women of color to marginalized labor forms. This suggests that ‘‘second-class,’’ gender-subordinated status means quite di√erent things for white women and for women of color vis-à-vis the heterosocial circuits available to them. The marginality of men of color, in turn, conditions the expectations women of color may bring to these alliances. The Chicana professor Andrea shares a story of her encounter with an ‘‘influential’’ Latino. In spite of his institutional power, she does not frame the alliance as one that would potentially enhance her career, but she does worry that her rejection of him may hurt her career. Carlos, she explains, treated her like a ‘‘high-priced spread,’’ the night she agreed to join him for a drink in his hotel room. ‘‘[He] starts all this garbage and I’m like, ‘OK, now what do you do? If you piss him o√, this is somebody who could really, really hurt me. . . . I’m never gonna be able to escape him.’ ’’ She extracts herself from the hotel room, but as he walks her to her car, he ‘‘grabs me and I feel one of those awful teeth grinding in my lips and it was just like, ‘awwww.’ But I figure, ‘OK, [you] got away with just that. You’re fine.’ ’’ As in Rita’s account, in Andrea’s an encounter of bodily dominance is foregrounded as he ‘‘grabs’’ her and subjects her to ‘‘one of those awful teeth grinding in my lips.’’ Just as Rita resists referring to her encounter as ‘‘sexual,’’ Andrea avoids the term ‘‘kiss,’’ framing his ‘‘teeth grinding’’ gesture as a repulsive advance at the edge of language (‘‘awwwww’’). Yet her capacity to resist ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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is constrained through the relational configuration of the encounter: her awareness of how he might deploy his institutional power to ‘‘really, really hurt [her].’’ She accepts these more benign forms of domination to avoid his retribution: ‘‘I really, really dealt with it by trying every way not to get him angry. And fortunately that worked because that would have been bad.’’ Thus Andrea frames Carlos’s institutional power not as a potential site of her own empowerment through a heterosocial exchange, but as a site of danger to be avoided (‘‘he could really, really hurt me’’). While she characterizes Carlos as institutionally powerful and their relational tie as configured through a form of heterosexual desire, Andrea does not view the exchange as heterosocial because she holds no expectation that he might share power with her.

CONCLUSION

‘‘Women’’ on the Inside, the Outsider-Within, and the Institutionalization of Feminism I have sought in this chapter to reveal some of the relational contours through which variously located academic feminists navigate the interface between the intimate and the institutional in their alliances with white men in positions of power. The chapter provides a sketch of the racialized and heterosexed relational conditions under which feminism becomes institutionalized, at least within the accounts of these particular women, as white women and women of color become unevenly empowered within the academy by virtue of their di√erentiated capacity to, or desire to, register as ‘‘woman’’ within their encounters with white men. The concept of heterosociality seeks to account for the relationship between white/heterosexual belonging and the transmission of power. For those white women who narrate their connections with white men through familial tropes, they become intelligible as women through their capacity to tra≈c in the figure of ‘‘woman.’’ That figure is reified within the white family structure, which provides a set of relational practices through which white men and these white women can engage within a reliable, or familiar, social text. My conversations with women of color suggest that the normative whiteness of this familial structure of heterosociality as an organizing relational principle renders their presence out of place. The rejection through which women of color are subordinated by white men, as 126

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theorized by Hurtado, characterizes these women’s encounters with white men. So while these women are largely cut o√ from lines of institutional power that are more often made available to their white female counterparts, they actively cultivate another form of power that is based in a critical reading of power relations. Positioned as outsiderswithin, their capacity to move across registers of belonging, to be located within, but not quite of, the white familial structure of academic social relations, provides them with an antiracist feminist critique of power that tends to be obscured within the white women’s narratives. The private transcript of our conversation, then, serves as a forum in which these women of color seize power, in which they re-verse the terms of white men’s rejection: rewriting the terms of subalternity, casting white men as inappropriate or out of place, rejecting the disciplinary apparatus of the white heterosexual gaze, or appropriating white femininity and gaining, however momentarily, institutional access through heterosociality. These re-versals in which women of color o√er critiques and stage their own agency aim to rewrite the conditions of their subalternity that arise from their status as outsiders-within. Indeed, the very act of placing their private transcripts within the public sphere creates the conditions of possibility for a reinscription of the epistemic and relational terms of subalternity. The institutionalization of women’s studies, then, must be read within the context of its relational production. The critique I have o√ered through juxtaposing these accounts suggests that white men, in many ways, may be understood as the unacknowledged architects of this process. The salience of the white male gaze and the investment in white men’s comfort vis-à-vis the emergence of ‘‘woman’’ within the project of women’s studies must be interrogated. This chapter is in no sense a general account of this process; it o√ers a small piece of a vast puzzle. Yet it may signal aspects of the hegemonic conditions of belonging constitutive of the institutionalization of feminism. In this small way it points to a lacuna within the relational production of contemporary hegemonic feminism in the academy: white women’s stories suggest that subordination serves as the condition of possibility for their production as women on the inside. This suggests that relational conditions productive of the insider status achieved by particular white women may be antithetical not only to the empowerment of women of di√erence, but of women of similarity as well. The critiques available to women of color, who occupy outsiders‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE

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within positionalities in the academy, resist and provide a potentially radical rewriting of this relational social text. Yet for their private transcripts to become legitimate public transcripts within women’s studies, or the academy more broadly, the entanglement of white and heterosexual supremacy and the liberal humanist logic of these projects would have to be unraveled. The subordinated status of third world feminist critique within the academy, then, occupies an ironic posture as it is this very status that marks its potential. The subaltern status of the re-versals allows these women of color to share a series of strategies for resistance, retelling, and di√erential belonging that, if centered within feminist theory and alliance praxis, would require a renegotiation of power relations, for it would compel white women to unravel the paradox of privilege/marginality that conditions white heterosociality’s condition of possibility.

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4. ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

On the Interface between ‘‘Feminism’’ and ‘‘Alliances’’

‘‘An ally is a person who will tell you what you don’t want to hear, but tell it to you anyway because they know it’s right.’’ Michele is speaking quickly, her eyes meeting mine through round glasses. We’re sitting at her kitchen table as evening snu√s out what’s left of the late afternoon sun. But I’m in no hurry; Michele and her partner have invited me to stay over. ‘‘An ally is someone who won’t turn her back on you when the going gets rough,’’ she continues. And the going has been rough for her: bad mentorship, feminist betrayals, and now a tenure battle stretches out before her. ‘‘An ally is someone who has connected with you on some level, either professionally or personally, and believes in you, or if they have a higher position than you, in bringing you up. An ally is somebody who will take a risk on your behalf. They don’t have to shout real loud. They don’t have to say they’re allies. They just have to do it.’’ ‘‘People who will help you.’’ Laura o√ers in response to my question, ‘‘What does ‘ally’ mean to you?’’ We’re sitting at a picnic table behind her building. We are surrounded by tall, smooth concrete walls, and I am struck by her desire to climb. She’s drawn to people with power. ‘‘Not necessarily people you socialize with or friends, but more like mentors or alliances, people you ally yourself with to get things done.’’ Like a good poker player, she holds her marginality close to her chest. A white lesbian feminist, she’s not out in her department or to her students. ‘‘They’re rooting for me to go through the process, get tenure, you know, become a full-time community member here.’’ While her investment in safety makes her work feel uninspired to me, I imagine she’ll deftly play her tenure cards.

Here alliances are theorized as the interface between intimacy and the institution. One’s relationship to the institution is mediated by, or perhaps more aptly manifested through, the ties one forms within it; the production of the institution, in turn, is sustained through those ties. One’s relationship to the institution, then, arises in conjunction with the alliances one forms, and those alliances are constrained by the racialized, gendered, (hetero)sexed politics of relation out of which they

emerge. This dynamic suggests a mutually productive relationship among alliances and power, the production of the institution and the subjectivities that unevenly inhabit it. If alliances signify and function di√erently for Michele and Laura, how do we assess the relational and political contours of this di√erence? What is an ally? The responses will vary, as these vignettes suggest, depending on who you ask—their experiences, as a function of their social locations and political investments, will shape the conditions under which di√erently located feminists will pursue and come to imagine alliances. This chapter reflects on the relationship between alliance formation and the production of academic feminism. An exploration of the connection between alliances and feminism uncovers what this interface means in the accounts of the women of this study. A close reading of our conversations enables us to map the interdependent racialization of alliances and feminism. Like Laura, many white women claim to participate in alliances to advance their own institutional status, while most women of color view their alliances as sites in which they participate in social and/or institutional change.∞ Because these white women view alliances as relationships through which they maneuver institutional politics, and women of color tend to lack this particular form of power, most white women do not recognize women of color as allies. They build alliances exclusively with other whites. Alternatively, alliances for women of color, as for Michele, arise out of their multiply marginalized social locations. Their e√orts to gain institutional access, or in many instances to merely survive the academy, compel them to engage in alliances on multiple fronts: to gain power and to secure emotional and political support; to make institutions more inhabitable to women of color and to exchange critique. So while securing institutional power is one component of alliances for women of color, it is not their primary function. The ‘‘critical’’ impulse within women-of-color alliances may also clash with the will-to-institutionalized-power impulse through which alliances are organized for many white women. The failures of transracial feminist alliances arise out of the disparate and in many ways competing notions of alliances for white women and women of color generate. These di√erentiated alliance dynamics, in turn, animate di√erently inflected feminist projects. Feminism for many white women remains bounded to gender-based notions of struggle and equality, while feminism for these women of color tends to be invested in multiple, or 130

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intersecting, modes of oppression and empowerment. Experience, theorized through a politics of relation, helps to account for this mutually constitutive relationship between alliance formation and the production of feminisms. If feminism emerges out of a critical reflection on and engagement with experience, then the communities with whom we undergo and make sense of experience become constitutive of the feminisms we produce. Thus our investments in alliances are inextricable from the relational conditions giving rise to our feminisms. The experiences that arise within segregated alliances allow white women to experience power and marginality as an exclusively gender-based phenomenon. This frame elides the experience of privilege, rendering it abstract, illusive, and in many ways incompatible with the subordinated status through which these white feminists come to imagine themselves. Segregated alliances also insulate white women from the experiences that women of color undergo on the other side of racism, rendering racism abstract and its eradication di≈cult to imagine. The institutionalization of feminism must be understood, then, through the politics of relation. The power and privilege that many white women have secured through their alliances with white men and the institutionalization of feminism and women’s studies produce the conditions for gender-based feminism to gain hegemony. Their accounts suggest that white feminist hegemony constrains the institutional possibilities under which women of color produce and imagine feminism, compelling them to forge feminisms in reaction to white feminism. The following sections consider the interface among several moments at work in the production of feminism within the contemporary U.S. academy. I first trace the feminist debates over the institutionalization of academic feminism to consider the racialization of this process. I then consider the mutually constitutive relationship among experience, the politics of relation, and the production of feminist theory. To retain an implicitly individualistic notion of experience erases the politics of relation that frame both the conditions of possibility for what one might experience, as well as the interpretive framework through which one renders that experience. Moving to an analysis of the white women’s accounts, I read the zero-sum logic that drives their alliance formation against the critique function of alliances for many women of color, to mark this alliance fault line among di√erently situated academic feminists. I conclude by moving these relational paradigms through the production of feminism within the context of racialized institutionality. ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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FEMINISM IN DIFFERENCE

Experience, Alliances, and the Institutionalization of Academic Feminism Much recent feminist and cultural scholarly attention has been paid to the institutionalization of leftist, liberal, and identity-based political projects, women’s studies in particular.≤ These authors encounter the conundrum of progressive agendas from within the institutional sites that we so intimately inhabit (Spivak 1990). How do we sort out the tensions that arise when feminist critiques arise not from the academic margins, but from its cultural and institutional center? How do we productively address the generational di√erences among those feminist foremothers who have forged this process and those feminist daughters who inherit it (Looser and Kaplan 1997)? Is the degree to which feminists have succeeded in achieving their mission also that to which feminism ‘‘has not su≈ciently come to terms with its own power?’’ (Looser and Kaplan 1997, 56–57).≥ While these texts go a long way to point to the impossibility of any pure space for leftist intellectual inquiry, sweeping claims to feminism’s power may also produce an undi√erentiated feminism. For which feminists is feminism institutionalized? And how does this institutionalized status unevenly (dis)empower di√erently positioned feminists? How might the institutionalization of academic feminism, and the uneven political terrain through which this process occurs, be analyzed from an alliance perspective? How does our analysis of this process account for the uneven relationships to institutional power that di√erentiate Michele’s and Laura’s alliances? The feminist crisis over its own success calls for inquiries of the racialized conditions under which this success has been secured. Here I seek one such inquiry under the rubric of belonging. To do so, I ask a series of questions about the relationships among the politics of relation, experience, and theory production within an institutional frame. My aim is to call attention to the ongoing relational conditions that give rise to the unevenly racialized terrain of the institutionalization of feminism. While a politics of relation is constitutive of this discourse (and the anger, guilt, and feminist discontents that spark it), these relational terms often operate beneath the surface of our inquiry. A relational approach to experience that clarifies, rather than obscures, its influence on knowledge production provides a point of entry for this project. From 1970s liberal feminist consciousness-raising to the 132

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coalitional struggles around third world feminism, the politics of experience remain central to the interrogation of the production of feminist theory and praxis. ‘‘The relation of experience to discourse,’’ Teresa de Lauretis o√ers, in her reflection on the 1985 conference ‘‘Feminist Studies: Reconstituting Knowledge,’’ ‘‘is what is at issue in the definition of feminism’’ (de Lauretis 1986, 5). Twenty years later, this imperative still remains at stake within feminist theory and praxis, yet we need new frames for thinking the relationship between experience and feminism. While a nostalgic notion of experience is sought to remedy feminism’s destabilization, serving as a foundational grounding, a palpable site for women’s awareness, solidarity, and commonality (Wiegman 2002c, 112–13), rendering experience as a function of racialized belonging brings the innocence that undergirds such fetishized desires into sharp relief. Neither reactionary articulations that seek to resuscitate experience as the basis for universal sisterhood, nor postmodernist critiques of experience’s foundational status, provides an adequate response to the alliance potential that a relational approach to experience might o√er. In this section I trace the debates over the role of experience within feminist theory production in an e√ort to flesh out this claim: that the identity categories ‘‘white women’’ and ‘‘women of color’’ are potentially reconfigured by the experiences that arise within transracial feminist alliances. Thus a relational approach to experience—which moves us beyond its individualistic, humanistic foundations—o√ers a viable direction to trace the politics of relation that inform feminist theory production and the politics of its reception. The wider aim of this intervention is to configure feminist theory production as an alliance function. That is, if experience is constitutive of feminist theory production, and belonging determines a range of experiences the subject may undergo, then alliance formation provides an appropriate site to investigate the politics of theory production. The politics of feminist theory production arise largely from within the context of the racialized institutionalization of feminisms. Within such a frame, the risks of a mere reversal between various binary systems that function to the exclusion of women of color must be interrogated. In her essay ‘‘Woman in Di√erence,’’ Gayatri Spivak locates the figure of a woman, Douloti, as a site of deferral within the di√erentiating logics of global capitalism, nation, and empire. Spivak poses that ‘‘for the subaltern, and especially for the subaltern woman, ‘Empire’ and ‘Nation’ are interchangeable names, however hard it might be for us to ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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imagine’’ (1993, 78–79).∂ The reversal of nation and empire does not free Douloti, but rather, substitutes one system of di√erence for another. The commodification of di√erence and the unreflexive celebration of libratory struggles in many ways compounds her marginality. For academic feminists of color, whose di√erence may be fetishized, commodified, and submerged under the sign of feminism, the reversal between white patriarchy and white feminism may also function as interchangeable names. Rendering theory production as an alliance process provides a potential intervention into these marginalizing logics. Caren Kaplan’s essay, ‘‘The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice,’’ provides a point of entry into the often overlooked alliance work and, alternatively, the exclusions achieved through the production of feminist theory. Kaplan urges feminists of privilege to examine the ‘‘politics of location in the production and reception of theory’’ in order to ‘‘turn the terms of inquiry from desiring, inviting, and granting space to others to becoming accountable for one’s own investments in cultural metaphors and values’’ (1994, 139). As feminists of privilege strive to make the shift from additive approaches of inclusion to more deeply self-reflexive and radical transformations, they must hold themselves and be held accountable for how their theories travel. If the work of theory is to open up and, alternatively, to foreclose grounds of inquiry—to shape ways of reading the world—then theory itself must be understood as a site of struggle. According to whose vantage point should we see? Whose interests are served by such in/sight? Which questions become possible and which are foreclosed? It becomes vital to examine the theoretical grounds enabled and constrained by feminist theoretical production from a transracial alliance perspective that foregrounds the politics of racialized difference to assess the ways theory travels. Theory production itself, then, must be theorized as a function of alliance. Third world and antiracist feminists have been quite vocal in their critiques of the exclusionary e√ects of liberal or gender-based feminist articulations on the viability of an inclusive, or alliance-based, feminism. Himani Bannerji argues that while such exclusions do not arise out of ‘‘individual ill-will and racist conspiracies,’’ they are e√ects of the underlying elitism of such ‘‘theories, methods, and epistemologies used by [white] feminists, and the cultural commonsense within which they arise’’ (1995, 66; brackets in original). The theoretical e√ect she foregrounds is the production of a feminist subject that collapses complex 134

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systems of di√erence into a ‘‘unitary woman-self ’’ who is defined in her ‘‘otherness to man’’ (68). Norma Alarcón argues in ‘‘The Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back ’’ (1991), the e√orts to merely add women writers of color to feminist theoretical production are inadequate to shift the epistemological categories of feminism. Not only does such work retain the silent center of feminism, but it also, as Chandra Mohanty has so cogently argued in ‘‘Under Western Eyes,’’ discursively colonizes the third world woman through her production as a ‘‘singular and monolithic subject’’ (1991b, 51). These critiques are compelled by an alliance-building impulse, as gender-exclusive theories are a function of ideologies and practices that trouble transracial feminist alliance formation. Mohanty continues: ‘‘My concern about such writings derives from my own implication and investment in contemporary debates in feminist theory, and the urgent political necessity (especially in the age of Reagan/Bush) of forming strategic coalitions across class, race, and national boundaries’’ (1991b, 52–53). This impulse surfaces in calls for more inclusive feminisms, alliances, and coalitions, as well as in the explicit ways in which third world feminists engage with the work of those they critique. The explicit alliance impulse that drives Mohanty’s theory is not, by and large, met with a mutual commitment by white feminists to engage in transracial feminist alliance work. Rather, hegemonic feminism∑ covertly engages di√erence in ways that (re)secure the terms of legitimate feminist theory, which maintains its privileged status (see Carrillo Rowe 2000, Lee 2000). While such exclusions have been the subject of third world feminist critiques of liberal and second-wave feminisms, the reversal between liberal and postmodern feminisms must also be interrogated. In what ways are these also interchangeable names in relation to the subalternizing practices of hegemonic feminist theory production? The exclusions that arise from gender-exclusive theorizing within liberal feminisms resurface in some strains of postmodern feminist theory—those in which racialized di√erence seems to serve as a silent subtext for the critiques put forth (see Armour 1999, Spivak 1993). The subtexts embedded within these articulations point to a(nother) moment within feminist theory, which exposes the limits of language to address racialized di√erence. Such texts tend to assert a progressive agenda, sometimes in the name of solidarity, even as their moves reinscribe white, middle-class, U.S., and/or heterosexual forms of privilege.∏ Such (re)centering gesZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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tures resolve neither the anxieties surrounding the crisis facing the hegemonic subject of (white) feminism, nor do they provide a productive transracial alliance analytic—at least in part because they fail to align the political interests of di√erently racialized feminists. For instance, Wendy Brown locates the impact of the injuries of oppression only within the oppressed, eliding the ways in which, as Mab Segrest (2002) so aptly argues, oppression also and di√erently wounds those in power. What is at stake, then, in the racialized politics of feminist theory production is the capacity of feminists of privilege to see their interests as inextricably bound to variously marginalized groups. The politics of experience have been an organizing principle for the formation of radical women of color as a collective identity, a series of social movements, and set of theoretical contributions. Chela Sandoval writes, ‘‘This Bridge was constructed as a mechanism meant to call up and recognize experiences—and to make them matter di√erently’’ (2002, 22). Paula Moya argues, in her critique of Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, that ‘‘the problem posed by postmodernism is particularly acute for U.S. feminist scholars and activists of color for whom ‘experience’ and ‘identity’ continue to be primary organizing principles around which they theorize and mobilize’’ (2002, 15). Moya’s critique calls us to reckon with the racialized implications for the ways in which our theory travels. The problem of experience is a thoroughly racialized discourse, yet the power arrangements at work within its textual production are often subtextual, silently undermining the organizing principles around which women of color may seek to mobilize and theorize.π For instance, the devaluation of experientially driven research creates a context in which Michele’s scholarship comes under a form of scrutiny not placed on her senior colleagues. At a historical moment in which ‘‘critics holding views like Scott’s have managed to dominate academic discussions of identity’’ (2002, 6), an alliance approach to theory production would compel us to consider what is at stake for potential allies in the reception of our theories. How do feminists of di√erence reckon with the di√erently racialized experiences they undergo within the production and reception of feminist theory? Marianne Hirsch’s reflection gestures toward the ‘‘threat’’ that woman-of-color experience poses to her as a white woman: ‘‘It took me a long time to realize that I was trying to talk her out of her experience. Her experience threatened me profoundly, and with my defensiveness I was only confirming her point’’ (quoted in Pérez 1998, 94). This 136

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accounting suggests the interplay between self-reflexive and alliancebased investigations that enable feminists of privilege to take responsibility for their perceptions, to acquire an alliance impulse. When Jacqueline Martinez argues that ‘‘perception is always-already an expression ’’ (2000, 9), she urges us to historicize and contextualize the conditions that shape our seeing in the first instance. Martinez’s insights, then, demand that accountability not only for our (in)actions, but also for the perceptions out of which those (in)actions arise. From an alliance perspective, Hirsch’s encounter, and the arrebato/rupture (Anzaldúa 2002a) in perception to which it gives rise, are conditioned by the vocalizing presence of the women of color with whom she is engaged. Ruth Frankenberg’s autoethnographic work also provides insights into the (de)racialization of experience. In her analysis of her own life history she comes to perceive whiteness as the ‘‘non-experience of (not) being slapped in the face’’ (1996, 4). Her observation arises from her own heartfelt grappling in which she encounters the paradoxical relationship between privilege and experience—that the experience of privilege might be understood as a nonexperience. Giorgio Agamben argues for the (universalized) ‘‘death of experience’’ within the age of colonial modernity: ‘‘Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events,’’ he muses, ‘‘but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience’’ (1993, 14). Agamben’s and Frankenberg’s insights converge in the notion that privilege itself may be lived as a nonexperience—as nothing remarkable, nothing in particular. Only the (non)experience associated with the undefined, the universal, the absence of sensation that constitutes existence on the other side of racism. Alternatively, whiteness may be experienced as a location at the moment in which white experience becomes particularized, as it does through its wounded status (Wiegman 1999a). But the recuperation of the white subject by usurping the political leverage of marginalized status is deeply problematic, particularly within a context of civil rights rollbacks in the United States (see Kennedy 1996).∫ How might experiences of privilege, then, be registered within a critical feminist vocabulary? And what role would transracial feminist alliances play in such a production? Becky Thompson’s important contribution, A Promise and a Way of Life (2001), provides a relational point of entry to disrupt such color/white binaries through her attention to transracial alliances in her sociology of white antiracist activists. She ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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notes that women-of-color organizations served as bridges from 1960s nationalism to the multiracial feminist activism that emerged in the 1980s. ‘‘In this context,’’ Thompson writes, ‘‘and in response to the limitations of mainstream feminist organizing, a small but growing group of white women began to articulate an explicitly antiracist feminist politics’’ that was ‘‘intertwined with and dependent upon the development of feminism among women of color’’ (397). Transracial feminist alliances, then, have historically provided, and continue to provide, contexts out of which viable antiracist feminist theories and practices emerge. Within such configurations the dialogue of shared experience among di√erently racialized feminists becomes the impetus for inclusive feminist forms to emerge. The presence of transracial alliances provides an experiential basis through which to transform intellectual understandings of power and privilege into the realm of embodied knowing. The embodied quality of these accounts moves us beyond what Martinez describes as the balance between the ‘‘cool edge of a precise theoretical argument’’ and the ‘‘burning edge of fleshy experience’’ (2000, 111). It moves us from a binaristic vision—in which white women and women of color are neatly divided and eternally opposed—to one in which feminists are joined over politics and through shared experience. This relational focus seeks to provide white women with a place to go beyond essentialism (see Alco√ 1998). It opens us to the necessity of retaining experience as an analytic source, even as we put experience into motion within specific contexts of racialized and heterosexed belonging. Experience takes place and gains meaning within community; the communities in which we invest our lives provide a range of possible experiences we may expect to have and how we interpret them. This observation calls into question the relationship between alliance formation and the production of feminism within an institutional frame.

ZERO-SUM ALLIANCES

On Intimacy and Institutional Power If the experiences that give rise to our feminisms are circumscribed by our (de)racialized belongings, then how we envision and engage in alliances becomes crucial to what we might experience, how we make sense of those experiences, and the feminisms we produce. This inter138

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play among belonging, experience, and feminism is constituted for academic feminists within an institutional frame. This section analyzes white women’s notions of alliances to consider how their investments in institutional power provide a frame through which they build and imagine largely segregated alliances. If feminism is institutionalized within the U.S. academy, the power arising from this status is unevenly distributed through white and heterosocial modes of belonging. As the following accounts from many white women suggest, their role in this process arises through strategic and intentional alliance building. The institutional character of alliances for these white women, then, is a salient theme to be untangled if we are to apprehend the relationship between alliance formation and the production of feminism. For many white women, allies serve as the gateway to the institution. One of the subjects in my study, Carol, defines alliances as ‘‘encouraging [you], letting you have positions, giving you responsibility,’’ illustrating her point by recalling her close relationship with a dean who helped her move into administration. Carol concludes, ‘‘So in general, [the dean was] putting me in positions where I would succeed.’’ The ‘‘you’’ in her account, who is then replaced with the personal, ‘‘me,’’ marks her shift in her point of identification from the universal to the particular object of her experience. She frames allies as acting upon this object, locating institutional agency outside of herself as her allies mediate and manifest her success. Another feminist in this study, Heather, defines an ally as ‘‘someone who listens to the problems and cares, who recommends me or says good things about me.’’ Allies, framed as those who can both ‘‘listen’’ and ‘‘recommend,’’ provide both emotional and institutional support as the institutional and the intimate merge for Heather. For my interviewee, Megan, allies have ‘‘more power [than she does]’’ and are ‘‘willing to share it’’ with her and ‘‘help [her] get it.’’ While her ‘‘half Asian’’ identity creates some racial ambiguities for Megan, she doesn’t ‘‘think people are aware that [her] mother was Asian,’’ and her identifications more closely approximate those of white women than those of women of color.Ω Laura’s definition of alliances resembles these in its emphasis on career advancement: for her, allies are ‘‘people who will help you.’’ She adds, ‘‘Not necessarily people you socialize with or friends, but more like mentors or alliances, people you ally yourself with to get things done. . . . They’re rooting for me to go through the process, get tenure, you know, become a full-time community member here.’’ The condition that alliances serve—as the gateway through which ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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these women secure ‘‘positions’’ or ‘‘responsibility,’’ a good recommendation, or tenure—places these allies necessarily in a power-up institutional position. Wendy, a graduate student in my study, defines allies as ‘‘people who sort of help me to, like, hold these disparate resources together. . . . They give me advice, like, on what grants to apply for, and what jobs to apply for and stu√ like that.’’ Her emphasis on access to resources replicates the investments in institutional power of the other white women, countering the notion that feminist progress happens naturally over time. The primary theme circulating among these accounts is the rather narrow, if not singular, focus on building alliances to leverage power. This is not to suggest that feminists should not be invested in power, nor to romanticize marginality, but to assess the depth of the investment in a particular kind of power and to consider what might be at stake in such a narrow focus for alliance formation. Unpacking alliances for these women (all white except Megan, who is half white), we find a series of related themes that reveal the relationship between alliance formation and institution building. Several themes suggest that alliances may be understood as the interface between intimacy and the institution: alliances are relational sites where these feminists ‘‘get things done’’; they are propelled by a√ective investments among allies; alliances are forged through the reproduction of sameness grounded in institutional power. That alliances are centered on labor and its reproduction, reveals both their tremendous potential for social change and their dangerous (re)productivity of classed and institutionalized social arrangements. The feminist forms of labor in which these women engage directs their energies toward women’s issues. Jean, the director of women’s studies whom I introduced in chapter 3, describing the link between her academic labor and her alliances, characterizes allies this way: ‘‘People who think of themselves as feminists and [are] sympathetic to women, these are [allies], simply because I teach women’s studies. If I were a person in an English or history department, I might not think of them, but because I associate so closely with women’s studies, obviously the people who support me tend to be sympathetic to women and value what women do.’’ A gender-based form of feminism, a theme to which I return below, serves as the political impulse that drives Jean’s labor and the institutional support that enables it. This articulation among gender-based feminism, academic labor, white and heterosexual alliance formation, and institutional access is salient for several white women who locate 140

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academic power in and through women’s studies and/or feminist studies within their disciplines. This constellation provides these women with the leverage to make tremendous inroads into the white male academy, even as their paths are often beset with struggle. Yet, as we will see, the undi√erentiated category ‘‘woman’’ upon which their feminist interventions rely undercuts possibilities for expanding the alliance bases that support and produce this labor beyond the boundaries of whiteness, class, or institutional forms of privilege. Thus the reproduction of labor that such alliances enable functions through the reproduction of the institution and through white and heterosocial belongings. The a√ective investments that drive and sustain alliances tend to render their relationship to power invisible. These a√ective ties mobilize subjects, rendering alliances as compelling sites in which to invest emotional energy and time. Carol’s father-daughter relationship with her dean, Laura’s sense that her allies are ‘‘rooting’’ for her to become a ‘‘fulltime community member,’’ and Emily’s account that allies ‘‘recognize your value’’ and fundamentally ‘‘like you’’ all point to the intimate nature of alliances and the generative force that they provide. While the institutionalization of feminism may appear to be a faceless process in which power heartlessly reproduces itself, it is more likely the case that power is transferred and (re)produced within the intimate spaces cleared by alliances. Consider Jennifer’s account, in which she vacillates on the intimate nature of alliances, only to conclude that her allies are so vital to her sense of self and the reproduction of her labor that they ‘‘make it possible for her to get up in the morning.’’ Jennifer characterizes allies in this way: [They are] people with whom you have strategic interests in common. . . . I think you can have allegiances or allies with whom you have no friendship or not necessarily a whole lot of respect. Um, but you can come together for a strategic issue a strategic moment. I’m usually using alliance for friendship as well, partly because for me the groups of people who have supported me and whom I have supported have become friends. Those friendship supports are what make it possible to get up in the morning. . . . [These are] example[s] of allies. . . . It’s been a real nurturing group: divorces, weddings, children. No doubt. Yes.

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reference a di√erent group of allies, but her concluding certainty (‘‘No doubt. Yes’’) that allies are those who ‘‘have become [her] friends’’ confirms that the most salient group that she can call her allies consists of those who have ‘‘nurtured’’ one another through ‘‘divorces, weddings, children.’’ These final terms, intoned with such certainty, speak to a circle of allies whose a√ective ties run deep and wide. Her account frames this group not overtly in institutional, but in familial terms (‘‘divorces, weddings, children’’). Yet because these close alliances ‘‘make it possible for [her] to get up in the morning,’’ they provide the relational fabric through which allies’ academic labor is reproduced. Alliances, then, acquire their most compelling meanings for Jennifer in the deeply intimate ties that bind. Yet the intimate is productive of the institutional. This interface between the intimate and the institutional reveals another important connection: between access and belonging. How are these intimate, institutional ties racialized? Which social actors, for instance, are positioned to ‘‘help [Laura] get tenure,’’ to ‘‘put [Carol] in positions where [she] would succeed,’’ or to ‘‘nurture’’ or be ‘‘nurtured’’ by Jennifer during some of life’s most challenging moments? If underlying notions of privilege-oriented sameness are present in these descriptions, they also appear in their alliances. Carol says, ‘‘Well most of my allies are white women, but I have a lot of white men friends that are allies, I would say. And so, they’re pretty much the same as I am in terms of white.’’ Heather echoes Carol’s candor, acknowledging, ‘‘I can’t think of a really close ally that would not be of my culture. There haven’t been any of other races.’’ Jennifer’s disclosure begins to unearth some of the ideology surrounding this phenomenon of all-white alliances: ‘‘Well, I mean, most of my allies are similar. Most women in academics are white, middle-class, and whatever. Um, I mean . . . you’re looking at allies at [her university]. But we also have some spectacular upper-middle-class [people]. Well, let’s face it. We’re all upper-middle-class!’’ Jennifer’s account provides two points worth exploring: the naturalization of a white, middle-class presence in academia and the flattening of di√erence that enables such a move (‘‘We’re all upper-middle-class!’’). For many white women, particularly those who form primarily or exclusively white alliances, whiteness is framed as a mere fact of academic life, not a socially constituted set of relational practices. Several women refer to the whiteness of their own institutions, as Jennifer does in the above account when she says, ‘‘Most women in academics are white, middleclass, and whatever. Um, I mean . . . you’re looking at allies at [her 142

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university].’’ The implicit question in such accounts (‘‘What do you expect?’’) e√ectively displaces accountability onto an inert white space. As Heather explains, ‘‘I don’t have any peers, I mean, I know some in the field, but I wouldn’t say that they’re close allies. I just do not have very many people of other races around me. It’s a very white place.’’ For many white women, this spatial alibi serves as a thin veil to conceal their pain and discomfort around the white forms of belonging in which they actively participate. Jean’s discomfort registers in her paralinguistic skirting: Culturally, I mean, one thing you can say about [her region of the country] is that it’s incredibly white. So that is, that’s an issue. So there’s not a lot of [laughs] cultural feeling you can get. But um, there have been occasional women of color here and, um, I have been friends with them, but most of them leave. I mean, it’s such a white institution. Um, so I try, I don’t try hard enough. Part of it is energy right now. I keep thinking I should call up this [woman of color], you know, we keep making noises about having lunch with each other and I should, um, do that more.

Doreen Massey’s (1994) insightful analysis of e√orts to naturalize the socially constructed nature of space marks the logics of whiteness at work in Jean’s account. Massey warns that such ‘‘attempts to institute horizons, to establish boundaries, to secure the identity of places, can . . . be seen to be attempts to stabilize the meaning of particular envelopes of space-time ’’ (5). Such moves, which stabilize the meanings of space, elide the power relations through which space is apprehended and disparate belongings are secured. The accounts of many white women—in which the regions or disciplines, departments or institutions they occupy simply ‘‘are white’’—naturalize the whiteness of these spaces. As another woman in my study, Sandra, puts it, ‘‘I would say that we are living . . . we’re still living in an incredibly white, middle-class academic world and the [university], [the state] in general, is extraordinarily white.’’ The stabilization of spatial meanings, then, undermines the politics of inclusion and, by extension, the emergence of transracial feminist frames within the academy. In my conversation with Nancy, she initially takes a stand that echoes those of the white women above, but then goes on to acknowledge the function of white bonding as productive of white space. Nancy divulges, ‘‘No matter how much—and I’m probably going to get into trouble for saying this—no matter how much we ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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say, ‘We’re committed to diversity,’ that ‘We want diverse faculty,’ it’s so much easier to hire someone like you because you suddenly feel comfortable with them. . . . So we just reproduce ourselves in every way possible.’’ Nancy’s self-conscious candor evokes the unspoken disciplinary apparatus of white belonging. Her concern that she is ‘‘going to get into trouble’’ for acknowledging how her white faculty ‘‘reproduce’’ themselves ‘‘in every way possible’’ suggests both the fear associated with naming white belongings, even as her speaking denaturalizes it. Here Nancy betrays what Aída Hurtado calls the unspoken and largely unconscious power dynamics of ‘‘white solidarity.’’ White solidarity, Hurtado writes, ‘‘may on first sight appear to be an oxymoron. . . . Although whiteness to them is natural and although few can articulate the privilege that whiteness brings, most can detect when whiteness is being questioned and its privilege potentially dismantled’’ (1996, 149). If white privilege requires its members to cooperate with its regulatory practices, then its meaning is not fixed, but is contingent upon white belonging: whites or those striving toward whiteness must reproduce these unspoken and largely unconscious social practices. Nancy’s excerpt reveals the move of reproducing whiteness at work in her account of the hiring practices in her department, even as she disrupts white bonding in her account of those practices. White solidarity manifests in my conversations with other white women, often articulated through the absence of women of color. This absence functions in these narratives as an unspeakable presence, a theme that resonates with Stuart Hall’s theorization of the role of slavery in the formation of diasporic identity: a present absence ‘‘hiding behind every verbal inflection’’ (2003, 240). Such inflections destabilize the fluency of their accounts. Carol recalls, ‘‘At that time I think definitely we had very few women of color anyway, and we, it wasn’t, it definitely—I mean, in the seventies or eighties when the women’s studies program—I think that, um, I don’t think race really was, it probably wasn’t an issue because there weren’t any women for it to be addressed.’’ Carol’s equation between the absence of race as ‘‘an issue’’ and the absence of ‘‘any women for it to be addressed’’ underscores the unmarked racial ubiquity of white solidarity. As long as women of color are absent, so is race, or the need to ‘‘address’’ its functions. This equation places an unspoken racial burden on women of color even prior to their arrival. Thus the presence of women of color occupies a fraught space for many white women, for whom this unspeakable presence suddenly has 144

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a name, a face, and signifies a host of responsibilities for which several claim to feel ill-prepared to address. Jean describes a situation in which a woman of color, who was subjected to sexual harassment, was considering leaving her institution. Because Jean felt unsure whether she had the ‘‘power to intervene’’ in the situation, she decided to wait until the woman asked her to do so before she would get involved. Jean’s account intimates an a√ective distance from the situation, which excludes the woman from a reliable feminist community, leaving her without a set of feminist allies upon whom she could rely: A: I’m just wondering if there’s a support network in place for her, or is

there anything informal where people— J: —Yeah, yeah, but I don’t think it’ll be enough. You know, if people don’t deal with things like sexual harassment on an institutional level, there’s very little you can do. A: Yeah, I was just wondering, she’s got people to talk to? J: She’s got that. A: She’s got that? J: Yeah, yeah. For sure. A: Are you involved in that? J: No, I heard it, though. I mean, I know her, I like her, and I will be more involved with her this year because we’re gonna be on the same committee.

As in Nancy’s account of the ease with which her white colleagues ‘‘reproduce themselves,’’ Jean’s story reveals that the reproduction of white space is not merely accidental, but is a function of a√ective investments. The toll is high for her colleague, whose positionality falls outside of the a√ective purview of her white feminist colleagues. The white space that Jean occupies is tacitly reproduced through the indi√erence not only of a faceless white institution, but also of the white women who seem to feel no loss from the other woman’s su√ering. The production of space is a function of belonging. White solidarity is characterized by the absence of set of political, intellectual, and a√ective investments in the lives of those who depart from or challenge the ubiquity of whiteness. White solidarity is, in Nancy’s words, ‘‘easy.’’ But is it really so easy? Or, as Mab Segrest (2002) suggests, does maintaining racism take a toll on white folks? What can be gained from Toni Morrison’s e√orts to consider ‘‘what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of the masters’’ (1992, ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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12)? Extending this argument in the direction of emotional labor, Aída Hurtado points out that it ‘‘takes psychological work to maintain privilege; it takes cognitive training not to empathize or feel for your victims’’ (1996, 130). Deborah’s account, which I will trace at length here, reveals some of the contours that shape this psychic work. Her initial response to questions about her awareness of di√erence underscores her lack of experiential knowledge of the lives of women of color: ‘‘There have just been so few women of color in any of the institutions I’ve been involved with. We just now have, in our department, we have two assistant professors who are, um, African American women, so um, it’s just so little experience, um, I mean, I know a few people at other institutions, but always, you know, part, only know part of those studies, so you know, I just don’t have enough data.’’ Deborah frames white space in passive terms, staging her-self through innocence—as one who simply lacks the experiences that would provide her with ‘‘enough data’’ to understand women of color. This construction elides both her complicity in maintaining white space and also the psychological work entailed in its production. Here, as in chapter 2, the influency with which Deborah describes her awareness of women of color, coupled with her e√orts to erect an a√ective distance by framing consciousness as a function of ‘‘studies’’ and ‘‘data,’’ reveals some of the forms Hurtado’s notion of ‘‘psychological labor’’ takes. Deborah’s account also shifts her a√ective energies to an intellectual register, rearticulating knowledge from the tangible (‘‘so little experience’’) to the scientific (as ‘‘studies’’ and ‘‘data’’). Mab Segrest refers to such gestures, which sanitize the structures of feeling through which race is constituted, as an ‘‘anesthetic aesthetic’’ (2002). Such gestures arise when dominating subjects seek to circumvent the empathic impulses they may feel toward their victims because such feelings may compel them to act against their interests. In spite of her claims of having ‘‘so little experience,’’ a bit later in our conversation Deborah reveals her painful feelings of betrayal in her e√orts to ‘‘help’’ these women. Like Nancy, Deborah contradicts her initial claim to innocence, divulging with much a√ect her failures in her e√orts to create an inclusive space for women of color: And so I worked hard to create a more women-friendly department and I fought so many battles against the guys to do that [starts to cry], oh shit. And um [pause]. . . . Uh, but there’s only so much struggle I can do and

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uh, uh, it would be nice [crying] to, uh, to not feel all the time like, uh, like I was the one responsible for taking the point and fighting. . . . And instead of just having to do all the work to make it a good environment for for for women, I have to be in a one-down position because I haven’t been able to also make it a good environment for people of color, and uh, I I don’t know. They do look to me like I should be able to do that [laughs through tears] and uh, I get a sense it’s my fault that I can’t do it instead of an alliance that tries to do it. . . . I understand that somebody like that coming in, they look around and see that there’s now a pretty comfortable place for white women, and so why haven’t, you know, why not for African American women too? And you know, yeah, there should be. But I wish they’d be pissed o√ at the boys instead of at me.

Deborah’s account reveals multiple strategies—primarily guilt and victimization—through which she manages her heightened a√ect. She conveys a deep sense of loss over her perceived powerlessness to ‘‘make it a good environment for people of color,’’ which slips into a form of self-induced guilt that arises from her ‘‘sense that that [their su√ering is her] fault.’’ Her failure to build a ‘‘good environment for people of color’’ also slides into a form of victimization: ‘‘I have to be in a onedown position,’’ Deborah says, suggesting that their anger might be more appropriately directed at ‘‘the boys.’’ While such a stance is deeply problematic in its reversal of power, it provides a point of entry into the psychological work, or the a√ective toll, that women of privilege accrue through their complicity with subordinating structures. This is not to downplay or erase Deborah’s pain or her e√orts to create an inclusive space, or to erase the su√ering of the women in her story, but to interrogate the a√ective work that enables and constrains such e√orts. The assessment of such a toll, then, goes beyond the psychological work engaged by individuals to span the a√ective ties that bind individuals unevenly to one another, or, in cases such as Jean’s, the absence of such a√ect. What structures of feeling enable white women to maintain a√ective distance from women of color? Deborah suggests that power imbalances precludes her from counting her women of color colleagues among her allies. I am very strong and very successful, and there aren’t a lot of things people can give me. But so, I mean, that sets up an awful lot of relationships where I feel it should be a power-equal situation, but maybe they aren’t altogether power-equal situations, but I do feel like I’m the giver and, uh, ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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it should be an alliance, but it’s not. . . . [pause] This is really hard. Um [pause]. If you, if you bring two cultures together that have di√erent values and di√erent expectations, uh, and di√erent norms and you, I’m trying to give something and somebody else needs that something, and . . . I want something back in my culture.

Deborah’s admission that allies should return ‘‘something back in her culture’’ reveals a vital component of the ideological and a√ective breakdown of transracial alliances. She foregrounds the paradox of her institutional power: her wish that her relationships with others could be ‘‘power-equal’’ fails to square with her realization that they are not. She assesses the conflict between her desire for equality and the power imbalances in her department by framing her-self as ‘‘the giver’’ in an uneven institutional exchange: what she has to ‘‘give’’ is ‘‘something [that] somebody else needs’’ (i.e., institutional support), and what she seeks in exchange is ‘‘something back in her culture.’’ Her recognition of the hegemony of ‘‘northern European values’’ in academia suggests that the cultural exchange she longs for is one she knows that her colleagues cannot o√er. Nonetheless, these assumptions about power, exchange, and alliance provide a racialized frame through which she decodes her relationships with her African American colleagues. This frame precludes her from perceiving the value of what these women bring to the relationship, even as it leaves her feeling used and unappreciated. I refer to this desire for a ‘‘power-equal’’ exchange as a zero-sum approach to alliances, a frame in which the resources available for exchange are, from the outset, fixed, knowable, defined. Because zero-sum logic assumes a finite set of knowable resources that participants must bring to an alliance, such a frame precludes an expansive approach to the multiple resources that allies may have to o√er. Zero-sum logic renders women of color unintelligible as allies. In the following account Carol describes an enduring ‘‘friendship’’ with her Chicana colleague, Adela, whom she does not consider as an ally: ‘‘She and I team-taught a class. . . . So we’d have lunch and we’d go over books, and it was really a nice, and we’ve become real—, and we wrote a paper, and we’ve become, you know, we’ve remained friends for a long time.’’ Previously in our discussion Carol has intimated that ‘‘most of her allies are white women’’ and white men, and all are ‘‘pretty much the same culturally.’’ In spite of the fact that she shared a close and apparently equal working relationship with Adela, she does not view the 148

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relationship as an alliance. Each time Carol starts to name the nature of the relationship, her language seems to falter: ‘‘we’ve become real—,’’ and ‘‘we’ve become, you know.’’ She finally settles on the term ‘‘friend.’’ The slippage between ‘‘friend’’ and ‘‘ally’’ gains meaning against a backdrop of power, which renders visible how the notion of resources is racialized. When I asked if there were any challenges she experienced in their relationship, Carol described a situation in which Adela pointed out the ‘‘exotica’’ in some of the readings Carol had selected. This account of critique then turned the conversation to the institutional component of their relationship. Adela ‘‘kids [Carol] about all [her] political connections’’ and Carol o√ers her ‘‘advice.’’ ‘‘So you mentor her?’’ I ask. C: Yeah, in a way, but she’s not in, you know— A: —You’re more equal? C: Yeah, we’re more equal. A: Do you consider yourself equal? C: Pretty much, yeah. A: Institutionally? C: Yeah, she could be. She could be. She could be a lot. She could move up

the ladder if she wanted to, but she doesn’t want to.

This excerpt unearths the subtextual tensions of zero-sum alliances. While she considers Adela a long-term friend, she does not consider her to be an ally. The distinction between friend and ally is a function of power, narrowly defined as institutional power, in which Adela demonstrates little interest. This is not to suggest that Adela does not actually hold institutional power, as Carol remains a bit vague on this point. Indeed within the contemporary U.S. academy, many women of color do wield institutional power. Yet, even in the context of their ‘‘pretty much’’ equal institutional positioning, Adela fails to signify as an ally to Carol. Rather, her identification remains illusive, at the edge of language, and is ultimately inscribed in the more benign, or power-neutral language of ‘‘friendship.’’ In this sense, Carol discursively and relationally minimizes Adela’s power over her. This sensibility gains clarity as the conversation moves to Carol’s alliance formation with people whom she perceives as having more institutional power than she. When I ask if she has any allies with ‘‘less institutional power,’’ Carol replies: ‘‘I don’t have, I mean, we all have about the same amount, which is none [laughing]! I mean, ‘less power’? Well, I ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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mean, I have friends who are junior faculty members that I try to help, with my sage advice after all these years. But, you know, I mean, some of the things that I experience aren’t relevant either. So, I don’t know, Aimee, whether I can answer that well.’’ As with Jean and Deborah’s accounts, Carol’s first move is to level or erase power relations, joking that ‘‘we all’’ lack institutional power. When she does give name to those who are less powerful, she uses the term ‘‘friendship’’ to characterize her relationships with junior faculty. This framing allows her to position her-self through benevolence (‘‘I try to help’’) and self-reflexive irony (‘‘my sage advice’’), problematizing the question of power, even as she distances herself from that site of relational di√erence. She achieves this distance by simultaneously marking the di√erence, but then turning it to downplay her ability to e√ectively connect with the less powerful: the things that she experiences aren’t necessarily ‘‘relevant’’ to those with ‘‘less power.’’ With power placed overtly on the table, Carol finds she must acknowledge that the entire question of alliances across power lines is ultimately unanswerable within a zero-sum logic. In each of these instances, zero-sum alliances compel these white women to retain an a√ective distance and/or cultivate ambiguously fraught relationships with their women-of-color colleagues. Because they seek exchanges within institutional currency—and they view the women of color as having little institutional power or as lacking interest in such power forms—they fail to recognize what resources their potential allies would bring to the table. Even when women of color hold relatively similar kinds of institutional power, they do not necessarily register as allies for these white women. To interrogate the transracial alliance possibilities at work within these a√ective logics, then, entails unraveling and expanding the notions of resources implicit within these accounts. Adela’s critique of the ‘‘exotica’’ in Carol’s reading materials may be productively reread as a resource—a teachable moment. Recall that in the opening vignette, Michele evokes ‘‘critique’’ as a resource allies share. But the value of this exchange is subsumed by the uneasiness it evokes. That is, Carol frames this encounter not as one in which she learned something from Adela, but as illustrative of the ‘‘challenges’’ of her connection with Adela. Indeed, it may be that these ‘‘challenges’’ serve not only to erase ‘‘critique’’ as a resource that Adela brings to the alliance, but also that such challenges erase the resource of institutional power that Adela brings as well. In the same vein, another of the sub150

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jects of this study, Jessica, describes her relationship with a woman of color who is her peer as ‘‘a hard relationship. She’s defiantly a woman who argues every point. I basically see it as, um, a di≈cult relationship. A conversationally di≈cult relationship.’’ That these white women underscore the ‘‘di≈culty’’ of such relationships suggests that these relational challenges are racialized and gendered, that they circulate within a power-attentive relational field. Thus, in spite of the fact that the women of color are peers to these white women, a power-attentive relational frame is su≈cient to negate their alliance potential. The negative valence placed on these relationships, framed as ‘‘challenging’’ or ‘‘di≈cult,’’ implies that such experiences are to be avoided, and by extension, such connections are kept at bay. Such exchanges, however, may be productively reframed under a di√erent rubric of power. To cast such di≈culties as opportunities for antiracist work would frame the experiences and challenges women of color bring to the table not as a deficit, but as a resource. In the case of Deborah’s relations with her colleagues, their anger, which she seeks to avoid, could be recalibrated as a resource. Audre Lorde reminds us that anger is an appropriate response to racism: ‘‘If your dealings with other women reflect those [racist] attitudes,’’ she says, ‘‘then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth’’ (1984, 124). The growth to which Lorde refers seeks to displace guilt and defensiveness, giving way to a relational frame in which attending to power becomes a mutually, if di√erently, configured site of healing, collective struggle, and movement. Such an approach to alliances entails a radical approach to power. Albrecht and Brewer argue that a Western patriarchal view of power foregrounds domination and control. This form of power is ‘‘a property or quality that particular people possess situationally. Those who have acquired power work toward maintaining it by attempting to be invulnerable and closed’’ (1990, 4). In the above excerpts Deborah’s struggle within and against this form of power rises to the surface. While she initially seeks to remain ‘‘invulnerable and closed’’ to the ensuing discussion, she goes on to divulge stories that potentially allow for a more thorough and honest investigation of the relational conditions constitutive of her invulnerability. When I first asked her if she’d ever felt ‘‘betrayed’’ by an ally, she responded: ‘‘Let’s move on. You know, when you say that I feel there’s one of those little hurt places in there, but it’s not ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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gonna pop up.’’ Ultimately our conversation provided a space for her to delve into those ‘‘little hurt spaces,’’ revealing their unresolved a√ective depths. Albrecht and Brewer’s theories of power, like those of Lorde, suggest that viewing the anger of women of color as a resource provides a way through those ‘‘hurt spaces’’ that moves the alliance beyond guilt and defensiveness to deeper levels of growth through transracial intimacy. If guilt and defensiveness serve the anesthetic aesthetic function of relational distancing, they also provide the relational groundwork for one’s consciousness of the lived experience of di√erence. Deborah’s claim that she lacks ‘‘data’’ to really understand the experiences of women of color provides a compelling illustration of the formative role alliances play in one’s consciousness of power relations. For instance, Laura describes an alliance with an ‘‘ethnic minority female’’ in which there have been no challenges around issues of di√erence. In fact, she is not sure how cultural di√erences come into play in their relationship at all. A: Does she experience racism here? L: Not that she’s confided to me. And I think she would. I think she

would, so [pause] probably not. At least not yet, and I hope not ever [pause], not that I’m aware of.

Laura’s nonverbal language suggests her growing uncertainty as to whether or not her ally’s lack of disclosure actually means that she has not experienced racism. Prior to this exchange, Laura has disclosed that all of her allies are white, giving rise to the tension that surfaces in her inability to know something so vital about this woman. Her initial remark confirms a color-blind logic: she reads the absence of disclosure as transparent evidence of the absence of racism. Such an assumption, however, erases the conditions under which such disclosures become possible and the a√ective work that allows such conditions to happen. Additionally, the assumption of transparency perpetuates the notion of a level playing field between white women and women of color, a colorblind logic that alleviates the pressures of inequality by erasing them. In contrast, Heather reveals over the course of our conversation that she seeks a more in-depth knowledge of such power relations. She says that her career advancement has ‘‘probably been smoother than women of color.’’ She ranks institutional access along lines of race and gender, ‘‘I mean I would say white male, white female, women of color in terms of how di≈cult it would be.’’ Yet she doesn’t really know the ‘‘personal struggles of women of color’’ because there are not ‘‘very many women 152

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of color in [her] university.’’ As she reflects on race and alliances, she arrives at a desire to build transracial connections to ‘‘broaden [her] knowledge of culture so that [she’s] not so stuck . . . in a white kind of middle-class perspective.’’ Heather’s insights unearth the importance of a√ective investments in the formation of consciousness when she concludes that intellectual knowledge of power is ‘‘really di√erent from having the up and close personal experience with those people.’’ This critique of zero-sum logic is not meant to essentialize white women, or to suggest that white women necessarily invest in such alliances. Judith’s willingness to acknowledge power imbalances in her relationships with women of color allows her to shift to an alliance frame. In response to my question of how her career advancement compares to what she knows of the experiences of women of color, she states without hesitation, ‘‘Oh much easier. Piece of cake. Piece of cake. . . . They had a much tougher time.’’ Judith begins the interview stating that all of her allies are white, echoing Deborah’s despair over the prevalence of white space: ‘‘[Pause] Most of them are, most of them are similar. Probably. I mean, I think that whiteness is just such a [sigh] such a prevailing part of all this.’’ Over the course of our conversation, however, she begins to unpack the valuable lessons she has gained from her connections with women of color, whom she later depicts as allies: ‘‘Um, you know having them [women of color] as allies forces me to think of things di√erently.’’ She describes an ongoing ‘‘friendship’’ with her former student, Barbara, with whom she ‘‘share[s] some commonalities—same age core, and as women.’’ She adds, ‘‘I can’t even express how profoundly she has impacted the way I think about race.’’ The awareness she has gained, however, has not come without its challenges: ‘‘I can even say that, as close a friend as she is, there are times when I feel the stress and the discomfort of communicating across the racial divide.’’ The e√ect of such uncomfortable communication is the kind of intimate experience of di√erence that Heather seeks. It enables Judith to move her intellectual knowledge of di√erence to a more a√ective level: ‘‘Just knowing her helps me concretize what I read,’’ she concludes. While white women such as Judith and Carol do not readily see as allies the women of color who challenge them, reframing their notions of what constitutes an alliance would productively allow for an alliance frame more conducive to transracial work. In the following section I turn to my conversations with women of color in an e√ort to untangle their conceptions of alliances, which provides a productive frame for ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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building transracial connections and, by extension, a more progressive feminist frame. Zero-sum alliances, in which the only intelligible resources one can bring to an alliance are embedded in institutional power, are by definition exclusionary. Zero-sum logic, then, provides the relational ground through which white space is (re)produced. If white women such as Deborah are really interested in building more inclusive spaces in their departments and disciplines, colleges and universities, they must be willing to transform the very terms that define their belongings. The notions of alliance that follow, then, are a resource in a transracial alliance exchange.

CRITIQUE IN A RACIALIZED INSTITUTIONAL FRAME

Women of Color and Alliances Alliances are multifaceted for the women of color of this study. As with white women, institutional access is one function of alliance building, but it is not the primary purpose, nor are alliances contingent upon institutional power. The multiple sites of marginality arising from their positioning within academia means that institutional access for women of color is di√erently inscribed and experienced than for white women. While the previous section suggests that many white women seek security and success within the institutional structure, the concern for women of color tends to be framed in a more defensive posture—that is, merely to survive. As Rita puts it, ‘‘An ally is someone who won’t block my way.’’ Because alliances for women of color are contextualized within intersecting power relations, they require a diverse set of alliance resources. Themes such as trust and honesty, critique and confidentiality arise. In this sense transformation, or the possibility of being transformed within alliances, seems to be a more salient alliance function for women of color than for white women.∞≠ Institutional marginality frames the point of entry for alliance formation for most of these women of color. While white women seek and build alliances that will help them advance in their careers, Rita finds an ally in anyone who will not obstruct her way. She explains, ‘‘I think that basically an ally is somebody, ya know, that’s [not] part of the problem and [is] part of the solution. If they’re not in my way, they’re pretty much my allies.’’ While there is room within her definition for an ally to be ‘‘part of the solution,’’ for Rita this is not a precondition for alliances. 154

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Rita’s accounts underscore her multiply displaced positionality (as a working-class, black, lesbian, single mother) in academia: being overlooked by her professors throughout graduate school, students throwing papers in her face, and sexual harassment. Unlike some of the white women for whom career advancement has been a ‘‘piece of cake,’’ Rita lives with a marginality that conditions her notion of alliances through the double negative of her inscription—as the absence of domination. That is, not being in her way is su≈cient to earn the space of being ‘‘pretty much’’ an ally to Rita. While her accounts of transracial alliances with white women, which I develop in the following chapter, belie this double negation, it is important to mark the acute and multiple forms of subordination that constitute her experiences within the academy as a function of how she experiences and imagines alliances. That is, Rita’s relationship to alliances is framed through the potential negation of a negative (subordination)—not the possibility of gaining power. The double-negative relationship to alliances arises from the experience of multiple displacements, while the expectation of power arises from the nonexperience of racism. This awareness of experience provides Rita with a rather nuanced analysis of how allies function, compelled by both a√ect and critique. Rita’s story of her dissertation advisor illustrates that nuanced, contradictory, and ambiguous notion of alliance. John is a ‘‘white, . . . Southern, and very Christian’’ male who, she emphasizes, had built his career doing research on black women, but had never worked with any black women: My dissertation director was probably the person I perceived as my strongest ally, and he’s white, male, Southern, and very Christian, and yet I felt like I had his fervent support. He was on my side and he wanted me to succeed for a variety of reasons, some of them not having much to do with me. . . . He’s a white man who [pause] started his career working on black women. Same things that I do, he does. I mean I do them because he does them. That was the basis of our relationship, and none his students before me have been black women and none have been as successful as I was by a certain measure, so I know that part of his investment in me was wanting to see, wanting to be able to say, ‘‘At least one of my students is a black woman,’’ because it validates his work. But I think that that is a small fraction of why he was a strong ally, because he believed in me and my work and the particular ways I think that are distinctive and he wanted to

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support that. I appreciate that. That makes him an ally. Also, it’s more than just an ally and somebody that didn’t obstruct my way. He made some definite overtures in my behalf.

As with the white women in the previous section, Rita finds John to be such a ‘‘strong ally’’ because he ‘‘wanted [her] to succeed.’’ Yet the alliance she depicts is fraught. She immediately problematizes the alliance by acknowledging that his support of her work arises ‘‘for a variety of reasons, some of them not having much to do with [her].’’ Her account of his underlying tokenism (his ‘‘wanting to be able to say, ‘At least one of my students is a black woman,’ because it validates his work’’) does not, however, negate her view of him as an ally. Indeed, she describes him as her ‘‘strongest ally’’ because he ‘‘believed in [her] work’’ and ‘‘made some definite overtures on [her] behalf.’’ John exceeds those allies inscribed through the double negative: he was ‘‘more than . . . somebody that didn’t obstruct my way.’’ Rita’s framing, in which John values the ‘‘particular ways’’ she conducts her work, redeems both figures from the potential abjection of his tokenizing impulse. She is redeemed by his positive judgment of her work; he is redeemed by his sincere support. In this sense, their interests become intertwined: her success negates the possibility that he is interested in her only because of her identity. Thus while it functions through appropriation, the alliance is contingent upon and productive of Rita’s success. Donna’s notion of alliances echoes the double-negative logic at work in Rita’s, but Donna o√ers another alliance function—discretion—as a relational practice that shifts the double negative into a≈rmative, or constructive alliances. Donna draws a distinction between ‘‘private’’ and ‘‘public’’ outlets for criticism, explaining: An ally to me means that, um, you know, the person that’s on your side. You can depend on them on your side. Even while they might be critical to you between the two of in private, in public, they will defend you. And in public, they won’t, they will certainly not do anything to hurt you, they hopefully will do things to help you. That’s what an ally means to me, it means that, someone you have an honest relationship with.

Donna’s discussion foregrounds the often urgent institutional needs placed on women of color for discretion within the public sphere of academia, the outsider-within status that she underscores here through the distinction between public and private transcripts. The distinction 156

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she makes between appropriate relational practices—allies provide criticism ‘‘in private’’ and ‘‘defend you’’ in public—marks the strategic nature of alliances for women of color in the face of multiple displacements. Such an alliance frame provides space for allies to disagree and push each other within a sanctioned space of mutual confidence—‘‘in private.’’ While an ally is someone ‘‘you can depend on’’ to ‘‘defend you’’ in public contexts, she is ‘‘honest’’ and ‘‘might be critical to you between the two of you in private.’’ By foregrounding the importance of ‘‘honesty’’ and critique within the context of a relationship built on trust and discretion, Donna inscribes alliances as a potentially transformative site. Striving for a progressive social justice agenda is one quality that is readily apparent in definitions of alliance o√ered by many women of color. They tend to evoke this agenda in concrete situations and relationships, as opposed to abstract references to equality. That is, their alliances are grounded in the materiality of their daily lives. For instance, one of the women I interviewed (Cheryl) defines alliances in terms of relational and political practices in which allies engage. The knowledge that informs such practices is both intimate and experiential, resonating with Judith’s account of her relationship with Barbara. Cheryl describes how this knowledge can productively inform the politics of speaking: Well, I’ve worked very hard [pause] to be an ally to gay and lesbian students and faculty. I have to define that in myself, what it means in my behavior. One of the things it means is speaking out in forums where the members of that other group are not present. That doesn’t mean you speak for them, but you at least, because you have that [knowledge] about their perspective, because you actually have ongoing conversations with members of that group because you actually have friends and acquaintances or colleagues who are members of that group. You raise the question, ‘‘OK, now if we do this, how will that influence, you know, gay/lesbian students? How will that impact minority faculty?’’ Or simply saying, ‘‘Have you talked to the minority faculty about [that]?’’

The knowledge ‘‘about other groups’’ that Cheryl evokes arises from intimate contact across power lines and enables allies to productively ‘‘speak out’’ on behalf of others. Linda Alco√ insightfully identifies two identity-related underpinnings of the problem of speaking for others: first, that the speaker’s social location is inseparable from ‘‘the meaning and truth of what she says’’ and second, that ‘‘certain privileged locations are discursively danZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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gerous’’ (1995, 98–99). The speaker can neither transcend her social location, nor can she assume to unproblematically speak for others. Alco√ problematizes these claims, exposing the layers of complexity surrounding questions of belonging and identity—the multiplicity and indeterminacy of which continually displace the desire to decide, once and for all, who may speak for whom. As Cheryl demonstrates, the political impetus to cultivate inclusive representational practices, when placed within an alliance context, is contingent upon belongings that span lines of di√erence: ‘‘you have that [knowledge] about their perspective, because you actually have ongoing conversations with members of that group because you actually have friends and acquaintances or colleagues who are members of that group.’’ Cheryl’s tone imbues her observation with sarcasm—notice her underscoring of ‘‘friends,’’ paralinguistically drawing out the word, and her use of the term ‘‘actually,’’ which parody the general absence of such intimate connections across power lines. Her sarcasm both acknowledges and circumvents the dangers of speaking for others. Cheryl illustrates her point with a reference to ‘‘gay and lesbian students and faculty,’’ describing her own transracial alliance with Dee, a white lesbian. This alliance provided an intimate and political site in which Cheryl’s homophobia began to unravel: ‘‘I come out of the African American community where there’s all these stereotypes about lesbians . . . and I didn’t consider myself to be a prejudice person in any way, but I also thought I would know a lesbian when I saw one [big laugh]. And so I had to totally redefine what was meant to be a lesbian in the context of this person whom I now knew and admired.’’ Her laughter alleviates the potential pressure surrounding Cheryl’s evolving sense of herself as overcoming her ‘‘prejudice’’ within her transracial alliance with Dee. Thus, while Cheryl does not identify as a lesbian, her alliance with Dee provides her with intimate knowledge of the issues that may be salient to queers and empowers her to ‘‘speak for,’’ or at least ‘‘raise questions’’ on their behalf. The problem of speaking, then, is productively analyzed from an alliance perspective in which social location, and the consciousness to which it tends to give rise, are constantly reworked through intimate encounters with di√erence. Cheryl nonetheless trusts Dee to represent the concerns of faculty of color. Indeed, if each is to act in alliance, according to the above excerpt, they will dedicate themselves to consulting with and representing such issues. This work should not be idealized, however, as some encounters 158

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are fraught. She goes on to describe a situation in which Dee urges her to speak out in a forum on diversity. ‘‘Not a single woman of color in sight,’’ she recalls; ‘‘I was in the audience sitting next to [Dee] and I leaned over and said [lowering her voice], ‘Dee, there isn’t a woman of color up there.’ . . . And she said, ‘Stand up and say that! Stand up and say that!’ [laughing]. So she’s always getting me in trouble [laughing and breathing in], and I did. . . . And [a white feminist who was leading the forum] characterizes that as the day I called all the white women ‘racist.’ ’’ At this point in the conversation Cheryl discusses a range of related examples of white women’s tokenism and appropriation of women-ofcolor feminist thought—the conditions out of which such a diversity forum could emerge and the ways the forum contained the contributions of women of color. She also shares examples of several white women who really took her challenge seriously—white women whom she considers to be allies, who are willing to investigate their own racism. But never does she level a critique of Dee’s alliance politics in this situation. In spite of the fact that women of color face a greater risk of speaking in such situations, that she spoke at Dee’s prompting and was framed as the aggressor in the situation, and in spite of the fact that allies speak on behalf of one another—Cheryl does not explicitly question Dee’s actions. Nothing in Cheryl’s account suggests that Dee has betrayed their alliance. Does Cheryl experience it as a failure of the alliance? Does she wish to construct Dee, in this potentially public interview context, in positive terms? Such a move would be consistent with her notion of alliances, even if it circumvents one important layer of the politics of speaking that constitute the situation. The politics of speaking that is constitutive of alliances for Cheryl underscores another salient factor of alliances for other women of color: that allies are willing to take risks for one another. Maya explains: ‘‘Implicit in this idea of what an alliance should be, for a woman of color, is that you would take a risk for me if we were really allies. And not like, ‘Hey, when it comes down to it, if you play by the rules, I can give you a nod or something.’ ’’ Chapter 2 examines Maya’s painful encounter with her department chair, the experience to which she refers here. In Maya’s account it is her chair’s color-blind liberalism—her e√orts to cultivate an ‘‘equal’’ environment without attending to the power di√erentials among the community members—which is at stake in the question of the alliance. As an international woman of color, Maya’s employment is ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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structurally constrained, while other members of their academic community are institutionally privileged by virtue of their U.S. citizenship. Her subordinated positioning within the community, organized through a discourse and set of relational practices that assume equality, frames Maya’s conditions for employment as excessive—as ‘‘a favor done for [her].’’ Maya’s sense that allies should ‘‘take a risk’’ for one another, then, bumps up against the notion held by many white women that allies are ‘‘people who will help you.’’ Indeed, to operate in alliances may require that institutionally powerful allies take ‘‘risks’’ on behalf of those with less institutional power. Acting in alliance may threaten, as opposed to enhance, institutional access. The zero-sum frame that constitutes alliances for many white women is cast in sharp relief by Maya’s experience. The juxtaposition unearths the injurious impact that color-blind, liberal notions of equality can have on women of color. Additionally, the e√orts by white women such as Deborah to ‘‘create a more inclusive environment’’ in their workplaces may be rendered ine√ectual if they do not begin with the assumption that the academy functions, by and large, to protect and advance the interests of multiple forms of privilege. Michele echoes Maya’s observation that allies take risks for one another, extending the logic that the academy is a fraught site in which a whole host of struggles, connections, and possible transformations are possible. ‘‘An ally,’’ Michele reflects: is a person who will tell you what you don’t want to hear. But tell it to you anyway because they know it’s right. An ally is someone who won’t turn her back on you when the going gets rough. An ally is someone who has connected with you on some level, either professionally or personally, and believes in you, or if they have a higher position than you, in bringing you up. An ally is somebody who will take a risk on your behalf. They don’t have to shout real loud. They don’t have to say they’re allies. They just have to do it.

Michele, like Maya, intimates the importance of allies acting strategically within an uneven field of power. Her insistence that an ally ‘‘won’t turn her back on you when the going gets rough’’ assumes that the academy is a site of struggle—that the going will get rough—as it has for Michele in her tenure struggle. In both accounts the assumption is that allies are likely to experience some rough times, an assumption based on their own experiences in the academy, experiences that belie 160

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the story that the academy is inclusive. Michele also specifies some of the relational practices in which allies might engage: honesty, loyalty, and dedication. The notion that allies ‘‘bring you up’’ overlaps with white women’s notions of alliances, the primary distinction being the caveat: if they are in ‘‘a higher position than you.’’ Thus Michele’s notion provides a point of entry for her to build alliances with white women who share this notion of alliances, but also allows for the multiple resources differently empowered allies might bring to the table. A final point to underscore is the overlap between Michele’s notion that an ally ‘‘will tell you what you don’t want to hear’’ and Donna’s sense that allies can ‘‘be critical’’ of one another: these practices allow allies to build ‘‘honest relationship[s].’’ For Cheryl, this kind of mutual criticism tends to become a sticking point in her e√orts to build alliances with white women. ‘‘White feminists,’’ Cheryl explains, ‘‘want black feminists who sort of claim their feminist or womanist identity to support them in their activity, but they do not do the same. And they do not want to hear any critique of their work by black feminists.’’ Thus one of the primary functions of alliances for many women of color, in which allies challenge one another, diverges from alliances for many white women (as we saw in the ‘‘friendship’’ between Carol and Adela). Some white women quoted in the previous section describe such encounters with women of color as ‘‘challenging’’ or ‘‘di≈cult,’’ relational practices that they frame more through a√ective distance than intimacy. Thus the role of criticism seems to be at the heart of how alliances are racialized and, by extension, productive of the relational practices through which di√erence becomes unevenly manifest within the institution. Cheryl’s insight also highlights her sense of the potentially tokenistic impulse that drives white feminists’ desire for ‘‘black feminists [to] . . . claim their feminist or womanist identity to support them in their activity.’’ She underscores the absence of a forum for equal exchange, arguing that while white feminists want to appear to be supported by women of color, they do not ‘‘want to hear any critique of their work by black feminists.’’ So while some white women in the previous section seem to disinvest from women of color who critique them, for Cheryl such disinvestments leave her feeling an imbalance of interest: that white feminists want black feminists to ‘‘claim a feminist identity,’’ but ‘‘they are not willing to do the same.’’ Angela, one of the women I discuss in chapter 3, shares an account of her relationship with a white woman who ‘‘had a real need to befriend people of color,’’ but who was ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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not interested in a deeper or more challenging exchange. Angela explains how she came ‘‘to realize that after a point it was very important for her to be seen with me and to be perceived as someone who was supporting me. But I was not really supposed to speak up or to question anything that she might be putting forward because apparently that wasn’t part of the deal.’’ The support Angela received, then, was conditional on her subalternity. Likewise, Donna shares the sense of frustration experienced by African American women with white women who feel that ‘‘they know better’’: ‘‘On our end, what causes it for me is when I have worked with white women for them, what’s di≈cult for me when I’ve worked with them, they’re [pause, sigh] there’s an automatic feeling of entitlement that they know better. And so, you know, even if you’re working with them there’s this tendency to take over.’’ These accounts show that some women of color seek more in-depth exchanges with the white women with whom they strive to build alliances, but they encounter the limits of these relationships when they feel they cannot fully participate, that they must not ‘‘speak up,’’ that white women ‘‘feel they know better’’ so they assert a ‘‘tendency to take over.’’ As Donna says, it becomes clear that naming racial di√erence marks the ‘‘perimeter’’ of such exchanges. ‘‘You might think that you’re close enough or that you’ve been through enough together, that you have this bond,’’ she explains, And you can say what’s on your mind, but you don’t have that bond. That ‘‘yes, I will support you, [but] don’t cross over that border.’’ It’s just something that has to do with questioning whether or not the department might be acting in a racist way. ‘‘As a matter of fact, I don’t want to discuss that racism with you at all. Or gender.’’ That’s the limit on the relationship. And if you can’t, that to me, that perimeter, you can’t discuss the things that are near and dear to your heart. You have a very superficial relationship.

Donna’s positionality shifts between her own, expressed in her desire to ‘‘discuss the things that are near and dear to your heart,’’ and an abstracted white voice who is addressing her, and by extension, me, her listener: ‘‘I don’t want to discuss that racism with you at all. Or gender.’’ She expresses the full impact of this ‘‘limit’’ placed on the relationship and submits to its power-evasive logic: ‘‘You have a very superficial relationship.’’ But this ‘‘perimeter’’ must be transgressed if her white allies

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are to build intimate ties with Donna—if they are to move beyond a ‘‘superficial relationship.’’ These accounts signal the relational practices that give rise to ‘‘superficial’’ relationships across power lines, characterized by a sense of tokenization. The white woman in Angela’s story wants to be ‘‘perceived as supporting [her]’’ without cultivating the intimacy that would really allow her to do so. Clara, a Chicana I interviewed, concurs, citing ‘‘a handful of white feminists that seem to, it seems so important to them that I be someone they can claim, as friends or colleagues, and if they only knew that I don’t tell them even a fraction of things that I really think because I don’t trust them.’’ Here Clara explicates and also inverts the terms of silencing in Angela’s story: Clara foregrounds her agency as the one who withholds her voice from them (‘‘I don’t tell them even a fraction of things that I really think’’) because she doesn’t ‘‘trust’’ these white feminists. So while Angela feels like she’s ‘‘not really supposed to speak up,’’ Clara refuses to speak the ‘‘things [she] really thinks.’’ In this way Clara inverts the politics of speaking and listening to retain a sense of power over these white feminists. In both cases, as with Donna’s and Cheryl’s descriptions, there is the sense that these women of color cannot fully participate in these relationships with white women and so they fail to manifest as alliances. The possibilities of transracial alliances seem to encounter limitations for both white women and for women of color as their conceptualizations of alliances are not only di√erent, but in some ways incompatible. From the perspective o√ered by these women of color, in which allies challenge one another, relationships in which white women who withdraw from critiques or revert to power-evasive communication fail as alliances because women of color may feel they must censor vital components of their lives. Intimacy is truncated when a potential ally cannot be fully present and recognized within the relationship—when allies ‘‘can’t discuss the things that are near and dear to your heart.’’ From the perspective of white women, who seek an institutional exchange (‘‘something in my culture’’) from their allies, relationships in which women of color o√er criticism or seek to share such ‘‘near and dear things’’ fail to signify as alliances. Not only do these alliance modes fail to register as resources for white women, but the alliance needs of women of color may actually work against their impulse to build alliances for power.

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What alliances might be possible, then, if women of color could be fully present in alliances across lines of di√erence? Angela o√ers an extended definition of alliances based on her experiences in building alliances across power lines in ways that navigate the need for institutional loyalty and the likelihood of multiple failures. For Angela, alliance is not just organized around a single-issue politics. I mean, certainly we come together, people rallying for my program’s struggle to stay alive . . . it’s awesome. But we know we have to be there for other groups that need our help as well. It’s not like, ‘‘Oh please come and help me with my racebased issue and then you’ll never see me again.’’ So it’s all about ‘‘di√erential consciousness’’ and the ability to be flexible and to shift and to know that you’re going to fuck up and you’re going to piss people o√ and people are going to piss you o√ at the same time. But you don’t, well, that often quoted thing from Bernice Johnson Reagon, ‘‘You know if it’s not kinda hurtin when you’re trying to make coalitions, then you’re not doing it right, because it is really hard work, and it’s never going to be easy.’’

Angela’s reference to Sandoval’s ‘‘di√erential consciousness’’ (2000) and Johnson Reagon’s ‘‘coalitional politics’’ (1998) begin to unearth the theoretical layers of transracial alliance that inform her articulation. Sandoval’s di√erential consciousness refers to the capacity of women of color to move across groups and remain flexible to the needs that arise and how those needs match up with the needs of other groups. Johnson Reagon’s recognition of the need to risk anger and pain and failure (‘‘pissing people o√ ’’) is also forming transracial alliances. Angela goes on to cite her own experiences of an uneasy coalition: And that was never brought home to me more than when dealing with American Indian studies faculty here, because of their construction of sovereignty. I had never thought of myself as an Asian colonial settler, but basically I am. And how do we make coalitions across that? . . . We’re going to continue to have those kinds of conversations with American Indian studies in the fall. I really appreciate their willingness to come to our conference, completely in support of women, but not at the expense of really telling the truth.

Here Angela deploys Sandoval’s ‘‘flexibility’’ as she shifts her own positionality from marginality (as a Filipina) to privilege (as an ‘‘Asian colonial settler’’). Such a shift is not easy or painless, but for Angela, ‘‘kinda hurtin’’ is part and parcel of building transformative alliances. 164

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Robyn, a white woman who builds her alliances ‘‘primarily with women of color,’’ echoes Angela’s call for an approach to alliances that works through multiple power lines: ‘‘I would see it [alliance] in the notion of being a comrade, of having similar philosophies and goals, goals being social justice for everybody [chuckles]. And, uh, philosophies in terms of a critique of power, an examination of how structures reproduce the status quo and those kinds of things.’’ Her laughter captures the irony of her vision that ‘‘social justice’’ is ‘‘for everybody,’’ echoing Michele’s ‘‘as if ’’ clause, underscoring her awareness of the disparity between this empowering vision and her own lived experiences of injustice—experiences that emerge in relation to those of the women of color whose stories she holds. Unlike some of the white women in the previous section, who seek to distance themselves from women-of-color critiques, Robyn describes how she ‘‘looks to’’ and ‘‘listens to’’ women of color because they are just ‘‘more savvy on these [social justice] issues.’’ Robyn’s notion of alliances departs from the zero-sum exchange to resonate with the alliances depicted by women of color. Unlike Deborah, who shares a sense of feeling daunted by the task of creating social change, Robyn makes active choices about the relationships in which she invests her emotional and political energies. Like Angela, she privileges alliances that span power lines, relationships organized around the theme of intersectionality.

WHITE BONDING, TRANSRACIAL ALLIANCES, AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF FEMINISM

This section unpacks this mutually constitutive relationship between alliances and feminism by exploring some of the ways in which differently situated feminists define feminism. The intersectional approach to alliances suggested by Angela prefigures the feminisms produced and imagined by her and other women of color: its intersectionality and its emphasis on self-reflexive reckoning with marginality and privilege signal the dynamic interplay between alliance formation and the production of feminism. That is, alliance formation is the experiential grounding out of which feminisms emerge. So for those women engaged in transracial alliances, like Robyn and Angela, feminism entails a constant tacking between marginality and privilege, a vigilant mapping of supremacy and subordination. For women who invest in segregated alliances, like ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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most of the white women in the previous section, their alliances do not engage them in this kind of reckoning. For these white women, whose alliances are invested in institutional power, gender becomes the exclusive frame through which they apprehend power. Thus gender-based notions of feminism arise from their alliance practices. These often competing definitions of feminism arise within an institutional frame in which gender-based feminism tends to hold more institutional currency than intersectional, women-of-color, or third world feminism. The ‘‘as if ’’ quality that thematizes the feminism they propose troubles the notion that feminism has outlived its purpose, that ‘‘feminists have achieved positions of power,’’ that ‘‘feminist arguments have achieved a certain cultural weight’’ (Elam 1997, 56). This section seeks to unsettle the framing of feminism’s success as an accomplishment that circulates within the conversation over the institutionalization of academic feminism. While these women’s accounts confirm that a particular form of feminism has achieved hegemony, claims to feminism’s success universalize hegemonic feminism, which undermines the possibility for the emergence of more radical feminisms to gain cultural currency. Robyn’s comment signals the struggle to engage an intersectional feminism within the institutional constraints of white supremacist feminism. She responds to my question, ‘‘What does ‘feminism’ mean to you?’’: If I can define what feminism is in that bell hooks’s sense, you know, dealing with white supremacy and patriarchy and class exploitation, but that’s not the ‘feminism’ that I see in the academy primarily. So, that’s why I’m hesitant to use the term in that setting because I think it means particular things in the academy. . . . In the academy feminism has to do with white heterosexuality and white lesbianism and white supremacy, but everything else seems to be fairly closed down, and I’m not interested in oppressive politics.

That Robyn frames her intersectional approach to feminism in conditional terms (‘‘if I can define what feminism is’’) provides significant insights into the production of feminism within the academy. The ‘‘if ’’ signals the absence, or subordination, of her intersectional feminist vision within the context of hegemonic feminism invested in multiple manifestations of white dominance: ‘‘white heterosexuality and white lesbianism and white supremacy.’’ Robyn’s hesitancy to ‘‘use the term’’ because of its linkages to ‘‘oppressive politics’’ is a concern shared by many women of color. It suggests 166

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the degree to which hegemonic feminism circumscribes the imaginary of feminism for those seeking to enact third world feminism because, in Robyn’s words, ‘‘that’s not the feminism that [she sees] in the academy primarily.’’ Thus feminism is understood as a site of struggle. This sense of struggle is echoed by Rita. ‘‘Feminists,’’ for her, ‘‘basically . . . want equal rights, [and are] willing to work for them. The unafraid say that this is the way it should be and equal economic power, mostly recognition of equal capabilities.’’ Her phrase ‘‘the way it should be’’ depicts the counterfactual status of the vision for equality held by the ‘‘unafraid.’’ She frames feminism not as an accomplishment, but as a site of struggle, equality is posed as an ‘‘as if ’’ proposition that requires its proponents to be courageous. Her vision of ‘‘equal rights’’ and ‘‘equal recognition’’ is not what ‘‘is,’’ but what ‘‘should be’’; it is so threatening as to be spoken only by the ‘‘unafraid’’; it is one ‘‘feminists’’ must be ‘‘willing to work for.’’ As with Robyn’s use of modifiers such as ‘‘primarily’’ and ‘‘fairly,’’ Rita’s account allows for the possibility of radical social change, but acknowledges the magnitude of this challenge, even as it functions as a manifesto, a call to feminists to be bold and ‘‘unafraid.’’ While many of these women of color and white feminist allies such as Robyn find their notions of feminism constrained by the institutional apparatus of white feminism, ‘‘feminism’’ itself remains a contested, if highly unevenly racialized, term. In spite of the hegemonic feminism they encounter, they neither acquiesce to its power-evasive investments, nor are they willing to abandon the term. As Donna points out, ‘‘race trumps gender’’ for many of her black female friends, who distance themselves from the term ‘‘feminism.’’ But for Donna, race and gender are inseparable. She identifies as a feminist and struggles in alliance with white women to ‘‘discuss race’’ in an e√ort to build an intersectional approach to feminism. Thus the degree to which transracial alliances succeed or fail is constitutive of the (de)racialized terrain out of which feminism arises. The relationship among feminisms, alliances, and institutional power is mutually productive. Angela’s and Robyn’s transracial alliances generate a multiply inflected feminism, a frame that is marginalized within academia; zero-sum alliances and gender-based feminism are also, in turn, mutually productive and this constellation secures legitimacy within a broader institutional context of hegemonic feminism. Mapping the contours of this mutually productive relationship unearths the formative role that the politics of relation plays in the production of ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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feminism and the reproduction of institutional power arrangements. It builds on the premise that feminism arises from experience, but reconfigures experience relationally. Because experience occurs and is processed within community, it is vital that we attend to the politics of relation as productive of our feminisms. If those politics are invested in white modes of belonging, the feminisms we produce will reify those investments; but if those politics are invested in alliances that span power lines, the feminisms we produce will attend to the multiple forms of privilege and subordination that constitute the uneven terrain of our diverse communities. The a√ective investments in whiteness, then, must be apprehended if we are to unearth the politics of relation through which hegemonic feminism arises. In light of the subtle and yet powerful ways in which white bonding constitutes alliances for many of these white women, how do these alliances inflect their feminism? The tendency to focus on institutional advancement outlined above provides a narrow point of entry into power. Zero-sum alliances arise from an individualistic impulse in which the woman who builds alliances for power emerges as both the subject and object of empowerment. The individualistic impulse, in turn, animates gender-based notions of feminism as the subject/object of empowerment is also cast as the subject/object of feminism. That is, she—the ally striving for power—is the subject and object of both projects. As with transracial alliances, experience serves as the bridge between alliances and feminism. But because zero-sum alliances are built exclusively with other whites, it becomes possible for these white women to experience and imagine power in exclusively genderbased terms. Further, because most of these women view women of color as lacking resources necessary for alliance formation and because they find women-of-color critiques ‘‘di≈cult,’’ the relational conditions that could give rise to a more comprehensive view of power are actively resisted. Heather articulates a gender-based, race-neutral feminism, defining it as ‘‘male/female equality.’’ The object of inquiry is deracialized in a gender-exclusive frame, and all gendered subjects are assumed to fall under these categories. Feminism deals with ‘‘how men and women think and feel di√erently,’’ Heather explains. Her notion of feminism, in turn, echoes a zero-sum alliance function, even as she marks the limits of this liberal approach to feminism: ‘‘I also adopt all the liberal feminist agenda about, you know, equal pay, and advancement and all of that. 168

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But I think liberal feminism can take us only so far. It’s important but it’s not the only thing.’’ While she does not explicitly reference her own experience of cultivating alliances that might help her achieve such parity, the ‘‘liberal feminist agenda’’ she adopts is consistent with her notion of alliances (someone ‘‘who recommends me or says good things about me’’). Thus her own experience of ‘‘advancement’’ becomes metonymic, unwittingly universalized to stand in for feminism as ‘‘male/female equality.’’ The hope for a more possible feminism lies in her recognition that ‘‘liberal feminism can take us only so far.’’ Her acknowledgment that this feminism is ‘‘only one thing’’ gestures toward the possibility of situating hegemonic feminism—and the particular experiences that give rise to it—within a field of power. A relatively unproblematized equation between feminism and gender subordination surfaces in the discourse of many of the white women participants in this study. As Deborah puts it, ‘‘[Feminism] means that either you’re very concerned about women or maybe that you’re very concerned about gender, which I think is [a] related and more complex notion of what it is that woman is.’’ While Deborah establishes a distinction between women and gender, acknowledging that gender is ‘‘more complex,’’ she does not elaborate on the complexities that might give this distinction its relevance. Robyn Wiegman’s (2002b) insightful observation that the move from ‘‘woman’’ to ‘‘gender’’ still fails to address issues of race, class, and nation becomes salient in decoding Deborah’s text. Indeed, Deborah circles back to an undi√erentiated category ‘‘woman’’ in her ensuing discussion of abortion. The opportunity to complicate the singular focus of feminism, then, is circumvented by her recentering of an unproblematized notion of ‘‘woman.’’ While Deborah gestures in the direction of a ‘‘more complex’’ notion of gender, Carol retains her focus on an undi√erentiated category of ‘‘women’’: ‘‘Well, I think a feminist is a person who believes strongly and acts upon the idea that women have been oppressed, are oppressed, and have received less than their due,’’ she o√ers. ‘‘And they support other women, and they bond with women.’’ Carol’s reference to the ‘‘support’’ and ‘‘bond with women’’ in which feminists participate echoes her notion of alliances. Recalling that Carol’s allies are all white and that her allies ‘‘put [her] in positions where [she] would succeed,’’ we can see here the interplay between her gender-based feminism and her alliances. If her experience in alliance informs her feminism, the women around whose oppression feminism is defined are those with whom she ‘‘bonds’’ ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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—that is, white women. Thus gender is the only salient category through which oppression becomes intelligible. Further, recalling the institutional access she has been able to achieve for herself and other white women and her failed attempts to extend such inclusions to people of color, the alliance process through which gender-based feminism becomes institutionalized also becomes visible. Zero-sum alliances, then, generate the relational conditions of possibility not only for feminism’s subject to remain unproblematically defined through gender subordination, but also for the universalization and institutionalization of genderbased feminism. This is to say that the subject of feminism is an a√ectively produced subject—a subject of experience, identification, and belonging. Within segregated alliances, such as those that Carol invests in, the issues that shape ‘‘women’s oppression’’ are defined around the struggles she and her allies experience. As the previous section details, most of these white women have very little tangible sense of the experiences of their womenof-color colleagues. Emily underscores the interrelationship between intimacy and knowledge of oppression, divulging that she doesn’t ‘‘know people’s stories.’’ She continues, ‘‘It’s, I find that the stories of injustice, unless you’re right there and it’s in your yard, it’s in your house, that (pause), you don’t find out about it.’’ The lack of a√ective proximity captured by Emily, in which one doesn’t know ‘‘stories of injustice’’ unless ‘‘it’s in your house,’’ underscores the interplay between segregated alliances and the formation of gender-based feminism. Here again the theme of the (white) home is evoked, a ‘‘house’’ that is formed through a history of racialized and heterosexed exclusions, through the disparity between spatialized and a√ective proximities/distances. In Emily’s account, the house evokes both an a√ective and a spatial distance, which allows her to remain detached from the struggles of women of color, and, in turn, to focus on her own experiences of oppression without having to problematize how her experience constitutes and is constituted by those distanced women of color. This absence also allows white women who maintain such distance to overlook their complicity in producing, maintaining, and/or benefiting from the oppression of women of color. Zerosum alliances, then, simultaneously generate the mutually productive conditions of possibility for gender-based feminism to gain hegemony: they provide white women with institutional power and a segregated community from which to build and imagine that oppression is both one dimensional and universal. 170

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For feminists seeking to build and imagine expansive feminist visions, the hegemony of white feminism is a force that must be negotiated. The formation of third world feminisms, then, must respond to this hegemony. Many of the women of color with whom I spoke articulated their feminisms, as does Robyn above, in reaction to or as a critique of white women’s feminism. Maya critiques gender-based feminism for its failure to complicate the ways in which white women are positioned as racially privileged. She sees white feminism operating through a ‘‘two-step move’’: ‘‘As a feminist, I am critical; as a white person, I am implicated.’’ The tensions that constitute this location, however, are subsumed under the weight of gender subordination. ‘‘But it’s the ‘white person’ part of things that remains general and not ‘white woman,’ that it doesn’t implicate itself to feminism. . . . It’s almost like it authorizes whiteness, in a way, in themselves by keeping this [implication] at bay or by oppression constantly being caused by white men.’’ Maya’s insights recall Deborah’s uneasy relations with her African American colleagues—her wish that they would direct their anger ‘‘at the white boys.’’ Maya’s observation is that framing oppression as ‘‘constantly being caused by white men’’ lets white women o√ of the hook. The ‘‘two-step’’ logic of gender feminism articulated by Maya, then, underscores the strategies through which white women circumvent a heartfelt grappling with their own privilege and the conditions that shape the lives of women of color. The investment in a unidimensional theory of power gives rise to a universalized feminist subject, defined through her gender oppression. Such investments leave white women such as Deborah unprepared for the transracial experience she undergoes in which it is she who is positioned as (aligned with) the oppressor. If zero-sum alliances give rise to feminist theory that is simultaneously limited and universalized, they also contribute to an institutional context in which such theory gains legitimacy because it emerges from a privileged institutional location. This privileging of gender-based feminism, Andrea observes, perpetuates investments in white feminism as property. ‘‘I think white feminists think they own gender,’’ she states. ‘‘And that anything that is not centered on them is not important. And I think that whites are so used to having everything centered from their perspective that if they’re not at the center of it, they don’t have a role, they’re not going to play second to (any)body.’’ Andrea’s insights resonate with those o√ered by Cheryl Harris (1993) and George Lipsitz (1998): that whiteness is an investment that produces material benefits for those who ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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maintain it. The centrality of whiteness in Andrea’s account translates feminism into property owned by white feminists. The account given by the participant Cheryl unearths the material consequences of this kind of ownership. She recalls how she ‘‘had a di≈cult time’’ becoming ‘‘part of that [white women’s] network,’’ explaining that when she submitted her work to their journals, she ‘‘got some fairly nasty reviews back from feminists.’’ This account reveals the field of power women of color such as Cheryl must negotiate for the feminism they produce to gain any visibility. Because the approval of white women in positions of power is the condition of possibility for the emergence of her feminist writing, Cheryl’s work is constrained by their capacity to imagine a feminism beyond gender exclusion. This is the rhetorical burden of third world feminism. Andrea’s sense that ‘‘white women think they own gender,’’ coupled with the material apparatuses through which white feminists have gained a certain degree of power within the academy, give many of these women of color the sense that they are subordinated by white women. Andrea’s critique of this system of institutional control culminates in this experience: ‘‘I’ve always experienced with white feminists is that they are very good to women of color as long as they don’t perceive you as their peer. We’re not supposed to be as good as they are. You can be an icon. They allow a few icons out there. They’ll allow a few divas. But otherwise, they don’t like it. They want that power. They want you to be deferential.’’ Andrea’s insights into subordination may be productively read against Carol’s story of her inability to define her relationship with Adela. While she had a long-term, professional relationship with her junior colleague, Adela, the criticisms Adela o√ered Carol, the uneven institutional power arrangement between them, and perhaps more important, Carol’s sense of Adela’s lack of interest in institutional power, all collude in Carol’s account of why Adela is not her ally. Given the force that white feminist investments in power exert over the production of feminism, then, women of color are often compelled to critique white feminism. But as the previous section reveals, while such critical practices are part and parcel of women of color notions of alliance, their e√orts to engage white women on this level often fail. These relational failures, in turn, inform the feminist contexts and experiences productive of women-of-color feminisms.

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CONCLUSION

Toward a Transracial Feminist Imaginary In her comments at a roundtable discussion of the National Women’s Studies Association (2004) of This Bridge Called My Back, Jacqui Alexander urged the women of color present to begin to consider not only what feminism is reacting against, but more important, what it stands for. The accounts of women of color I analyze in this chapter reveal the challenges they face in forming feminist theory and/or praxis that arises not merely in reaction to white feminism. Indeed, if white feminists have achieved a degree of success in their feminist practices through the formation of white alliances designed to advance their careers, then they also exert a measure of control over the means of feminism’s production. In spite of these institutional constraints, however, several women of color shared provocative visions for what their feminism stands for. In Andrea’s vision, feminism would stretch beyond ‘‘those individual identities’’ to strive for ‘‘an agreement about basic social justice issues. What is antisubordination practice? What is antisubordination theory?’’ Her questions encounter their limits at the divisions that arise among segregated identities. She continues, ‘‘But it’s like, ‘That’s an issue dealing with feminism. That’s an issue dealing with race. That’s an—,’ you know. And so as women of color we find ourselves crossing in di√erent areas and having to call each on the issue.’’ Her final analysis, then, returns us to the question of alliances, for she reiterates the positioning of women of color as ‘‘crossing in di√erent areas and having to call each on the issue.’’ The di√erential consciousness evoked by Andrea and previously referenced by Angela suggests that the movement across power lines is productive of a more inclusive feminism. This feminism arises from the movement across di√erently marginalized communities—a mode of di√erential belonging. Andrea’s sense that women of color are positioned as those inclined to such crossings echoes third world feminist literature, from Sandoval to Rushin. But the concept of di√erential belonging I propose suggests that there is no necessary connection between social location and multiple belongings. That is, while women of color, particularly academic women of color, are positioned to engage in such crossings by necessity, white women who seek such crossings can participate in the feminisms that arise from them. For white women such as Robyn, who actively seek transracial alliances, di√erential belonging serves as a relational practice through ZERO-SUM FEMINISM

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which she cultivates a feminism that is simultaneously contingent and intersectional. That Robyn’s feminism arises out of and is productive of her investments in transracial alliances suggests the mutually constitutive relationship between them. Robyn’s transracial alliances, then, may be instructive for other white women who find themselves stuck in gender-based notions of feminism and segregated alliances. Emily shares that for her, feminism is inseparable from her ‘‘guilt-ridden’’ sense that she is ‘‘not doing enough’’: And feminism is another one of those guilt-ridden beliefs or philosophies, because I feel I’m not doing enough. I’m not reading enough and I’m not a≈liating enough in a way that I can learn. So I think being a feminist, I’m a feminist, and I’m not afraid to say it, but I still feel, I think, ‘‘intimidated’’ isn’t the word, but maybe ‘‘less than’’ is, because I don’t know as much as I should know. Based on who I am and where I am, I should know more, and so it’s a little frustrating.

Resonating with Deborah’s frustration that she is ‘‘not doing enough’’ for her African American colleagues, feminism, for Emily, is tainted by the guilt she feels for ‘‘not a≈liating enough in a way that I can learn.’’ Heather’s desire to build transracial alliances to ‘‘broaden [her] knowledge of culture’’ so that she is not so stuck ‘‘in a white kind of middle-class perspective’’ resonates with Emily’s sense that she’d like to ‘‘do more.’’ What is potentially dangerous about these accounts is the sense of guilt, frustration, and powerlessness these women share because these gestures produce and arise out of complicity and stagnancy. What’s potentially productive is a relatively untapped desire to move across power lines. Chandra Mohanty (2003) envisions an ‘‘imagined community’’ of radical women from diverse social locations, united by their investment in social justice. Benedict Anderson (1991), who coined the term, recognizes that a shared language, converging systems of meaning, are necessary to the formation of imagined communities. As long as competing notions of feminism emerge as a contested site of struggle, as long as alliances are defined and imagined in incompatible terms, the work of translation is necessary as we cultivate converging systems of meaning. Shared languages arise from shared experience, so the intimacies we generate in transracial alliances provide the context through which we cultivate such imagined communities. This chapter marks some of the disjunctures in meaning, some of the struggles over signification and power, that mark our contemporary academic feminisms. If 174

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rendering these disjunctures and struggles visible provides a point of entry into transforming them and generating new meanings, this work will have productively intervened. The frustration white women such as Emily and Deborah express over feminist failures can be productively rechanneled as fuel within transracial feminist alliances. To begin to imagine such communities, taking seriously the alliance work shared by these women of color may provide a point of departure from which to begin this alliance-building process. Recognizing that women-of-color allies may ‘‘tell you what you don’t want to hear,’’ for instance, may allow white women to reframe the critiques women of color share with them—to understand them not as personal attacks, but as alliance practices. That is, if women of color practice and imagine alliances as an appropriate space for critical exchange, such gestures may be read as overtures of connection, not separation. Indeed, in the broader context of the institutionalization of white women’s power, particularly within the realm of academic feminism, such criticisms are a necessary part of the fabric of academic feminism. If women of color are to engage on feminist terms, as Cheryl points out, the hegemony of gender-based feminism becomes a site of contestation that must be challenged. For white women such as Robyn and women of color such as Angela, who seek to learn more about how they may be aligned with power, learning to listen across power lines is essential. Robyn proposes, ‘‘If you’re white and you’re involved in intercultural alliances, you have to learn to listen to hard stu√ and not take it personally.’’ Such a move entails an intersectional view of power in which overdetermined subjects are constantly interpellated by multiple investments in privilege. This work entails constant investigation and reworking of who we think we are beyond power evasion, a process encountered by Angela’s insight: ‘‘I had never thought of myself as an Asian colonial settler, but basically I am.’’ The alliances in which we invest are a primary site in which these privileging apparatuses are reproduced and/or challenged. Within transracial alliances, alternative forms of power become possible and necessary. To frame a critique as a resource and a gift is to divest from zero-sum logic and invest in a more possible feminism.

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5. POWER LINES

Toward a Feminism of Radical Belonging

‘‘When friends of color of mine have had one of those days when they’ve been shit on by white people and they want to bitch about white people’’—Robyn is leaning back in her chair—‘‘this is not the time for me to say, ‘Well, you know, I’m white and I’m a nice person,’ ’’ she says in a high, slightly nasal tone. ‘‘It’s not the time to do that kind of feed-my-ego stu√. It’s time to listen and to learn and to try to see myself in that and to see what I can, I mean, to provide support for the person, but also to use it as an opportunity to learn something about whiteness that I may very well not know.’’ The morning sun comes in strips through the half-open blinds hanging over the east-facing window. My focus is soft, resting somewhere between her face and the tiny dust particles that are floating upward, cast as tiny rainbows in the sunlight. I’m listening carefully to Robyn’s insights. I’m thinking, what would we be capable of if more white women . . . ? We’ve been walking through the park down the street from Maya’s house for about an hour. The sun is starting to dip, its light turning trees and grass golden. Trees and our bodies cast long shadows. ‘‘So I think, like, on certain things she gets it,’’ Maya has been describing her alliance with her close friend and colleague, Eva. ‘‘But, like, I think that’s, I have to invest myself in her getting it. It’s, like, I can tell you, but if you can’t really get it, aren’t ready to really hear, I’m just going to waste my time.’’ I think this conversation is di≈cult for Maya. She cares deeply for Eva, but there are these moments of such deep loss. ‘‘That’s one of the hardest things about white women,’’ she continues, ‘‘and it really takes a lot to go back and say it again and again. And I think when someone of color will say it again, but for me, that’s not how I am. I say it once or twice, and if you don’t get it, then it’s, like, that becomes a. . . .’’ Her voice trails o√. ‘‘A barrier?’’ I o√er. ‘‘Yeah, a place of silence.’’ A hush falls over the conversation like evening. We walk home.

Power lines are webs of heavy cable that criss-cross the globe. They serve to connect us to one another across time and space. They allow us to communicate with others, to build community, to shape the world within and against power relations. In their absence, no such communi-

cation/community would be possible. Power lines empower us by enabling our connectivity. They are human-made structures, part and parcel of colonial modernity. These structures, erected through the blood sweat of colonized labor—these structures of wood and metal and heavy cables that sway in the wind—they dig into the earth. Power lines reflect and produce the uneven material relations that give rise to their tall frames. If our vision is to forge a more possible feminism,∞ how will we use power lines? If they are a means to know one another, a channel through which to build connections, who will be included within the webs of meaning that power lines enable us to cast? What tones and tenors will inflect our conversations? Will our connections be clear, or will they be filled with static? Will our e√orts to call one another drop out altogether? Power lines are about communication and access, the politics of speaking and of listening. Power lines are inseparable from the politics of our becoming. Close attention to the webs of power we weave and into which we are woven renders visible the a√ective labor we invest into the lives of others, and how that labor is constitutive of the selves we are becoming. Perhaps too often such investigations produce a sense of loss or guilt or failure. If for some feminism has become ‘‘one of those guilt-ridden things’’—a nagging reminder of the segregated longings through which we have structured our beings—this reckoning with failure also marks our loss of innocence (Visweswaran 1994). Indeed, a particular manifestation of feminism within the academy is institutionalized, and this process is racialized. As such, women-of-color critiques of white feminism must be read in the frame of the uneven lines of power that give rise to them. If ‘‘feminism’’ for many white women means ‘‘gender parity,’’ then ‘‘feminism’’ for women of color entails a critique of white feminist theory and praxis, for in each feminists seek freedom from the ‘‘heel print upon her face’’ (Lorde 1984, 132). This critique of white feminism, then, is compulsory. And as I seek to unfold in what follows, it arises not from a space of separation from, but from an impetus toward connection. That is, the absence of such critiques signals a process of subalternization, whereas their presence is a function of alliance. These di√erently constituted feminisms, then, arise from and enable a set of a√ective investments in the lives of others. Indeed, the degree to which white women gain the institutional parity they seek through the formation of segregated alliances is part and parcel of the formation of an oppositional woman-of-color feminism. This dynamic emerges from POWER LINES

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and perpetuates both segregated alliances and feminisms, antagonistically and unevenly juxtaposed within academia. This chapter seeks to call attention to the power lines constitutive of our becoming. Drawing on the insights o√ered by Robyn, Maya, and the other women of this study who gesture toward a path that goes beyond critique, that points in the direction of what our feminism might stand for, that calls us to reflect upon the radical possibilities contingent in the formation of a ‘‘we’’ who might stand together to possess this ‘‘feminism.’’ Power lines, like belonging, are not necessarily linked to power over; rather, they are channels that may be deployed for resistive and transformative purposes. Power lines, like belonging, are generative: they o√er the potential for an array of progressive renovations; they generate community and purpose; they are the vehicle of our becoming. This potentiality is signified in the empty space between ‘‘be’’ and ‘‘longing’’ I introduced at the start of the book. Becoming intimate with this space is like listening to a silence, learning to dance to the rhythm of one another’s anger, and our own. It is like peering into an abyss. It might mean taking a risk, stepping aside, imagining a future anterior for feminism. A future anterior in which we consider what we ‘‘will have been,’’ a reflection we share with an ‘‘unknown addressee’’ (Elam 1994, 41). The possibility of a future anterior for feminism arises in that space between ‘‘be’’ and ‘‘longing,’’ for the space of our a√ective investments is productive of our becoming—the being imprinted by our longings. While these longings are overdetermined by structures of desire embedded in the transfer of privilege, hegemonic forms of sustenance fail to quench the hunger and thirst of those they sequester, because the quest for resistive belongings is present in so many of the narratives of the women of this study. This quest is like peering into the abyss—gaining a glimpse of anger or silence, of power or possibility. The addressee of our message is unknown, then, because she stands on the edge of her becoming, teetering between here and there, self and other, between power over and power with. What will be required of us as we step into this becoming? For those white women who find that their tongues betray them at the moments in which they would speak of how they have been sequestered by whiteness and heterosociality, it may require an engagement with the deep context of their lives or ‘‘coalitional consciousnessraising’’ (Keating 2005) or ‘‘breaking through the narrow circle called home’’ (Bulkin, Pratt, and Smith 1984, 17; see also Mohanty 2003, 92) or 178

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becoming ‘‘fluent in each other’s histories’’ (Alexander 2002, 91). It may require becoming fluent in the language of her multiply interpellated subject position. It may require reconfiguring her belongings. For those women of color who have given up on white women, who have endured one too many loss at their hands, it may require allowing for the possibility of ‘‘white women’’ to emerge in their heterogeneity. It may require attention to building the feminism we stand for. The following sections sketch some possible visions for such a feminist future anterior. Power would be multiple, the first section suggests. Our feminism would arise from our betrayals, not our investments in innocence, the second section observes. Transracial feminist alliances are a productive site in which feminists of di√erence can ‘‘make face’’ (Anzaldúa 1991, xv), as I argue in the final section of this chapter.

ON BEING AND LONGING

Power Manifolds As the above vignettes suggest, the work we have to do as feminists from a range of social locations is both distinct and overlapping. As we strive to more consciously occupy the space between being and longing, then, we must self-reflexively move across communities of similarity and di√erence, because some of the work must take place with others similarly positioned and some of the work more productively arises in transracial alliance. The work of this becoming calls for di√erential belonging—a fluidity of movement across communities. To engage in feminist theorizing and praxis that more actively investigates the politics and possibilities at stake in the movement itself. While feminists of color have aptly demonstrated that the bridge work entailed in di√erential belonging falls unevenly on the backs of women of color, the reverse hailing I proposed in chapter 1 within the concept of di√erential belonging seeks to interpellate women of all colors to engage in bridge work across communities and institutional sites for the transmission of power. What kind of power, then, do we seek to transmit? Di√erential belonging functions through reversing, or perhaps more aptly, multiplying the sites or resistive communities that interpellate us. Interpellation occurs when we turn in response to being hailed. Differential belonging entails investigating who or what constitutes this power relation in our lives—this intimate manifestation of our becomPOWER LINES

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ing in which we recognize that it is our name that is being called, in which the other knows our name and can call out to us. Such an interpellation entails a radical reconfiguration of what constitutes ‘‘power,’’ one that accounts for diverse resources to serve as the basis for alliance formation. Thus institutional access would be considered just one of multiple forms of power, which would be placed in critical conversation with one another. The accounts of the women of this study provide a cartography that enables feminists to re-vision what constitutes a ‘‘resource’’ in the production of radical feminist belongings. ‘‘Listening,’’ Robyn underscores. Learning to read that ‘‘space of silence,’’ Maya reflects. These stories gesture toward an expansive vision of power that productively intervenes into the zero-sum logic that drives alliance formation for several white feminists. This is not to suggest that institutional power should be, or could be, abnegated. Rather it should be recognized as one of multiple forms of power, the critique of this form being one of them. Sheena Malhotra and Kimberlee Pérez (2005)≤ provide an opening in this direction when they theorize the multiple forms that bridge work among allies might take. Allies might bridge to power, to community, or to consciousness. Their analysis o√ers possibilities for feminists who occupy di√erently empowered institutional locations and di√erently racialized bodies to imagine a series of exchanges that alliances may serve. Those white feminists, such as Deborah, who are ‘‘very strong and very successful’’ in the institutional positions they occupy, may serve as ‘‘bridges to power’’ for women of color who may, in turn, serve as ‘‘bridges to consciousness’’ and/or to ‘‘community.’’≥ Allies within such a frame value the multiple resources the alliances makes available. This expanded vision of what resources might constitute an alliance exchange challenges us to reconsider what constitutes ‘‘power’’ because it assumes that women of institutional privilege would seek the ‘‘consciousness’’ and ‘‘community’’ to deepen their feminisms. Nancy Bereano (1984) reflects on her realization of the value of Lorde’s ‘‘di√erence’’ provides an imaginary for how bridges to consciousness might interpellate women of privilege: I realized how directly Lorde’s knowledge was tied to her di√erence— those realities of blackness and lesbianism that placed her outside the dominant society. She had information that I, a white woman who had lived most of my life in a middle-class heterosexual world, did not have,

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information I could use, information I needed. . . . I was ashamed by my arrogance, frightened that my ignorance would be exposed, and ultimately excited by the possibilities becoming available to me. I made a promise to my future to try and listen to those voices, in others and in myself, that knew what they knew precisely because they were di√erent. (9)

Bereano acknowledges her fear and shame, but the ‘‘excitement’’ of the ‘‘possibilities’’ of her own becoming through alliance sweeps her in the direction of a promise: a promise to listen. This gesture brings us full circle to Joanna Kadi’s refrain, ‘‘If you want to hear me, listen to my silences as well as my words’’ (2003, 541). That several white women of this study intimate a desire to do just this—as Heather said, ‘‘[I want to] broaden my knowledge of culture so that I’m not so stuck, you know, in a white kind of middle-class perspective’’—demonstrates an interest in ‘‘bridging to consciousness’’ and/or ‘‘community’’ engendered by progressive women of color. And some white women, like Judith, have found themselves ‘‘profoundly’’ educated through their interactions with women of color: ‘‘I can’t even express how profoundly [her ally] has impacted the way I think about race. I can even say that, as close a friend as she is, there are times when I feel the stress and the discomfort of communicating across the racial divide. . . . Just knowing her helps me concretize what I read.’’ The critique that her ally brings to the table, her capacity to bring her racialized self to the alliance, provides Judith with a ‘‘profound’’ resource—helping her ‘‘concretize’’ feminist thought. These connections need not be comfortable. Indeed Judith underscores the ‘‘stress’’ and ‘‘discomfort’’ evoked by the alliance. But the reversion to ‘‘comfort’’ is an assertion of ‘‘freedom’’ counterproductive to responsible alliance formation (Spivak 1992). The intimate and deeply reflexive experience with di√erence that ‘‘concretizes’’ intellectual knowledge—allows it to travel from the head through the body, heart, soul—holds tremendous potential for a transracial feminist anterior. Why, then, aren’t more of these white women engaged in transracial feminist alliances? What would it take to build such connections? And what is at stake in our (in)capacity to do so? In the remainder of this chapter I reflect on these questions, drawing on the accounts of women who are, or would be, engaged in transracial feminist alliances to gesture in the direction of a series of relational practices conducive to transracial belongings.

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ON GRACE AND FALLING

Feminist Betrayal and Innocence How do we forge feminisms of possibility out of the wreckage of our betrayals? The writings of so many feminists of color∂ and antiracist white feminists reverberate with the accounts of women of this study around the dangers of an innocent approach to feminist ‘‘universal sisterhood.’’ My hope in this writing is that these reverberations will amplify, harmonize with, or generate new bridges within these previous tones, providing passages to the possibilities of a transracial feminist future anterior. That is, only by learning to listen to the silences and to hear the rhythms of each other’s anger can we arrive at some clarity through which to direct, channel, and possibly orchestrate our energies in the direction of a more possible movement (see Lorde 1984). The dangers of feminist innocence are captured brilliantly in Visweswaran’s reading of betrayal as ‘‘an allegory’’ for feminist praxis: ‘‘the paired terms betrayal and innocence metonymically recall one another’’ (1994, 40). If the moral of her parable is that feminist innocence is ‘‘betrayed by power relations’’ and ‘‘betrayal signals the loss of innocence,’’ then a closer investigation of the interrelation between these terms, as well as the practices that intervene in the dynamics they produce, would be worthwhile. What lies on the other side of feminist innocence? How are these terms themselves and the practices that their metonymy enables gendered, racialized, and heterosexed? A series of translations∑ across power lines may reveal the contours of di√erently located feminist betrayals, which, in the process of naming them aims to disrupt the innocence that undergirds them. Donna’s account of the silences surrounding racialized di√erence suggests that such namings may provide some movement through the gaps and fissures that run between innocence and betrayal: ‘‘Black professional women talk about it all the time amongst ourselves,’’ she explains. ‘‘That we all get frustrated by the inability or the unwillingness of white women to acknowledge that there is a tension there.’’ This ‘‘tension’’ arises in her relationships with white women for whom ‘‘it’s hard . . . to acknowledge white privilege,’’ gaining momentum through a series of conflicts—‘‘I never had anything but conflict with white women. Nothing but conflict’’—to a breaking point: black professional women ‘‘hit that wall, they become very upset and the friendship can’t continue.’’ In spite of the potentially productive movement that may arise when 182

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women of color voice such betrayals to white women, in Donna’s account she and her friends ‘‘talk about it all the time’’ among themselves, but not necessarily with the transgressing white women. Maya traces her frustration with a white woman, which brings her to the ‘‘space of silence’’ that she encounters at end of her ‘‘investment’’ in her ‘‘getting it’’: M: So I think, like, on certain things she gets it. But, like, I think that’s, I

have to invest myself in her getting it. It’s, like, I can tell you, but if you can’t really get it, aren’t ready to really hear, I’m just going to waste my time. . . . That’s one of the hardest things about white women . . . and it really takes a lot to go back and say it again and again. And I think when someone of color will say it again, but for me, that’s not how I am. I say it once or twice, and if you don’t get it, then it’s like, that becomes a— A: —a barrier? M: Yeah, a place of silence.

Maya’s portrait of the burden of responsibility for white women ‘‘getting it’’ recalls Aída Hurtado’s ‘‘pendejo game’’—a ‘‘trick of whiteness’’ in which a white person who is called on her or his white privilege plays dumb. ‘‘At critical points in your analysis,’’ Hurtado writes, ‘‘I will claim I do not know what you are talking about and will ask you to elaborate ad nauseam. I will consistently subvert your e√orts at dialogue by ‘claiming we do not speak the same language.’ . . . I will ask you to educate me and spend your energies in finding ways of saying things so that I can understand. I will not do the same for you’’ (1996, 135). The ‘‘trick’’ of the pendejo game is that it shifts the responsibility for accounting for power imbalances from the person of more privilege to the person of less privilege. Further, locating power as embodied within individual interlocutors risks decoupling it from its structural force. As such, it relies on white feminist innocence in the form of ‘‘playing dumb’’—displacing the labor required by transracial feminist alliances onto women of color. Maya is clear about the unevenness of the burden and the danger of the conflation between her desire for white women to ‘‘get it’’ and the potential shift in responsibility that desire can produce in the relational dynamic. This innocent stance positions women of color to ‘‘spend [their] energies finding ways of saying things’’ that white women can hear while refusing to engage in the deeper consciousness work that such speakings and hearings would require. In this regard, Maya frames her own subject position through her e√orts to strike a balance between responsibility and agency: while she is willing to ‘‘say it once or twice,’’ ‘‘if POWER LINES

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you can’t really get it,’’ she is not going to ‘‘waste [her] time.’’ If that happens, she locates her agency in ‘‘a place of silence’’—refusing to play the ‘‘game,’’ thereby refusing to take up the subordinated subject position into which she is being slotted. This gesture allows us to reframe the conditions under which subalternity arises within such contexts. While the subaltern is often theorized as a presubject, capable of speaking but not of being heard, the ‘‘pendejo’’ relational dynamic coupled with Maya’s refusal to ‘‘play’’ by its rules, frames subalternity as a series of missed speakings and hearings that arise between and among unevenly located social subjects. This move recasts the onus for shared meaning on the powerful, as opposed to framing the powerless as always already in need of salvation, as the powerless figure who needs to come to voice. So while Maya would not be considered subaltern by virtue of her voice (evidenced by her multiple publications, the courses she teaches, the lectures she delivers, etc.), she may find herself subalternized at any given moment through the arrival of an unhearable/unspeakable impasse. Subalternization—understood as a relational process, as opposed to a (non)location—aims to provide an awareness of how di√erently situated social actors move in and out of the limits of discursive intelligibility. Recalling Wallace’s (1989) subalternization, which she locates not prior to her rise as a feminist thinker, but at the height of her career, suggests that the speaking (hearable) subject may rise and fall, move in and out of subalternity and intelligibility, according to who is listening and when and how. This awareness may also allow us to read the refusal of impossible speaking locations as an exertion of agency and, simultaneously, a re-placement of responsibility on the listener, a theme to which I return below. Clara’s response to betrayal echoes Donna’s in that both claim to completely disengage from relationships in which betrayal occurs. In a departure from the strategic forgetting that enables feminist innocence, Clara’s ‘‘very Mexican’’ stance is that a public betrayal is ‘‘never forgotten’’: ‘‘I am very Mexican in this respect. There’s that chapter in Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude about the mask of Mexicans and how Mexicans, if you do something to them in public, one way or the other . . . it’s never forgotten. The relationship is never the same. There is absolutely no way those three people will ever be trusted by me for anything. And nothing will ever make me change my mind. . . . So they’ve been written out of my book.’’ The ‘‘absolute’’ stance Clara occupies in response to this betrayal foregrounds her agency because it is she who forecloses the 184

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possibility of working the conflict through with her colleagues. Her framing of this resistance through the ‘‘Mexican mask,’’ for those nonMexicans who would translate her cultural reference, reveals the duality of vulnerability, which gives the mask its contours. Paz writes that the Mexican ‘‘passes through life like a man who has been flayed; everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words. His language is full of reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats’’ (1985, 29). For Clara, as for Paz, silences are complex, explosive, elusive. Most of all, they speak. Like Clara, Michele shares a story in which she came to realize that her alliance with a white woman ‘‘was a mistake,’’ but she did not confront the former ally. ‘‘One day she said to me something like, ‘I’m not on the A-team anymore.’ And I said, ‘I don’t have an A-team.’ She said, ‘That’s what I mean.’ ’’ Here, even when Michele is directly called out on her disinvestment in her ally, she obfuscates. While this white feminist seems to realize that she has lost the alliance, Michele refuses to acknowledge this loss. Indeed, if an ally is (in her words) ‘‘a person who will tell you what you don’t want to hear. But tell it to you anyway because they know it’s right’’—then Michele’s refusal to speak is an enactment of her departure from the alliance. In this sense the refusal in and of itself is an alliance gesture in that it marks this departure. That these women shared these accounts of ‘‘hitting a wall’’ and ‘‘writing [people] out of [her] book’’ with me, but not with the people who betrayed them, points to a series of relevant issues surrounding the politics of speaking that frames feminist betrayal and innocence. The uneven speaking conditions into which such ‘‘criticisms’’ might be received, revealed within the accounts of several white women, signal how white privilege is insulated through white women’s refusal to hear these critiques. This refusal compels them to maintain an a√ective and institutional distance between themselves and the women of color who challenge them. Women of color echo this dynamic, as we see in Cheryl’s concern that white women ‘‘do not want to hear any critique of their work by black feminists.’’ In the context of di√erently (dis)empowered academic feminist speakers and listeners, who could potentially address di√erence across the chasm of feminist betrayal, these women of color bear a heavy risk in speaking such ‘‘conflicts’’ to those who would potentially benefit the most. In this sense, their refusals to speak may be read as a subaltern inscription: their silences (re)inscribe the pendejo script, POWER LINES

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even as they subvert it. The work of belonging across power lines, then, entails learning to read the scripts encoded in subalternized assertions of agency (see Kwon, 2005). What is entailed in approaching such chasms is an articulation of love to a transracial feminist politics grounded in the politics of di√erence— a love disarticulated from its foundation in Enlightenment civilizing discourses of benevolence. Following Franz Fanon, Dawn Rae Davis argues that the ‘‘lovelessness’’ experienced by the colonized subject o√ers a radical potentiality for a space of connection across power lines outside of the conditions of colonial modernity. Lovelessness, Davis o√ers, ‘‘is not only a postcolonial condition but a space of radical possibility free from the objectifying force of western, imperialist love and knowledge and its yoke of humanism used to justify violence and the civilizing mission of a ‘benevolent’ colonialism’’ (2002, 148). This loveless encounter displaces the civilizing and Christianizing processes through which the colonial subject is sutured to the Enlightenment project through a series of ongoing encounters with the colonizer. Benevolence is the thread that secures the suture. As such, the loveless gesture entails the colonial subject’s refusal to take up the subject position into which she would be sutured. Read through this lens, women-of-color refusals to speak are not only silent articulations of third world feminist agency, but they also gesture in the direction of a space of radical belonging beyond, or at least to the side of, the colonizing conditions of belonging inherited by Western feminism. In contrast to the nonspeaking in the above accounts, in which women of color refuse to occupy abjected subject positions, Rita’s account of the aftermath of betrayal signals an alternative positioning of white femininity vis-à-vis black femininity. Rita shares a story in which she ‘‘held [a former ally, Susan,] at arm’s length’’ after hearing complaints from students of color about her ‘‘curriculum’’ and on discovering that Susan was friends with someone whom she found ‘‘quite despicable.’’ The sources of Rita’s betrayal are worth noting. First Rita’s contentions with Susan are relationally indirect: they arise through conversations with students and from Susan’s alliance with a third party. These relational dynamics underscore the interconnected nature of transracial feminist alliances— that feminist betrayals may arise within any number of relational positionings we occupy. Second, because Susan had no necessary access to the impetus for Rita’s departure from the alliance, it would have been

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quite easy for her to politely acquiesce to its dissolution. Instead, according to Rita, Susan ‘‘confronted me and told me that what I thought had happened had not happened. . . . Anyway, she’s won all kinds of points with me that she had the nerve to confront me. She was totally ballsy. She just rose in my esteem.’’ She does not account for how Susan became aware of the source of Rita’s disapproval, but Susan’s ‘‘ballsy’’ confrontation provided a point of entry to move through the betrayal, a potential to move the alliance to another level. Rita’s rhetoric frames Susan’s gesture in a sexualized context that is gendered masculine—in noninnocent terms that run counter to dominant notions of white femininity. In this sense, Rita’s framing suggests that she encounters Susan’s gesture as a refusal of the subject position into which her white femininity would interpellate her. This alterior positioning is one Rita portrays as compelling, as Susan ‘‘just rose in [her] esteem,’’ enabling Rita to perhaps redeem Susan. These accounts congeal around the conditions of possibility for subjects to simultaneously occupy and refuse the subject positions ascribed to them within the politics of relation. Spivak’s call to postcolonial intellectuals to ‘‘use the Enlightenment from below’’—to ‘‘ab-use’’ the academic structures we so intimately inhabit for the purposes of transforming them—provides a point of entry for imagining the contradictory work of transracial belonging. While feminists who inhabit academia are inseparable from its privileging and dominating machinery, our work is to occupy our academic locations in a variety of impure ways. The hyphen that connects ‘‘ab’’ and ‘‘use’’ signifies a rearticulation of ‘‘freedom,’’ dislodged from its Western logic rooted in the choice of the individual, coupled to an ‘‘insertion into responsibility’’ (Spivak 1992, 7). That is, the Enlightenment promise of freedom as ‘‘freedom from restriction’’ serves as the condition of possibility for a potentially radical postcolonial feminist practice: ‘‘freedom to exercise freedom.’’ The distinction arises as freedom functions not as an end, but as a means to act responsibly and to be ‘‘held responsible in significant ways’’ (Spivak 1992, 7). This distinction between freedom-from and freedomto is precisely what is at stake in the subalternizing processes in which these women of color refuse pendejo interactions through silence. The reversion to innocence constitutive of the pendejo subject is an exertion of freedom-from any discomforts that arise when one is inserted into responsibility (freedom-to).

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Following this articulation between freedom and responsibility, how might academic feminists simultaneously inhabit and refuse the subject locations available to them in the face of encounters with di√erence? What alliance potential do such practices hold? Robyn shares a story of her e√orts to contact a Native woman, Sandi, for an academic event she was coordinating. Robyn leaves a series of messages that go unanswered until she boldly and humorously engages a reference in Sandi’s voicemail reference to ‘‘making frybread.’’ And we talked about it afterward and she was like, ‘‘Yeah, I was hearing this white voice, this little, you know, uppity, tight-assed white voice,’’ and you know, she had her own experiences with white people and she had no desire to call this white voice back. But then when I had left this other message, she got kind of intrigued. So, but, I’m sitting here having my own little white tantrum on why didn’t she call me back. So we were able to end up learning a lot from each other. And so those are the kind of things that end up happening of people having to check you out, because you know, emotional and sometimes physical survival depends on that.

Here Robyn (self-)reflects with a sense of whimsy on Sandi’s critique of her ‘‘uppity, tight-assed white voice’’ as a source of connection between them. In this speech act she engages in what Lisa Albrecht (2003) refers to as a ‘‘loving critique’’ of her own subject position from the vantage point of another. That Robyn foregrounds a sense of mutuality (they ‘‘ended up learning a lot from each other’’) signals Robyn’s movement vis-à-vis Sandi from an unbridgeable location within the narrow space of white femininity to an expansive connection through which Robyn may imagine and in this account enact an alterior ‘‘white woman.’’ Robyn’s emphasis on her capacity to read what might be understood as Sandi’s subaltern inscription—that is, her silence, her refusal to respond to the hailing of this ‘‘white voice’’—provides a productive point of entry into the possibility of freedom as responsibility. In this story of her own alliance location, Robyn simultaneously inhabits and refuses white femininity as she assumes a noninnocent form of responsibility for bridging the communication gap that would foreclose the possibility of their connection before it could even begin. This ability to be held responsible arises from and is productive of her transracial belongings, which provide her with an intimate sense of the relational strategies that people who occupy the

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margins may rely upon: they have to ‘‘check you out’’ because their ‘‘survival depends on that.’’ Feminist betrayal may be mourned as an end, as loss, or as falling: the end of a relationship, the loss of an ally, as falling from grace into the abyss of an unknown future in which we encounter the limit of universal sisterhood. Alternatively, betrayal may be glimpsed as an opening—the condition of possibility for a noninnocent feminist future. ‘‘Betrayal,’’ writes Visweswaran, ‘‘does not end with the premise that we can never know anything. It does presume that to confront the subaltern is not to represent them, but to learn to represent ourselves’’ (1994, 77). That is, we can know one another across power lines, if only in glimpses refracted through the lens of our own seeing. The work, then, is to ‘‘learn to represent ourselves’’ in relation to one another. The self-representations I trace in this section reveal that such representations of self are always staged in relation to an other. Thus the work of self-representation, as with the work of self-reflexivity, arises not merely within the interior of the individual, but within the relational spaces in which the subject of feminism locates herself. The contours of her singularity always arise in the ethical encounter with others. Spivak writes of the ‘‘secret’’ to gesture toward this space of intimacy, generated not through knowledge-based acquisition of the other, but through a continual unfolding, which, nonetheless, fails to uncover that which is foreclosed between subjects. ‘‘We all know that when we engage profoundly with one person, the responses come from both sides: this is responsibility and accountability. We also know that in such engagements we want to reveal and reveal, conceal nothing,’’ she explains. In spite of our e√orts to bridge this gap between us, it nevertheless eludes us because the gap is itself and abyss. ‘‘Yet on both sides there is always a sense that something has not got across. This we call the ‘secret,’ not something one wants to conceal, but something one wants to reveal’’ (Spivak, quoted in Davis 2002, 154). Our traversals across these various lines of demarcation—between self and other, whiteness, race, gender, nation, location or space—are the means through which we make face (Anzaldúa 1991, xv). The face we make, then, is not an end, but is the means, the process, the mechanism of our becoming, which is formed through all that is known and all that remains concealed by virtue of the singularity of each encounter: the secret we want to, and yet cannot, reveal.

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BECOMING OTHER

Transracial Feminist Alliances as Making Face What di√erence does it make the company we keep in the process of our becoming? What faces do we make in the face of the other? How do we begin to responsibly belong to one another across power lines? Elspeth Probyn’s (1996) sense of ‘‘becoming-other’’—placing oneself at the edge of ‘‘subjectivity’’ that arises not so much through the desire for an other, but through the self one must become in the recognition of this striving—may provide a way in. Minnie Bruce Pratt’s (Bulkin, Pratt, and Smith 1984) layered account of her movement through ‘‘the jungle’’ of Washington, D.C., pries into some of the layers in these questions. Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty (1986) read Pratt’s chronicle to reveal the limits of white feminist innocence and the possibilities that emerge on the other side of the ‘‘fragile moments’’ of fleeting encounters with others. Martin and Mohanty call attention to the productive location Pratt participates in through an alternative metonym— that of displacement and reflection. Her ‘‘not being home’’ (dis)places Pratt with relational contexts that reveal home as an ‘‘illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of di√erences even within oneself ’’ (1986, 196). Pratt’s deflated illusions call up neither feminist innocence nor betrayal, but a keen sense of bravery, a deep space of listening, an opening to a noncoherent and profoundly possible self-in-community. Pratt, for instance, reflects on a moment in which her ‘‘illusion of acceptance vanishes into the chasm of the worldas-it-is that opens up between me and another.’’ She narrates an incident that occurred as she was walking in the city: ‘‘[A] white-headed white woman coming with di≈culty down the walk, she spat at me, shoutsinging, ‘How much is that doggy in the window?’ ’’ (Bulkin, Pratt, and Smith 1984, 14). Pratt is undone by such encounters throughout her text, oscillating between terror, denial, and shame, here working her way around to the possibility held in the practice of ‘‘listen[ing] for the beauty in the stark truth that someone tells me, that which seems brutal and may terrify me. This listening,’’ Pratt continues, ‘‘is one way of finding out how to get to the new place where we all can live and speak-to each other for more than a fragile moment’’ (14). As a feminist alliance practice on the other side of innocence, Pratt’s capacity to stand squarely in the center of her own vulnerability to ‘‘listen for the beauty’’ in the 190

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‘‘stark truth’’ posed by another o√ers an ‘‘extraordinary’’ portrait of the practices constitutive of transracial feminism. The woman’s mockery of the potentially child-like location Pratt occupies as white woman undermines any potential for Pratt to retain a sense of feminist innocence. She does not play pendejo to this message, but listens to the rhythm of the woman’s anger for the subaltern inscription she needs to forge her own becoming. Donna’s account of her alliance with her white feminist colleague aligns with the portrait that emerges between these texts (Pratt’s selfrepresentation and Martin and Mohanty’s reading of it). Donna describes the conditions of possibility for this alliance: ‘‘Oh, what makes an alliance possible between us, I think, is her acknowledgment, that she’s aware of, understands these tensions, where you’re coming from, um, she doesn’t try to gloss over and say, ‘Oh, no, what tension?’ or ‘Well, black women are so sensitive,’ or something like that. She’s, um, very, I don’t know. And that, that I think for people of color that is so important.’’ Donna’s account depicts a relational space in which she can reveal, and reveal in the absence of the constraint of feminist innocence. In the absence of the denial of transracial ‘‘tensions’’ or stereotypical positionings that construct black femininity as ‘‘so sensitive,’’ Donna is able to more fully presence her-self as woman of color in this alliance. The space between them, as she describes it, is generative, the openings reinforcing openings. The relational space is both the site in which she can share herself to the ally who ‘‘understands where you’re coming from,’’ even as the space becomes a place in which that transracial learning and acknowledgment is produced. Donna describes her ally as ‘‘someone who [she] really confide[s] in,’’ someone she ‘‘admires’’ for her ability to discuss ‘‘the tension between black and white women. She’s very open to discuss, . . . she understands it, she acknowledges it. And that’s something that’s pretty rare.’’ This expansive relational space, in which a series of intimate exchanges come from both sides, resists inscription in Donna’s account—‘‘She’s, um, very, I don’t know.’’ This ine√able figure of ‘‘white woman’’ is one she ‘‘thinks, for people of color, is so important.’’ This instance of transracial feminist belonging, then, is the condition of possibility for this ‘‘rare’’ figure of white woman to emerge in her ethical singularity to woman of color, whose singular face is simultaneously made somewhere outside of colonial inscription that would require her silence, whether imposed or asserted. This is a moment in which the secret of their relationship rises POWER LINES

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to the surface, marking the space of intimate encounter that is steeped in unknowing, which constitutes the ethic of transracial love on the other side of possession, civilizing, benevolence, and lovelessness. Andrea depicts an ongoing alliance with a senior white woman, Helen, who has engaged her in a number of professional activities that have provided Andrea with opportunities to make important connections, participate in challenging work, and collaborate as peers. ‘‘The thing that I liked about her was that she was very genuine about her interest in what I was doing,’’ Andrea explains, ‘‘and our work . . . could complement each other. And she was never patronizing to me.’’ The presence of Helen’s ‘‘genuine interest’’ in Andrea’s work and the absence of a ‘‘patronizing’’ relationship create the condition of possibility for the exchange to deepen. This sense of mutuality provides a point of entry into a series of collaborations, culminating in a conference of diverse women organized around their shared interests, which Andrea finds revitalizing: We put together several conferences together. I mean, the last conference we edited a book out of it, but other than that, it was just sort of an opportunity to get together and create a research space that we both wanted. . . . And what I really liked about that setting was that it was one of the few times I really felt good about focusing on issues of ‘‘women’’ because it—people included class, they included race. There were black women, there was Latina women, there was straight women, there were gay women, lesbians, there was older women. . . . I made a joke about the fact that my self-esteem, of being with them for four days that I walked away feeling taller.

Andrea’s account echoes Mohanty’s notion of ‘‘imagined communities’’ organized not around similarity but around struggles for social justice. For Mohanty, ‘‘it is not color or sex which constructs the ground for these struggles. Rather it is the way we think about race, class, and gender—the political links we choose to make among and between di√erent struggles. Thus, potential women of all colors (including white women) can align themselves with and participate in these imagined communities’’ (1991a, 4). Mohanty’s vision aligns with Andrea’s sense that the questions feminism should be asking are ‘‘What is antisubordination practice? What is antisubordination theory?’’ These questions and the coalitional logic that undergirds them provides a ‘‘ground for struggle’’ conducive to a community of ‘‘women of all colors’’ (‘‘black women, Latina women, 192

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straight women, gay women, lesbians, older women’’) aligned around collective struggle. The women also organized the conference with the intention of equalizing voices, as opposed to privileging some over others: ‘‘We structured it so that everyone got equal time. Everybody had to present something.’’ Andrea’s critique of the divisiveness that arises from organizing and theorizing around individualized notions of identity and the alternative vision she o√ers for a collaborative imagined community, united by an investment in ‘‘antisubordination theory and practice,’’ materialize in this conference. Within such a space of radical belonging—capable of engaging all of the intersections that constitute Andrea’s experience and justice sensibilities—she ‘‘walks away feeling taller.’’ In the context of U.S. academia, in which women of di√erence—working-class women, women of color, non-U.S. women, queer women—encounter a series of dislocations, creating such spaces in which these various displacements are central to the conversation is vital, revitalizing. This embodiment of her raised ‘‘self-esteem’’ reveals the palpable interplay between belonging and being, and the importance of placing our bodies in communities within which we may engage multiple components of identity, experience, consciousness, and belonging. Andrea’s depiction of how she and her white ally organized a conference with the intention of creating an equal speaking environment to include the voices of diverse women provides a sketch of the organizing that enables the formation of imagined communities. Read in the context of Donna’s portrait of a white ally who acknowledges the ‘‘tensions’’ around racial di√erence, Andrea’s picture gains depth. For Cheryl, allies who ‘‘walk the walk’’ of transracial connection are those with whom she encounters shifts in consciousness. Such transformative encounters occur with her white feminist allies, who are ‘‘willing to listen to you. They want to hear your critique of their work, or of their decision-making, and as well to o√er those kinds of things . . . as opposed to someone who says, ‘OK, it’s kinda chic or it will be cool, or it will do something for me or my image or my career.’ ’’ The formation of transracial alliances provides a space for mutual critique that enables a nontokenizing relationship to ensue. Rita concurs, distinguishing white feminist allies from other white women. The di√erence is ‘‘they’re much more thoughtful around race,’’ Rita reflects: ‘‘They’re not too persistent. They don’t start out with ‘I’m not a racist.’ They’re aware of the possibility that they are, that they can get over it. That’s a constant struggle. They’re really aware POWER LINES

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of white privilege and they speak out against racism and they’re constantly challenging others around them as well.’’ Rita’s sense that these white feminist allies are ‘‘possibly’’ racist, but ‘‘that they can get over it’’ through ‘‘constant struggle’’ is a frame conducive to a wide range of social and relational locations that white women may occupy. Her reading allows for a dynamic connection in which white women who take responsibility can move into a space of alliance in which they are ‘‘really aware of white privilege’’ and ‘‘speak out against racism.’’ These white allies practice ‘‘responsibility’’ in ways that ‘‘ab-use’’ both the identities they inherit as white women and the institutional locations they occupy as academic feminists. Such allies may, in turn, inspire others to ab-use the privileging structures they inhabit by ‘‘constantly challenging’’ them to assume a responsible stance vis-à-vis privilege. Maya feels that transracial alliances are a space in which feminists can cultivate such resistive stances: ‘‘I think the biggest thing a white woman can do is to seek out women of color, and me, too, and form alliances.’’ While she is critical of white women who don’t ‘‘get it,’’ she frames her own subject position in parallel terms (‘‘and me, too’’) to the white women to whom she would suggest ‘‘seeking out women of color’’ to ‘‘form alliances.’’ Maya continues in this vein, reflecting on her own fears in forming such connections as a point of entry into imagining white women’s fear of women of color: ‘‘I think it’s scary for a lot of people. And I feel that sometimes. I feel like when I see a radical Chicana lesbian woman who’s really outspoken, all this stereotype shit comes to my head, ‘Whoa! I don’t want to go there!’ And I’m able to overcome those sometimes because I’m a woman of color too. . . . But I think a lot of white women get scared.’’ In this reflection Maya inserts herself responsibly into a transracial feminist alliance location. Her capacity to hold a series of contradictions is enabling in this regard: she acknowledges the work is ‘‘scary,’’ but she locates the ‘‘stereotype’’ at the root of her fear; she draws on her experience as a woman of color to deconstruct her response to the ‘‘radical Chicana lesbian,’’ but this category remains heterogeneous to her; she is critical of white women who ‘‘don’t get it,’’ but she shares their fears of di√erence. Her account of her own fear is reactionary, grounded in her body: ‘‘Whoa! I don’t want to go there!’’ But she draws on her own experience of being stereotyped as a woman of color to move through this reaction. Maya’s self-representation as noninnocent provides a necessarily complex frame for the formation of a woman-of-color location, not (only) as an identity that she occupies 194

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but also as a set of relational practices in which academic feminists insert themselves into responsibility (see Lee 2000). This kind of self-reflexivity—the move from defensive reaction to vulnerable listening—enables women of di√erence to build alliances, to become fluent in one another’s histories and the uneven colonial relations that connect di√erently located women. This noninnocent hearing is also what they seek in their alliances with white women: ‘‘Somebody’s telling you, ‘It’s a white thing,’ or ‘It’s a white move,’ don’t dismiss it. Don’t get all defensive. Actually hear what somebody is saying.’’ Robyn reflects on her own e√orts to enact this kind of alliance work: When friends of color of mine have had one of those days when they’ve been shit on by white people and they want to bitch about white people, this is not the time for me to say, ‘Well, you know, I’m white and I’m a nice person.’ It’s not the time to do that kind of feed-my-ego stu√. It’s time to listen and to learn and to try to see myself in that and to see what I can, I mean, to provide support for the person, but also to use it as an opportunity to learn something about whiteness that I may very well not know. And I think that in the beginning that’s hard, because in the beginning white people aren’t used to hearing themselves bitched about. And so I think that’s a crucial part of being [an] antiracist white is that you have to learn to hear that critique or that pain or that anger or that rage or whatever, because it’s very likely that some really serious important learning is there.

‘‘i was born, i will die, ego loves to talk. And yet, the way home must be found,’’ Ruth Frankenberg begins her piece on ‘‘being white, seeing whiteness’’ (1996, 3). Robyn’s self-reflexive framing of her own struggle with ‘‘ego stu√ ’’ resonates, revealing the barrier that ego plays in listening and learning, acting as an antiracist and as an ally, and in these ways, finding ‘‘the way home.’’ Robyn navigates this work by drawing a distinction between whiteness and her-self. ‘‘And so I’ve learned that it has something to do with me, but that’s not me. I mean, that I don’t have to feel the need to defend my race, because that’s not the race I want to belong to.’’ Robyn’s negotiation, like Maya’s, allows her to hold a series of contradictions: that she is accountable for white privilege, but is not the object of her friends’ criticism; that racism ‘‘has something to do with me, but that’s not me’’; that she both belongs and does not belong to the white race (‘‘I don’t have to feel the need to defend my race, because that’s not the race I want POWER LINES

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to belong to’’). Robyn frames her own shifting positionality as tacking between the ‘‘seeing myself ’’ in what is being said and the recognition ‘‘that’s not me,’’ without reverting to the need to be seen by another as exceptional. She brackets ego. This tacking provides a glimpse at an alliance process of enabling an awareness of how the ‘‘master’s tools’’ have come to constitute our very beings, but that we are not the same as these tools which we seek to ab-use. That is, transracial feminist alliances as a vehicle for making face. These negotiations reveal the contours of the ‘‘impossible no’’ Robyn asserts in her e√orts to ab-use the location within whiteness that she intimately inhabits and simultaneously refuses. This negotiation returns us to Martin’s and Mohanty’s remarks (1986) about Pratt’s ‘‘situation on the edge’’ (Bulkin, Pratt, and Smith 1984)—her chosen location is outside of the bounds of white belonging. This relationally configured location ‘‘expresses the desire and the possibility of breaking through the narrow circle called home without the pretense that she can or should ‘jump out of her skin’ or deny her past’’ (Martin and Mohanty 1991, 198). This following quote from their essay reveals some of the complexities at work and the politics at stake in such movement across power lines: What we find extraordinary about Pratt as a narrator (and person) is her refusal to allow guilt to trap her within the boundaries of a coherent ‘white’ identity. . . . Pratt’s approach achieves significance in the context of other white feminists’ responses to the charge of racism in the women’s movement. An all-too-common response has been self-paralyzing guilt and/or defensiveness; another has been the desire to be educated by women of color. . . . Thus, walking down the street and speaking to various people—a young white man, young black woman, young professional white woman, young black man, older white woman, are all rendered acutely complex and contradictory in terms of actual speakings, imagined speakings, and actual and imagined motivations, responses, and implications—there is no possibility of a coherent self with a continuity of responses across these di√erent ‘‘speaking-to’s.’’ History intervenes. (198–99)

Martin and Mohanty’s reflections reveal Pratt’s struggles to break from ‘‘the narrow circle’’ of ‘‘home’’ formed through white and heterosexual belongings as an ongoing process—messy, painful, and fraught with contradictions. What this move accomplishes, however, is the production of a white antiracist identity that refuses the traps of guilt, fear, or 196

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the need for coherence, which depart from the ‘‘all-too-common’’ white feminist responses to charges of racism. It is Pratt who crosses the color line, placing herself in the way of ‘‘actual speakings, imagined speakings, and actual and imagined motivations, responses, and implications.’’ It is the investment of her emotional labor, not her demand that women of color educate her, that opens her experiential horizons beyond the confines of ‘‘home.’’ From this shifting, continually destabilizing transracial social location ‘‘history intervenes’’ in the possibility of the production of a coherent white female self—experienced or imagined. Likewise, Robyn and Maya place themselves in the uneasy space of di√erence to make face through these encounters.

CONCLUSIONS / OPENINGS

If nothing else, my hope is that this chapter provides a series of openings in the direction of ‘‘becoming-other’’ (Probyn 1996, 5) as we surrender ourselves to those interstitial spaces, as we seek to reveal the secret that nonetheless eludes us, as we make face in those intimate encounters constitutive of our becoming. Detailing the gestures by women of this study to act in alliance across power lines reveals the multiple forms and social locations that potentially animate a transracial feminist project. The formation of a feminist future anterior on the other side of innocence, as their accounts demonstrate, entails an ongoing practice of deep reflection, an active posture in which academic feminists ab-use the institutional structures and social locations we inhabit. Cricket Keating’s (1995) pragmatic theory of ‘‘coalitional consciousness-raising’’ offers a concrete set of relational practices conducive to these e√orts. Keating reworks the steps of liberal feminist consciousness-raising to reflect and produce an intersectional approach to theorizing from and about experience. The process asks participants to reflect on such questions as, How was your experience marked by, and whose interests are served by, your own and others’ particular racial, sexual, national, class, or other context? What are the barriers and possibilities for coalitional action in the experiences analyzed? Keating argues that such critical and collective practice assumes and produces a consciousness in subjects as simultaneously ‘‘oppressor and oppressed within a scenario’’ and that ‘‘both positionings may be resisted’’ (97). Keating proposes an interactive process through which allies may POWER LINES

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critically and collectively read their experience in community as points of entry into multiple forms of radical belonging. Whether those belongings arise at that particular moment as transracial or separatist, the questions Keating poses incline community members in the direction of a complex, historicized, noninnocent sense of self embedded in and constituted within community. Toni King et al. (2002), speaking as ‘‘African American Women in Higher Education,’’ evoke the kitchen table as a ‘‘site of restoration and revolution’’—a ‘‘black girl-to-woman rite of passage where earning a place at the table signals acceptance into womanhood. Like women before us, we sit around the kitchen table, talking deep—planning, strategizing, and healing each other’s wounds’’ (405). This practice of ‘‘talking deep’’ prepares girls for womanhood by providing a context for them to become fluent in the politicization of their own lives. Kitchen table talk is as strategic as it is healing, as restorative as it is revolutionary. Such engagements prepare us to encounter one another with both a fuller awareness of the unevenness of our interrelatedness and the a√ective investments that compel us to alter those conditions. They are one site in which we might become fluent in one another’s histories as a function of coming to a fuller awareness of our own. Sandoval might call this interactive posture a ‘‘contract.’’ Just as ‘‘the writing or reading of Bridge incurred a debt of honor: its narrative worked in perception in much the same way as a vow, an action that requires a heightened moral consciousness by persons performing it’’ (2002, 22)—so does the possibility held within our inclination toward each other. The sites of radical belonging incite heightened perceptions or the ongoing radicalization of consciousness and so inspire, or breathe life into, the contract to hold one another’s stories. This contract hails us, holds us accountable, remaking the subject of feminist alliances.

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EPILOGUE

Pilgrimage

A still glacier lake, water sheer, like ice. You can see every pebble, ancient rock, and boulder under a thin mossy fur. The lake reflects California’s highest twin peaks and an airless sky like a crystal ball. This is where my dad said we should lay him. A day on horseback to get here, to this mountain of many returns, a lake of my childhood. A place of solid stone and glacier, where we’d make grape icees, cook freeze-dried beef strogano√ over a small fire, and dream of the hamburgers we’d eat on the way home. This is where we’d return every summer, where we learned to grow like trees, to bow to the wind. He has brought us back here for the first time in almost twenty years. My sister is the first to spread the ashes. Under a small baby pine. When it’s my turn, I pour them into the lake. I watch the ashes color the water like powdered milk. The water turns white. My mom is quiet, solid as the rocky peaks that rise up behind her. My brother draws his long brown legs into his chest and wraps them in his arms. My sister howls as if something ancient—longing, loss, grief—is coursing through her. I’m just looking at the ashes as they turn the water white. I study it like snow swirling in a crystal ball, searching for a final reply. As his ashes float and drift under the watery weight of gravity, settling into the mossy bottom, a sense of urgency rises up within me. He’s disappearing. This is my last chance. I tug at my T-shirt, kick o√ my boots, step out of my shorts. I dive into the ashy white water. I want to see him, to touch him. He is blurry white all around me. He is cold ice water. I pass through him, and then he is gone. G G G

Every year since, my mom, my partner, and I return to visit this place. The journey is all phases of life, death, and rebirth at once. ‘‘It’s a pilgrimage,’’ my mom always reminds us. ‘‘That means there is struggle involved.’’ It’s hard work walking all those miles with the weight of her

pack on her grandmother-back. It’s hard work facing grief. It’s a struggle to touch the interface between the past and the future, to glimpse the abyss between life and death. A pilgrimage. Involves struggle. Instantiates change. Invites transformation. Join me. Every year. We’ll revisit, in sacred ceremony, the love that has made us.

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APPENDIX A

Solicitation Letter [Name and address of author] August 23, 1999 Dear Friends, Acquaintances, Allies, and Colleagues: I am a doctoral candidate in Speech Communication at the U of W. I am writing to solicit your help in locating potential interviewees for my study of how academic feminists form alliances, particularly within the academy. My work draws on that by scholars who seek to understand the dynamics of how race, national origin, ethnicity and class function in feminist alliance formation. The specific focus of my study is power balance or imbalance among feminist academics. I hope to interview at least twenty self-proclaimed academic feminists. The interviews will be done in person. They will take about an hour and will be tape recorded, with your consent, transcribed and analyzed by me. Audiotapes will be destroyed within thirty days. Names and other identifying information will be kept separate from interview data and destroyed within one year. No real names will be used when writing my dissertation without explicit permission from interviewees. My dissertation may become a book; chapters may become journal articles. Here are some of my research questions: 1) How do academic feminists negotiate power and subordination in their work? 2) With whom, and under what conditions, do feminists ally themselves within academic contexts? 3) How do academic feminists position themselves along axes of race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, religion, and other personal identity markers? 4) What do feminist alliances mean to those who describe them? My hope is that my research will lead to further understandings about how academic feminists arrange their collaborative practices both within and outside of the workplace (the academy). Will you participate in my study? Would you also direct me to others who might be willing to be interviewed? If yes to either of these questions, please call or email me. Participation in this study is voluntary. Interview participants may choose to stop the interview at any time and may select to decline response to any questions they do not feel comfortable answering. Thank you for your time. [signature and name of author]

APPENDIX B

Interview Questions

I. CAREER HISTORY

1. What is your current academic rank or title? 2. Could you provide a brief history of your academic career? 3. Would you describe your career advancement as relatively challenging, or has it been more smooth, compared to what you know of the experiences of your white male counterparts? Compared to what you know of the experiences of other feminists (especially those who are culturally di√erent from you)? 4. Description or story of circumstances of successes/failures. 5. What aspects of your own identity do you think may contribute to your ability or di≈culties in rising through the academic ranks? 6. (If necessary) Follow-up, your race/whiteness, your gender, your sexual orientation, your class positioning? II. ALLIANCES

1. Would you consider the people who facilitated your advancement during critical times of this process to be your allies? 2. What does this term [alliances] mean to you? 3. Have your allies changed over time and in relation to your career advancement? 4. Can you think of a circumstance in which you have disappointed, betrayed, or lost an ally (in this process, especially with regard to your securing more institutional power)? 5. Are there any instances in which you have felt disappointed, betrayed, or lost an ally (in this process, especially with regard to your securing more institutional power)? 6. Could you describe a situation in which someone has considered you an ally and you may not have thought of that person as an ally, or vice versa? 7. In what respects are your allies similar to and/or di√erent from you, especially culturally? Institutionally? In terms of their feminist politics? 8. Could you describe an alliance you have with an academic who holds more institutional power than you, especially any challenges that have arisen in this case? 9. How do cultural di√erences and/or similarities come into play in this alliance?

10. What do you hope to get out of and/or contribute to this alliance? 11. Could you describe an alliance you have with an academic who holds less institutional power than you, especially any challenges that have arisen in this case? 12. How do cultural di√erences and/or similarities come into play in this alliance? 13. What do you hope to get out of and/or contribute to this alliance? III. FEMINIST POLITICS

1. Participants in this study are academics who have self-identified as ‘‘feminists.’’ Could you describe what this term means to you, especially in the context and under the constraints of academia? 2. Can you recall any experience in which your feminist ethics or politics seemed to be at odds with some aspect of retaining or enhancing your institutional status? 3. Can you describe an instance in which you have used your own institutional power to enhance the status of a junior academic feminist? (If so, discuss cultural di√erences/similarities in this event.) 4. Could you describe any circumstances in which you felt your feminist politics have been compromised within academic settings, especially an instance that relates to your e√orts to enhance or protect your own academic status, (separate?) or someone else’s or that of a group on campus? 5. To whom, if anyone did you turn as allies in this case? 6. Whom, if anyone did you disappoint or betray in this case? 7. How successfully do you feel that you are able to secure power and respect within an academic setting which is not necessarily ‘‘feminist’’ or that you consider to be patriarchal? (If interviewees foreground ‘‘failures,’’ I follow up with whom they turn to as allies in such instances, then ask what this term means to them. If they foreground ‘‘successes,’’ I pursue questions around how they use their institutional power, particularly with regard to feminists in subordinate positions.) IV. IDENTITY

1. How would you describe your identity in terms of race, class, ethnicity, national origin, and sexual orientation? 2. Could you describe how you have come to identify as such, especially any changes that you have experienced with regard to your identity? 3. Do you feel that your identity remains relatively stable across academic contexts, or do you feel you foreground di√erent aspects of your identity in di√erent academic contexts?

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1 ‘‘Power lines’’ may also take on a di√erent spin of the imaginary. The lines we inscribe, the phrases we turn, the webs of meaning we weave—what possibilities for feminist futures might arise from these lines? The spider weaves a new language from the webs she churns from her body. Fine shimmering fibers emerge from her belly as she moves from leaf to branch to leaf to branch. The sun catches her work, illuminates it. Dew and web and sun, dancing in golden light. What languages might we weave at the intersection between the mundane and the divine? ‘‘Power lines’’ also evoke the institutional status of academic feminism: the lines that employ us, divided up according to institutional needs, frame the conditions of possibility both for our academic labor and for the politics that inform our belonging. 2 Women of color from a wide range of social locations and antiracist allies have produced volumes of work marking the exclusionary practices of academic feminism, women’s studies, and the women’s movement in the United States. Seminal anthologies in this tradition include This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981), All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Hull et al. 1982), Yours in Struggle (Bulkin et al. 1984), Home Girls (Smith 1983), Sister Outsider (Lorde 1984), Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (hooks 1984), Women, Race, and Class (Davis 1983); and such writings as ‘‘The Combahee River Statement’’ (Combahee River Collective 1983) and ‘‘White Women Listen!’’ (Carby 1982). These writings laid the theoretical groundwork necessary to reveal the limitations of romanticized notions of struggle as ‘‘women of color’’ used the writing process to forge a collective, imagined identity through the process of analyzing their experiences and theorizing the ‘‘intersecting’’ modes of oppression that constitute those experiences (see Anzaldúa 1981). Increasingly, the conversation seeks to address issues of transnationalism and postcoloniality: Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (Alexander and Mohanty 1997), Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray! (Alexander et al. 2003), This Bridge We Call Home (Anzaldúa and Keating 2002), Thinking Through (Bannerji 1995), and Feminism without Borders (Mohanty 2003). 3 This turn to the politics of love is inspired by, among others, the work of Chela Sandoval (2000): ‘‘revolutionary love’’ occurs as we ‘‘submit, however temporarily, to what is ‘intractable’ ’’ (19), to a state of being ‘‘not subject to control or governance . . . to pass into another kind of erotics, to the amplitude

of Barthe’s ‘abyss’ ’’ (142). Sandoval attends to the a√ective movement of love as di√erential consciousness, inaugurating a methodology of the oppressed as a capacity to move across, and even beyond, multiple ideological registers—to reverse interpellation. bell hooks attends to the ‘‘transformative power’’ of love, noting that ‘‘all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic,’’ but she also underscores the cynicism with which the politics of love tends to be approached (2000, xvii–xxix). Roland Barthes (1978) in his treatment of lover’s discourse and William Haver in his theorization of the erotic bring us to the limit point of the subject: ‘‘The erotic,’’ Haver writes, ‘‘in its existential materiality, confounds the subject/object dichotomy’’ (1996, 15). Daniel Gross underscores the nonessential, political, historical, and rhetorical character of emotions—not as biological phenomenon, but as technologies conditioned by power relations. This means that the ‘‘constitutive power of emotions depends upon their uneven distribution’’ (Gross 2006, 5). These theorists call our attention to the possibilities and constraints placed on the ample space of love as a site for rethinking subjectivity through the political placement and deployment of those a√ectively charged encounters that potentially undermine the divide between self and other. This is the site, between self and other, that I argue contains tremendous potential for transracial feminisms. 4 In this sense I depart from theorizations of the ‘‘self ’’ proposed by Taylor (1989) and Sorabji (2006) by directing the point of departure for our questions not to the originary self, who is then inclined toward, or morally bound to, others. Rather, the interstitial spaces between subjects come to occupy our attention. Sorabji’s notion that the self arises through its visuality, its embodied presence, calls attention to the need for the other in the process of forming the self. Yet to center the contingency of the self ’s intelligibility upon the gaze of the other, and to consider how that gaze—or the various embodied and discursive processes through which we apprehend each other—as political, historically contingent, and steeped in power is to cast the ‘‘self ’’ not as a prior condition, but as a rhetorical production that is itself invested in erasing these power-laden specificities through which the self is produced and imagined. ‘‘The politics of relation’’ is a name I give to the multiple rhetorical strategies I deploy to underscore the textuality, or intertextuality, of the ‘‘self ’’ as she unfolds in a series of ongoing relations. 5 I propose the term ‘‘transracial,’’ as opposed to ‘‘multiracial,’’ to describe feminist alliances that span racial lines. ‘‘Multiracial’’ assumes that each racial positioning remains intact, but is multiplied, through di√erence-based alliances. This contention relies upon an individualistic notion of the subject. I am arguing that the subject is not discrete, that the categories of di√erence are absolutely real and simultaneously fictitious. The selves we produce in alliance bleed into one another through shared experience and mutually constructed

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theory. To recognize this mutuality is to theorize a feminist politics of relation that moves us beyond the individualism that undergirds the politics of location. 6 The term ‘‘transracial’’ draws on the deessentializing move of transgendered crossings to theorize the politics and practices associated with racial crossings. Michael Awkward reads Michael Jackson’s optic whitening as ‘‘transraciality’’—a ‘‘mode of masquerade’’ arising through ‘‘the radical revision of one’s natural markings and the adoption of aspects of human surface (especially skin, hair, and facial features) generally associated with the racial other’’ (1995, 180; see also Giroux 1992, Gubar 1997). Andrea Newlyn deploys the transracial as a literary device that potentially displaces the ‘‘panoptical position’’ of the white male character Neil, who ‘‘crosses into blackness’’ in Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal as he ‘‘becomes the object of the white male gaze’’ and the ‘‘authority of the signifying eye doubles back on itself, leaving whiteness—particularly its ability to racialize others’’ (Newlyn 2002, 1047). Dorienne Kondo productively underscores the risks of ‘‘transcendence’’ associated with too easy manifestations of transracial crossing: the suspicion with which we should approach utopian ‘‘third space’’ politics within an era of racial violence. ‘‘Destabilizing the racial signifier is not enough’’ (Kondo 2000, 101); the work must attend to the movements of solidarity, empowerment, and accountability across multiple power lines. Thus ‘‘transracial’’ has been deployed by cultural and literary critics to examine the risks and possibilities with various forms of movement across. Power Lines extends this work as both a critical reading practice through which to read ethnographic texts and as a theoretical frame to theorize coalitional subjectivity. 7 The scope of literature on the politics of feminist alliances, while limited, underscores the importance of solidarity, self-reflexivity, and cultivating categories of analysis that are not always already exclusionary (see Alarcón 1991, Albrecht and Brewer 1990, Alexander and Mohanty 1997, Bannerji et al. 1992, Dean 1996). 8 On the theme of feminist alliances, women of color and antiracist white feminist theorists have underscored the forces, habits, and political and theoretical investments that undermine feminist alliance formation (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992, Bannerji 1995, Chrystos 1981, Combahee River Collective 1983, Córdova 1998, Frankenberg 1993, Grewal 1994, hooks 1995, Hurtado 1996, Kaplan 1994, Mohanty 1991a, Moon 1999, Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, Russo 1991, Sandoval 1991). 9 Transnational and antiracist feminist interventions have productively mapped some of the issues that confound transracial feminist alliances (Alexander and Mohanty 1997, Alexander et al. 2003, Kaplan and Grewal 1994, Thompson 2002). 10 For instance, Cynthia Enloe argued in her keynote address at the 2004 NOTES

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nwsa (National Women’s Studies Association) convention that we feminists need to redefine our ‘‘battles’’ as those political struggles in which we engage outside of the ranks of academic feminism and feminist communities. She calls us to view the struggles that arise from within as ‘‘debates’’ as opposed to ‘‘battles,’’ encouraging us to keep a wider vision of the global politics at stake in where we place our energies. I want her argument to be true. The goal of this project is to provide points of entry into the depth of alliance that would allow us to consolidate our forces and direct our vision and our energies outward. And yet, what is potentially lost in too hastily making this move is our ability to theorize the connections between the forces that drive the ‘‘battles out there’’ and the ‘‘debates in here.’’ I call attention to her comment because it emerges within the political/institutional context of the national organization devoted to the field of women’s studies and, as such, deserves attention as we imagine what constitutes the ‘‘battles’’ that animate our present as well as the relational boundaries between ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘there’’ for feminist practitioners (see Alexander 2005). 11 Most notably, Wendy Brown argues that the poststructuralist and third world feminist destabilization of the category ‘‘woman’’ render women’s studies as a field formation ‘‘impossible’’ (1997). Rachel Lee underscores the ‘‘perhaps simplistic,’’ pre-Foucauldian insight that white women and women of color are not only ‘‘di√erent’’ from one another, but those di√erences are unevenly ‘‘ranked ’’ (2000, 91). This is to suggest that the struggle over the category ‘‘woman’’ is an ongoing contestation; critiques powerfully waged by women of color (and white allies) are often dismissed as capitulating to a cycle of ‘‘guilt and blame’’ or silencing and ‘‘censoring’’ white women (see Gubar 1998). A number of edited volumes and special issues of feminist journals mark and provide commentary on this crisis, including the special issues of di√erences (Scott 1997) and Feminist Studies (Hewitt and Lanser 1998); books such as Feminism and ‘‘Race’’ (Bhavnani 2001), Anti-Feminism in the Academy (Clark et al. 1996), Generations (Looser and Kaplan 1997), Is Academic Feminism Dead? (Social Justice Group 2000), and Feminisms in the Academy (Stanton and Stewart 1995); and an exchange between Gubar (1998) and Wiegman (1999). 12 While it would seem that the attention to the immediate and lived nature of power relations depicted within the feminist slogan ‘‘The personal is political’’ would lend itself to a comprehensive view of the politics of di√erence, feminists of color have consistently pointed out that feminism operates through a gender-exclusive logic. That is, power is equated with marginality, which is equated with gender oppression, as opposed to power being theorized as complex, constituting its subjects through simultaneous and competing relations of privilege/supremacy (such categories as heterosexual, class, U.S., white) and marginality (gender oppression). To this end, feminists of

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color have underscored the limits of white feminism’s capacity to speak for all women, to adequately theorize oppression, and to build epistemologies that would enable transracial feminist alliances (see Alexander and Mohanty 1997, Anzaldúa 2002b, Bannerji et al. 1992, Bhavnani 2001, Collins 2000, Córdova 1998, hooks 1984, Hull et al. 1982, Hurtado 1996, Lee 2000, Mabokela 2001, Mohanty 1991a, Yee 1997). 13 The question over the legitimacy of the categories of experience and identity within critical and feminist theory raises important questions about the politics of knowledge production. Thus the categories through which we develop our inquiry, particularly those that are located in the body, become salient in theorizing di√erence, even if those politics as they are mediated through the body are in no way transparent (see Brown 1995, Carrillo Rowe 2000, Christian 1989, Elam 1994, Frye 2000, Lee 2000, Mohanty 2003, Moya 2002). 14 Standpoint theory considers the relationship between social location and consciousness (Bannerji 1992, Combahee River Collective 1983, Fowlkes 1997, Hall 1996b, Haraway 1988, Harding 1986, Harding 1991, Hartsock 1987, Marx 1967, Smith 1987). 15 Some contemporary ‘‘realist’’ theorists who stake out this claim do so for political purposes in an e√ort to counteract the power of postmodernism to displace those real lived conditions of oppression that give rise to critical insights into the operation of power and global capital (Mohanty 2003, S. Mohanty 1997, Moya 2002, Moya and Hames-García 2000). 16 These are terms deployed by feminist and cultural critics to capture the limits of self-reflexivity within the discursive space of academic writing (Behar 1996, Mercer 1991, Spivak 1990, Visweswaran 1994). 17 Michele Serros (1993) evokes her when she tells how she never felt like a real Chicana, lacking prevalent signifiers of ‘‘Chicana’’ identity: a grandmother with masa between her palms, border-crossing experiences, Spanish slipping from her tongue. Serros draws the title for her book, Chicana Falsa, from an encounter with her best-friend-turned Chola, tough ghetto girl, La Leti y Que Nomas, who calls out Serros’s lack of Chicana authenticity as their friendship dissolves over shifting belongings. La Leti, formerly Laticia, takes the chola name La Leti y Que Nomas to signify her new identity as unquestionably ‘‘y Qua Nomas’’—and nothing more, that’s it. La Leti darkens her eyelids with smoky eyeliner, stays out late with boys in pleated khakis and Chevy Impalas, fails in school. Michele reads books, wants to be a writer, listens from the interior of her room for La Leti to come home from her dates. Their friendship is lost and regained over the same cultural terrain: authenticity, identity, and the politics of representation. Michele loses Leti through her failure to ascribe to the Chola politics of identity at work in her hometown, a failure predicated on her desire to write, to represent, an assertion of (Chicana) power that Leti NOTES

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denies and seeks to undermine. But when Serros’s book is finally published, La Leti is so moved by the loving accounts of her that the identity di√erences that divide them are subordinated to the history of a√ect and memory that unites them. How can the impure subject of belonging, the Chicana falsa, serve our e√orts to build an alliance-driven theory? What webs of meaning might she weave? Given the unstable nature of ‘‘Mexican’’ identity—Mexicans having been classified as Spanish, Hispanic, and white (see Keating 1995, 911)—my suggestion is that this ambiguous location provides a point of entry to theorize the politics of relation precisely because this ambiguity produces an unevenness of ‘‘identity,’’ both historically and in terms of lived experience, that foregrounds the necessity of living the politics of relation. 18 Sanchez argued this in a classroom talk on Latin American studies. Due to shifting demographics in the United States and the social relations arising out of the increasing visibility and presence of Latina/o populations, it no longer makes sense (if it ever did), on either side of the border, to theorize ‘‘America’’ in the absence of ‘‘Latin America’’ (see also Shukla and Tinsman [2004], for a special issue devoted to the question of politics, borders, and solidarity in ‘‘America’’). 19 I put ‘‘feminists’’ in quotation marks to signal the diversity of feminisms at work within these women’s lives. For instance, the feminisms of women of color and their white allies tend to be intersectional and overtly communitybased, while the feminisms of white women tend to revert to gender-based and often institutionally situated strategies of inclusion. As Tina Chanter (quoted in Armour 1999, 2) writes, ‘‘There is a sense in which sexual di√erence forms the silent center of feminist theory, which is left unthought as such, but which nevertheless acts as a pivot round which feminist categories are constructed.’’ While the ‘‘silent center’’ of feminist theory and praxis that Chanter describes captures the ‘‘unthought’’ feminisms articulated by these white women, it is one that is actively challenged by feminists of color and their white allies, which also must be accounted for. These disparate feminisms emerge from and are enacted in these women’s lived experiences and particularly the alliance bases that form them, revealing the connection between ‘‘alliances’’ and ‘‘feminisms’’ in ways that trouble the white/color binary that shapes much feminist thought. For instance, ‘‘white feminism’’ is not monolithically one adhered to by all white women, but rather the feminisms of white women are contingent upon the conditions of their belonging. It is in the unfolding of the latter that the experiences, practices, and ideologies that form their feminisms gain meaning. So for the feminists for whom ‘‘feminism’’ retains its ‘‘silent center’’ of genderbased struggle, the relational conditions that enable this retention are the largely or entirely white alliance base through which their experience is mediated and by which it is circumscribed. But for feminists of color and their white allies, retaining a singular notion of di√erence becomes implausible in the face

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of their experiences in relation to one another and the academic world they negotiate as community. To view ‘‘feminism’’ as an inductive and relational process is to expose its contingent nature, and to call attention to the relational practices through which it unevenly and oftentimes contentiously unfolds. 20 I take steps to protect the anonymity of the women of this study: the names are pseudonyms, and I work to conceal their institutional locations and identifying material. I also use pseudonyms to refer to other people who arise in these women’s stories. 21 My reference to ‘‘a face’’ plays on Jean Luc Nancy’s notion of ‘‘singularity’’ as the ‘‘question that lurks’’ behind the ‘‘theme of the individual.’’ The singular tropes of our embodiment—‘‘a body, a face, a voice, a death, a writing’’—form the sites in which sharings that are constitutive of community take place, because singularity occurs at the level of the clinamen, the tilting toward one another, in a gesture that subverts the cultural logic of individualism (Nancy 1991, 6–27; see also Davis 2002, Spivak 1999). It also plays on Gloria Anzaldúa’s iteration of ‘‘making face’’ among Chicanas: ‘‘making faces means to put on a face, express feelings by distorting the face—frowning, grimacing, looking sad, glum, or disapproving,’’ with the ‘‘added connotation of making gestos subversivos, political subversive gestures’’ (1991, xv). Thus for Anzaldúa, as for Nancy, the face becomes a site of cultural work: it constitutes the inter-face between and among us; it is the visual site of our expression; it is written on and it writes back; it is the singular and shifting marker of our relations to one another; it is, quite literally, the site through which we constitute our belongings. CHAPTER 1: BE LONGING 1 ‘‘Home’’ itself a shifting construction, contingent upon temporal, spatial, and a√ective investments in place and relations (see Martin and Mohanty 1986, Visweswaran 1994). Neither the girlfriend nor her pu√y chair remain (in) my ‘‘home,’’ thus what constitutes ‘‘home’’ has become reconfigured through a series of relational variations that have already marked the space between ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘then.’’ Time and space give way to the variations, the shifting contours which (re)make ‘‘me.’’ 2 When I reference ‘‘feminists of privilege,’’ I am referring at once to white women, but also to the various forms of privilege women of color navigate, whether heterosexual or class-based, as function of (neo)colonial occupation and militarization. Following Rey Chow (1993), Rachel Lee underscores the importance of women’s studies attending to its own complicity in hegemonic structures. ‘‘In a similar fashion,’’ she writes, ‘‘ ‘women of color’ criticism might exit the prisonhouse of reactiveness—negative definition—through the articulation of its own blind spots, which is simultaneously an acknowledgement of

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its distinctive terrain’’ (2000, 96). For instance, the U.S.-centered approach of critical race feminism, based in the civil rights movement’s logics, struggles, and legal protections, fails to account for postcolonial complexities, new forms of global capitalism, and the occupation of indigenous lands (see Trask 1999). This is to suggest that transracial belongings bring us face to face, in intimate and tangible ways, with our investments in whatever forms of privilege we’ve secured as a function of the histories and contexts giving rise to our locations and relations. While Power Lines attends primarily to the racial divide between white women and women of color—as this particular mode of domination is most clearly at stake in contemporary feminism and its struggle with its own institutionality—I draw on this recognition arising from third world and antiracist feminisms that we must engage in an accounting of the conditions of our privilege. 3 By ‘‘love’’ I mean to suggest the infinite modes of a√ective connection that bind us to one another: sexual, sensual, intimate, mundane, contentious, political, strategic, ephemeral, spiritual, dedicated, ‘‘charity and pleasure, emotion and pornography, the neighbor and the infant, the love of lovers and the love of God, fraternal love and the love of art, the kiss, passion, friendship’’ (Nancy 1991, 83). To think such infinitudes, Jean Luc Nancy tells us, ‘‘demands boundless generosity toward all these possibilities, and it is this generosity that would command reticence [to solicit the thinking of love]: the generosity not to choose between loves, not to privilege, not to hierarchize, not to exclude’’ (83). What remains unthought by Nancy is love’s politics, particularly of the feminist variety. That is, the transformative, constitutive, and also benignly rehabilitative functions that it potentially serves. The intervention I seek is one that sensitizes us to the political work our love achieves: ‘‘alliance,’’ as the site where the intimate encounters the institutional, gives name to it. Love on the other side of colonial desire. 4 Several theorists gesture in this direction, and their formulations have influenced my thought: Audre Lorde’s ‘‘uses of the erotic,’’ bell hooks’s recent book on love, Maria Lugones’s ‘‘world-traveling,’’ Chela Sandoval’s ‘‘hermeneutics of love,’’ Nancy’s ‘‘clinamen,’’ Elspeth Probyn’s ‘‘outside belongings,’’ Heidegger’s ‘‘ekstasis,’’ and Barthes’s ‘‘zero degree.’’ The passionate strivings of these texts signify a trend toward some kind of vision forming on the horizon of mind, body, and soul that moves us beyond the limits of critique as the only weapon of the cultural critic to an a≈rmation of ‘‘what we are for.’’ As Jacqui Alexander (2000) said at a recent conference, it is not enough to state what we are against, it is necessary to envision what we stand for. Gloria Anzaldúa reflects this impulse when she writes, ‘‘At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes’’ (1987, 100–101). At the risk of impure theorizing, the work is to build a vision.

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5 This possibility for ephemeral unfolding appears in that which recedes from the senses, such as the missing Mayan word for ‘‘I.’’ Here the ‘‘subject,’’ or what in the West we would call ‘‘I,’’ is gestured toward through utterances such as ‘‘we there in that place,’’ accompanied by a nod in the direction of the person being named (Jorge Rivas, personal communication, August 4, 2002). The individual is not consolidated as such, but an embodied and spatially located form of ‘‘we’’ among ‘‘us’’ can be gestured toward. The gesture itself calls upon a set of bodies in motion, coinciding with their own variation and the infinite unfoldings possible among them. This space between eludes us because it does not coincide with itself, especially in those relations that have become so naturalized that their unfoldings are continuous and immediate. We encounter collision, however, when our belongings are stripped from us. And also when our belongings challenge us to rewrite the consciousness of our notions of ‘‘self.’’ But even such collisions occur in motion, washing over us like waves. We, sucked under, gasping for air. We turn and ride. 6 The distinction between identity and positionality potentially allows for a more mobile, context-specific conceptual frame that allows us to name the ways in which the subject’s meaning and relative privilege/marginality are contingent upon how s/he is situated in time, space, and relations (for work on ‘‘positionality,’’ see Awkward 1995, Lal 1996). 7 If ‘‘view’’ and ‘‘vantage point’’ evoke the eyes and the seer, they call forth the individual who sees. As Gearóid Ó Tuathial observes, ocularcentrism privileges the faculty of vision and is deeply rooted in the Western tradition of theory production (the term ‘‘theory’’ derives from the classical figure who was privileged to observe an event and verbally verify that it had taken place) (Ó Tuathial 1996, 69). Vision is ‘‘decorporalized’’ as a function of the ‘‘Cartesian separation of the subject from that which it observes’’ and the masculine gendering of knowledge production—disembodied knower overcomes feminized known (98–99). According to Ó Tuathial, this entails the inauguration, or reinscription, of the Subject: the Western colonial who seeks to ‘‘map’’ unknown, wild, and feminized terrain. Certainly the sensuous body is not lost on Rich or standpoint theorists more broadly, but to undertake a rigorous excavation of individualism within feminist thought entails dropping into the pockets of knowledge production that revert to its logic. If ‘‘theory’’ itself is already encoded through a language of verification, contingent upon the vision of the privileged one(s), then certainly the conditions of knowing must be radically reimagined as a function of belonging. I am grateful to an anonymous nwsa reviewer for suggesting I unpack the ‘‘status of visuality’’ in Rich’s work. 8 I have witnessed this condition among many white women who both seek and fear alliance with women of color (and women of color who fear women of color). Sometimes the disembarkation/arrival at alliance falters because the

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white woman becomes mired in the fears of her own privilege; sometimes she is rejected at the point of arrival by women of color, suspicious of her desire; sometimes she remains too tightly bound to the colonial shore and buckles under the weight of its logics; she retreats from alliance at a critical juncture, when the woman of color needs her most. Trust, once lost, will likely not be regained when the woman of color encounters the breaking point of a white woman’s tenuous solidarity. It leaves her dangling in a haunting pose she seeks to leave behind. 9 The slippage among terms performed by the ‘‘/’’ suggests the inseparability among them sought in this articulation of belonging, perhaps sloppily mapped as bodies/living together/in recognition of the sacred/honoring belonging/for the purpose of social justice. ‘‘The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world,’’ writes Nancy, is that of the ‘‘dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community,’’ a dissolution coevally produced alongside communism’s—the latter an ‘‘emblem of the desire to discover or rediscover a place of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical dominion, and thereby beyond such wasting away of liberty, of speech, or of simple happiness as comes about whenever these become subjugated to the exclusive order of privatization’’ (1991, 1). The dissolution, then, is multivalent: spiritual, communal, experiential, political—as must be its (re)formation. 10 No absolute determinations can be made in response to such questions, since the transgressive potential of ulterior modes of belonging are always in process, always arising across lines of uneven di√erence. The compulsion to assimilate must not be equated with the desire to slum. Gayatri Spivak (1990) has noted that desire produced in the ‘‘third world’’ for the ‘‘first’’ as a respond to a ‘‘command,’’ while the colonial desire for the other flows with the direction of power. Anoop Nayak argues in his study of ‘‘wiggers, wannabes, and white negroes’’ that such relations of crossing might be thought of in terms of their potentiality and danger: ‘‘a sustained engagement [by white youth] with black culture through the medium of dance or basketball can open up rare avenues through which white youth may come to meet other black acquaintances’’ (2003, 135). For Nayak, initial contact, often driven by ‘‘fetishization, projection, and longing,’’ can give way to more ‘‘lasting friendships,’’ which can become a site of white youth becoming ‘‘gradually educated.’’ Whose responsibility, burden, and accountability is at stake in ‘‘educating’’ must be carefully navigated because the ‘‘command’’ is a function of uneven relations of ruling. But there is something of the a√ective ties that form in these friendships that provides potentially transformative relational grounds. 11 But such modes of belonging are also rewritten by people such as my friend and former student Erin Rand—now ‘‘he,’’ formerly ‘‘she,’’ not because he’s had surgery or hormones, but because neither pronoun quite fits, so he

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chooses the one that confuses assumptions about masculinity and femininity that condition belonging (Rand, personal communication, September 27, 1993). 12 By privileging belonging over consciousness in this reinscription of differential consciousness I seek to frame consciousness itself as a collective process. That is how we imagine and make sense of our experiences; likewise, the range of experiences that we are likely to undergo are functions of belonging. 13 It should be noted that Sandoval’s modes of consciousness arise out of the experiences of women-of-color struggles to build coalition within various civil rights groups. Thus they assume both an oppositional consciousness and a particular social location (U.S.–third world woman). By framing consciousness in terms of belonging, the shift I propose retains the resistive qualities of these components as a framework for viewing di√erential belonging. Yet I seek to open up the field of di√erential belonging to include a wide range of social locations. There is no reason, for instance, that a ‘‘straight white man’’ cannot navigate di√erential belonging. And were he to do so, I would suggest that his identity would become destabilized by virtue of his resistive belongings. 14 ‘‘Feminism’’ is a formation continually in process. Its production as an inclusive space is contingent upon the imaginary of those involved in struggles under its name. When feminists become blocked around issues of power, it is in large part a question of a blocking of the feminist imaginary—perhaps being too stuck in the head, too invested in hegemonic forms of power, or a lack of literacy in the realms of the heart. In the poetics of Lorde (1984, 123): We have chosen each other And the edge of each others battles The war is the same If we lose Someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet If we win There is no telling We seek beyond history For a new and more possible meeting. 15 The theories and narratives that mark such transitions reveal the relational nature of subject formation (see Bulkin et al. 1984, Frankenberg 1993, Frankenberg 1996, Harris 2000, Moon 1999, Russo 1991, Segrest 1994, Thompson 2000). 16 Segrest (2000) reads Mary Boykin Chestnut’s diary to locate an uncanny moment of the anaesthetic aesthetic. Chestnut encounters a slave woman on the street, whom she describes as: ‘‘a mad woman taken from her husband and children. Of course she was mad, or she would not have given her grief words in that public place. Her keepers were along. What she said was rational enough,

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pathetic, at times heart-rendering. It excited me so I quietly took opium. It enables me to retain every particle of mind or sense or brains I have, and so quiets my nerves that I can calmly reason and take rational views of things otherwise maddening’’ (165–66). Segrest writes of the heartfelt response that the scene evokes in Chestnut, but that this longing toward the other (becoming-other that arises in through their spatial proximity) is quickly contained through the ingestion of opium. The drug allows her to remain ‘‘rational’’ in the face of an ‘‘otherwise maddening’’ situation. While her response is empathic, Segrest notes, Chestnut has ‘‘neither the resources, nor the courage, and resorts to opium to short-circuit the transformative process. Seeing implies action, unless the paths of perception are blocked. Action expands perceptions because it shifts and enlarges our point of view and our capacity and motivation to process bigger chunks of reality’’ (166). The transformative process that is ‘‘shortcircuited’’ here is conditioned by hegemonic belonging. Chestnut’s belonging—to white U.S. culture, to white femininity—binds her through the imposition of various regulations: to not speak out; to remain ‘‘rational,’’ which is literally disembodied; to remain separate from the slave woman, even though she identifies with her grief. The costs to both Chestnut and the unnamed slave woman are incalculable and need not be ‘‘ranked’’ (Moraga 1981), but the bounds of belonging prohibit the possibilities for addressing and altering them. 17 Segrest distinguishes her assignation as a ‘‘race traitor’’ from the work of Ignatiev and others within what has come to be known under this sign within whiteness studies. The latter type of work, critiqued for its investment in white injury (see Wiegman 1999a), volunteerism, and (white) masculinism, is distinct from Segrest’s gesture at least in part because Segrest was assigned this label by white supremacist groups against whom she was agitating in her antiKlan organizing years (see Segrest 1994). CHAPTER 2: BRIDGE INSCRIPTIONS 1 The names of people referred to in their stories are also changed to protect their anonymity. 2 I hyphenate the word ‘‘her-self ’’ to call attention to the constructed nature of the writing subject and the subjects that she constructs. The hyphen decouples the ‘‘self ’’ from her natural insertion into the text, in an e√ort to underscore the textuality of the ‘‘self,’’ to render the power relations constitutive of ‘‘her’’ palpable. The hyphen, then, denaturalizes the self as an achievement prior to the politics of relation by attending to the relational production of the ‘‘self ’’ within the stories these women share about their alliance interactions: listening for how they stage their own identities in relation to others, how they frame and render others intelligible, what sites of belonging discipline and interpellate them.

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3 His study of ‘‘Paradise,’’ a museum in London that focuses on the New Guinea Highlands, reveals a dynamic interchange between accountability and complicity at work in even the most reflexive e√orts to create an anticolonial museum space. A compelling moment that exposes this accountability/complicity interchange, and the politics of relation that constitute it, arises when tribal members honor the museum curator through the performance of a ‘‘beautification ceremony.’’ The ceremony reconfigures the museum collection as a ‘‘bride,’’ which, in turn, positions the curator as ‘‘groom.’’ This relational configuration forges a relational bond that compels accountability within and against the constraints of colonial complicity. While Cli√ord inscribes a circle of accountability around those immediately implicated within the power relations that constitute this (post)colonial exchange, this circle of relations may be too small to encompass the range of ‘‘consumers’’ of these tribal artifacts and those implicated through the politics of relation arranged by the ceremony. 4 What we define as ‘‘home’’ is paradoxically always changing as a result of the ebb and flow of global migrations and movements, and our relationship to them. In his book Modernity at Large (1996), Arjun Appadurai coins the term ‘‘ethnoscapes,’’ which he defines as the shifting landscape of culture that takes place as di√erent nationalities find their ‘‘home’’ in new lands, and how traditions are mutually influenced and changed across shifting geopolitical terrains. Thus the constitution of ‘‘home’’ is never innocent or isolated, but must be apprehended within global and historical relations of power. 5 The politics of representation at stake in the relationship between speaking for and knowing the other circulates across disciplinary boundaries as a productive trouble spot that remains an unresolved but nevertheless vital site of feminist, postcolonial, and critical ethnographic interrogation (see Alco√ 1995, Conquergood 1991, Geertz, Foyster 1990, Mani 1989, Mohanty 1991b). 6 This Bridge marks a point of departure for a productive formation of feminist theory under the rubric of ‘‘U.S. third world feminism,’’ which considers the ways women-of-color subjectivities and modes of resistance/survival are formed within and against the structuring force of U.S. empire (see Alexander and Mohanty 1997, Alexander et al. 2003, Anzaldúa and Keating 2002, Latina Feminist Group 2001, Mohanty et al. 1991, Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981). 7 Anzaldúa’s promptings arise at this postessentialist historical moment, in which the politics of identity that were necessary to forge in This Bridge Called My Back—where what was needed was a radical articulation of ‘‘woman of color’’ identity—encounters its limits in her e√orts to widen the circle of allies to engage the experiences of white women, men, and transgender people. The ‘‘home’’work accomplished in forging a ‘‘woman of color’’ identity in This Bridge becomes the basis of the ‘‘bridge’’ work of which we are capable in this bridge.

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8 In his introduction to A Subaltern Studies Reader Ranajit Guha (1997) calls for the need to conduct a historiography that recovers what is rendered silent in the dominant historical narrative. He compares this process to the work of the archeologist who examines traces and fragments of culture sedimented through power relations across time and space, and from these fragments reconstructs these submerged histories. Thus excavations attend to the nuanced positionings of the fragments of memory we can recover by placing them within a historical, political, and cultural context so that their meanings may be more fully decoded. 9 The tension over the relationship between consciousness and identity continues to provide a productive and yet risky negotiation as antiracist white feminist men and women are certainly influenced and shaped by women-ofcolor thought and experience, and hence may acquire a woman of color consciousness, and yet they are not ‘‘women of color’’ in terms of identity. Moya’s critique of Butler and Haraway begins to untangle the role of the body and the lived experience of oppression as sites that are potentially written over in too easy celebrations and appropriations of women-of-color consciousness (see Haraway 1997, Moya 2002). I depart from Moya, however, in arguing that white allies do gain a tangible ‘‘experience’’ of racism when living, working, and loving in deep and politicized connection with people of color. 10 Shefali Milczarek-Desai (2002) provides a point of entry for centering the relational practices of third world feminism in ways that create spaces for people who are not women of color to engage in such humanizing practices. She writes of ‘‘Third World feminism’’ not as ‘‘a categorization in which I would place certain women, but a labeling of certain actions ’’ (133). MilczarekDesai writes from the nexus of being neither ‘‘American’’ enough for U.S. Americans nor ‘‘Indian’’ enough for South Asian Indians. These categories cannot contain the relational experiences that arise from her hybridity. The action-based ‘‘third world feminism’’ that she evokes allows her to negotiate the contradictions of ‘‘rebellion’’ and ‘‘conformity’’ that constitute her mother’s and grandmother’s negotiations with power relations. ‘‘If what mattered,’’ she concludes, ‘‘were my actions and not the categories themselves, then I could resist certain traditional norms and still be Indian and I could embrace certain roles as an Indian woman and still be American’’ (2002, 133). Her emphasis on action challenges both the need to be ‘‘correct’’ that she encounters in Western feminism’s rejections (of marriage, familial structure, and traditional roles) and the rigid categories (Indian, American, woman) that cannot accommodate her contradictions. So for Milczarek-Desai third world feminism provides a point of departure for engaged action, not for the purpose of categorization, but to accommodate the complexities and contradictions that arise at the interface between oppression and privilege, self and other. 11 A rich body of literature underscores the complex power dynamics

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through which space is constructed and managed in ways that naturalize the mobility and access for some over and against the forced mobility, immobility, and/or exclusion of others (see Brady 2002, Massey 1994, Mohanram 1996, Ó Tuathial 1996). 12 Like the time when a friend of mine shaved her hair o√ and I showed my ‘‘a√ection’’ by rubbing the top of her short-clipped head. ‘‘Don’t ever rub the top of a black person’s head,’’ she told me. That is a historically dominant gesture, akin to calling black men ‘‘boy.’’ White men would rub the heads of black boys, she told me. Framing such ‘‘failures’’ as opportunities to learn how to bridge helps us move. 13 Am I acting in alliance with the ‘‘subject’’ when it is Jo Carillo’s ironic anger that sparks me as I’m writing about this woman? Can anger function within an alliance frame? Audre Lorde inspires us to learn to listen to the rhythm of each other’s anger. The work within a bridge methodology may entail locating moments of anger within ourselves and those we encounter in the field. 14 The contradictory terms productive of Cheryl’s positionality (as both ‘‘aggressive’’ and as ‘‘positive’’), then, leave me unable to provide a coherent account for it without reference to the broader discourses through which racialized femininities emerge (see chapter 3). For instance, my awareness of the ‘‘controlling images’’ (Collins 2000) through which black femininity is decoded, coupled with my own sense of Cheryl as warm and engaging woman, made me suspicious of the white women who rendered her femininity intelligible through narratives of black female ‘‘aggression.’’ But to hear another white woman who (at least in the context of our conversation established an investment in Cheryl) found her ‘‘warm’’ provided an unexpected warrant for Cheryl’s account. This is not to suggest that I sought or encountered the ‘‘truth’’ of the matter, but that the spontaneous interconnections among these stories and the encounters they signify reveal something of the racialized and gendered terrain of this ‘‘field’’ that might be called ‘‘academic feminism.’’ 15 For a brief genealogy of this term, see how it has circulated in whiteness studies (see Hurtado 1996, Moon 1999, Rich 1979). 16 This is not to suggest that the consequences for transgressing whiteness are the same for di√erently racialized bodies, or even that the same transgressive modes are available to people occupying di√erently racialized bodies. Indeed, the above section suggests that white women were more likely to find commonality with me, and thus ‘‘trust me,’’ more than they would a more visually marked woman of color. My white privilege, then, sanctioned my relational transgression. 17 This term captures the ironic pairing between color-blind racism and white social power as a coupling that frames white racial discourse. Colorblind racism, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2006) argues, is an ideology that engages NOTES

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racism in an indirect, ‘‘now you see it, now you don’t’’ (25) discursive form. This tacit agreement to hedge power-attendant conversational modes serves as a condition of white belonging and white influence. This ‘‘influency’’ becomes the relational condition that enables white influence. (Thank you, Justin Faerber, for noting this verbal double-play.) 18 Because power-evasive discourse conditions white belonging, women of color may deploy this rhetorical form to make their communication, and hence themselves, intelligible to whites. But, as with Donna’s illustration, this mode of communication downplays her racial fluency, making her ‘‘nonfluent’’ as she works to accommodate the illogics of color-blind racism. I distinguish ‘‘nonfluency’’ from ‘‘influency’’ because color-blind discourse, even when deployed by women of color, retains and strengthens the influence, or social power, of whites. CHAPTER 3: ‘‘WOMEN’’ ON THE INSIDE 1 The debate has often been defined more around feminism’s ambiguous insider/outsider status in the U.S. academy than around questions of racial di√erence and power imbalances; these latter questions have been raised by women of color, but not necessarily integrated into the debate (Aisenberg and Harrington 1998, Bannerji et al. 1992, Boxer 1998, Chilly Collective 1995, Crowley 1990, de Lauretis 1986, Gubar 1998, Looser and Kaplan 1997, Social Justice Group 2000, Stanton and Stewart 1998, Turner et al. 2000, Wiegman 2002a). 2 For a more extensive critique, see feminist-of-color theorization (Alexander and Mohanty 1997, Bannerji et al. 1992, Kaplan and Grewal 1994, Lee 2000, Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, Yee 1997). 3 ‘‘Institutional claims made within ‘diversity’ discourses become the claims within which people of color are understood,’’ Jacqui Alexander (2005, 133) writes. These discourses come to ‘‘represent people of color,’’ serving as the mediating field of intelligibility through which the racialized academic subject is decoded. While such discourses appear ‘‘benign’’ on the surface, they become ‘‘quite aggressive’’ when their representational apparatus is challenged, as in the case of Alexander’s participation in collective struggle to redefine institutional norms at the New School. Alexander’s excavation of her case of institutional racism, as it arises at the interface of sexism/homophobia, signals the intense scrutiny placed on the speaking positions of women of color and, by extension, the tendency of white institutional practices to define and erase women of color in terms that serve the institution’s needs for ‘‘diversity,’’ while maintaining an investment in white supremacy. Thus Rita’s evocation of ‘‘jungle fever’’ marks the abject racist/sexist cultural script that serves as the unspoken subtext of her intelligibility within the framework of the white male academic gaze. In this way, the path to the ‘‘inside’’ of academia’s interior is

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often foreclosed to women of color whose speaking positions are deeply compromised by the simultaneous assertion and disavowal of white supremacy coupled with compulsory heterosexuality. 4 Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1985) notion of ‘‘homosociality,’’ which exposes the subtext of male same-gender desire as constitutive of the male bonds through which power is transferred ‘‘between men,’’ I strive to underscore how white women materialize within a ‘‘heterosocial’’ system as both objects of male tra≈cking and as subjects participating in the exchange. 5 Rachel Lee incisively analyzes the ways in which women’s studies courses such as ‘‘Women of Color in the U.S.’’ function as a ‘‘racial alibi’’ by mining a flattened notion of ‘‘women of color’’ expertise to teach such courses and localizing ‘‘women of color’’ knowledge within such courses in ways that contain third world feminisms. Through the ‘‘inclusion’’ of such courses, women-of-color feminisms and ‘‘women of color’’ as interchangeable group members occupy a space simultaneously ‘‘inside and outside’’ of the institution. She notes that the category ‘‘woman of color’’ gets dispersed within this academic setting through a conflation of the racialized body of the instructor (always a woman of color) and the content of the course. This conflation not only localizes a particular form of knowledge within a particularly racialized body, but also produces Lee, an Asian American woman with a particular set of cultural and racialized historicities and experiences, as a ‘‘woman of color.’’ Thus she ‘‘becomes’’ a ‘‘woman of color’’ in this institutional context. This inclusion (re)assures women’s studies leadership that they are ‘‘progressive’’ and that they are addressing the ‘‘women of color’’ issue. Yet this gesture prevents them from having to fundamentally reconfigure either the feminist canon upon which such departments rely or the faculty bodies that constitute them. This inclusion also ‘‘serves notice of the field’s diversification and awareness of its own faults,’’ or racially motivated failures, signifying a wider (white) feminist anxiety that women of color are ‘‘perceived as too much ‘inside’ the field’’ (Lee 2000, 86). 6 Cheryl Harris (1993) argues that whiteness is ‘‘property’’—that its assumed ‘‘normalcy’’ conditions the material relations produced by the legal system. Unearthing the regressive political work of the U.S. Supreme Court as it intervened on behalf of whites through a series of decisions that nullified a≈rmative action policies viewed as ‘‘detrimental’’ to whites, Harris extends the field of whiteness studies beyond questions of identity formation to consider the materiality of whiteness. George Lipsitz builds on insights o√ered by Harris and others to argue that whiteness functions as ‘‘an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity’’ (1998, vii). Lipsitz defines ‘‘investment’’ as the ways in which ‘‘social and cultural forces encourage white people to expend time and energy on the creation and re-creation of whiteness’’ (vii). His analysis calls NOTES

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attention to the contradiction between the active and often conscious decisions that whites make with regard to race that are accompanied by the disavowal that ‘‘race matters’’ (Frankenberg 1993). He defines ‘‘possessive’’ as the ‘‘relationship between whiteness and asset accumulation in our society’’ (viii). His work clarifies the ‘‘so what’’ to the normative status of whiteness by figuring white privilege as a set of actively maintained social and material practices that translate into material advantage. Examining this connection reveals white supremacy as ‘‘less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility’’ (viii). 7 Ruth Frankenberg’s observation that the ‘‘racialness of constructions of masculinity and femininity’’ within discourses of interracial relationships reveals the ‘‘impact of racism both on white women’s experience and worldview and on social organization more broadly’’ (1993, 71). Her analysis of white women’s discourse about and especially against interracial relations demonstrates the historical, cultural, and structural dimensions of antimiscegenation discourses as productive of racialized, gendered, classed, and (hetero)sexed identity formation. Yet Frankenberg’s analysis of interracial heterosexuality produces this intersection only against the backdrop of racialized di√erence. This focus overlooks the ways in which whiteness and heterosexuality intersect to produce ‘‘white femininity’’ in proximity to white masculinity. 8 For white women the question was, ‘‘Would you compare your career advancement as relatively challenging, or has it been more smooth, compared to what you know of the experiences of your white male counterparts?’’; then they were asked how it ‘‘compared to women of color.’’ I asked women of color the same question with regard to white men and white women. 9 While white women have been the primary beneficiaries of a≈rmative action, the discourse surrounding its demise has largely been articulated through the category of racial (seen as ‘‘racial preference’’), not gender, di√erence. A further, and related, point is that white women have not been vocal in defending a≈rmative action (see Wise 2001). 10 In spite of this class di√erence, their current institutional positionings are similar, signaling the ways in which racial and heterosocial similarity can overwhelm class distinctions in the production of white female subjectivities in the academy. 11 These ‘‘versings’’ manifested within the relational space each woman shared with me, and I seek to inscribe their stories here neither transparently, nor innocently. My inscription of these ‘‘versings’’ is staged by me at so many levels—formulating the questions to which they respond, and which they rewrite; the theoretical framework into which I insert their voices; the historical frameworks on which I draw; the normativity of white femininity in which I strive to and fail to decenter in these inscriptions. In this sense, these reversals

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arise through a set of relations and inscriptions that aim toward transracial feminist alliances. 12 As in Visweswaran’s study of ‘‘betrayal’’ among anticolonial Indian activist women (1994), in which one woman’s agency is asserted against the backdrop of another woman’s lack of agency, the self-stagings in which subjects engage are not innocent. They are inseparable from betrayal. This is not to suggest, however, that such moves are not acts of alliance. They are, rather, indicative of the ways that subjects construct their agency, experience, and identities through the relational social scripts available to them. Indeed, I argue that critiques of the systems of domination to which other women submit themselves must be understood as alliance gestures. CHAPTER 4: ZERO-SUM FEMINISM 1 By virtue of the multiple forms of oppression that get played out in the struggles women of color face in academia, ‘‘institutional change’’ constitutes for them a very di√erent set of issues than it does for white women. In Michele’s account we see that the struggle to hold her job becomes the most salient experiential context formative of her alliances and the feminism in which she engages. 2 For critical examinations of the relationship between academic institutionality and progressive politics see Geist 1999, Grossberg 1997, Looser and Kaplan 1997, Nelson 1999, Scott 1997, Spivak 1992, Wiegman 2002a. 3 Contemporary feminist scholarship calls attention to the institutionalization of ‘‘feminism’’ through the emergence of the structure of women’s studies as a ‘‘discipline,’’ with all of the requirements that such a formation entails: an object of study, a set of intellectual requirements for students, some criteria that set this discipline apart from others, and more broadly, a set of authorizing principles through which the boundaries of women’s studies may be asserted and indeed policed. Each of these disciplinary requirements poses a series of politico-intellectual conundrums for ‘‘feminism’’: the category ‘‘woman’’ that would serve as the object of study has been deconstructed, decentered, and multiplied; the intellectual requirements are often found to be arbitrary; the overdetermination of subject formation by race, class, gender, sexuality, and national origin tends to blur the distinction between women’s studies and ethnic studies among other disciplines; and the speaking authority of those who would determine the boundaries of women’s studies becomes a site of critical inquiry in and of itself (Brown 1995). Women’s studies journals, such as Feminist Studies and di√erences, have been devoted to examining these conundrums. As guest editor of di√erences, Joan Wallach Scott asks in her introduction (1997): ‘‘Have women become so thoroughly integrated into the world of higher education (as participants, in the curriculum) that women’s studies has outlived its initial purpose? Or is women’s studies the only guarantee that

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whatever improvements have occurred will endure? And if that is the case, is the women’s studies that was institutionalized in the 1970’s and 80’s still e√ective for accomplishing that end, still on the cutting edge of theory and politics?’’ (ii). The history of women’s studies as an institutionalized forum of feminist inquiry productively frames the role of authorization within locales of feminist praxis. While second-wave feminist articulations of power largely arose out of a space of institutional marginality, contemporary ‘‘feminism’’ increasingly carries institutional legitimacy in a variety of academic contexts. For instance, many women’s studies undergraduate and even graduate programs are already in place and others are being designed, feminists occupy powerful positions within their institutions, there exist a variety of publishing outlets for feminist scholarship, and feminists are infiltrating their own disciplines (Scott 1997). While the feminists who have fought these battles must be acknowledged for their achievements, assertions by white second-wave feminists that these structures are the direct result of their own struggles frame ‘‘feminism’’ as belonging more to some than to others (Looser and Kaplan 1997). 4 The multiplicity through which the Bengali writer Mahasveta Devi signifies ‘‘India,’’ the ‘‘bounded space’’ of tribal existence, and the doubly erased body of Douloti as it is linked to global flows of capital reveal the multiple registers of di√erence through which Douloti is oppressed: within the intimate bounds of family whose bonded labor requires her prostitution; that as such, her body occupies the ‘‘last instance’’ of global capital; and as a function of the unresolved ‘‘women’s question’’ within anticolonial nationalism. 5 Chela Sandoval, drawing upon Gayatri Spivak’s articulation of ‘‘hegemonic feminism,’’ writes: ‘‘From the beginning of what was known as the second wave of the women’s movement, US feminists of color have claimed feminisms at odds with those developed by US white women’’ (2000, 45). 6 Wendy Brown’s States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995) illustrates this point. While Brown explicitly critiques the ‘‘exclusionary’’ function of the ‘‘identity politics’’ of (white) Marxist feminist Nancy Hartsock, she implicitly links her identity critique to the African American feminist Patricia Williams in a footnote. The footnote displaces the object of her critique, replacing Hartsock with Williams, the safer white feminist target with its more dangerous counterpoint: black feminist thought. Racialized di√erence, then, serves as the silent subtext to her text, a strategy that ignores and, by extension, implicitly undermines the ground for third world feminist theory and praxis. For instance, Brown’s alternative—to create ‘‘postmodern political spaces’’ and reclaim ‘‘the pleasures of public argument’’ as mechanisms to ‘‘mobilize a collective discourse’’—reify, through their normative production of space and voice, the power relations inherent in the cultural production of ‘‘public space’’ (Carrillo Rowe 2000). Kadi’s reminder that ‘‘every space lets you know who is welcome and who is not’’ (2003, 541) is one that Brown’s

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argument overlooks. Or, as Emma Pérez writes in reference to a similar move by a white feminist, ‘‘I ask, pleasurable for whom?’’ (1998, 94). For whom is public argument even possible, let alone pleasurable? The subject of feminist inquiry is flattened, di√erence is erased, and the e√ect is to (re)center the privileged feminist subject—not a coalitional subject, but an exclusionary one. 7 This problematic arises in the work of Joan Scott’s well-known essay, ‘‘Experience’’ (1998), in which she critiques the theoretical production of ‘‘experience’’ as deployed by theorists of di√erence as ‘‘uncontestable evidence’’ and ‘‘foundational’’ for truth claims. While she calls such theorists to contextualize and specify the discursive conditions for experience, her own text conflates racial, sexual, class forms of di√erence in her analysis of E. P. Thompson’s ‘‘essentialist’’ class analysis. ‘‘This use of experience has the same foundational status,’’ she argues, ‘‘if we substitute women or African-American or lesbian or homosexual for working-class’’ (63, emphasis added). As with Brown’s (1995) text, Scott’s critical object is a privileged author, but the critique slides through the flattening of di√erence to land on feminist-of-color theorists. In moves such as these not only does she lose sight of the specificity of di√erence, but also the potential for a theory of transracial alliance (that critiques the ideological production of di√erence) is confounded by an implicit and underdeveloped critique of feminist theories of di√erence. 8 Perhaps it is not the case that experience is no longer accessible to modern (wo)man, but rather that experience itself has become consolidated through discourses of oppression and privilege. Indeed, ‘‘modern (wo)man’’ longs for something that counts as ‘‘experience’’ (whether it be thrill seeking through extreme sports or drug use, truth seeking through meditation or prayer, or dramatizing the mundane to take our attention away from the crisis of recolonization). ‘‘I bleed just to know I’m alive,’’ is the refrain of one popular song. This paradox returns us to Segrest’s insight that ‘‘in gaining power, whites lose comfort of the nonmaterial kind’’ (2002, 189). It means that the work of regaining that which has been lost must be mindfully executed. 9 Megan’s interracial identity suggests that the politics of belonging that are circumscribed within whiteness are more salient to consciousness formation than identity itself. 10 This is not to say that women of color are inherently oriented toward such relationships, or that white women are biologically destined for institutional power, but that the ideologies at work within these definitions arise within the institutionalized and racialized logics of belonging. CHAPTER 5: POWER LINES

If ‘‘feminism’’ is a formation continually in process, its production as an inclusive space is contingent upon the imaginary of those involved in struggles 1

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under its name. Audre Lorde reminds us that if our feminism fails this time, it is a failure of the imagination. When feminists become blocked around issues of power, it is in large part a question of a blocking of the feminist imaginary— perhaps being too stuck in the head, too invested in hegemonic forms of power, or a lack of literacy in the realms of the heart. In the words of Lorde: We have chosen each other And the edge of each others battles The war is the same If we lose Someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet If we win There is no telling We seek beyond history For a new and more possible meeting. (1984, 123) My reference to a ‘‘more possible’’ feminism is inspired by Lorde’s vision for a ‘‘new and more possible meeting.’’ I would suggest that the kind of ‘‘meeting’’ she envisions is the condition of possibility for that ‘‘new and more possible feminism’’ to emerge. 2 This and other readings in this chapter arise out of a collaborative, transracial alliance devoted to the political project of ‘‘moving locations.’’ The project manifests itself in the form of a cluster issue of nwsa Journal (17.2), a testament to our belonging. I am grateful to my allies for the conversations and for the pieces they produced for the context they provide for my own thinking, for enabling my theorization-in-community. 3 This is not to suggest that white women necessarily hold institutional power or that women of color naturally possess ‘‘consciousness’’ or ‘‘community.’’ The locations of the players may not fall so neatly along these power lines. Nonetheless it seems vital to risk essentialism to gesture in the direction of an expansive feminist future that strives to reflexively and productively navigate its institutionalized status vis-à-vis its inclusivity. 4 As the women of this study suggest, woman-of-color critiques of white feminism’s exclusionary practices and theories are a site of necessary and vital struggle (see Bannerji 1995, Bulkin et al. 1984, Combahee River Collective 1983, Haraway 1988, hooks 1995, Lorde 1984, Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, Rich 1994, Sandoval 1991, Visweswaran 1994). 5 ‘‘Translation’’ in and of itself is always a problematic notion, raising questions of fidelity and intelligibility across power lines (Sakai 1997). The ‘‘translations’’ I reference here, then, are not aimed at providing a factual account, but to build a story that I, engaged within the stories of others, sense may point in some potentially productive directions.

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241

INDEX

Academic feminism, 2–4, 7–8, 18– 19; ab-use of privilege structures by white women in, 194–95, 197; academic labor and, 142; alliances between women and men of color, 123–24; alliances with white men and, 94, 97, 100–103, 107–9, 112, 116, 120–21, 126; ambivalence towards, 115; bridge methodology and, 58–59; career advancement and, 100; discretion and, 156; failure of transracial alliance in, 145–48; ‘‘family ties’’ in, 124, 127; feminist alliances and, 130; gatekeeping function of publishing in, 31; hegemonic feminism and, 166– 67; heterosociality and, 101–3, 107–9, 121; institutionalization of, 8–9, 131–36, 166; institutional marginality in, 154–55; institutional power and, 97, 149–50; nontokenizing relationships in, 193; outsiders-within status and, 112–13, 127–28, 156; production of, 166; race and, 20–21; racialized di√erence in, 59, 142, 177; racial silence in, 93; refusing subject positions and, 188; relational challenges between women of color and white women in, 146–54, 194–95; risk taking alliances and, 160; segregated alliances in, 177– 78; transracial alliances in, 191–94; white family trope and, 100–101; white feminist allies of women of color in, 193–94; white feminist

hegemony within, 93, 172; whiteness and, 142–43; white space in, 142–46; white women’s academic inclusion and exclusion, 82; white women’s allies in, 139–42, 145, 148–49; women of color and, 86– 87, 112–13, 115–16, 120–21, 156; women of color’s academic inclusion and exclusion, 82; women of color’s access to, 154; women of color’s alliances in, 160–61; zerosum alliances in, 148–54. See also Feminism Adela (interviewee), 148–50, 172 A≈rmative action, 100 ‘‘African American Women in Higher Education’’ (King et al.), 198 Agamben, Giorgio, 137 Alarcón, Norma, 135 Albrecht, Lisa, 5, 44, 151–52, 188 Alco√, Linda, 157–58 Alexander, Jacqui, 21, 55–56, 122 Althusser, Louis, 26 Amanda (interviewee), 73–75, 90 American studies, 15 Anderson, Benedict, 174 Andrea (interviewee), 47, 50, 52, 56, 67, 77–79, 86, 120, 126, 171–73, 192–93 Angela (interviewee), 67, 87, 124– 25, 161–65, 175 Antiracist white feminists, 75–77, 84, 127; critiques of feminist alliances, 134 Antisubordination theory, 192–93

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 5, 15, 29, 54, 57; on arrebatos, 22 Arrebatos, 22, 137 Bannerji, Himani, 134 Barbara (interviewee), 157 Barthes, Roland, 32, 46 ‘‘Becoming other,’’ 190, 197 Belonging, 10, 16–17, 23, 25, 32; academic, 74; antiracist, 75–76; bodies in motion and, 35; cartographies of, 34, 36–37; colonializing conditions of, 33, 186; constituative processes in, 28; experience of racism and, 87; hegemonic belonging, 36, 38, 41; heterosexuality and, 36–40, 46; heterosociality and, 102–3; home and, 53; normalizing discourses of, 38– 39; outside the bounds of white, 196; politics of relation and, 28; power and, 38; radical, 198; relational conditions in, 68; in research contexts, 68, 89; spatial and a√ective components in, 34– 35; transformative modes of, 40; transracial alliances and, 17, 45– 46; white modes of, 30, 68, 72–73, 106; whiteness and, 36–40, 46; women of color and, 87 Bereano, Nancy, 180–81 Betrayal, 182–90 ‘‘Betrayal: An Analysis in Three Acts’’ (Visweswaran), 80 Black femininity, 115–16, 119, 191; sexuality and, 117–18; white femininity and, 186 Black feminists, 60, 65, 116; institutional power of, 96; white feminists and, 161 Blackness, 72 Black women, 61, 183; politics of

244

INDEX

black women’s hair, 61–62; tension with white women and, 182; transracial alliances and, 191. See also Women of color Blood, Bread, and Poetry (Rich), 29, 31, 38 Brewer, Rose, 5, 44, 151–52 Bridge methodology, 14, 17, 48–51, 53, 56, 80, 180; academic feminisms and, 58–59; as engaged action, 56; homework/bridgework/fieldwork constellation and, 54–55, 57, 59, 91; interrelated relational moments in, 57–58, 63; as labor of love, 56–57; relational positioning of researcher in, 67; transracial alliance based approach to, 77–79 ‘‘Bridge Poem, The’’ (Rushin), 17 Bridges of Power (Albrecht and Brewer), 5, 44 Brown, Wendy, 136 Bruce Pratt, Minnie, 190–91, 196–97 Butler, Judith, 2, 6, 22, 44–45, 70, 136 Career advancement, 100, 108, 139, 152–53, 155 Carillo, Jo, 62–63 Carol (interviewee), 93–94, 96, 100– 103, 106, 108, 122, 139, 141–42, 144, 148–50, 169–70, 172; 105 Cheryl (interviewee), 77–79, 157– 59, 161, 163, 172, 175, 185, 193 Chicana falsa authors, 15–18; fragmented location of, 25 Civil Rights, 137 Clara (interviewee), 163, 184–85 Cli√ord, James, 48, 57 Clinamen, 27, 35, 46, 49 ‘‘Coalitional conciousness-raising,’’ 197

‘‘Coalition Politics’’ (Johnson Reagon), 5 Collective processes, 10, 15 Collins, Patricia Hill, 112 Colonialism, 186; transracial alliance and, 122 Colonial modernity, 2, 49, 186; death of experience in, 137; power lines and, 177 Colonial subjectivity, 32–33 ‘‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’’ (Rich), 38–39 D’Amico-Samuels, Deborah, 57 Davis, Angela, 61–62 Davis, Dawn Rae, 49, 186 Deborah (interviewee), 68–74, 82– 84, 146–47, 150, 152, 160, 165, 169, 171, 174–75, 180 de la Garza, Andrea, 82 de la Tierra, Tatiana, 112 de Lauretis, Teresa, 133 Di√erential belonging, 15, 28, 33, 36, 39–40, 43–45, 123, 179; coalitional subjects and, 41–42; disengagement and, 114, 119; relational conditions and, 57; women of color and, 173 Di√erential consciousness, 15, 40, 164 Dominguez, Virginia, 49 Donna (interviewee), 60–62, 87–89, 118–22, 156, 162–63, 167, 182–84, 191, 193 Elam, Diane, 6–7 Emily (interviewee), 65, 82–83, 141, 170, 174–75 Ethnographic exchange, 48–51, 53, 64; feminist, 53–54 Fanon, Franz, 32, 186 Feminism: academic, 2–4; a√ective

production of, 170; betrayal and innocence and, 182–90; centrality of whiteness in, 171–72; competing definitions of, 166, 174; different conceptions of between women of color and white women, 130; feminist alliances and, 129– 30; gender-based alliance formation and, 166, 168–71, 174, 177; guilt and, 177; hegemonic white, 135–36, 166–69; institutionalization of, 94–95, 131–36; institutional power and, 167–68; intersectional approach to, 166–67, 197; limits of liberal, 168–69; marginality and privilege and, 165; politics of experience and, 133; production of as alliance function, 129–30, 133–34; racialized institutionalization of, 133; racism in, 58; as site of struggle, 167; U.S. academic, 6; visions for future anterior, 178–79; white women and, 177; white women’s unproblematized notion of ‘‘women’’ and, 169; women of color’s critique of hegemonic, 171, 177; women of color’s vision of, 173; work of selfrespresentation in, 189; zero-sum alliances and, 168. See also Academic feminism Feminist alliances, 1–2, 43; academic, 13, 64, 130; academic labor and, 140, 142; alliances with white men and, 94, 97–106; bridge methodology and, 58; communicative gestures in, 80; competing notions of between women of color and white women, 130; criticism of allies and, 161, 163; critiques of by third world and antirascist feminists, 134–35; di√erential INDEX

245

Feminist alliances (continued) consciousness and, 164; failure in, 163; feminism’s institutionalism and, 93–94; feminist theory production and, 129–30, 133–34, 165; formation through multiple power lines, 164–65; gender-based feminism and, 169–70; genderexclusive theories, 135; incompatible views of, 163, 174; intersectional approach to, 164–65, 167; intimacy and institution and, 129, 140–42; listening to anger and, 190–91; meanings of for interviewees, 60; methodology of, 48; pain and anger in, 164–65; politics of relation and, 3–13; politics of speaking in, 157–59; power and intimacy in, 69–70, 151, 163; power-evasiveness in, 163; between races, 8; in research contexts, 66–79, 91; resources in, 180– 81; risk-taking and, 159–60; segregated, 130, 138, 165–66, 170, 174; social justice and, 165; subject of, 3–4; superficialness in, 161–63; transracial, 3–5, 12–13, 18–19; white men and, 99; white women’s institutional power and, 138–54; women of color’s conceptions of, 154–65; women’s stories of, 17– 23; zero-sum alliances, 148–54, 160, 165, 168, 170, 180 Feminists of privilege: alliance impulse, 136–37; feminist theory production and, 134; marginalized groups and, 136; nonexperience of, 137 Feminist theory production, 165; alliance formation and, 136–38, 165; third world and antirascist feminists critiques of, 134–35;

246

INDEX

feminists of privilege and, 134–36; gender-exclusive theories, 135; hegemonic white feminism and, 135–36; racialized di√erence in, 134–36; racial silence in, 135; third world feminism and, 135; transracial alliance and, 134 Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Visweswaran), 80 Fieldwork, 57; of author, 59; homework/bridgework/fieldwork constellation and, 54–55, 57, 59, 91; interrelated relational moments in, 57–58 Frankenberg, Ruth, 37, 43, 67–68, 80, 137, 195 Freedom as responsibility, 187–88 Geertz, Cli√ord, 51 Gender: gender subordination theory, 99, 109, 123; white women’s undi√erentiated notion of, 169. See also Feminism; White women; Women of color Grewal, Inderpal, 4 Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, 96 Hall, Stuart, 10, 144 Hammonds, Evelynn M., 96, 117 Haraway, Donna, 136 Harris, Cheryl, 171 Harris, Hilary, 104 Heather (interviewee), 72–74, 139, 143, 168, 174, 181 Heterosexuality, 115, 119; belonging and, 36–40, 46; compulsory heterosexuality, 38–39, 108 Heterosociality, 101–5; institutional power and, 97; radicalized femininities and, 109–26; sexual identity and, 106–8; transmission of power and, 126; transracial alliance and, 107; white femininity and,

121; women of color and, 97, 115, 121; women of color’s resistance to, 118 Hirsch, Marianne, 136 Homework, 53–54; of author, 58; homework/bridge work/fieldwork constellation and, 54–55, 57, 59, 91; interrelated relational moments in, 57–58 hooks, bell, 31, 33, 116, 166 Hurtado, Aída, 13, 37–38, 94–95, 110, 146; gender subordination theory and, 99, 109, 123; penjedo game, 183; on white solidarity, 144 Imagined communities, 174–75, 192–93 Institutionalization, 94–95 Institutional power, 7, 16, 20; in academic feminism, 8–9, 150; access to for women of color vs. white women, 84, 130, 154, 166, 180; access to white men and, 99–100; black women’s studies and, 96; feminist alliances and, 138–54; feminist bridge work and, 180; feminist production and, 167–68; heterosociality and, 97, 101, 124– 26; idealized white femininity and, 97; institutional marginality of women of color and, 154; interiority and, 96; uneven access to, 94–96, 132, 172; white women and, 138–54; women of color and, 126–27, 149–50 Interpellation, 28, 32, 179; hegemonic belonging and, 36; reverse, 26, 33 Jean (interviewee), 83–84, 105–6, 108, 140, 143, 145, 150 Jennifer (interviewee), 47, 50, 52, 56, 141–42

Jessica (interviewee), 151 Johnson Reagon, Bernice, 5, 164 Judith (interviewee), 85–86, 106–8, 153, 157, 181 Kadi, Joanna, 6, 13, 181 Kaplan, Caren, 4, 134 Keating, Cricket, 197 King, Toni, 198 Knowledge production, 14–15, 18, 49 Lal, Jayanti, 52–53, 57, 66–67 Language, 12 Lata (interviewee), 122–23 Laura (interviewee), 65–66, 129–30, 132, 139, 141–42, 152 Lee, Rachel, 16, 97, 100 Lipsitz, George, 1, 38, 98, 171 Lorde, Audre, 12, 39, 105, 151, 180 Love, 3, 43, 45, 186; bridge methodology and, 56–57; feminist, 49; politics of whom we love, 25–26; transracial alliances and, 192 Lovelessness, 191 Lugones, María, 12 Malhotra, Sheena, 180 Marcus, George E., 48 Marsha (interviewee), 65–66, 81 Martin, Biddy, 190, 196 Martinez, Jacqueline, 137–38 Massey, Doreen, 143 Massumi, Brian, 17, 35 Maya (interviewee), 89–90, 113–14, 121–23, 159–60, 171, 176, 178, 180, 184 Megan (interviewee), 139 Men of color, 123; marginality of, 125; women of color and, 123– 24 Michele (interviewee), 75–78, 129– 30, 132, 136, 150, 161, 165, 185

INDEX

247

Mohanty, Chandra, 122, 135, 174, 190, 192, 196 Moraga, Cherríe, 37, 44, 54, 56 Morrison, Toni, 145 Moya, Paula, 11, 136 Nancy, Jean Luc, 27 Nancy (interviewee), 102–6, 108, 122, 143–44 Native life and culture, 63–64 Nelson, Diane, 66–67 Neocolonialism, 63 Nonbelonging, 22, 33 Nonfluency, 22 ‘‘Notes on a Politics of Location’’ (Rich), 29–32 ‘‘Of Soul and White Folks’’ (Segrest), 45 Outside Belongings (Probyn), 34 Paralinguistic skirting, 82–83, 85, 88, 143 Paz, Octavio, 184–85 Penjedo game, 183, 187 Pérez, Kimberlee, 180 Personal interviews, 60–63; academic inclusion and, 82; author’s identity in interviews and, 67–70; blackness and, 72; communicative gestures in, 80, 82–84; institutional contexts of, 65–66; paralinguistic skirting in, 83, 85–86, 88; powerattentive intimacy in, 69, 73–75; power-evasive intimacy in, 70, 73, 87; racialized di√erence in, 72, 74; racial silence in, 81, 93; relational positioning of researcher in, 67, 70–72; self and subject in, 65–66; strategic silences in, 80; transracial fluency of white women, 81, 83– 84, 89; transracial fluency of women of color, 81, 86–87, 89;

248

INDEX

whiteness and, 70–71; white women and, 68–69, 73, 82–84; women of color and, 73–75, 82, 86–87 Politics of experience: feminist production theory and, 133–34; racialized experience and, 136–37; whiteness and, 137; women of color and, 136 Politics of location, 39–40, 44, 67; Adrienne Rich’s work on, 28–33; bell hooks on, 33; ‘‘Third Scenario: Theory and Politics of Location Symposium’’ and, 30–31, 33 ‘‘The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice’’ (Kaplan), 134 Politics of relation, 3–13, 25–26, 29, 46, 50–51; belonging and, 28; body of motion metaphor and, 27; in personal interviews of author, 69–70; range of options for entry to and, 10–11; theory production and, 13–17; women of color and, 10 Politics of speaking, 44, 185; alliances and, 157–59; inversion of, 163 Postcolonialism, 48–49, 53 Power-attentive intimacy, 69, 73–75 Power-evasive intimacy, 70, 73, 75, 81, 87; failure of alliances and, 163 Power lines, 1–2, 52, 151–52, 176– 77; alliance formation and, 164–65, 197; belonging across, 190; forging connections across, 11, 18, 58 Privilege, 32, 37–38, 45, 145–46; ab-use of by white women, 194, 197; feminist alliance and, 56; identity and, 82; playing dumb about, 183; refusal to hear critiques of, 185; transmission of white, 98–99

Probyn, Elspeth, 34–35, 190 Sexual harassment, 145, 155 Promise and a Way of Life, A (Thomp- Shari (interviewee), 62–64 son), 137 Slavery, 144 Social justice, 165, 192 Race: feminist alliances between, 8; Spivak, Gayatri, 53, 133, 189 life decisions and, 1. See also Subalternity, 12–13, 184; of women Whiteness of color in feminist contexts, 22 Racialized femininities, 123; privilegSusan (interviewee), 186 ing of di√erent, 122 Racialized institutionality, 22 ‘‘Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Racism: anger as appropriate Called My Back, The’’ (Alarcón), response to, 151–52; feminism 135 and, 58 ‘‘Third Scenario: Theory and Politics Radical community, 48 of Location Symposium,’’ 30–31, Radical consciousness, 11 33 Razack, Sherene, 13 Third world feminism, 7–8, 87, 123, Resaldo, Renato, 49 133, 166, 172–73, 186; critiques of Research and research contexts, 51– feminist alliances by, 134–35; 53, 91; belonging in, 68, 89; home and, 53; subordinated status politics of alliance in, 66–79; relaof, 128 tional positioning of researcher This Bridge Called My Back (Morag in, 67, 70–72; self and subject in, and Anzaldúa), 30, 54, 173 65–66 Thomas, Clarence, 38 Rich, Adrienne, 21, 32–33, 38–39, Thompson, Becky, 137–38 120–21; on politics of location, Torres, Edén, 8, 15 28–29 Transracial alliances, 13, 18–19, Rita (interviewee), 93–94, 96, 115– 45, 54–55, 182; in academia, 18, 120–22, 125, 154–55, 186–87, 191–94; alternative forms of 193 power and, 175; belonging and, Robyn (interviewee), 63, 84, 165– 17, 45–46; betrayal and, 185– 67, 171, 173–76, 178, 180, 188, 86; bridge methodology and, 58; 195–96 challenges to hegemonic feminism Rushin, Donna Kate, 17 and, 175; coalitional consciousness Russo, Ann, 43 in, 192, 197; colonial legacies and, 122; communicative gestures in, Sanchez, George, 15 80; competing notions of between Sandoval, Chela, 15, 26, 32, 40–41, women of color and white women, 136, 164 130; criticism of allies and, 161, Sandra (interviewee), 143 163, 185; critique as resource in, Scattered Hegemonies (Grewal and 175, 177; di√erential belonging Kaplan), 4 and, 44; di√erential consciousSegrest, Mag, 45–46, 136, 145–46 ness and, 164; di√erently situated Serros, Michele, 15 INDEX

249

Transracial alliances (continued) subjects and, 65; discretion as relational practice of, 156–57; failure of, 18, 69, 145–48, 163, 172, 175; feminist theory production and, 134, 165; formation through multiple power lines, 164–65, 173–74; gender-exclusive theories, 135; incompatible views of, 163, 174; institutional marginality and, 154– 55; interconnected nature of, 186; intersectional approach to, 164– 65, 167, 173–74; intimacy and power and, 163; language and, 84; limits of white feminist innocence and, 189–91; listening and learning in, 195; listening to anger and, 190–91, 195; love and, 186, 192; as making face, 190–97; pain and anger in, 164–65; paralinguistic skirting of white women on, 85– 86; participation in imagined communities and, 192–93; playing dumb about privilege and, 183; politics of speaking in, 157– 59; power and, 151; powerevasiveness in, 163; privileged feminists and, 32, 43, 56, 183; relational challenges in, 146–54; relational spaces in, 191; research contexts in, 66–79; resources in, 153–54, 180–81; risk-taking and, 159–60, 164–65; segregated, 165– 66; self-respresentation as noninnocent in, 194; social justice and, 157, 165, 192; superficialness in, 161–63; transformative possibilities of, 29, 32; as vehicle for making face, 195–97; white antiracist activists and, 137–38; white femininity and, 107; white heterosociality and, 107; white men and,

250

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99; white women seeking out women of color and, 194; women of color and, 56; women of color’s conceptions of, 154–65; zero-sum alliances and, 148–54, 160, 165, 175, 180 Transracial fluency, 80–81, 89, 179; of white women, 82–84, 179; of women of color, 87 Transracialism, 3–5, 12–13, 17; alliance formation, 8, 13 ‘‘Under Western Eyes’’ (Mohanty), 135 U.S. academy, 6, 58, 100; women of color and, 110. See also Academic feminism Visweswaran, Kamala, 43, 53, 55, 57, 63, 189; on reading silences, 80 Wendy (interviewee), 140 ‘‘When You Leave, Take Your Pictures with You’’ (poem, Carillo), 62 White antiracist activists, 137–38 White families, 100–101, 106, 126– 27; women of color and, 111–13 White femininity, 104, 188; black femininity and, 186; transracial alliances and, 107 White feminists, 189–91 White heterosociality, 178; racialized femininity and, 122; sexuality and, 118; women of color and, 110, 123, 126; women of color’s resistance to, 113–15, 118, 120–21 White men, 99; alliance formation and, 99; alliances with academic feminists of, 94, 97, 100–103, 107– 9, 112, 116, 120–21, 126; gender subordination as experienced by white women versus women of

color and, 94–95, 97, 99; institutional power access and, 99; rejection of women of color and, 110, 121, 126; white women and, 126; woman’s studies and, 127; women of color and, 97, 111–14, 116, 118– 20; women of color’s resistance to, 114–15, 120–21; women of color’s sexuality and, 119–21 Whiteness, 1, 30, 178; belonging and, 36–40, 46; in feminism centrality of, 171–72; exclusionary social practices and, 37–38; as nonexperience, 136–37; in personal interviews, 70–71; as relational practice constitutive of, 80–81, 98; of U.S. academia, 6 White solidarity, 144–45 White solipsism, 21, 68 White Woman, Race Matters (Frankenberg), 37 White women, 63, 65; ab-use of privilege structures by, 194; alliance formation and, 164–65; allies of in academia, 139–42, 145, 148–49; author’s identity in interviews and, 68–69; betrayal by, 182–83; bodies of, 30; critique and, 161, 185; divide with woman of color and, 18; institutional power and, 138– 54; making face of on identity, 195–97; need for coalitional consciousness raising by, 178; participation in imagined communities and, 192–93; playing dumb about privilege and, 183; racialized institutionality and, 20–21; racial silence and, 81; refusal to hear critiques of, 185; relational challenges with women of color in academia, 146–54, 194–95; segregated alliances and, 138–54; tension with

black women and, 182; transracial alliance and, 194–97; transracial fluency and, 179; unproblematized notion of ‘‘women’’ and, 169; white feminist allies of women of color, 193–94; white men and, 126; woman of color consciousness and, 11; women of color and, 21, 43–44, 63, 65, 69, 85; zero-sum alliances of, 148–54, 160, 180 Wiegman, Robyn, 6, 169 Wittig, Monique, 39 Woman and jungle fever chasm, 93– 95, 115–17 ‘‘Woman in Di√erence’’ (Spivak), 133 Woman’s studies, 100; institutionalization of, 127 Woman’s Studies on Its Own (Wiegman), 6 Women of color, 10, 13, 16, 55; on academic inclusion and exclusion, 82; Adrienne Rich and, 31; alliance formation and, 164–65; ambivalence towards academia of, 115; conceptions of alliances of, 154– 65; critique of white women’s feminism by, 171; di√erential belonging and, 173; divergent proximities to white men of, 111–12; divide with white woman and, 18; institutional marginality of, 154; marginalization of, 21, 31, 96; men of color and, 123–24; participation in imagined communities and, 192–93; in personal interviews, 86; racialized bodies of, 30; racialized institutionality and, 20–22; radical consciousness and, 11; relational challenges with white women in academia, 146–54, 194–95; relational process of becoming, 55– INDEX

251

Women of color (continued) 56; resistance to white heterosociality of, 97, 113–15, 118, 121, 123, 126–27; resistance to white men, 120–21; self-representation as non-innocent in, 194; sexual harassment of, 145; sexuality of, 119–20; silences of, 185, 187; struggles in the academy and, 160– 61; transracial alliances and, 56; transracial fluency of, 80–81; white families and, 111–13; white feminist allies of, 193–94; white

male rejection and, 110, 121, 126; white men and, 97, 112–14, 116, 118–21; white women and, 21, 43–44, 63, 65, 69, 85; white women on absence of, 144; writings of, 12. See also Black women Women’s studies, 16, 96; institutionalization of, 94 Yearning, 55–56; of authors, 57 Zero-sum alliances, 148–54, 168, 175, 180

AIMEE CARRILLO ROWE is an associate professor of rhetoric and poroi at the University of Iowa. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carrillo Rowe, Aimee. Power lines : on the subject of feminist alliances / Aimee Carrillo Rowe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4301-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4317-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Feminism—Political aspects. 2. Lesbian feminism. 3. Minority women. 4. Race relations. 5. Feminism and higher education. I. Title. hq1233.c36 2008 305.4201—dc22 2008013880

252

INDEX