Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics by Laura Gillman (review)

Confronting the undermining of women-of-color identity politics in the 1980s, 1990s, and forward, Laura Gillman "reimagines" womanist and mestiza feminist methodologies through a postpositivist realism and works against postmodern feminist and neoconservative tactics that seek to "drive identities underground" (p. 5). As conservative trends appropriate the "racial discourses that minoritarian groups have honed for their own empowerment," postmodern feminists and more generally the "feminist agenda" risk "being co-opted from without but also from within" by neglecting a reappraisal of the theoretical possibilities of identity politics (pp. 20-21). Gillman's ultimate focus, however, is not on rescuing postmodern feminists but in establishing the connection between objective, theoretical interpretations of experience, womanist and mestiza feminist identity politics, and the potential of social consciousness and movement. Drawing from the work of Paula Moya and Satya Mohanty, she argues that through postpositivist realism subjugated voices can be interpreted as sources of "objective" knowledge production, especially as they remain the key for raising social consciousness.

In chapter 1, which also serves as the book's introduction, Gillman situates the major concepts within the debates of (post) identity politics. She argues that identity matters, "particularly for those whose visible identities (of race and gender) place them disadvantageously with respect to social power" (p. 4). In order to move beyond the dominant feminist arguments of postmodern, mostly white feminists, Gillman utilizes the theories of womanist and mestiza feminists. She nuances her approach with postpostivist realism, which she argues addresses the limitations of the postmodern denial of the existence of objective truth. Carrying this approach into the next chapter, Gillman critiques Susan Friedman and Robyn Wiegman as examples of postmodern feminist theorists who claim that all attempts to define identity remain participatory in conforming to normative roles, thereby denying identity-based politics. Within this critique she subtly stresses the importance of seeing what is or is not invested in through the knowledge production of American, mostly white feminisms and the general dismissal of identity politics.

Overstepping the limitations to empowerment through the denial of identity politics, Gillman focuses on the reclamation of "objective" and accurate knowledge of one's social identity context even as identity is also subjective, fluid, and changing. In outlining womanist theories beginning with Alice Walker's definition and moving through womanist ethicists and theologians such as M. Shawn Copeland, Linda Thomas, Katie Cannon, and Clenora Hudson-Weems, Gillman casts embodied identity as an "objective social location" (p. 74). In chapters 3 and 4 she demonstrates the critical perspective black feminists and womanists apply to social environments. She argues that as they write about their identities, they engage in a "mediated interpretive process that corrects not only the distorted interpretations of minority identity(ies) that are the result of racism and sexism, but also provides a more accurate rendering of our social world" (p. 74). Giving particular attention to historical and neo-slave narratives, Gillman highlights Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) as an example of the cognitive practice of "rememory" or a re-articulation of identity that carries the potential of verifying history and enabling the transformation of contemporary social changes (p. 103). The unique and key component of Gillman's postpositive realist approach to these knowledge formations rests within her overarching framework of "situated universalism" (p. 10). She argues for an unassimilable but universalist approach that does not collapse womanist and mestiza identity experiences even as it works toward universal and translatable identity theorizations and articulations (p. 200). Her approach encourages constant interpretation and discursive feminist engagement, thereby leading to more objective knowledge of women's lives.

While she continues her emphasis on embodied knowledge, Gillman draws out a particular difference between black and Latina women's writing. In the final two chapters focused on "feminist mestizaje/mulatez" perspectives, she situates mestiza feminist work as largely focused on place and space, and she relies mostly on social human geography, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work, to...