Reflections on the Status of Continental Feminism

The last election cycle in the United States featured an unprecedented moment in history. For the first time in the life of the nation, a woman was the presidential nominee of a major political party. The feeling in my heart of hearts is that, because of the axis of race, Hillary Clinton's political agenda and my own political priorities as a black woman may have nothing in common. Upon winning, her administration might have proven me wrong, but this is where I begin my encounter with her candidacy for president. I begin with the assumption that, as a white woman, her fight is not my fight.¹ Perhaps my ambivalence is really less about the kind of president Hillary Clinton herself would have been, and more about the kind of feminism that I've come to reasonably expect from white women. It's easy enough for white women (like Hillary Clinton) to assume that their concerns are sufficiently representative of all women's concerns, because the whiteness of their womanhood often serves to center not only their conceptions of what it means to be a woman, but also their understanding of gender oppression, and the content of their feminist program of liberation. The black womanhood that arises at the intersection of gender oppression and racial oppression may not figure into such accounts, precisely because, in being thus centered in terms of whiteness, these accounts remain blind to their own racialization.

I could be wrong about this. Indeed, I want to be wrong about this. Nevertheless, my hesitation toward Clinton's candidacy seems to be part of the much larger stakes of our exchange about continental feminism. I understand this branch of scholarship (and activism) to name the feminism that deploys those methodologies of the continental branch of philosophy. As such, one might expect, from this branch of feminist critique, questions of agency, the destabilization of subjectivity, the role of power structures in that destabilization, and the role of experience in becoming epistemological agents (to name a few). When coupled with the question of race (racial embodiment, racial oppression, racial justice), the implications of such questions change in notable ways. In other words, race matters, and always figures into one's feminist comportment. This means that one's resistance against structures of gender oppression is always already implicated in one's relationship to structures of racial oppression. To my mind, this obligates continental feminists to be intentional about the relationship they occupy, quite simultaneously, to racial and gender liberation.

The following illustrates the ways in which continental methods oftentimes refract differently across race and gender axes. In her essay, "The Difference That Difference Makes: Black Feminism and Philosophy," Donna-Dale Marcano traces what a social constructivist account of subjectivity does for identities racialized as nonwhite.² She writes that "the strategy of social construction of race as it has been taken up in philosophy, other academic disciplines, as well as in the common culture has … yielded a turn to nonreality or an eliminativist tendency" (55–56). In other words, the proposal that race is socially constructed is either followed by, or builds into the subtext, the assumption that races don't exist. Marcano is critical of this since, as she rightly points out, the premise of the non-realness of race is not necessarily one that supports a program of racial liberation. To the contrary, to conclude—via the continental trope of a socially constructed identity—that race isn't real then makes it particularly challenging to argue against structures that operate as though it is. Marcano notes the different implications (or, at the very least, what feel like different implications) for a social constructivist account of gender. To name gender as constructed is to denaturalize this axis of human identity. In so doing, "gender as constructed" positions us to acknowledge multiple and complex gender performances, which ultimately facilitates a more liberatory account of the existential condition of "woman." Writes Marcano, "the role of ambiguity and disruption [across the axis of gender] results in the production of a more complex [gender] reality" (56, emphasis added). Unlike what...