Body Language: Sisters in Shape, Black Women's Fitness, and Feminist Identity Politics

4. New Bodies of Knowledge

4 / New Bodies of Knowledge H egemonic ideologies of the body are often rendered visible when “othered” bodies are drawn into dominant discourses, made to serve as points of comparison. For instance, the process by which it has become almost common knowledge that black women are more comfortable with their bodies than are white women reveals some of the white heteronormative body ideologies that maintain black women’s invisibility and poor health in a racist and sexist culture. This chapter centers on the sisters in shape women’s explicit interventions into dominant explanations of black women’s higher body esteem as compared to white women’s and builds on the previous two chapters to explore the ways that the sisters in shape women generate a unique black feminist standpoint that resists reinforcing a fixed identity. standpoint theory has been crucial in challenging hegemonic feminist theories and epistemologies by drawing from a greater diversity of experiences and by developing more nuanced accounts based in intersectional analyses. The widespread and diverse critiques of “second-wave” feminism as exclusive of the knowledges and experiences of women who are positioned in nonhegemonic social locations—determined by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, age, and citizenship, among other identity markers—attest to the power of standpoint theory. Along these lines, 108 \ Chapter 4 patricia Hill Collins (1991, 1998), bell hooks (1981, 1990), Angela Davis (1981), and Audre lorde (1984) have delineated the importance of black women’s experiences to black feminist thought. Underlying their work and the extensive work they have inspired, however, is the tendency to reinscribe a fixed group identity, an enduring category of black women that implies a stable self at its center. By bringing together a set of collective experiences based in both discourse and embodiment (discussed in Chapter 2) and an understanding of sisters in shape’s particular black womanhoods as performative and multiple (discussed in Chapter 3), the women of sisters in shape recover the promise of standpoint theory for subject formation, political consciousness, feminist epistemology, and social and political change. Against the hegemonic assumptions that black women have greater body esteem than do white women because of different cultural standards, i read a range of sisters in shape discourses as a complex cultural commentary that reorients the dominant discourse of black women’s higher body valuation and rearticulates alternative ways of understanding self-esteem in relation to race and the body. Throughout this chapter, i foreground the sisters in shape women’s interventions in order to highlight the ways that their multiple and embodied selves prompt us to reconsider the complex interworkings of “women’s experiences” to feminist theory and feminist activisms as well as the relationship of particular standpoints to new bodies of knowledge. The sisters in shape women’s experiences as simultaneously discursively constituted and embodied sources of knowledge exemplify satya p. mohanty’s understanding of experience as crucial to a reinvigorated standpoint theory and to the generation of alternative epistemologies (1993). in suggesting a productive return to the intersection of experience , identity formation, and feminist standpoint theory for social and political change, mohanty seeks to mediate some of the tensions between difference feminists and postmodern feminists around identity politics, particularly in terms of the debate between essentialism and radical constructivism. Given his contention that experiences can be assessed like any other form of knowledge, mohanty finds a solution in an objective (or critically evaluated) feminist standpoint. According to mohanty, an objective feminist standpoint develops out of an understanding of “women’s experiences” as a theoretical concept grounded New Bodies of Knowledge / 109 in and constrained by a gender-stratified society, an understanding that grants the socially constructed nature of “women’s experiences” while recognizing the ways that such experiences can be evaluated in order to serve as objective forms of knowledge (as discussed in Chapter 2). such an argument resonates with nancy Hartsock’s now-classic definition of feminist standpoint as distinct from women’s standpoint more generally; feminist standpoint, according to Hartsock, undertakes a critical analysis of the dominant social practices that sustain women’s oppressions in order to articulate a different social reality that might liberate all people (1985, 1998). Despite her important vision for human emancipation through feminist standpoint theory, Hartsock generally relies on an overly universalizing understanding of the “feminists” who generate her feminist standpoint. expanding on Hartsock’s universal “feminists” by focusing on black women in particular, patricia Hill...