Race, Gender and the Activism of Black Feminist Theory
Working with Audre Lorde
Suryia Nayak
- 156 Seiten
- English
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Race, Gender and the Activism of Black Feminist Theory
Working with Audre Lorde
Suryia Nayak
Über dieses Buch
Beginning from the premise that psychology needs to be questioned, dismantled and new perspectives brought to the table in order to produce alternative solutions, this book takes an unusual transdisciplinary step into the activism of Black feminist theory. The author, Suryia Nayak, presents a close reading of Audre Lorde and other related scholars to demonstrate how the activism of Black feminist theory is concerned with issues central to radical critical thinking and practice, such as identity, alienation, trauma, loss, the position and constitution of individuals within relationships, the family, community and society.
Nayak reveals how Black feminist theory seeks to address issues that are also a core concern of critical psychology, including individualism, essentialism and normalization. Her work grapples with several issues at the heart of key contemporary debates concerning methodology, identity, difference, race and gender. Using a powerful line of argument, the book weaves these themes together to show how the activism of Black feminist theory in general, and the work of Audre Lorde in particular, can be used to effect social change in response to the damaging psychological impact of oppressive social constructions.
Race, Gender and the Activism of Black Feminist Theory will be of great interest to advanced students, researchers, political activist and practitioners in psychology, counselling, psychotherapy, mental health, social work and community development.
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1 Introduction Race, gender and social change
The activism of Black feminist theory
Theory is inescapable because it is an indispensable weapon in struggle, and it is an indispensable weapon in struggle because it provides certain kinds of understanding, certain kinds of illumination, certain kinds of insights that are requisite if we are to act effectively.(hooks & West, 1991: 34–5)
… survival isn’t theoretical, we live it every day. We live it on the streets, we live it in the banks, we live it with our children.(Greene, 1989: 183)
… those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill.(Lorde, 1979a: 112; emphasis in original)
Each of these above sets of critical formulations provide powerful ways of thinking [about] the conjunction of the psychological and the political, the affective and the structural, the psychical and the governmental. We have as such a powerfully critical combination of registers that one would take to lie at the centre of critical psychology’s ostensibly critical concerns (Hayes, 1989; Hook, 2004). Why then have such post- or anti-colonial thinkers not featured more strongly in the conceptual resources of critical social psychology? How might their work, and their characteristic concerns – racism, colonial discourse, cultural dispossession, alterity, psychical mutilation, resistance, etc. – alert us to gaps in the growing orthodoxy of critical psychology? To approach the question from another direction: what might be said to be the ‘critical psychology’ of these theorists, and particularly of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko? How might their use of the register of the psychological within the political and their concerns with the cultural dynamics of colonisation alert us to the possibilities of psychology as a vocabulary of resistance? Furthermore, what does each of these critics have to tell us about the crowning problematic of the colonial and postcolonial condition, namely that of racism, a phenomena that seems as political as it does psychical in nature?(Hook, 2005: n.p.; refer to original source for details of citations within extract)
I would argue that the question we need to ask is not, “should feminism use theory?”, as feminism (as with any other political discourse) always does use theory: it is always going to involve ways of ordering the world. For me, the question is rather: “is this theoretical framework explicit or not?” Feminism needs to make explicit its theoretical frameworks and it needs to do so precisely in order to re-conceptualise the relation between theory and practice.(Ahmed, 1998: 18)
What is critical psychology?
- Critical psychology here is therefore, first of all,the systematic examination of how some varieties of psychological action and experience are privileged over others, how dominant accounts of ‘psychology’ operate ideologically and in the service of power.(p. 13; italics in original)
- Second, then, critical psychology is,the study of the ways in which all varieties of psychology are culturally historically constructed, and how alternative varieties of psychology may confirm or resist ideological assumptions in mainstream models.(p. 13; italics in original)
- Third, then, critical psychology is,the study of forms of surveillance and self-regulation in everyday life and the ways in which psychological culture operates beyond the boundaries of academic and professional practice.(p. 14; italics in original)
- Fourth, then, critical psychology is,the exploration of the way everyday ‘ordinary psychology’ structures academic and professional work in psychology and how everyday activities might provide the basis for resistance to contemporary disciplinary practices.(p. 15; italics in original)
- confronting the workings of dominant ideology assumptions in the service of power, surveillance and self-regulation;
- raising the need to examine oppressive constructs as products of social, historical and cultural spaces;
- contributing models of resistance to contemporary disciplinary practices.
The psychologization of Black women
Social theory is a body of knowledge and a set of institutional practices that actively grapple with the central questions facing a group of people in a specific political, social, and historic context. Instead of circulating exclusively as a body of decontextualized ideas among privileged intellectuals, social theory emerges from, is legitimated by, and reflects the concerns of actual groups of people in particular institutional settings. This definition creates space for all types of groups to participate in theorizing about social issues. Moreover, it suggests that differences in perspective about social issues will reflect differen...