Christina كريستينا (Taylor's Version) > Status Update

P1 “To be truly liberating, any social theory must reflect the actual problems of an historical conjuncture with a commitment to rigor and scholastic truth.” — Manning Marable, 1993, pg 127

P1 “Theory is no longer theoretical when it loses sight of its own conditional nature, takes no risk in speculation, and circulates as a form of administrative inquisition. Theory oppresses when it … perpetuates existing power relations, when it presents itself as a means to exert authority—the Voice of Knowledge.” — Trinh Minh-ha, 1989, pg 42

- Surviving intellectual assaults of this magnitude requires oppositional knowledges that tell Black women, if only in the simplest terms, “Don’t let anybody tell you who you are.” The fact that Black women in the United States have survived at all is proof enough for me that Black feminist thought exists.”

P1 “The fact that so many African-American women have grown to womanhood able to resist the damaging effects of stereotyping demonstrates the significance of Black feminist thought for African-American women. …

- (e.g., a patriarchal Black cultural nationalism, a racist feminism, or a raceless, genderless class analysis). In other words, theorizing from outsider-within locations can produce distinctive oppositional knowledges that embrace multiplicity yet remain cognizant of power.”

- This, to me, is what distinguishes oppositional knowledges developed in outsider-within locations both from elite knowledges (social theory developed from within centers of power such as Whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, class privilege, or citizenship) and from knowledges developed in oppositional locations where groups resist only one form of oppression -

P1 “Theorizing from outsider-within locations reflects the multiplicity of being on the margins within intersecting systems of race, class, gender, sexual, and national oppression, even as such theory remains grounded in and attentive to real differences in power. -

PART 1 “Under conditions of social injustice, the outsider-within location describes a particular knowledge/power relationship, one of gaining knowledge about or of a dominant group without gaining the full power accorded to members of that group.”

- More recently, I have deployed the term outsider-within to describe social locations or border spaces occupied by groups of unequal power. Individuals gain or lose identities as “outsiders within” by their placement in these social locations. Outsider-within spaces are riddled with contradictions.”

PART 1 “For my own survival, I chose the term outsider within to describe the location of people who no longer belong to any one group. Initially, I used the term to describe individuals who found themselves in marginal locations between groups of varying power. …