Rannie Women of Color

When we think about oppression, it is important to think about intersectionality and multiple types of marginalization. Women of color are often cast together into one group, not because they have natural connections, but because they have experienced a similar context of struggle. These, of course, look quite different depending on what groups and issues we are talking about at any given point, as is shown by Smith with the different pillars of White Supremacy. Cotera also discusses that we need to understand how women of color’s experiences converge and diverge all of the time. She advocates for a relational approach to feminist analysis, which involves looking both for difference and sameness in diverse environments. This idea is probably what most people today would call intersectionality, that groups that have multiple or partial marginalization experiences are very different from each other and that multiple identity categories have multiplicative effects rather than additive ones. Even though women of color live at different crossroads of gender, sexuality, race, identity and more, they possibly share some kind of differential consciousness, because they have faced the same context of struggle.

I also really appreciated using women’s literature as evidence for women’s narratives and their lives. In this way, the stories can be important historical accounts, but at the same time speak to the women of today about their own experiences with oppression and marginality. I discovered this while working as a research assistant on a study of sexual assault survivors. For this project, we were recruiting female sexual assault survivors as well as one friend or family member who they had told about the assault, and interviewed them separately. The point was to understand how telling others about sexual assault and how hearing about it from friends and family would impact both parties. For one of the interviews, I talked to a young, Black woman whose mother had been a survivor, both in her childhood and as an adult. The young woman told me about the struggles her mother has had in her life and how they had impacted her. Her mother had grown up in a Black family in the South and been sexually victimized repeatedly by family members, but it was never spoken of in the family, even though it was common knowledge. The young woman told me she didn’t understand how that could happen, and that she was at times not even been sure it had really happened, since her mother had used drugs heavily, which may have distorted her memories. She told me that it was not until the young woman read the book The Color Purple that she finally understood what her mother had been through. The story is about a young Black girl in the South who is repeatedly victimized, first by her father and then by an abusive husband. Even though this story is fictional, it probably contains elements and narratives of women living in that culture at that time, and it helped communicate the pain from generation to generation of these two women in front of me. I found that to be an incredibly powerful experience.