Black feminist and philosophical feminist critique
Black feminists are sceptical about a supra-ethnic notion of sisterhood. All women
are not the same, and the notion that they are fundamentally oppressed by men
could only be advanced by those who have never suffered from racist stereotyping.
Women themselves can be racists and oppress black women (as well as black men),
and the experience of subject women under slavery and colonialism demonstrate
very different patterns of family and economic life to those assumed by radical
feminists.
Rape is a case in point. The view of a black man as a potential rapist has been
a formidable racist stereotype (particularly in the southern states of the USA) and
black women who report assaults to racist-minded police have a very different
experience from white women who have been raped. Audre Lorde puts the matter
in a nutshell in her open letter to Mary Daly, when she comments: ‘The oppression
of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean that
it is identical within those differences’ (Humm, 1992: 139). A feminism that ignores
ethnic or racial differences is a feminism that unthinkingly privileges one group over
others.
Feminist empiricists reject the notion that science and objectivity are somehow
male activities. It is true that patriarchal prejudices can claim scientific warranty,
but this is poor science. Science is not to blame for male domination but is a powerful
weapon for exposing and combating it. Facts which point to discrimination and
inequality are crucial to the arsenal of feminist argument, and make it much moreChapter 14 Feminism 325The pornography debate
Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, two radical feminists in the USA, campaigned
against pornography on the grounds that it harmed the interests of women everywhere. They
secured the passing of the ‘MacKinnon–Dworkin’ ordinances in Minneapolis and Indianapolis
in 1983 and 1984. These would have made it possible for women who considered that they
had been harmed to sue producers, distributors and retailers of pornography. The first ordinance
was vetoed by the mayor and the second overruled by the federal courts.
These attempts were seen as a model for use elsewhere. Campaigners have sought to achieve
restrictions on pornography in Britain, and in 1986 Clare Short sought to introduce the ‘Page
Three Bill’ which would have banned printing pictures of ‘naked or partially naked women in
provocative poses in newspapers’ and fined offending publishers. The attempt failed. The
Campaign Against Pornography was launched in the House of Commons in 1988. These
campaigns have been challenged by other feminists who argue that pornography is a symptom
rather than a cause of women’s oppression; a legal attack on pornography, they argue, allies
feminists with right-wing fundamentalists who are opposed to any portrayal of explicit sexual
material through art and the media. The US liberal feminist Nadine Strossen sees both obscenity
laws and feminist proposals to restrict pornography by law as violations of free speech (Bryson,
1999: 174–7).
Focus