288 Mary Jo Neitz
subsuming or displacing them. Such a sociology develops from inquiry and not
from theorizing: it aims at discoveries enabling us to locate ourselves in the complex
relations with others arising from and determining our lives; its capacity for truth
is never contained in the text but arises in the map-reader’s dialogic of finding and
recognizing in the world what the text, itself a product of such an inquiry, tells her
she might look for. (1999: 130)Smith advocates a disruption of how sociologists have understood theory. She looks for
a dialogic form of theory, a feminist theory that begins in the experiences of women,
and produces an active text, in dialogue with a reader.
Patricia Hill Collins: Black Feminist Thought and Intersectionality
Patricia Hill Collins’s project has some basic similarities with Smith. InBlack Feminist
Thought(1991), Hill Collins draws on the voices of black feminist writers and activists to
make visible the subjugated knowledges of black women. Collins describes the condi-
tion of being “outsiders within” generated by the historical situation of black women’s
role in retaining and transforming an Afrocentric world view in African-American com-
munities while, at the same time, finding employment as domestic workers in white
households. This particular location produced an angle of vision, allowing them to see
contradictions in the construction of womanhood, a kind of consciousness that Collins
sees produced in many of the setting in which black women in the United States today
find themselves. Too often marginal to the movements of white women and black men,
the lives of black women point to the intersections of race and gender as well as class.
Also classed as a standpoint theorist (Harding 1986), standpoint means something
specific for Collins. It does not refer to the experience of an individual – rather a stand-
point is the product of a group’s common experience of oppression, and it focuses on
the social conditions that produce such experiences. Collins (1991) is one of the found-
ing theorists of what is now being called the “intersectionality paradigm.” Standpoint
and groups located through intersecting structures of oppression are intimately tied for
Collins:
...Current attention to the theme of intersectionality situated within assumptions
of group-based power relations reveals a growing understanding of the complexity of
the processes both of the generating groups and accompanying standpoints....What
we have now is increasing sophistication about how to discuss group location, not in
the singular social class framework proposed by Marx, nor the early feminist frame-
works arguing the primacy of gender, but within constructs of multiplicity resid-
ing in social structures themselves, and not in individual women. Fluidity does not
mean that groups themselves disappear, to be replaced by an accumulation of de-
contextualized unique women whose complexity erases politics. Instead the fluidity
of boundaries operates as a new lens that potentially deepens understanding of how
the actual mechanisms of institutional power can change dramatically while con-
tinuing to reproduce long standing inequalities of race, gender and class that result
in group stability. (1997: 377)For Collins, both standpoint and intersectionality are ways of talking about group-based
oppression and group-based power relations.