difficult for unsympathetic men to dismiss feminism as a man-hating, irrational
doctrine.
Standpoint feminists are, it seems to us, more likely to be influenced by radical
feminists and they can only distance themselves from radical feminism where they
defend an argument that a woman’s standpoint depends upon the particular social
experience she has.
Postmodern feminists hold to the fact that power is exercised at every level in
society, and it would seem therefore that they should be sympathetic to the radical
feminist argument that male domination extends to apparently private as well as
public institutions. In reality, however, postmodern feminists are particularly hostile
to radical feminism since, as we shall see, they regard the whole notion of a ‘woman’
as problematically universalist in character. Radical feminism, in their eyes, suffers
from deep-rooted binary divides – between men and women, reason and emotion,
etc. – which leads these feminists to invert patriarchal arguments by accepting that
there is a fundamental sexual divide. Instead of demonising women, they demonise
men, but the same absolutist logic is at work.Black feminism
Black feminists are acutely aware of the question of difference. Indeed, the very
existence of a ‘black feminism’ is a protest against the idea that women are all the
same. Beneath the supposedly universal notion is to be found women who are often
white, university-educated and of middle-class background.
Black feminists argue that there is sufficient in common in Britain between Afro-
Caribbean women, African women and Asian women to assert a common identity.
Of course, each of these categories is itself extremely diverse, but black women are
considered to have a common experience. In the case of Britain, they are all
‘outsiders’, regarded as ‘invisible’ by the dominant culture, and judged to be ‘ethnic’
and abnormal, as though the majority community is itself without an ethnic identity
and embodies normality.
Black feminism is a protest against marginalisation and the belief in monolithic
identities. It rejects the idea that black women have to choose whether they want
to be humiliated as women by patriarchal black movements or disregarded as blacks
by a feminist movement that really speaks for white women. When the Nation of
Islam marched in the USA in 2002, many black women found it very painful to
decide between their dislike of patriarchy (which the Nation of Islam explicitly
represented) and their concern about racism.
It is true that many white women turned to feminism as a result of their experience
in anti-slavery and civil rights movements, but they failed to see that oppression is
never simply universal – it always takes differential and particular forms. The notion
that there is an analogybetween women and blacks (Gayle Rubin wrote an essay
in 1970 entitled ‘Woman as Nigger’) assumes that somehow black women do not
exist.
The specific existence of black feminism contributes significantly to feminist
theory as a whole by stressing the importance of a concrete approach that takes
account of people’s real-life situations and differences. By noting that some women326 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies