The work of this week has been intense, enriching and powerful. A group of passionate members of the St. Catherine University community, led by Mission Chair and Professor Hui Wilcox took the time to reflect deeply on texts written by Women of Color (WOC), to think about the theoretical practices explained in the texts and to think about how these texts have a bearing on our disciplines and our lives.
I especially appreciated the range of texts that we read from the last thirty to forty years: it elucidated for me, and for the rest of the participants, the breadth of the feminist thought produced by women of color. We read many authors’ writing from a variety of humanities and social sciences disciplines and had a chance to reflect on this long history. I particularly enjoyed reading and learning about the work of Patricia Hill Collins, Sarah Ahmed, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Trinh T. Minh-ha, bell hooks and Audre Lorde, among many others. Audre Lorde and bell hooks are well-established feminist thinkers whom I have heard of before but never got the chance to read their work with some depth before attending this workshop, and it was enriching as these two writers lay down the foundation of WOC feminist thought by proposing definitions for feminism based on reflections not of specific acts or agents of sexism and oppression, but rather reflections upon the different interlocking systems of oppression. These systems of oppression and their analysis create an economic structure and cultural superstructure that feminist work wants to undo.
Moreover, the work of Hill Collins, Sarah Ahmed, Mohanty and Minh-ha provided different theoretical entries onto feminism, wanting to provide an epistemology of black feminist thought, providing a phenomenological approach to the concept(s) of orientation(s), reflecting upon feminism as a transnational practice and writing at the intersection of postcoloniality and feminism respectively. I especially appreciated the work of Ahmed, as the concept of “orientation” can be very valuable for my work on space and Latin American cultural production for different reasons.
First, the concept of “orientations” can be used as a category that helps understand the specific plot of a novel through an analysis of space and subjects: how do subjects “orient” themselves in the story? How do their choices of orientation have a bearing on the development of the story? Second, “orientations” can serve to understand the context of the artifacts themselves within a system or a tradition: how does the text “orient itself” within a specific tradition? Is a writing within or against a specific set of texts? Moreover, how does the text circulate, and how does this set of market orientations determine its context, validity, and cultural capital? Third, I can reflect on the “orientation” of my work, the philosophical, ideological, methodological presuppositions of my work and how these have helped determine my objects of study (and the limits of such study) and finally, I can reflect on my own orientation, not only my positionality as a subject, but my personal trajectory and how that impinges onto my reflections, my ideas, my academic project and career.
I am extremely grateful that I had the opportunity to take part on this seminar, and I wished that it would have lasted a month and not just a week. Hui Wilcox’s leadership was both inviting and thoughtful as she made the seminar a place of reflection for a group of staff and faculty from various disciplines and with different goals for the week. The seminar has opened many different avenues for inquiry and provided many different authors that I hope to keep exploring in the coming months and years at St. Kate’s. Thank you for a wonderful week!
