WEEK 3 BLACK

FEMINIST
EPISTEMOLOGY
Aidan McGlynn
INTRO: BLACK FEMINIST
THOUGHT
 Black Feminist Thought is explicitly a work within a standpoint theoretic framework
 The book aims to articulate the standpoint associated with Black women, drawing on the
intellectual work done by Black women
 Recall, though, that Collins has a much broader notion of who counts as an intellectual than
we might be used to (e.g. Sojourner Truth, blues singers, hip-hop artists – I mentioned Lauryn
Hill before, thinking of tracks like ’Black Rage’)
 This is totally deliberate (1990: 17-20): ‘Many Maria Stewarts exist, African-American
women whose minds and talents have been suppressed by the pots and kettles symbolic of
Black women’s subordination […]. Far too many African-American women intellectuals have
labored in isolation and obscurity and like Zora Neale Hurston, lie buried in unmarked graves.’
(Collins 1990: 4)
 [Stewart was a 19th century teacher and public speaker who vocally supported abolition and
women’s rights; Hurston was a 20th century author and filmmaker]
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INTRO: BLACK FEMINIST
THOUGHT
 A central purpose of the book is to demonstrate that there is a ‘rich’, ‘multifaceted, African-
American women’s intellectual tradition’ (1990: 5)
 Such a demonstration is, unfortunately, required
 Let me say a bit about how I’m going to present Collins’s ideas here
 I’m not going to go through the content of the controlling images in any detail here, and
likewise I’m not going to cover the different distinctive features of Black feminist
epistemology, as Collins understands it – that’s all set out in the chapters that were set as
reading for this week
 Rather, I want to zoom out from those details, and think about the main philosophical and
epistemological themes in Collins’s work

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COLLINS’S EPISTEMOLOGY: 7
THESES
 In terms of the book’s philosophical, and in particular its epistemological views, I’ll separate
out seven different theses for consideration
 The separation is largely artificial; in the text itself, these are spread out across multiple
chapters, and they also crisscross into each other
 But teasing them apart lets us examine each more clearly, and better understand how they all
fit together

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COLLINS’S EPISTEMOLOGY: 7
THESES
 The seven theses are:
 1. Black women are subject to a number of ‘controlling images’
 2. This is a result of their marginalization within certain institutions and practices
 3. The controlling images can be spread by Black institutions too, and may be partially
internalized by Black women
 4. This is a form of objectification/othering: ‘objectification as the Other’
 5. Black women can resist this form of oppression by replacing the controlling images with
self-defined images (at least within their own thoughts)
 6. Self-definition involves formulating and maintain a standpoint, the product of collective
reflection within certain ‘safe spaces’, and resistance
 7. The knowledge produced and available from the Black feminist standpoint is ‘subjugated
knowledge’, which is partly a result of, and helps to perpetuate, the controlling images 5
1. CONTROLLING IMAGES
 Let’s look at these in turn:
 1. Black women are subject to a number of ‘controlling images’
 Collins details five of these: the Mammy, the Matriarch, Welfare Mother/Queen, the Black
Lady, and the Jezebel
 (When we read Dotson in week 6, she only counts four, missing out the Black Lady – I don’t
know why)
 These images are meant to be dynamic; they shift over time, depending on the particular ways
in which the dominant forces in society need to control Black women (2000: 72)
 For example, Collins discusses how the Welfare Mother/Queen images were introduced in
response to Black Americans finally being recognized as eligible for Welfare programmes
following the Civil Rights Movement
 Nora Berenstain plausibly suggests adding ‘the angry Black woman’, as applied to Serena
Williams and Michelle Obama – see the reading for week 8 6
1. CONTROLLING IMAGES
 For Collins, these controlling images have three main functions:
 First, they’re meant to be punitive:
 “Black women’s assertiveness and their use of every expression of racism to launch multiple
assaults against the entire fabric of inequality have been a consistent, multifaceted threat to the
status quo. As punishment, Black women have been assaulted with a variety of negative
images” (Cheryl Gilkes, quoted in Collins 2000: 69)
 Second, they’re meant to mask social and economical inequalities, partly by placing the
responsibility and blame for the disadvantages faced by black women, and by black families
more generally, onto black women themselves (and particularly onto black mothers), rather
onto discriminatory and oppressive institutions, practices, and policies:
 ‘These controlling images are designed to make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of
social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life.’ (2000: 69)

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1. CONTROLLING IMAGES
 Finally, they’re meant to control Black women, to ‘keep them in their place’ and to reward
some forms of behaviour while stigmatising others
 This is why Collins calls these ‘controlling images’ and not just stereotypes – the images are
stereotypes, but Collins’s name makes their primary purposes more evident
 What are some ways in which these images function to control Black women?

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2. MARGINALISATION
 2. That these controlling images are able to achieve such dominance is a result of Black
women’s marginalisation within certain institutions and practices
 This is something that Collins comes back to again and again throughout her book
 It’s also one place we should look for overlap with Fricker’s later views (particularly with
Fricker’s notion of ‘hermeneutical marginalisation)
 Collins picks out a number of institutions as particularly significant:
 ‘Schools, the news media, and government agencies constitute important sites for reproducing
these controlling images. Whereas schools and the scholarship produced and disseminated by
their faculty historically have played an important part in generating these controlling images
[…]their current significance in reproducing these images is less often noted.’
 ‘The growing influence of television, radio, movies, videos, CDs, and the Internet constitute
new ways of circulating controlling images.’
 ‘Government agencies also play a role in legitimating these controlling images.’ (2000: 85) 9
3. INTERNALISATION
 3. The controlling images can be spread by Black institutions too, and may be partially
internalized by Black women
 ‘African-American institutions also perpetuate these same controlling images.’ (2000: 86)
 Examples: African-American churches, hip hop lyrics
 Collins suggests that these institutions are sites of ‘negotiation’, where the controlling images
are both reproduced and contested (2000: 87)
 This means there’s also a risk of Black women themselves internalizing these controlling
images; Collins thinks that they are largely able to resist this, though not entirely; see the
discussion of beauty standards in chapter 4 for example
 (For a recent relevant debate in philosophy on this, see Stanley’s How Propaganda Works and
Srinivasan’s reply in ‘Ideology and Philosophy’)

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4. OBJECTIFICATION AS THE
OTHER
 4. This is a form of objectification/othering: ‘objectification as the Other’
 Objectification and othering are often seen as distinct notions, sometimes even as rivals (e.g.
Ann Cahill’s Overcoming Objectification)
 Roughly: objectification involves seeing, treating, or representing a person as a thing, othering
involves failing to fully recognize them as a person in their own right
 Collins clearly doesn’t take these to be rivals (and she’s in good company here – think of The
Second Sex)
 As Collins explains ‘objectification as the Other’, it relates to what she calls ‘binary thinking’
– our tendency to think of diversity in terms of oppositional binaries, which typically involve
one side being regarded as derivative and lesser in some sense
 ‘Objectification is central to this process of oppositional difference. In binary thinking, one
element is objectified as the Other, and is viewed as an object to be manipulated and
controlled.’ (2000: 70) 11
5. THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-
DEFINITION
 5. Black women can resist this form of oppression by replacing the controlling images with
self-defined images (at least within their own thoughts)
 Resistance to this kind of objectification involves developing a self-conception and knowledge
of the lives and experiences of Black women that comes from Black women themselves
 Given the marginalization of Black women within the kinds of institutions that play the
biggest role in reproducing the controlling images, there may not be much scope yet for
contesting them on a large scale
 But Collins thinks that Black women are often able to resist internalizing them, and that even
this is an important point of resistance

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6. STANDPOINT
EPISTEMOLOGY
 6. Self-definition involves formulating and maintaining a standpoint, the product of collective
reflection within certain ‘safe spaces’, and resistance
 Self-definition doesn’t mean that this is something individual Black women do alone
 Rather, self-defined images of Black women are produced and sustained by the Black feminist
standpoint, developed within certain ‘safe spaces’
 Collins isn’t using ‘safe spaces’ the way it’s usually used nowadays (to denote spaces in which
people can rely on not encountering triggering material or, sadly, to mock such spaces)
 Rather safe spaces are places where Black women can talk about their experiences and
perspectives without interference or retaliation, and collectively develop images and produce
knowledge that equips them to resist the controlling images:
 ‘These spaces are not only safe—they form prime locations for resisting objectification as the
Other.’ (2000: 101)
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7. SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGE
 7. The knowledge produced and available from the Black feminist standpoint is ‘subjugated
knowledge’, which is partly a result of, and helps to perpetuate, the controlling images
 The idea that Black feminist thought is subjugated knowledge is a major theme of chapter 11
of Collins’s book:
 ‘Because elite White men control Western structures of knowledge validation, their interests
pervade the themes, paradigms, and epistemologies of traditional scholarship. As a result, U.S.
Black women’s experiences, as well as those of women of African descent transnationally
have been routinely distorted within or excluded from what counts as knowledge.’ (2000: 251)
 The idea is that the standards for evaluating whether something is a genuine piece of
knowledge within institutions dominated by elite White men reflect their interests, and are
skewed against the knowledge claims of Black female academics, and Black women more
generally

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7. SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGE
 In the passage just quoted, Collins (following Harding) draws a distinction between
epistemologies, paradigms, and methodologies (270)
 I always find this bit of Collins’s chapter rather hard to follow, so it’s worth saying a little to
try to unpack this
 Paradigms are interpretive frameworks ‘used to explain social phenomena’ (e.g.
intersectionality)
 Methodologies are ‘the broad principles of how to conduct research and how interpretive
paradigms are to be applied’
 Epistemologies determine (among other things) which interpretive paradigms are to be used in
the validation of knowledge claims
 One sense in which there can be rival epistemologies, then, is that different groups advocate
the use of different interpretive paradigms in assessing claims as knowledgeable or not
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7. SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGE
 And an epistemology can suppress certain claims by insisting on the use of an interpretive
paradigm that rigs the game against them
 The suggestion is that the epistemology associated with ‘elite White men’ does just that with
respect to Black feminist thought - that’s why is ’subjugated’ knowledge
 One thing Collins’s argues is that this makes the entire system of exclusion self-perpetuating in
various ways
 For example, academic institutions have an epistemic gate-keeping role; they assess and review
potential publications and grant applications, with the outcomes of these processes bearing directly
on the outcomes of job applications and promotions applications
 If Black women’s claims to knowledge are dismissed due to the imposition of an inappropriate
interpretive paradigm or epistemology, then that will contribute to their exclusion from and
marginalization within academia, preventing them from playing a significant role in this process of
epistemic gatekeeping
 Collins thinks this is a genuine problem – moreover, she thinks that any research that conflicts with 16
the controlling images of Black women is particularly prone to dismissal
 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
 1. Can you think of any controlling images of black women that Collins has missed (either through
omission, or through the passing of time)?
 2. Thinking in terms of the ways some people get left out or harmed by our epistemic practices
discussed in week 1, what epistemic relevance might these controlling images of Black women
have?
 3. Do the distinctive features of Black feminist epistemology (for example, relying on lived
experience as a criterion for credibility, the use of dialogue, making use of character-assessments to
assess claims to knowledge) seem plausible or implausible? Why?