Feminist Review

Issue 53: Speaking Out: Researching and Representing Women

The Feminist Review Collective

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134759675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

A unique combination of the activist and the academic, Feminist Review has an acclaimed position within women's studies courses and the women's movement. It publishes and reviews work by women; featuring articles on feminist theory, race, class and sexuality, women's history, cultural studies, black and third world feminism, poetry, photography, letters and much more.

Situated Voices

‘Black Women’s Experience’ and Social Work

Gail Lewis

Abstract

The article uses a discourse analytic approach to explore some of the ways in which black women social workers invoke the category ‘experience’ as a means by which to mediate their structural and discursive location in social services departments. The article draws on current feminist theoretical debates about ‘experience’ and the ‘multivocality’ of black women as they construct dialogic spaces with diverse interlocutors. In so doing an argument is made for an understanding of ‘black women’s experience’ as constituted rather than descriptive.

Keywords

discourse analysis, black women, social services, ‘experience’, contingency

In reconstituting the history of feminism in the post 1960s era, white feminists in Britain and the USA have discussed how consciousness raising groups had the effect of historicizing individual circumstance and experience (see e.g. Wandor, 1990). By sharing the content of everyday life, what was often believed to belong only to the individual was gradually and collectively understood as deeply embedded in a web of social and cultural relations which were themselves rooted in historical change. ‘Experience’ then was understood as collective and social: ‘the personal as political’. This new understanding was to lead to the highly problematic notion of a global sisterhood organized around an appeal to a unified ‘woman’s identity’. In response, black and Third World (white working-class and lesbian) women protested at this totalizing definition and began to point to differences amongst women. The outcome of these emergent critiques was that the content of ‘women’s experience’ began to be dissembled, which in turn meant that the authority of white middle-class women to construct a singular and hegemonic ‘experience’ was profoundly challenged (see e.g. Carby, 1982; Parmar, 1982; Feminist Review, 1984).

These challenges notwithstanding, the category of ‘experience’ was not rejected by black and other feminists. As a privileged site from which to speak, and so constitute oneself, the category was appropriated for a different content and with an oppositional purpose. As feminist writings by black women on both sides of the Atlantic proliferated (see e.g. Anzaldua and Moraga, 1983; Bryan et al., 1985; Choong et al., 1991; Grewal et al., 1987; Jordan, 1986; Lorde, 1984; Smith, 1983; Sulter, 1990), the constitution of ‘black women’s experience’ was well underway. Embedded within many of these was a notion of claiming a ‘voice’: a position from which to speak. This ‘speaking’ was necessary if the specificity of ‘black women’s experience’ was to be articulated and a claim to a self-defined womanhood made. Such a claim had been denied by white feminist texts because of their exclusions and (perhaps unconscious) claims to universality.

At first the category itself remained unchallenged and unproblematized, not least because at this point the explicit turn to post-structuralist theory had not yet exerted its influence on much of black British feminism. Having said this, the endurance of the category is testimony to its tremendous political importance and the power of its challenge to dominant epistemologies. For, in creating a legitimacy to speak from experience, feminists (black and white) had made it possible to begin to undo established ideas about what it means to ‘know’. This, together with the adoption of some post-structuralist insights such as the category of ‘the subject’, cast new light on and raised new problems about the ways in which social categories and the social/psychic selves which inhabit them are constituted. Those who had erstwhile understood themselves as ‘individuals’ could now cast new meaning on their lives and think of themselves as historically constituted ‘subjects’. They could now become alive to their gendered selves. The link to the constitution of a classed ‘self’ is also apparent in a comment made by Patrick Joyce in his work about class and ‘self’ in nineteenth-century England:

In many regards we are still Engels’ children, not least the most sophisticated students of the historical formation of subjectivities, [who are] alive to the complexity of textual positioning of subjects, but borne down by the leaden weight of an obsolete view of class in which ‘individual’ is the sign of ‘middle class’, a ‘collective self’ that of the ‘working class’.

(1994, p. 86, my emphasis)

While the divide between self-knowledge as individual or collective is here a result of class, in the twentieth-century feminist context we can add ‘race’ as the axis along which this divide is organized. As Nell Painter (1995) has commented, when transposed to the black/white binary, this becomes rewritten as white people having psyches while black people have community. So if white middle-class feminists in the USA and Britain discovered through a collective process that they are constituted as individual selves and from there celebrate what they deem to be a universal sisterhood, black feminists (people) are denied any such individuality (which the notion of psyche suggests) from which to so ‘discover’ themselves. Those with an ‘always already’ ‘community’ are denied the very element from which such processes of identification are made.

Once the issue of what it means ‘to know’ is established as a site of contestation, the requisite broadening and deepening of the content of knowledge and experience can be seen as only part of the issue. As a result, if in the early years the sociality of ‘experience’ began to be accepted, some twenty years or more later, feminists (white and black) in these two national formations (Britain and the USA) have begun to problematize and theorize the category ‘experience’, to examine its ontological and epistemological status, to see, indeed, how it may be used in politically committed intellectual work.

To do this, some consideration about how to theorize the category of ‘experience’ is required. Two US-based feminists have turned their attention to this—one white (Joan Scott), the other a woman of colour (Chandra Talpade Mohanty). Beginning with a profound sense of opposition to the foundational status of ‘experience’ in much academic (and feminist) work, where the category is constituted as ‘uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation —as a foundation upon which analysis is based’ (1992:24), Joan Scott argues for a historiography which would reveal the connections between the ‘experiences’ of different groups, repressive mechanisms and the inner logics by which difference is relationally constituted (p. 25). To get to this, she argues, a problematized notion of ‘experience’ is required, one in which it is recognized that

It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience. Experience in this definition then becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced. To think about experience in this way is to historicise it as well as to historicise the identities it produces.

(Scott, 1992:26)

Here, then, the very category of ‘experience’ itself is established as in need of examination, so that the web of historical relations in which all ‘experience’ is inscribed is brought to the fore. In this way it is possible to reveal not only the binaries, the boundaries, the closures and erasures which are produced in time and space, but also the subjectivities and identities which it is possible for specific social groups to inhabit in specific places at specific times.

‘Experience’ is widened, deepened and embedded. While Scott addressed herself to historians and cultural theorists, Mohanty directs her attention principally to white feminists. Writing in a similar vein to Scott, but earlier and with more explicit emphasis on political imperatives (as well as intellectual ones), Mohanty argues that ‘experience must be historically interpreted and theorised if it is to become the basis of feminist solidarity and struggle, and it is at this moment that an understanding of the politics of location proves crucial’ (1992:88–9, my emphasis).

Inspired by Adrienne Rich’s work (1984), Mohanty uses the term location ‘to refer to the historical, geographical, cultural, psychic and imaginative boundaries which provide ground for political definition and self-definition’ (1992:74). Her concern with the ‘politics of location’ is derived from her project (shared with many black feminists) to challenge the singular and unitary notion of ‘experience’ such that it is at once both constitutive of the individual and the collective. Mohanty’s criticism of such a formulation of ‘experience’ is stated thus:

There seem to be two problems with this definition. First, experience is seen as being immediately accessible, understood and named. The complex relationships between behaviour and its representation are either ignored or made irrelevant; experience is collapsed into discourse and vice versa. Second, since experience has a fundamentally psychological status, [in this approach] questions of history and collectivity are formulated on the level of attitude and intention…. If the assumption of the sameness of experience is what ties woman (individual) to women (group), regardless of class, race, nation and sexualities, the notion of experience is anchored firmly in the notion of the individual self, a determined and specifiable constituent of European modernity.

(1992:82, emphasis in original)

Strategically it is key to understand that ‘the experience of being woman can create an illusionary unity, for it is not the experience of being woman, but the meanings attached to gender, race, class, and age at various historical moments’ (p. 86), that it is important to grasp. Hence the need to ‘locate the politics of experience’.

Both Scott and Mohanty suggest that the way to theorize experience is to concentrate on its historical specificity and excavate its embeddedness in webs of social, political and cultural relations which are themselves organized around axes of power and which act to constitute subjectivities and identities. Without such a problematizing of ‘experience’, the binaries, exclusions and erasures which are embedded in it cannot be deconstructed and thus challenged and transformed.

Part of this task involves an analysis of when and how the category of ‘experience’ is mobilized. This entails an excavation of the location of specific speakers within multiple systems of subordination—those of class, ‘race’, gender and indeed sexuality. One writer who has been concerned with explicating the positions black women occupy in multiple and simultaneous systems of oppression is Barbara Smith, the black lesbian feminist literary critic. She emphasized the need to locate the contexts through which fictional texts by black women authors can be read. For her, black women’s position could not be understood in a framework which conceived of systems of oppression as either discrete or hierarchical.

A Black feminist approach to literature that embodies the realisation that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers is an absolute necessity.

(Smith, 1982:159)

And as she was to make clear in another, more polemical piece, the systems of class, ‘race’, gender and indeed sexuality, had to be understood as intersecting and giving rise to a simultaneity of oppression:

The concept of the simultaneity of oppression is still the crux of a Black feminist understanding of political reality and, I believe, one of the most significant ideological contributions of Black feminist thought.

(Smith, 1983:xxxii)

More recent work by Mae Gwendolyn Henderson (1992) has adapted Smith’s idea of ‘simultaneity of oppression’ and taken it in new directions. She offers an inspirational approach to the examination of the discourses through which black women constitute their multiple selves, give meaning to the content of their lives and define the parameters within which their ‘experience’ is produced and lived. As Henderson says, ‘black women speak from a multiple and complex social, historical and cultural positionality which, in effect, constitutes black female subjectivity’ (Henderson, 1992:147).

For my purposes the point of interest is the way in which Henderson moves from a recognition of the complex embeddedness of ‘black women’s experience’ to a conception about how black women create a position from which to speak (and write), and the discourses which it is possible to discern in their speech (writing). She begins by suggesting that both ‘raced’ and gendered perspectives, and the interrelations between them, structure the discourse(s) through which black women speak/write. This she refers to as the ‘simultaneity of discourse’.

By using this concept, she argues, it is possible to hold on to the notion of black women as at once ‘raced’, gendered, classed (and sexual) subjects and thus that they are both ‘“Other” of the Same, [and] also… “other” of the “other(s)”’ (Henderson, 1992:146). The discourses which are simultaneously embedded within, and which serve to structure black women’s speech/writing, produce relationships of both difference and identification. This means that black women will speak/write ‘racial difference within gender identity and gender difference within racial identity’ (p. 145).

While this refers to processes of interaction within and between socially constituted groups in which ‘othering’ plays a central role, Henderson is attempting to get to another dimension as well. This is the constitution of ‘self’ that occurs through the simultaneity of discourse. Thus she suggests that the complex multiplicity of black women’s positioning results in the discursive production of a ‘self’ in which ‘other(s)’ are always present. Black women’s selfhood, and the speech/writing through which this is constituted, necessarily contains both a ‘generalised “Other” and “otherness” within the self’ (p. 146).

Critical examinations of how black women in Britain use the category experience to give meaning to the web of relations in which they are inscribed and of the multivocality which this produces are scarce. This article is based on interviews in which black female social workers talk about ‘experience’ as a way to make sense of and give meaning to their working lives. It discusses some of their views on the links between ‘black women’s experience’ and social work as a practice; and then considers what conclusions might be drawn about the category ‘experience’ when ‘race’ and racism are vectors in the constitution and negotiation of power relations. The article arises out of research I have been undertaking into the formation of ‘raced’ and gendered subjectivities in specific employment contexts. More specifically, their voices arise in response to two interconnected questions. What, if any, are the particular skills or attributes which black women can bring to social work; and why are these important? There was a high degree of repetition of the major themes around and through which the women constructed their specificity as black women. These themes centred on ‘oppression’, ‘struggle’ and ‘coming through against the odds’, all of which were presented as particular to black womanhood.

‘Sisters chant: I struggle therefore I am’

I want to argue that the meanings which these black female social workers constructed about both themselves and their work were produced on similar discursive terrain to that which Henderson identifies in the works of African-American women writers. The processes of identification and differentiation; the implicit use of historical memory; the acute awareness of diverse and subordinate social positionings, are factors which it is possible to trace in the accounts which follow. All of these are located within the context of what might be termed an ‘occupational situatedness’ which defines the parameters within which the women are speaking. Their construction of ‘self’ and meaning is, then, cast within (the ever present) shadow of their paid employment and as such they draw on professional discourses in which a ‘fit’ between ‘black women’s experience’ and the ‘nature of social work’ is posited.

The accounts are numbered sequentially and at the end of the first extract from a new speaker their ‘ethnic origin’ is given in brackets.

1.a. [GL: OK, and do you think there are any particular skills or qualities that black women can bring to social work?] (a big nod) ‘I think we have the experience in terms of having to survive, in terms of whether it is limited housing, with our parents growing up, the areas we live in because yes, we can move on after you get into the job situation you know, and the area of schools, we have got all those experiences of having to cope with those problems repeatedly, whether it is going to school or wherever you go to, and having to speak up for yourself, and be heard and be counted, and I think that in social services that’s what...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Who’s Who and Where’s Where: Constructing Feminist Literary Studies
• Situated Voices: ‘Black Women’s Experience’ and Social Work
• Insider Perspectives or Stealing the Words Out of Women’s Mouths: Interpretation in the Research Process
• Revolutionary Spaces: Photographs of Working-class Women by Esther Bubley 1940–1943
• Between Identification and Desire: Rereading Rebecca
• Poem
• Reviews
• Letter
• Noticeboard