F eminist and g ender t heories

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
“differences in penalty and privilege that accompany race, class, gender and similar systems 
of social injustice” (ibid.:3).
Collins uses the term matrix of domination to underscore that one’s position in society 
is made up of multiple contiguous standpoints rather than just one essentialist standpoint. 
Thus, in contrast to earlier critical accounts (e.g., the Frankfurt School—see Chapter 3) that 
assume that power operates from the top down by forcing and controlling unwilling victims 
to bend to the will of more powerful superiors, Collins (1990/2000:226) asserts that, 
“depending on the context, an individual may be an oppressor, a member of an oppressed 
group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. . . . Each individual derives varying 
amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which frame 
everyone’s lives.”
9
In addition, Collins emphasizes “that people simultaneously experience and resist 
oppression on three levels: the level of personal biography; the group or community level 
of the cultural context created by race, class, and gender; and the systemic level of social 
institutions” (Collins 1990/2000:227). At the level of the individual, she insists on “the 
power of the self-definition” (Collins 2004:306) and “self-defined standpoint” (Collins 
1998:47), and that “each individual has a unique personal biography made up of concrete 
experiences, values, motivations, and emotions,” thereby reasserting both the subjectivity 
and agency absent in earlier critical models (e.g., the Frankfurt School). For Collins 
(ibid.:50), breaking silence represents a moment of insubordination in relations of power—
“a direct, blatant insult delivered before an audience.”
The group or community level of the cultural context created by race, class, and gender 
is vital to Collins’s conceptualization of black feminist thought, which, like all specialized 
thought, reflects the interests and standpoint of its creators. Collins locates black feminist 
thought in the unique literary traditions forged by black women such as bell hooks, Audre 
Lorde, and Alice Walker, as well as in the everyday experience of ordinary black women. 
In addition, black feminist thought is rooted in black women’s intellectual tradition nurtured 
by black women’s community. As Collins (1990/2000:253) maintains,
When white men control the knowledge validation process, both political criteria (contextual 
credibility and evaluation of knowledge claims) can work to suppress Black feminist thought. 
Therefore, Black women are more likely to choose an alternative epistemology for assessing 
knowledge claims, one using different standards that are consistent with Black women’s criteria 
for substantiated knowledge and with our criteria for methodology adequacy.
.
.
.
In other words, Collins maintains that the experience of multiple oppressions makes 
black women particularly skeptical of and vulnerable to dominant paradigms of knowledge 
and thus more reliant on their own experiential sources of information. Black women “come 
to voice” and break the silence of oppression by drawing both from their own experiences 
and from the “collective secret knowledge generated by groups on either side of power”—
that is, the black community and the black female community in particular (Collins 
9
In her recent Black Sexual Politics (2004:9–10), Collins takes an even more radical postmodern 
stance. Here she sees the complexity of “mutually constructing,” intertwined dimensions of race, 
class, gender, and sexuality as so great that she sets her sights not on “untangling the effects” of race, 
class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, and the like, but rather on simply illuminating them. The point 
of Black Sexual Politics, she says, is not “to tell readers what to think,” but rather “[to examine] what 
we might think about” (ibid.).

---