F eminist and g ender t heories

Feminist and Gender Theories  
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1998:48–49). Black feminist thought offers individual African American women the con-
ceptual tools to resist oppression. Black women have historically resisted, and continue to 
resist, oppression at individual, community, and institutional levels. A women’s blues tradi-
tion, the voices of contemporary African American woman writers and thinkers, and wom-
en’s everyday relationships with each other speak to the outpouring of contemporary black 
feminist thought in history and literature despite exclusion or marginalization in the hege-
monic framework.
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By articulating the powerful but hidden dynamics of black feminist thought, Collins 
highlights the underlying assumed whiteness of both feminism and academia and reminds 
white women in particular that they are not the only feminists. In addition, however, black 
feminist thought disrupts the masculinist underpinnings of Afrocentrism. Collins maintains 
that in the same way that European theorists have historically prioritized class over race or 
gender, and feminists have prioritized gender over either race or class, Afrocentric scholar-
ship, although formally acknowledging the significance of gender, relegates it as secondary 
to the more pressing fight against racism.
To be sure, Collins (1998:174) readily appreciates the guiding principles at the heart of 
Afrocentrism—most important, the emphases on reconstructing black culture, reconstitut-
ing black identity, using racial solidarity to build black community, and fostering an ethic 
of service to black community development. Yet, she is highly critical of the “unexamined 
yet powerful” gender ideology in black nationalist projects, particularly that of Afrocentrists 
such as Molefi Kete Asante (1942– ), who seek to replace Eurocentric systems of knowl-
edge with Afrocentric ways of knowing.
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As indicated above, the terms “matrix of domination” and “standpoint epistemology” are 
explicitly devised so as to reflect a multidimensional approach to order; that is, they point-
edly work at the level of the social structure or group and the individual. However, above 
all, in the spirit of the critical tradition, it is to the collective level that Collins’s work is most 
attuned. For instance, while Collins’s term “self-defined standpoint” readily reflects agency 
at the level of the individual, interestingly, Collins (ibid.:47) maintains that she favors this 
term over bell hooks’s term “self-reflexive speech” because self-defined standpoint “ties 
Black women’s speech communities much more closely to institutionalized power rela-
tions.” Clearly, that “standpoint” refers to “historically shared group-based experiences” 
and that “groups have a degree of permanence over time such that group realities transcend 
individual experiences” reflects a prioritization of the collective realm (Collins 
1990/2000:247; emphasis in original). As Collins (ibid.:249) states,
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For instance, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) epitomizes black feminist thought. Told from 
the perspective of the fourteen-year-old Celie, a semiliterate black girl brutalized first by her father 
and then by her husband, The Color Purple supplants the typical patriarchal concerns of the historical 
novel—“the taking of lands, or the birth, battles, and deaths of Great Men”—with the scene of “one 
woman asking another for her underwear” (Berlant 2000:4).
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Asante asserts that Afrocentricity can be done only via complete separation, and that Afrocentrism 
is vital to combat the Eurocentric arrogance that necessarily obliterates others, for Eurocentrism is 
nothing less than “symbolic imperialism.” However, Collins identifies several specific ways in which 
gender assumptions undergird black cultural nationalism.

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