You will prepare and submit a term paper on Gender Definitions, Racism and Class Theories. Your paper should be a minimum of 1250 words in length. The essay “Gender Definitions, Racism and Class Theories” talks about the theories by Judith Butler and Bell Hooks which are both challenging popular feminist notions about gender definitions, racism, and class within the folds of feminist ideology. Both types of theories challenge the preset notions of a woman.
According to Bell Hooks the “feminist movement”, a chiefly white middle and upper-class affair, did not articulate the desires of poor and nonwhite women, thus strengthening sexism, racism, and classism. She hints this is the reason such low numbers of black women participated in the feminist movement in the 1970s (Louis Harris’ Virginia Slims poll done in 1972 for Phillip Morris). The call for unity and camaraderie pre-arranged around notions that women constitute a sex class/caste with universal experiences and universal oppression made feminism a structurally unsound theory. Women of color, for the most part, black females, some of whom had been mixed up in the movement from its inception, some jointly occupied with women’s liberation and black power struggle, called awareness to differences that could not be reconciled by over-romantic evocations of sisterhood. The face of feminism was changed. Bell Hooks states that the correlation of sexism and racism during slavery added to black women having the lowest status and worst circumstances of any group in American society. Hooks points out to the fact that white female reformers were more concerned with white morality than the conditions of black women.
