Collier- Cotera and Smith

Cotera and Smith both navigate convergence and difference among women of color theorizing and reveal the potential for “shared epistemological orientation”(Cotera,10).  Cotera implements a “comparitavist model” of the literature and life experiences of Deloria, Hurston, and Gonzalez, three women of color working and writing in the 1930s.  Cotera highlights how they navigated the intersections of academic worlds, their “native” homes, and the constraints of “appropriate” ethnographic and literary representations. In her comparison, she challenges the notion that one must always search for sameness.  She calls for “divergent thinking” to take into account difference, and that these authors, “pondered questions of identity, history, and culture through the lens of their particular (yet interconnected) experiences as gendered and racialized subjects whose status, class, and cultural positioning constituted a unique epistemic vantage point on the mechanics of social life”(9-10).  These case studies historicize US third world feminism and counter the erasure of the tradition of women of color intellectuals.  Cotera situates these author’s texts in conversation with each other, but also in conversation with more contemporary women of color feminist theorizing through the work of Collins, Sandoval, Alarcon, and Mohanty, which links these intellectual contributions.

Smith’s piece on the three pillars of white supremacy examines these complexities of coalition building among “women of color,” with a focus on the implications for organizing and activism.  She examines how white supremacy impacts women of color in interrelated but distinct ways, operating through three logics: “slavery/capitalism,” “genocide/colonialism,” and “orientalism/war.”  Smith illustrates how logics of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy can simultaneously benefit and oppress different social groups, arguing for strategic alliances that recognize differences among women of color to, “ensure that our model of liberation does not become the model of oppression for others”(69).  Smith’s piece highlights the political and material implications of not adequately attending to difference often subsumed under the umbrella of “women of color.” 

Cotera’s comparative model and attention to difference is useful because it allows for an examination of shared oppression without obscuring the particular ways domination functions.  These readings made me reflect back to the policing in Chicago panel from a few weeks ago and the intersectional aspects of the project.  Focusing on the particulars of policing in Chicago can promote more attention to the situated knowledges of different communities, offering a more complex discussion of power, as well as strategies for resistance.  When it comes to the production of knowledge, women of color methodologies also highlight the limits of only attending to one area of difference, which can obscure those subjects who are fall into the borderlands between different systems of domination and acceptable modes of representation.   I see some overlap in Cotera’s project with Abu Lughod’s ethnography of the particular, as both problematize generalizability and the “relations of rule” that structure and constrain knowledge.  Cotera illustrates a practice that involves, “critical analysis of the connections between experience, subjectivity, and theory”(18).   She investigates storytelling and testimony to reveal the structures, contexts, and histories that shape women of color’s lived experiences, while also situating the work of Hurston, Deloria, and Gonzalez in the borderlands of accepted academic and literary work.   Women of color methodologies and the use of storytelling and coalition has the potential to disrupt some assumptions about authorship and authority, revealing marginalized knowledges, and offering complex critiques of multiple structures of domination.

Cotera’s comparative project highlights Hurston’s storytelling and Gonzalez’s coalitional work.  Do these methods provide strategies for addressing some of the power dynamics inherent in research or different ways of representing or articulating the “voices” of marginalized subjects? 

Cotera also looks at the role of fiction for revealing knowledge about the social world and the particulars of domination.  Can science fiction similarly be implemented as a tool to imagine alternative political and organizing solutions and possibilities for change?