Gender and the Abjection of Blackness

240 Pages·2018·0.97 MB·English

by  Sabine Broeck

Gender and the Abjection of Blackness
SUNY series in Gender Theory
—————
Tina Chanter, editor
Gender and the Abjection of Blackness
Sabine Broeck
Cover art: Migdalia Valdes, “Every Year in Black and White,” 2007
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bröck-Sallah, Sabine, 1954– author.
Title: Gender and the abjection of Blackness / Sabine Broeck.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York, 2018. | Series: SUNY
series in gender theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017037080 | ISBN 9781438470399 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781438470412 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women, Black. | Blacks—Race identity. | Racism. | Womanism.
| Feminism. | Intersectionality (Sociology) | Slavery.
Classification: LCC HQ1201 .B83 2018 | DDC 305.896082—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037080
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Against Gender: Enslavism and the Subjects of Feminism 1
2 Abolish Property: Black Feminist Struggles against
Anti-Blackness 9
3 Gender and the Grammar of Enslavism 43
4 Abjective Returns: The Slave’s Fungibility in
White Gender Studies 97
5 Post Gender, Post Human: Braidotti’s Nietzschean Echoes
of Anti-Blackness 177
6 On Dispossession as a False Analogy 201
Bibliography 211
Index 223

Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in the making, dating back to first
presentations around 2010. Parts of some chapters have appeared
in previous publications. The entire text, however, has been written and
revised for the purposes of this book. Some passages of the chapter “Abolish
Property” were published in “The Challenge of Black Feminist Desire:
Abolish Property,” Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century,
edited by Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi, Liverpool University Press,
2013. Parts of chapter 4, “Abjective Returns,” appeared in “Re-reading de
Beauvoir ‘after Race’: Woman-as-Slave Revisited,” International Journal of
Francophone Studies, vol. 14, nos. 1–2, 2011. I thank State University of
New York Press, and particularly Andrew Kenyon and Tina Chanter, for
their patience and support. Heartfelt gratitude goes to Dana Foote and to
Gordon Marce for kindness and swiftly provided expertise to help make
text into book. To the numerous friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and
students in Bremen, Berlin, Bielefeld, Hannover, Potsdam, Oldenburg,
Erlangen, Munich, Hamburg, Bonn, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Rostock, Giessen,
Dusseldorf, and Munster, as well as in Italy, Poland, Austria, France, Spain,
Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Senegal, Mexico,
Sweden, South Africa, and Russia, who I had the privilege to meet or work
with for Erasmus visits, conferences, workshops, lectures, and seminars, and
to learn from, I am deeply and sincerely grateful for your critical input,
your always freely given listening and kind advice, your prodding and
contradicting, questioning and thinking along with me, your pushing and
pulling me to the finish line. You know who you are: thank you. Jana Geisler:
nothing doing without your help. Christina Sharpe and Rinaldo Walcott:
thank you for collegial “tough love”—interest in my work. Jane Desmond
and Virginia Dominguez: your eager curiosity for the project gave me a
beginning. Maria Diedrich: you trusted me to write another book. Sara
vii
viii | Acknowledgments
Lennox: thank you, again, for unerring g uidance through the versions. Renate
Hof: without you, this project would not have become a book. To Malick
and Youssoupha Sarr: jerejef, but words don’t really do it.
One
Against Gender
Enslavism and the Subjects of Feminism
How can one—in my case a senior white feminist German scholar who
has struggled with and through decades of transnational, (post-)mul-
ticultural, intersectional, queered, intergenerational feminism—be against
gender? Why—and how can one, or even need one—read the category of
gender as constitutively anti-Black, not just in cases of racist practice but as
a theoretical formation? This book is about a (self-)critical recuperation of
white feminist interventions, which have paradigmatically shaped my genera-
tion’s trajectory of gender studies. It could not have been written without
Black feminism. Writing it has been about coming to terms with where I
come from: the white habitus of gender and my own being implicated in
the longue durée of enslavism. It responds to Elisabeth Spelman’s pioneering
attempt, as a white feminist philosopher, to question the essentialization
and universalization of white women’s feminist approaches to gender, and
takes up her questions, still unanswered. For me, this reckoning with the
history of my own formation as a white feminist recapitulates an epistemic
challenge: white gender studies’ evasion of the authority of Black theoreti-
cal interventions.
The book is neither a historiography of white feminism and gender
studies, nor a painstaking discussion of lively and massive intramural debates
in gender studies, including those over trans-difference, postcolonial and
decolonial intersectionality, and queerness, which have shaped gender studies
over the last half-century. It is a theoretical intervention focused on a, for
me, paradigmatic set of intellectuals—Simone de Beauvoir, Jessica Benjamin,
Judith Butler, and Rosi Braidotti—with an American and transnationally
1