DAVIS
We’ll put Angela Davis (Distinguished Professor of History of Consciousness, Emerita at UC Santa Cruz) in conversation with Cooper. Please first read Dwayne Mack’s biography of Davis.
SEXISM, RACISM, AND CAPITALISM
Davis. 1981. Women, Race, & Class. (pp. 3-98, 110-26, 137-48, 172-244)[1]
Davis examines feminist struggles in the United States and in doing so she shows how sexism, racism, and capitalism are fundamentally connected. She doesn’t critique “white feminism” as much as she critiques white bourgeois feminism, which has historically marginalized the concerns of not only people of color but also the working class. From the campaigns for suffrage and birth control to more contemporary struggles against sexual assault and unequal housework, Davis illustrates how many women’s liberation efforts are frequently leveraged against the interests of those who suffer most under racism and capitalism. This occurs in a world where women’s oppression exists as something deeply entangled with white power and the supremacy of capital. Davis illustrates this entanglement with more than just examples of social movements. Her analysis of physical violence during slavery illustrates how slaveowners’ abuses of enslaved women cannot be understood as just exercises of male power, nor can they be understood as the singular effects of racial or class oppression. Davis’s critiques of modern American culture, be it the motherhood ideal, capitalist ideology, the myth of the Black rapist, or the stereotype of the promiscuous Black woman, all point to a similar conclusion. In the final chapter, Davis calls for the industrialization and socialization of domestic labor. However, this must be read as part of a broader call to topple multiple systems of domination and exploitation.
DAVIS AND COOPER
Read the "Cooper Excerpts for Davis" in the Excerpt Packet.
Davis doesn’t mention Cooper, but putting these two theorists in conversation makes sense. Both showcase racism within American feminist movements and both consider how struggles for racial progress have ignored the unique voices of Black women. They also detail interlocking systems of oppression. For these reasons and others, scholars usually situate Davis and Cooper under a broad umbrella of Black feminism. That said, the differences between Davis and Cooper are numerous and significant. Consider, for example, their differing accounts of gender, capitalism, and the state. And just as there are basic contrasts between their diagnoses, so too are there fundamental differences between their prescriptions. It’s certainly hard to reconcile Cooper’s call for Americanism with Davis’s call for socialism, even if both could be framed as calls for universal reciprocity. Time permitting, we may also want to put Davis in conversation with Gramsci (on hegemony), Robinson (on Black radicalism), Mies (on housewifization), and others.
[1] Chapters 1-5, 7, 9, 11-13. E-book pages: 8-59, 66-74, 81-7, 101-39.