Gender and the Abjection of Blackness (SUNY series in Gender Theory)

An anti-racist critique of gender studies as a field. In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness, Sabine Broeck argues that gender studies as a mostly white field has taken insufficient account of Black contributions, and that more than being an ethnocentric limitation or blind spot, this has represented a structural anti-Blackness in the field. Engaging with the work of Black feminist authors Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Broeck critiques a selection of canonical white gender studies texts to make this case. The book discusses this problem at the core of gender theory as a practice which Broeck terms enslavism—the ongoing abjection of Black life which Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This has become manifest in the repetitive employment of the “woman as slave” metaphor so central to gender theory, as well as in recent theoretical mutations of these anti-Black politics of analogy. It is the structural separation of Blackness from gender that has functioned over and again as the scaffold enabling white women’s struggles for successful recognition of equality and subjectivity in the human world as we know it. This book challenges white readers to rethink their own untroubled identification with gender theory, and it provides all readers with a white feminist theorist’s sophisticated theoretical and self-critical scholarly account of her own reckoning with and learning in dialogue from Black feminism’s critique. “Broeck draws on a wide range of experience to provide a frame for rethinking gender as category that can work towards something like Black freedom. Most importantly, Black theoretical insights in this work move beyond intervention to offer a whole new way of being, and the author grapples with the new conceptual terrain she is now occupying.” — Rinaldo Walcott, author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies Sabine Broeck is Professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. She is the coeditor of several books, including (with Jason R. Ambroise) Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology. Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 1 Against Gender: Enslavism and the Subjects of Feminism 10 2 Abolish Property: Black Feminist Struggles against Anti-Blackness 18 Remembering 18 Hesitation 20 Rereading the Human: Repercussions of Sylvia Wynter’s Epistemic Project 25 Spillers: Gender and Black Flesh 33 White Culpability, Enjoyment, and Gender in Hartman’s Work 38 3 Gender and the Grammar of Enslavism 52 The Anti-enslavist Challenge of Blackness 52 Reading Enslavism: A Hermeneutics of Absence 55 White Machinations 58 Woman as Slave Mobilized 59 Hegelian Fallacy and Its Lacanian Echoes 76 The Promotion of Slavishness, or Nietzsche’s Contempt 83 Enslavism and Abjection 91 White Abjectorship at Work 94 Orphan Reading: A Methodology of Tracing Absent Absence 101 4 Abjective Returns: The Slave’s Fungibility in White Gender Studies 106 De Beauvoir’s Discontents, Feminism, and Enslavement 106 Slavery and Ambiguous Interventions 110 Rhetorical Slavery and the Distinction of Gender 117 Jessica Benjamin: Gender and Bondage 126 The Subject, Desire, and the Question of Violence 141 Mothering 147 The Suffering Subject 154 Repeating Abjection: Judith Butler Yet Again 160 Reading Abjectivation 166 Antigone and Fungibility 170 Subjectivation 176 The Human Frame 181 5 Post Gender, Post Human: Braidotti’s Nietzschean Echoes of Anti-Blackness 186 Bondage and Vulnerability 196 A Leap through Pain: Slave Moralities, Recycled 198 6 On Dispossession as a False Analogy 210 Bibliography 220 Index 232 In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness, Sabine Broeck argues that gender studies as a mostly white field has taken insufficient account of Black contributions, and that more than being an ethnocentric limitation or blind spot, this has represented a structural anti-Blackness in the field. Engaging with the worl of Black feminist authors Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Broeck critiques a selection of canonical white gener studies texts to make this case. The book discusses this problem at the core of gender theory as a practice which Broeck terms enslavism--the ongoing abjection of Black life which Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This has become manifest in the repetitive employment of the "women as slave" metaphor so central to gender theory, as well as in recent theoretical mutations of these anti-Black politics of analogy. It is the structural separation of Blackness from gender that has functioned over and again as the scaffold enabling white women's struggles for successful recognition of equality and subjectivity in the human world as we know it. This book challenges while readers to rethink their own untroubled identification with gender theory, and it provides all readers with a white feminist theorist's sophisticated theoretical and self-critical scholarly account of her own reckoning with and learning in dialogue from Black feminism's critique--back cover In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness , Sabine Broeck argues that gender studies as a mostly white field has taken insufficient account of Black contributions, and that more than being an ethnocentric limitation or blind spot, this has represented a structural anti-Blackness in the field. Engaging with the work of Black feminist authors Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Broeck critiques a selection of canonical white gender studies texts to make this case. The book discusses this problem at the core of gender theory as a practice which Broeck terms enslavism --the ongoing abjection of Black life which Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This has become manifest in the repetitive employment of the "woman as slave" metaphor so central to gender theory, as well as in recent theoretical mutations of these anti-Black politics of analogy. It is the structural separation of Blackness from gender that has functioned over and again as the scaffold enabling white women's struggles for successful recognition of equality and subjectivity in the human world as we know it. This book challenges white readers to rethink their own untroubled identification with gender theory, and it provides all readers with a white feminist theorist's sophisticated theoretical and self-critical scholarly account of her own reckoning with and learning in dialogue from Black feminism's critique. Against Gender. Enslavism And The Subjects Of Feminism -- Abolish Property: Black Feminist Struggles Against Anti-blackness -- Gender And The Grammar Of Enslavism -- Abjective Returns: The Slave's Fungibility In White Gender Studies -- Post Gender, Post Human: Braidotti 's Nietzschean Echoes Of Anti-blackness -- On Dispossession As A False Analogy. Sabine Broeck. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.