Читать книгу Intersectionality - Patricia Hill Collins - Страница 12

More than 1,000 black women and their allies attended the seventh annual meeting of Latinidades, the Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean women’s festival in Brasilia. As the largest festival for black women in Latin America, the 2014 event was scheduled to coincide with the annual International Day of Black Latin American and Caribbean Women. Latinidades was no ordinary festival. Several decades of black women’s activism in Brazil had created the political, social, and artistic space for this annual festival that was devoted to the issues and needs of black women in Brazil specifically, as well as Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean women more generally.

In 1975 at the beginning of the United Nations (UN) Decade of Women, black women presented the Manifesto of Black Women at the Congress of Brazilian Women. The Manifesto called attention to how black women’s life experiences in jobs, families, and the economy were shaped by gender, race, and sexuality. During this Decade of Women, white feminists remained unwilling or unable to address black women’s concerns. Léila Gonzalez, Sueli Carneiro, and many other black feminist activists continued to push for black women’s issues. Their advocacy is all the more remarkable given that it occurred during the term of Brazil’s military government (1964–85) and that it preceded contemporary understandings of intersectionality.

Brazil’s national policy concerning race and democracy militated against such activism. Brazil officially claimed not to have “races,” a position that rests on the Brazilian government’s approach to racial statistics. Without racial categories, Brazil officially had neither “races” nor black people as a socially recognized “racial” group. Ironically, the myth of Brazilian national identity erased race in order to construct a philosophy of racial democracy, one where being Brazilian superseded other identities such as those of race. In essence, by erasing the political category of race, Brazil’s national discourse of racial democracy effectively eliminated language that might describe the racial inequalities that affected black Brazilian people’s lives. This erasure of “blackness” as a political category allowed discriminatory practices to occur in areas of education and employment against people of visible African descent because there were neither officially recognized terms for describing racial discrimination nor official remedies for it (Twine 1998). Brazil’s cultivated image of national identity posited that racism did not exist and also that color lacks meaning, apart from when it was celebrated as a dimension of national pride. This national identity neither came about by accident nor meant that people of African descent believed it. Women of African descent may have constituted a visible and sizable segment of Brazilian society, yet in a Brazil that ostensibly lacked race, the category of black women did not exist as an officially recognized population. Black women challenged these historical interconnections between ideas about race and Brazil’s nation-building project as setting the stage for the erasure of Afro-Brazilian women.

Black feminists’ ongoing criticisms of racial democracy and advocacy for the needs of black women provided a foundation for the new generation of activists to organize Latinidades. These intergenerational social movement ties enabled younger black women to highlight the connections between gender, race, and class that were advanced within intergenerational networks of black feminist activists. In this context, Latinidades’s expressed purpose of promoting “racial equality and tackling racism and sexism” both continued the legacy of an earlier generation and showcased the use of intersectionality as an analytical category within Afro-Brazilian feminism. For example, Conceição Evaristo, Afro-Brazilian author and professor of Brazilian literature, attended the festival. Her novel Ponciá Vicencio, a landmark in black Brazilian women’s literature, remains a classic in examining the challenges and creativity of an ordinary black woman who faces multiple expressions of oppression (Evaristo 2007). Evaristo’s presence spoke both to the synergy of arts, activism, and academic work among Afro-Brazilian feminists, and also to the significance of intergenerational intellectual and political engagement for the black women’s movement in Brazil.

The festival cultivated a range of relationships that typically were seen as separate. As is the case with intersectionality, the festival accommodated people from all walks of life. Community organizers, professors, graduate students, parents, artists, schoolteachers, high-school students, representatives of samba schools, government officials, and music lovers, among others, all made the journey to Brasilia to attend Latinidades. The festival centered on women of African descent, but many men and members of diverse racial/ethnic groups from all areas of Brazil’s states and regions, as well as from Costa Rica, Ecuador, and other Latin American and Caribbean nations, also attended. This transregional and transnational heterogeneity enabled participants to share their strategies for tackling how racism and sexism affected Afro-Latin women.

But the festival’s inclusivity also highlighted an expansive understanding of intersectionality that reflected the synergy of intellectual and activist work. Black women’s activist traditions informed both its sessions and its special events. Latinidades did not just talk about the need for relations across social divisions of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, and ability; it promoted opportunities to do so. Community organizers rubbed shoulders with academics, as did young people with revered elders. For example, Angela Davis’s keynote address got the audience on its feet, many with fists raised in the Black Power salute. The festival also set aside time for a planning meeting to educate attendees about the upcoming Black Women’s March for a National Day of Denouncing Racism. Another programming strand emphasized the significance of African diasporic cultural traditions, especially in Brazil. Writers, artists, activists, and academics learned from one another. From the content of academic sessions, to a workshop for girls on black aesthetics and beauty, to a session on the art of turbans and their connections to black beauty, to a capoeira workshop, and a tree-planting ceremony of the seedlings of sacred baobab trees, Latinidades saw culture as an important dimension of Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean women’s lives. After two days of intensive workshops, talks, and films, festival participants spilled out of the museum onto its expansive plaza to enjoy two nights of live music. Latinidades was a festival where serious work and play coincided.

Latinadades’s use of intersectionality as an analytic tool for structuring the conference illustrates broader issues concerning how Afro-Brazilian women’s longstanding commitment to challenging racism and sexism reflects the specific social context of their experiences. Notwithstanding its myth of racial democracy, Brazil’s specific history with slavery, colonialism, dictatorship, and democratic institutions has shaped its distinctive patterns of intersecting power relations of race, gender, and sexuality. Sexual engagements, both consensual and forced, among African, indigenous, and European-descended populations created a Brazilian population with varying hair textures, skin colors, body shapes, and eye colors, as well as a complex and historically shifting series of terms to describe them. Skin color, hair texture, facial features, and other aspects of appearance became de facto racial markers for distributing education, jobs, and other social goods. As Kia Caldwell points out, “popular images of Brazil as a carnivalesque, tropical paradise have played a central role in contemporary constructions of mulata women’s social identities. Brazil’s international reputation as a racial democracy is closely tied to the sexual objectification of women of mixed racial ancestry as the essence of Brazilianness” (2007: 58). For Afro-Brazilian women, those of mixed ancestry or with more European physical features are typically considered to be more attractive. Moreover, women of visible African ancestry are typically constructed as non-sexualized, and often as asexual laborers or, conversely, as prostitutes (Caldwell 2007: 51). Appearance not only carries differential weight for women and men, but different stereotypes of black women rest on beliefs about their sexuality. These ideas feed back into notions of national identity, using race, gender, sexuality, and color as intersecting phenomena.

Intersectionality’s framework of mutually constructing identity categories enabled Afro-Brazilian women to develop a collective identity politics. In this case, they cultivated a political black feminist identity politics at the intersections of racism, sexism, class exploitation, national history, and sexuality. The political space created by reinstalling democracy in the late 1980s benefited both women and black people. Yet there was one significant difference between the two groups. In a climate where women’s rights encompassed only the needs of white women, and where black people experienced an anti-black racism in a context of alleged racial democracy, Afro-Brazilian women experienced differential treatment within both the feminist movement and the Black Movement. Clearly, women and men had different experiences within Brazilian society – there was no need to advocate for the integrity of the categories themselves. Yet the framing of the women’s movement, even around such a firm subject as “woman,” was inflected through other categories. Because both upper- and middle-class women were central to the women’s movement, their status as marked by class, yet unmarked by race (most were white), shaped political demands. Brazil’s success in electing women to political office reflected alliances among women across categories of social class. With the noteworthy exception of Benedita da Silva, the first black woman to serve in the Brazilian Congress in 1986 and the Senate in 1994, feminism raised issues of gender and sexuality, but did so in ways that did not engage issues of anti-black racism that were so important to Afro-Brazilian women.

Unlike white Brazilian women, black Brazilians of all sexes and genders had to create the collective political identity of “black” in order to build an antiracist social movement that highlighted the effects of anti-black racism. Brazil’s history with transatlantic slavery left it with a large population of African descent – by some estimates, 50 percent of the Brazilian population. Those who claimed an identity as “black” seemed to contradict the national identity of racial democracy, and thus ran the risk of being accused of disloyalty and not being fully Brazilian. In this sense, the Black Movement that emerged in the 1990s did not call for equal treatment within the democratic state for an already recognized group. Rather, recognition meant both naming a sizable segment of the population and acknowledging that it experienced anti-black racial discrimination (Hanchard 1994).

Neither Brazilian feminism led by women who were primarily well-off and white, nor a Black Movement that was actively engaged in claiming a collective black identity that identified racism as a social force could by itself adequately address Afro-Brazilian women’s issues. Black women who participated in the Black Movement found willing allies when it came to antiracist black activism, but much less understanding of how the issues faced by black people took gender-specific forms. Indeed, they found little recognition of the special issues of living lives as black women in Brazil at the intersections of racism, sexism, class exploitation, second-class citizenship, and heterosexism. Brazil’s history of class analysis, which saw capitalism and workers’ rights as major forces in shaping inequality, made space for exceptional individuals such as Benedita da Silva. Yet when it came to race as a category of analysis, black women faced similar pressures to subordinate their special concerns under the banner of class solidarity. These separate social movements of feminism, antiracism, and workers’ movements were important, and many black women continued to participate in them. Yet because no one social movement alone could adequately address Afro-Brazilian women’s issues, they formed their own.

Taking a step back to view black Brazilian women’s ideas and actions illustrates how a collective identity politics emerged around a politicized understanding of a collective black women’s identity based on common experiences of domination, exploitation, and marginalization (Caldwell 2007). For example, when black domestic workers organized, it was clear that women of African descent were disproportionately represented in this occupational category. Not all domestic workers were “black,” but the job category was certainly closely associated with black women. Afro-Brazilian women were more vulnerable to violence, especially those living in favelas and who did domestic work. Drawing on cultural ties to the African diaspora, black women activists also saw their roles as mothers and othermothers as important for political action. Women of African descent in Brazil knew on one level, through personal experience, that they were part of a group that shared certain collective experiences. They were disproportionately engaged in domestic work. Their images were maligned in popular culture. They were disproportionately targets of misogynistic violence. They were mothers who lacked the means to care for their children as they would have liked, but had ties to the value placed on mothering across the African diaspora. Yet because they lacked a political identity and accompanying analysis to attach to these experiences, they couldn’t articulate a collective identity politics to raise their concerns. None of their closest allies – black men in the Black Movement, or white women in the feminist movement, or socialists in organizations that advocated for workers’ rights – would have the best interests of such women at heart as fervently as they themselves did (Carneiro 1995).

Latinidades marked one moment within a long struggle to acknowledge race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality as mutually constructing multidimensional aspects of Afro-Brazilian women’s lives. It was simultaneously a celebration and a recommitment to continue the struggle. Yet as the premature death of Marielle Franco (1979–2018) suggests, building an Afro-Brazilian women’s movement is neither easy nor finished. A black bisexual woman who grew up in a Rio de Janeiro favela, Franco was one of the most outspoken Brazilian activists and politicians of her generation. Elected to the City Council of Rio de Janeiro in 2016, she chaired the Women’s Defense Commission and fiercely condemned police killings and violence against women. Her strong grassroots and social media mobilizing presence made her a highly effective advocate for the rights of black women, youth, and LGBTQ people. Her political assassination made her an icon of democratic resistance and of the struggle for social justice in Brazil and beyond. A champion of human rights, Marielle Franco’s death and life remind us of the significance of intersectionality for movements for social justice.