Christine on Lugones & Spelman

Have We Got a Theory for You! – Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman (1983)

            The paper begins by criticizing theorizing methods of the early feminist movements through three binary oppositions: inferiority/superiority, active/passive and negation/affirmation. Lugones and Spelman discuss many ways in which white women, who have so dominated the academic and political arenas of feminism distinctly disregard, ignore and do not understand the life experiences of women of color or minority groups.
             The most obvious disregard of the feminist movement was the obvious superiority of the women making authoritative claims over the “female experience.”  By theorizing and dictating political and social position from “the woman’s voice” they inadvertently reduce such positions to simply their own.  They either intentionally or unintentionally disregarded the position of minority women that could be of lower socioeconomic, educational or class views forcing some women’s experience into lesser importance and denying them the opportunity to speak of that as experience.
            The second explicit binary opposition women ascribe to in early feminist theory is the active and passive involvement of different types of women in the movement and what that means for the movement as a whole.  The passive observation minority women and women of color use to understand and emulate the Anglo-centric world in order to survive often becomes regarded as simple disinterest or lack of education as to the “right” way women should be involved in the world.  For equal representation of all women, white women must take a more passive role and replace their power with distinct discomfort, alienation and criticism from women of color in order to begin scratching the surface of the experiences of their peers. 
            The final binary opposition explicitly used by the authors reflects the negation/ affirmation of one’s location in the world in order to connect to the movement.  Minorities are in a constant negation of the United States’ elitist social structure, whereas middle and upper class white women benefit greatly from such a structure and therefore are constantly affirming their surroundings.  Women of color do not necessarily see American, capitalist culture as affirming of their experience. Such a culture negates their historical and cultural make up in order to assimilate, survive and subsequently excel.  Women of color must constantly negate the current theories that are being produced by educated middle or upper class women in order to keep up with the political, social and academic shifts.  Rather than using their own language towards affirmative acknowledgement and reflection of their experience in the world, these women are forced to adjust their articulation in terms of the way powerful women can understand, which often distorts their experience or argument fundamentally. ​
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