chapter 1 Fractured 
IdentitiesIt has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective — or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in 'essential' unity. There is nothing about teeing 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices.
Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement
forced on us by the terrible historica experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy,
colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as 'us' in my own rhetoric? Which identities are
available to ground such a potent political myth called 'us', and what could motivate enlistment in
this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along
every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of
women's dominations of each other. For me — and for many who share a similar historical
location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies —
the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left
and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a
new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through
coalition — affinity, not identity.
Chela Sandoval (n.d., 1984), from a consideration of specific historical moments in the
formation of the new political voice called women of colour, has theorized a hopeful model of
political identity called 'oppositional consciousness', born of the skills for reading webs of power
by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. 'Women of color',
a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical
consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of Man in 'Western' traditions,
constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity. This
postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said abut other possible
postmodernisms. Sandoval's oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations and
heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and pluralisms.
Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of
colour. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation.
For example, a Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black
person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of
even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called 'women and blacks', who claimed to
make the important revolutions. The category 'woman' negated all non-white women; 'black'
negated all non-black people, as well as all black women. But there was also no 'she', no
singularity, but a sea of differences among US women who have affirmed their historical identity
as US women of colour. This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot
affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious
coalition, of affinity, of political kinship.8 Unlike the 'woman' of some streams of the white
women's movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix, or at least this is
what Sandoval argues is uniquely available through the power of oppositional consciousness
Sandoval's argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the
world-wide development of anti-colonialist discourse; that is to say, discourse dissolving the
'West' and its highest product — the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the
author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically, the
identities of the occident destabilize, including those of feminists.9 Sandoval argues that 'women
of colour' have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the imperializing,
totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the
consequences of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization
Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the political/ poetic mechanics of identification built into reading 'the poem', that generative core of cultural feminism. King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different 'moments' or 'conversations' in feminist practice to taxonomize the women's movement to make one's own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminisms are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontology and epistemology.
Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women's experience. And of course, 'women's culture', like women of colour, is consciously created by mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. The politics of race and culture in the US women's movements are intimately interwoven. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification. The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-through-incorporation ironically not only undermines the justifica-tions for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scient-ism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint.
I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also undermined their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all 'epistemologies' as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities. It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. The acid tools of postmodernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival.
we areexcruciatin
gly
concious 
