| The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism (Critical Perspectives on Women and Gender) |  | Author: Aida Hurtado
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 4813188
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 203
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 6.5 x 1
ISBN: 0472095315
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.420973
EAN: 9780472095315
ASIN: 0472095315
Publication Date: December 1996
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Condition: Cover & edges show very little wear, old sticker on back cover and cover has a slight curl, minor underlining and annotations, otherwise pages are in great shape
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This groundbreaking and important book explores how women of different ethnic/racial groups conceive of feminism. Aida Hurtado advances the theory of relational privilege to explain those differing conceptions. Previous theories about feminism have predominantly emphasized the lives and experiences of middle-class white women. Aida Hurtado argues that the different responses to feminism by women of color are not so much the result of personality or cultural differences between white women and women of color, but of their differing relationship to white men.
For Hurtado, subordination and privilege must be conceived as relational in nature, and gender subordination and political solidarity must be examined in the framework of culture and socioeconomic context. Hurtado's analysis of gender oppression is written from an interdisciplinary, multicultural standpoint and is enriched by selections from poems by Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldua, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Elba Sanchez, and from plays by El Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers theater group.
A final chapter proposes that progressive scholarship, and especially feminist scholarship, must have at its core a reflexive theory of gender oppression that allows writers to simultaneously document oppression while taking into account the writer's own privilege, to analyze the observed as well as the observer.
Aida Hurtado is Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Acknowledging the intersections of race, class, and gender April 6, 2000
24 out of 24 found this review helpful
I applaud Hurtado for discussing feminism among women of Color-- she capitalizes the C -- without resorting to simplisticgeneralizations about ethnicity and economic class.In one of the book's strongest contributions to the ongoing conversation on race and feminism, Hurtado acknowledges the major factor separating white feminists from feminists of Color: their different relationships to white men. Hurtado concludes that white women's position (living in the same homes as white men) avails them to an "economic cushion," a term coined by Phyllis Marynick Palmer. Without trivializing the oppression of White women, Hurtado shows how White patriarchy subjects them through seduction (to propogate the race) while oppressing women of Color through rejection. She makes another noteworthy contribution by considering Chicanas' decisions not to leave their sexist communities, explaining how women are subordinated within their own cultural groups through sexuality. She also advocates a means for theorizing about oppression and liberation that considers the privilege of the theorist, a feminist epistemology that would not separate the scholar from her/his findings but instead would require a "disrobing of self" not found in masculinist paradigms (p. 128). Hurtado's suggests that, rather than exchange Eurocentric domination for Afrocentric domination, we consider the role of privilege as we create a "reflexive theory of subordination" that seeks "types of leadership models that lead to strategic action to accomplish particular goals" (p. 159). The key term here is reflexive. Hurtado wants each of us to consider our own biases, the baggage we each bring into our discussions of ineaquality. She acknowledges that some feminists have tried this approach, but adds that we need to encourage more of them to do so. Hurtado contends that we cannot question white power solidarity thoroughly until white people become racial whistle-blowers, fully exposing their privilege. The Color of Privilege is a rare find: an insightful, well-written scholarly text that will interest both the activist and the academician.
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