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Motivating Coalition: Women of Color and Epistemic Disobedience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Shireen Roshanravan
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Abstract

This essay engages Chandra Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and María Lugones in a “plurilogue” to elaborate and exhibit a method that animates the differential mode of Women of Color politics while rendering more acute the strategies each scholar offers against the racialized, gendered oppressions of colonialism and global capitalism. Ella Shohat describes “a multifaceted plurilogue” as a “dissonant polyphony” that “links different yet co‐implicated constituencies and arenas of struggle” (Shohat 2001, 2). The emphasis on reading differences within Women of Color theorizing resists the homogenizing tendency of superficial engagement that glosses Women of Color scholarship as a unified genre of thought. A plurilogue thus pursues dissimilarities to clarify the conceptual interventions made within Women of Color theorizing and the relationship among the different patterns of oppression that each intervention exposes. Plurilogued engagements bring these conceptual strategies and understandings of multiple oppressions together, not to resolve or rank them, but to more effectively ascertain the complexities of, and varied coalitional strategies for, resisting the racialized, heteropatriarchal oppressions of global capitalism and colonialism.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Interstices: Inheriting Women of Color Feminist Philosophy , Winter 2014 , pp. 41 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

My compañeras in la Escuela Popular Norteña motivated and shaped the “why” and “with whom” of this plurilogue. Thank you to Laura DuMond Kerr, Cricket Keating and, especially, María Lugones for the deep, demanding and sustained political conversations. Thank you also to Lynn Fujiwara, Rocío Zambrana, Gaile Pohlhaus, Alexis Shotwell, Alison Bailey, Melisa Posey, Tushabe, Lisa Tatonetti, Michele Janette, Crista Lebens, Michael Hames‐García, Ernesto Martinez, Kristie Dotson and the anonymous reviewers at Hypatia.

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