Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-9knnw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-06T23:59:40.906Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Mariana Ortega
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to analyze the notion of “loving, knowing ignorance,” a type of “arrogant perception” that produces ignorance about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims to have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them. The first part discusses Marilyn Frye's accounts of “arrogant” as well as of “loving” perception and presents an explanation of “loving, knowing ignorance.” The second part discusses the work of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, and María Lugones in their attempts to deal with the issue of arrogant perception within feminism, and examines how Lugones's notion of “‘world’-traveling” may help us deal with “loving, knowing ignorance.” Ultimately, the author suggests that we need to become aware of instances of “loving, knowing ignorance,” especially if we are to stay true to Third Wave feminism's commitment to diversity.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 21 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance , Summer 2006 , pp. 56 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Alarcón, Norma. 1987. Chicana's feminist literature: A re‐vision through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting flesh back on the object. In This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color, ed. Moraga, Cherríe and Anzaldúa, Gloria. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The politics of reality: Essays in feminist theory. Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Lewis R. 1999. Bad faith and antiblack racism. New York: Humanity Books.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1990. A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist‐feminism in the 1980s. In Feminism/postmodernism, ed. Nicholson, Linda J.New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women's lives. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Hooks, Bell. 1981. Ain't I a woman? Black women and feminism. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Hooks, Bell. 1984. Feminist theory from margin to center. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Kincaid, Jamaica. 1988. A small place. New York: Plume.Google Scholar
Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister outsider. Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press.Google Scholar
Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles. 1997. The racial contract. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1995. Feminist encounters: Locating the politics of experience. In Social postmodernism: Beyond identity politics, ed. Nicholson, Linda and Seidman, Steven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Moraga, Cherríe. 1983. Loving in the war years: Lo que nunca pasó sus labios. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Moraga, Cherríe and Anzaldúa, Gloria, eds. 1983. This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press.Google Scholar
Moya, Paula. 2002. Learning from experience: Minority identities, multicultural struggles. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. 1979. On lies, secrets, and silence. New York: Norton Press.Google Scholar
Sartre, Jean‐Paul. 1966. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. Trans. Barnes, Hazel E.New York: Philosophical Library.Google Scholar
Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential woman: Problems of exclusion in feminist thought. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Shannon. 2003a. Enigma variations: Laplanchean psychoanalysis and the formation of the raced unconscious. Radical Philosophy 122 (November/December 2003): 20–33.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Shannon. 2003b. Remembering the gift: Du Bois on the unconscious and economic operations of racism. Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 39 (2): 205–25.Google Scholar
Williams, Patricia. 1992. Alchemy of race and rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar