Violet Barrieteau's "The relevance of black feminist scholarship: a Caribbean perspective" highlights how under-appreciated and misrepresented black feminism is within the canon of feminisms. Barrieteau notes how black feminist theory should be given some credit for contemporary ideas within feminisms; "Problematising race and exposing how racist practices complicate all other social relations of power is a central organising principle of black feminist theorising" (Barrieteau, 10). The dissection of discourses through "problematising" elements of identity enables "others" to investigate once invisible hegemonic power structures. This was reminiscent of Briggs' ideas on contradictions within Reproducing Empire; he states, "The contradictions that a community, culture, or text contain elucidate its myths, its ideologies, its worldview" (Briggs, 201).
Like queer feminists, "...black feminists focus on difference..." (Barrieteau, 16). Thus, individual experiences can be analyzed more fully through the various, intersecting vectors of identity. Gina Ulysse's book, Downtown Ladies, employs the tools of black feminism to investigate constitutions of subjectivities (Ulysse, 18). Ulysse investigates class structures of Jamaican females, centering their differences, "...class as I present it here is intrinsically linked to race, gender, sexuality, and nationality" (Ulysse, 13). She continues on to an incredibly poignant analysis of Jamaican beauty queens and the role of skin pigmentation in identity construction; "Nowhere are the values of color more visible and significant than in beauty pageants..." (Ulysse, 35). Pageantry, associated with certain skin tones, days of leisure, and power, belongs to the "ladies" of Jamaica, while labor, dark skin, and higgling were characterizations of Jamaican "women." The issue of skin color on beauty queens remains an issue in Jamaica and in the United States.
Last night, an Indian-American woman of color was crowned Miss America, but it seems the pigment of her skin, to the general public, did not come off as "American." How long will it take, how much of a cultural shift will it take, before the populous of this nation understands that skin pigmentation and race cannot be barometers of nationalistic pride? While black feminist theories and the writing of Gina Ulysse expose how these vectors of identity intersect, often in oppressive ways, the Miss America Pageant did so by praxis.
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