Ain’t I A Woman Too? Groundings in Black feminism and Gender-Based Violence through bell hooks
Disclaimer: several forms of GBV, including rape and sexual assault are discussed in this blog, please be caring with yourselves when reading.
Gender-based violence underscores every part of global connecting crises today. Behind the variables that distinguish these forms of violence, according to class, colour, location, policy, environment…and plenty more, there are histories that illustrate the layers of these struggles today.
bell hooks’ Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism provides a history of black women during the system of chattel enslavement in the Americas. This foundational text haunts us today, words recounting violences that I know from my own experience, can identify their lineage in policy and attitudes where I am from and live, and that refer to conflicts and génocides happening across the world today.
hooks’ Ain't I a Woman echoes Sojourner Truth’s words in court in the United States in 1851 deliberately. Truth’s call, and hooks’' discourse in this text demonstrates that what we know as policies that deliberately and variably cause harm, are built from the systemic dehumanizing of Black bodies, from the systematic assault and violence inflicted on Black women.
This blog will be the first of a hopeful series that aims to briefly explore and share discourse from intersectional feminists (Black, Caribbean, global majority…), elaborating what the discourse is, and why this is important to gender justice movements today. If you have any suggestions for what you’d like to see discussed, please comment!
Ain’t I a Woman outlines the experience of racism through chattel enslavement for Black women in the American continent (although more especially the US). The text is an indictment of the complementary development of racism and white feminism together. It is also a scathing condemnation of the internalisation of an all-north-American narrative that trains individuals to hyperfocus on ‘America first’, no matter on what level - “In an imperialist racist patriarchal society that supports and condones oppression, it is not surprising that men and women judge their worth, their personal power, by their ability to oppress others” [p.104]. Ain’t I A Woman grounds this narrative in its brutal history, calling to the present-day versions of this that endanger movements demanding otherwise not as a policy point, but as a prerequisite for life.
Perhaps more significantly, hooks teaches us about the necessary grounding of feminism in intersectionality and the experience of Black women. We cannot begin to understand the full scope of - for instance - patriarchal harm in our everyday lives without understanding the histories that shaped these forms of violence.
"While racism was clearly the evil that decreed black people would be enslaved, it was sexism that determined that the lot of the black female would be harsher, more brutal than that of the black male slave", p.43
We (those of us from or in the Caribbean), have grown up and live in environments that used to be plantation estates, land that still bears these scars. These carved-out estates are the active site of a colonial relationship that treated land, and human bodies, as objects to be used and abused, exploited and dehumanised. Several realities emerged on the plantations; of African enslaved bodies that had to negotiate the brutal and relentless assault of violence on the estates, and of enslaved Black Women who had to negotiate both the first reality, and the systematic rape and sexual assault of their bodies.
“The significance of the rape of enslaved black women...led to a devaluation of black womanhood”, hooks says [p.52], outlining that, as the most extreme forms of GBV were intentionally used as policy during chattel enslavement, this seeped into how Black women, how we exist, how we view and hold ourselves, on top of what standards and images we are held to. Ways of sexualising children from small, telling young girls to ‘sit properly’, normalising predatory behaviours…it is clearly not just the ‘devaluation of Black womanhood’ that permeates our psyche, but translates in inter-generational trauma that keeps getting an update. Once we are black (from light skin to dark skin) and assigned female at birth, our first relationship with our bodies is shame, and we spend the rest of our lives dealing with that.
hooks talks about this unwanted ‘birthright’, considering that “the shift away from the image of white woman as sinful and sexual to that of white woman as virtuous lady occurred at the same time as mass sexual exploitation of enslaved black women...the rage white women enslavers felt towards black women shaped an outlook of women as bearing responsibility for 'attracting' any kind of assault - black women were not seen to be blameless” [p.36]. So this objectification of women was certainly not new, it had existed in histories of almost every society before the Middle Passage, but chattel enslavement introduced new variables of discrimination which shape racist, sexist and feminist outlooks today.
So no matter the gradient of blackness, the attributed gender of Black women was targeted as a site for plunder. In Caribbean and North American plantation societies, an enslaved person’s light or dark-skinned blackness did afford several privileges or not: light-skinned black bodies received (and we still do) and internalised a filtered racist and sexist violence. And yet there are so many more ‘filters’ to being perceived as white-adjacent (so ‘proper’, ‘clean’, ‘good’ and all the other myths colonialism has fed us) - our experiences of any form of injustice are tied to more than skin.
Moving from the 19th century trauma of chattel enslavement to the development of womanhood in the Americas (again, especially the US), particularly at a time when feminist movements were rising, hooks critiques mainstream (white) feminism for ignoring the unique struggles of Black women, who face racism, sexism, and class oppression simultaneously. There is a particular intersection of injustice that Black women must navigate. The brand of white femo-imperialism that creates itself alongside patriarchal systems and racialisation, all hold at its root the rotting vision of our world that says - some people matter more than others, some people have to earn their rights before being ‘granted’ them, some people must toil for those who matter to live nice.
Ain’t I A Woman is a key text as it offers a history of chattel enslavement that centers Black women first and foremost. hooks’ discourse traces the production of Black women bodies as spaces of systematic abuse as well as spaces of ‘waste’ - and therefore our value is reduced to being of and taking up undervalued labour and work. Try to answer the question ‘who cleans the world?’. Who does the domestic labour, in their and others’ houses? Who does the labour of care, for their own and for others (never for ourselves, of course not)? Who are those that are expected to carry entire worlds on their shoulders, placing the needs of every other body above their own, not even acknowledging their needs? People, is we.
So in imagining otherwise, which hooks always beckons us to do, we should perhaps start by asking ourselves, who cleans this world? Who, in rights, policy, voice, agency, safety, is cleaned of this world?
“Freedom (and by that term I do not mean to evoke some wishy-washy-hang-loose-do-as-you-like world) as positive social equality that grants all humans the opportunity to shape their destinies in the most healthy and communally productive way can only be complete reality when our world is no longer racist and sexist", [p.117]
bell hooks calls for a feminism that challenges all systems of domination, not just patriarchy.
The violence of a framework that needs the unpaid domestic labour and unvalued care work of black women to operate translates into policy: government policies that dismiss the specific care needs of people who menstruate, that reject the inclusion of SRHR-informed care practice in medical infrastructure, or the significance of CSE in equipping all of us to be better informed in our health, safety and well-being. The administration of economies and living environments that facilitate the disruption of water and elemental supply access, that turns every part of life into a profit margin. The violence inflicted on our enslaved ancestors was re-branded into policies and institutions that disenfranchised, continued to dispossess our communities and excavate the resources from our environments. So when hooks calls for a feminist praxis that is actually intersectional, that fights all fronts of domination and injustice, she grounds this in the experience of Black women, because our experiences suffer from the cross-section of all injustices, then our experiences can ground the intersectionality with which we must organise for better, more just and sustainable…life.
hooks’ words haunt us, as the experiences that she talks of, those that violated the agency, power and bodies of our great-(great)grandmothers, are in many ways experiences that we hold the ghostly symptoms and realities of. Ain’t I A Woman haunts us not only as a history of chattel enslavement, but as an analysis of crises we face, and advocate against today.
Sudan, gender-based violence is a tool of oppression among a massively displaced population. Congo, sexual assault and rape are policies and negotiations for food, property…anchoring hooks’ words of our bodies, the bodies of black women, being sites of excavation similar to the lands colonial powers decided they were entitled to plunder in the Caribbean, in Africa, the entire world… In occupied Palestine, and in the ongoing brutal genocide in the Gaza Strip, 73% of WASH facilities are destroyed, menstrual cycles are “a recurring nightmare”, where menstrual products are almost completely unaffordable, with instead the use of old cloth or tissues - and this is only a brief concentration of a thousand harms in these crises, those we face in the Caribbean, and across the world.
In sites of escalated conflict and genocide, the basic elemental needs for life are systematically stripped, creating and targeting a particular harm layered with all others for women, black women, for menstruators.
Ain’t I A Woman makes very clear that forms of gender-based violence are fundamental to racism, which is fundamental to colonialism and imperialism. hooks’ quotes Angela Davis saying that “the rape of black female slaves was not…a case of white men satisfying their sexual lust, but was in fact an institutionalised method of terrorism which had as its goal the demoralisation and dehumanisation of black women” [p.27].
This terrorism haunts our bodies today, as intergenerational trauma, repeated violence, through state policies, and more. hooks’ text is foundational to understanding that, for as much as our advocacy and communal work in gender justice, climate justice, forms of social justice, all intersect…it must intersect not only as necessary to realising ways we could all live together without harming someone or thing, it must intersect in response to entire forms of oppression that were created and sustained in connection with one another.
Some (!!!) further listening/reading with bell hooks’ Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism:
hooks bell (2000), Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Pluto Press (this blog post is only a brief consideration of this text, inviting you to read the book more thoroughly!)
Aandayie (2020), The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writings from Aandayie, Pluto Press
Brand Dionne (2001), The Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Vintage Canada edition
Meddeb Hind (2024), Sudan, Remember Us! , film documentary
Verges Francoise, (05/2019), ‘Capitalocene, Waste, Race and Gender’, e-flux Journal n.100
Olufemi Lola (2020), Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power, Pluto Press
¹hooks does not use the term, Kimberle Crenshaw coined ‘intersectionality’ as we understand it, but hooks definitely opens up this consciousness