oh! just because i didn't reply this weekend, didn't mean you had to bribe me to the Naughty Nooner Motel by telling me that you know Young!!!
don't forget, tho, that my nickname is "barbie" (in addition to snitgrrRl) hee. http://catalog.com/mrm/barbe/roadkill.jpg
>>Kelley - thanks--could you provide the full cite to Young, 1990? I'm also
>>interested in any other attempts to sharpen the definitions of various
>>forms of
>>oppression. Mat
"The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of inte- grated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions are the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face." -- The Combahee iver Collective, 1977 (included in Zillah Eisenstein's _Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Femninism_ Monthly Review Press, 1979)
i guess the place to start is in Intro Women's Studies texts books, since these provide a pretty good bib, most of them. It's an old debate in feminist literatures. see, for example, Marilyn Frye's essay on "Oppression" in _The Politics of Reality_ 1983 Crossing Press.
precisely because it's old and things have progressed/morphed, then you can see how initial attempts to formulate oppression, articulated from the standpoint of white, upper middle class feminists, was primarily about how women's oppression is primarily about exploiting women's 'free' labor in the home. but, as these women started entering the labor force, they had to take a second look. and here, they had to listen to the voices of feminists that had been largely ignored earlier: black feminists, latina feminists, working class feminists, lesbian feminists, etc. the classic texts in this regard, (i think) are bell hooks' _Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center_ South End Press, 1984. Also, Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spellman
from there, you might want to look at the (deeply problematic: you need to connect the dots on your own) work on what our dept calls "intersectionality" (and D.Breslin called the "race, gender, class" lit.) The best, most Marxish of these, that i've read, is Collins and Andersen's _Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology_. Speaking of which, iirc, Patricia Hill Collins' _Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment_ Routledge 1990. Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for `The Woman's Voice'," Women's Studies International Forum 6(6): 573-581 (1983).
a more sophisticated reader is Linda Nicholson's _The Second Wave_, Routledge, 1997.
kelley
