It is not that I am against feminism: I’m appalled at what it became. Originally, there was nothing wrong with my seeing myself as a feminist; I thought it was adding to how we were going to understand this world. If you think about the origins of the modern world, because gender was always there, how did we institute ourselves as humans; why was gender a function of that? I’d just like to make a point here that is very important. Although I use the term “race,” and I have to use the term “race,” “race” itself is a function of something else which is much closer to “gender.” Once you say, “besides ontogeny, there’s sociogeny,” then there cannot be only one mode of sociogeny; there cannot be only one mode of being human; there are a multiplicity of modes. So I coined the word “genre,” or I adapted it, because “genre” and “gender” come from the same root. They mean “kind,” one of the meanings is “kind.” Now what I am suggesting is that “gender” has always been a function of the instituting of “kind.” For example, in our order, which is a bourgeois order of kind, a bourgeois order of the human, the woman was supposed to be the housewife and the man was supposed to be the breadwinner. Each was as locked into their roles. By making the feminist movement into a bourgeois movement, what they’ve done is to fight to be equal breadwinners. This means that the breadwinning man and the breadwinning woman become a new class, so that the woman who remains in her role becomes a part of a subordinated class.
… What we are witnessing is the incorporation of the bourgeoisie. You are incorporated like Skip Gates has become incorporated–if I use him, I am just using him as the very model of someone who has been incorporated into academia; and, to be honest with you, as has Cornel West who, for all his “radical” talk, has become incorporated.
What I have been trying to work through is this whole idea of “genre.”Because, you see, when Césaire resigned from the Communist Party, he said that our issue cannot be made into a subset of any other issue; and so I’ve been saying, “What is our issue?” And our issue is the “genre” of the human. So when Black Studies came up, when this guy called for another order of “truth” (because every genre has an order of “truth”), what he was calling for was this. Now when I speak at a feminist gathering and I come up with “genre” and say “gender” is a function of “genre,” they don’t want to hear that. Look at the tremendous perks that feminism has given to some Black women, for example, and “of color” women as they call themselves. Right? This is what I am trying to say about the temptations, you see; and then you say you’re a “Black feminist,” but what is happening to Black women?
… Black women’s struggle is quite other. Our struggle as Black women has to do with the destruction of the genre; with the displacement of the genre of the human of “Man,” of which the Black population group–men, women and children–must function as the negation.
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