The Politics of Race in U.S. Feminist Scholarship: An Archaeology

This article examines the fraught relation between constructions of third world women and the displacement of black feminist concerns in the pages of Signs. Juxtaposing a significant interchange found in the Signs archive between a journal editor and African American scholars with journal content from the first decade of publication, I demonstrate an inverse relationship between discussions of third world women in developing countries and scholarship on black women in the United States. As the frequency of scholarship on third world women grew in the pages of Signs, scholarship on black women became increasingly absent. The article examines the enduring consequences of this inverse relationship on the construction of the category “women of color” within feminist scholarship and on the relative attention given to particular discourses and strategies of inclusion and exclusion within academic feminism.