A New Genealogy of “Intelligent Rage,” or Other Ways to Think about White Women in Feminism

Rage, we argue, has been vividly constructed in multiple academic and popular feminist forums as specifically directed at white women. White women are both the object of rage and the readership that must witness “eloquent rage”—and perhaps even be disciplined by it—in order to transform themselves into good feminist political subjects. In this essay, we examine Black feminist constructions and uses of “intelligent rage” alongside other moments of feminists’ reckoning with the problematic object of white women in order to contextualize rage and to make visible the long genealogy of reckoning with white women’s bad object status in feminism.