Why does recent intersectional scholarship so clearly echo hooks's own contention, in Feminist Theory, that the wisdom of foregrounding black women's voices in intersectional theorizing is very much subject to debate? The answer is that hooks's work is significant not only because it still animates feminist research but also because it offers an important, pioneering explanation of why contemporary feminists disagree about black women's place in intersectional theorizing. Still other feminists contend that centering black women as intersectionality's principal research subjects undermines racist white women's ability to determine that “racialized women's structural experience cannot generate theory” (Bilge Reference Bilge2013, 412 see also Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw, Lutz, Herrera Vivar and Supik2016). Doing so, these feminists assert, provides black women with a “tool for analyzing and responding to the material realities” of their oppression (Jordan-Zachery Reference Jordan-Zachery, Jordan-Zachery and Alexander-Floyd2014, 34–35 May Reference May2015).

Other contemporary feminists conclude, in sharp contrast, that it is important to privilege black women's voices when contemplating the co-constitutive dimensions of race, gender, and other inequalities of power.

A related argument is that intersectionality is an emancipatory analytical framework precisely because it seeks to deconstruct, rather than embrace, the flawed, “calcified” notion that “black woman” and other social groups are static entities (Dhamoon Reference Dhamoon2011, 239 see also McCall Reference McCall2005). Many contemporary feminists similarly argue that although “reliance on black women's experiences” is often part of a well-intentioned effort “to underscore problems of exclusion within feminist and anti-racist theory,” this phenomenon is problematic because it erroneously depicts black women as a “unitary and monolithic entity” unmarked by sexual, class, and other differences (Nash Reference Nash2008, 8 see also Hancock Reference Hancock2007).

hooks is equally adamant that women, including black women, mistakenly believe that “describing” or highlighting their particular “experience of oppression” is necessarily “synonymous with developing a critical political consciousness” (26). hooks's specific argument is that black women's location within the “prevailing classist, sexist, racist social structure” affords them a “unique” and “central role … in the making of feminist theory” ( Reference hooks2015, 16). Thirty-five years after the publication of bell hooks's Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, feminists continue to debate one of the book's core themes -namely, that foregrounding black women's voices in intersectional theorizing is a politically promising and perilous act.

From margin to center bell hooks