Collins, Patricia Hill (1948-)

Patricia Hill Collins is a social and standpoint theorist. Her scholarly work has examined issues of race, gender, social class, sexuality, and nation. In 1990, Collins published her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. In this seminal work, she sought to provide a theoretical framework that espouses Black women's standpoint. She makes three central claims regarding Black women: (1) Intersectionality characterizes the oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation; (2) outsider definitions of Black women have pervaded notions of Black womanhood; and (3) Black women's worldviews shape their self-definition and must necessarily work toward social justice.

Collins constructs Black feminist thought as critical social theory that reflects the distinctive themes of African American women's experiences: work, family, sexual politics, motherhood, and political activism. This paradigm aims to empower African American women within the context of social injustice sustained by intersecting oppressions and the dialectical relationship between oppression and activism and to link their diverse experiences and ideas to similar challenges with collective recognition of differential group treatment. Collins points out the connective thread and dia-logical relationship between collective experience and group knowledge/standpoint and the integral contributions of African American women intellectuals to account for, validate, distinguish, and exalt the experiences of Black women.

Historically, Black feminist thought has been enacted through collective social activism. The articulation of Black women's consciousness is expressed creatively through the lived experience of their everyday lives. Black women have a particular niche within U.S. social relations in that they navigate within and among multiple intersecting oppressions. Embodied in a history of slavery, civil rights, patriarchy, and sexual politics, these oppressions inform Black women's consciousness and identities, both individually and collectively.

In her other works, such as, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought” (1986) and Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (1998), Collins described Black feminist conceptions of Black women as the “outsider within” and the significance of self-definition toward social justice praxis. In this way, Collins has been noted as a standpoint theorist in linking Black feminist thought to the outsider within position. In Fighting Words, she further expounded on the importance of Black women's self-definition toward advancing their sense of worth and fostering resistance to oppressions that result from internalized oppression and the overarching matrix of domination.

Collins's conception of intersectionality evolved out of the individual's lived experience of negotiating the complexities of social power, as well as the inequalities of race, gender, class, sexuality, geosocial location, and age. Intersectionality aims to facilitate [Page 315]analysis at multiple system levels: individually, culturally, and institutionally. The individual can occupy multiple status positions within these systems or even simultaneously occupy spaces of privilege and domination. The resulting power differentials are a consequence of the matrix of domination.

This concept of the matrix of domination evokes consciousness around two conflicting epistemologies: one representative of White male interests and the other expressing Black feminist concerns. Conceptualized together, the concepts prove to be useful tools in examining domains of oppression. Collins believes that an intersectional examination of the relations of power is essential to the work of social activists who hope to oppose systems of racial, patriarchal, and class oppression. According to Collins, it is through social activism that Black women gain collective momentum, power, and influence by finding strength in the utility of the interrelational power of the collective. These woman-centered spaces synergistically move toward pointed resistance to institutional oppression, as well.

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