Womanism

Womanism is a form of feminism that focuses on the perspectives and experiences of women of color. As a term, it has an often-quoted genealogy. In 1983, Alice Walker coined the term with a four-part definition in her text In Search of Our Mother's Gardens. The first part of the definition emphasizes the importance of women's handing down their wisdom from one generation of women to the next. The second part of the definition stresses communal thought and action. The third part of the definition critiques the standards of beauty Black women are subjected to. Finally, womanism is a critique of the limitations of White feminist thought and activism and its shortcomings in dealing with race and class. This etymology is the birthplace of womanism as a term but not as [Page 889]a tradition. In this entry, the etymology or history of the term is mentioned, but the focus is on the ways in which womanism functions as a theory, method of inquiry, and framework for identities.

Theorizing womanist rhetoric is about locating the cultural and theoretical narratives that place Black women at the center of their own narrative. This has been the overarching goal of womanist scholarship since its inception. This goal recognizes that for centuries, women in general and Black women in particular have been the oppressed subjects of “universalizing” European academic discourse.

Womanist scholars bring to academic theorizing their own historic locations and cultural, social, and political knowing. This knowing is born out of a place of liberation rather than a constant dwelling on the limiting discourse of oppression. This opens womanist scholarship up to new possibilities for theorizing. For womanists, theorizing happens primarily outside of the academy as a result of finding solutions to the problems that persist in the communities of women of color. Through womanist theorizing, scholars have created a paradigm and a discourse shaped as much by experiences as raced, classed, and gendered as by identities aligned as sexual, professional, or national.

The strength of womanist theorizing lies in the privileging of multiple identities in a singular body. This means that the womanist is understood to be gender/race/class/sex/family/friend/worker/nation. These are not mutually exclusive identity constructs that exist as boxes on shelves like so many pairs of shoes. Identities, unlike shoes, can be worn 40 at a time. Womanist theorists may be inclined to delete the slashes in this construct, preferring instead to argue that the strength in the theory is the ability to reveal the world as an interlocking narrative of gender race classs exfamily friend workernation. Without punctuation to separate identities that are mutually informative and totally encompassing, womanists utilize all the cultural scripts available to investigate the world and articulate modes of change. The cultural scripts used to construct a worldview that gives moral agency to Africana women can be spiritual, academic, religious, literary, music, personal narrative, or all of these. The creation of womanist knowledge is mapped from local spaces to academic places. Walker's definition and coining of the term womanism came at a critical juncture for Black women scholars who have developed a theory of womanism that privileges multiplicity in identity. The naming of the cultural identity womanist allowed for the construction of theory and theology that lead directly to epistemological centeredness.

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