Collins, Patricia Hill

Patricia Hill Collins (b. 1943), a sociologist and feminist theorist, is chair and Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology in the Department of African American Studies and Sociology at the University of Cincinnati. She received her BA and PhD degrees in sociology from Brandeis University and an MAT degree from Harvard University. Collins has taught at several institutions, held editorial positions with professional journals, and lectured extensively in the United States and abroad. Her work examines issues of gender, race, social class, and nation, particularly relating to African American women.

Collins's best-known work, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990, 2000), theorizes a “black feminist epistemology” that draws on and extends the work of African American intellectuals such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and Alice Walker. Collins's epistemology, based on feminist and Afrocentric standpoints, stresses the importance of self-defined knowledge for group empowerment through personal accountability, experience as a source of wisdom, feminist discourse as a tool for analyzing differences, and an ethic of empathy. Black Feminist Thought won the C. Wright Mills Award in 1991. In its 10th-anniversary edition, Collins revises some of her earlier arguments and themes. Still believing that knowledge can foster empowerment, Collins (2000) proclaims: “I now recognize that empowerment for African-American women will never occur in a context characterized by oppression and social injustice” (p. x). She further develops and enhances themes such as empowerment, social justice, and oppression.

Both Black Feminist Thought as well as Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (1998) involve Collins in exploring the distinctive standpoints and knowledge available to members of subjugated groups, especially African American women. Recognizing their diversity, Collins sees in these women an outlook derived from their lived experiences that is at once critical, self-defining, and resistant. That outlook finds expression in their community work, their music, and their friendships with one another.

It also finds expression in the motherwork, which typically comprises raising one's own children while also taking active, overt, reliable responsibility for other children in one's extended family and in the community as well. With her conceptualization of motherwork, Collins overcomes the binaries commonly associated with white, middle-income motherhood. Motherwork blurs the boundaries between public and private, family and community, and self and other. This notion underscores the thoroughly social—indeed, collective—aspects of mothering.

More recently, Collins's work has focused on sexuality as a social force as well as an anchor of identity. In Black Sexual Politics (2004), she explores how beliefs about sexuality and sexual behavior deeply affect racial, gender, and social class inequalities in American society. She also delineates how sexual politics intertwine with minority politics in American society.

With Margaret Andersen, Collins has coedited Race, Class, and Gender (1995), an anthology widely used in university courses. This best-selling anthology uses a wide array of contemporary and historical readings as well as personal narratives from diverse individuals.

[Page 123]Historically informed and sociologically savvy, Collins's feminist theorizing promotes a multicultural ethic of care that resonates with Carol Gilligan's later work. By emphasizing the intersections among society's institutionalized hierarchies, Collins's theorizing about the matrix of domination renders hers a feminist framework that is as much a call to action as it is an insistence on inclusiveness.

...