Once More With My Sistren: Black Feminism and the Challenge of Object Use

R.E.S.P.E.C.T. ¹ —or introducing black feminism

Community activists love to hark back to a golden age, that mythical era when ‘the movement’ was united in purpose and determined in action; when divisions and resentments did not distract one from the struggle; when it was clear who was oppressed and who the oppressor; when leaders had integrity and passion, and when confidence and optimism were boundless. The black women’s movement in Britain is no exception: we are haunted by the spectre of the ‘OWAAD days’ (Brah 1992b; R. Bhavnani 1994). According to this popular mythology, the collective empowerment experienced by black women in the late 1970s and the early 1980s has been dissipated and black women have become introspective, fragmented and competitive (Grewal et al. 1988; Parmar 1990). A certain magic and innocence has been forever lost. […] Yet black women’s organisations have demonstrated remarkable staying power. (Sudbury, 1998, pp. 1–2)

This is how Julia Sudbury ² opens her book ‘Other Kinds Of Dreams’: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (1998), in which she maps and analyses the emergence and, at that time, current condition of black women’s activism and everyday theorising of the conditions of their lives as they pushed towards the wholesale transformations they envisioned and desired. Adopting what she called a womanist (not feminist) methodology, Sudbury built an analysis around twelve in-depth case studies of organisations, and charted the extraordinary breadth of black women’s organising both geographically across Britain and in terms of the range of issues taken up by these organisations and the everyday theorising that emerged organically as part of their practice. Far from a demise following the supposed hallowed days of a mythic past, black women’s organisations extant in 1998 represented in their diversity ‘… a unique synthesis of struggles and histories in Britain, the Indian sub-continent, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas and of gender, racialised and class relations … [offering] fertile ground for the examination of the intersection of economic, ideological and political structures, forces and counter forces in Britain’ (ibid., p. 13).

Sudbury argued that among the effects of black women’s organising in Britain was the production of alternative paradigms enabling her to achieve her two main goals, which were to counter the ‘erasure of black women’s collective agency’ in analyses and theories of social change and to explore how black women’s organisations had responded to increasing differentiation within black communities along axes of class, ethnicity, sexuality and political ideology. Her analysis was constituted around four paradigm shifts that produced a conceptual framework for her work. These paradigm shifts, themselves part of general epistemological reorientations in the social sciences, and in black scholarly inquiry more specifically, ranged from conceiving black women as agential subjects who engaged in everyday theorising as part of their activism, to foregrounding a ‘politics of location’ as opposed to identity. She also adopted an intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1989), or what was termed ‘simultaneity of oppression’ by the Combahee River Collective (1983 [1977]). Sudbury’s (1998, p. 226) conceptualisation was of ‘gendered racism and racialised sexism’, bringing into greater clarity the specificity of women’s differential positioning within structures and relations of power. Her fourth paradigm shift involved a rejection of biological conceptions of race and gender with a view to looking anew at the shaping and political mobilisation of racialised constituencies.

The year before Sudbury’s publication, Heidi Safia Mirza published her edited collection Black British Feminism: A Reader (1997). Her introduction lays out her analytic stall, i.e. the framing through which she curated the pieces into a specific coherence around three lines of enquiry/argument. These are: the lines of development of Black British Feminism; an exploration of Black British Feminism’s preoccupations and organising principles, along with its areas of strength, underdevelopment, weakness, exclusion and closure; and the larger social/political/discursive landscapes that shaped and constrained Black British Feminism whilst also being its target of intervention:

Black British Feminism as a body of scholarship is located in that space of British whiteness … which quietly embraces our commonsense and academic ways of thinking … To be black and British is to be unnamed in official discourse … Thus being ‘black’ in Britain is about a state of ‘becoming’ (racialized) … (ibid., p. 3)

Mirza’s introduction outlines the scope and aims of the collection and guides the reader through the pieces—individually and collectively. It was as if Mirza were saying: Dear Reader, your taking in, processing and absorbing the text must leave you to understand three things: that Black British Feminism has been a manifestation of an agency denied and deemed impossible (because black women are stereotyped as too aggressive, Asian women too passive, etc.); that Black British Feminism is a move to inject raced/gendered reflexivity into academia; and that it is a ‘micro-institutional genealogical project’ (West, 1993 cited in Mirza, 1997, p. 6) unmasking strategies and effects of domination through which our being is cast and yet contested and resisted.

Alongside the contributing authors’ consideration of specific topics—e.g., struggles around employment, migration and cultural artefacts (e.g., music)—Mirza’s Black British Feminism project of criticality involved three key areas. First was a struggle within and challenge to the terrain of the gendered subject set up by white feminism. Second, Mirza pointed to the work undertaken to theorise the dynamic processes of social reproduction by which positions and relations of class and race, as well as gender difference, are constituted. Third, she explicitly noted and named the place given to delineating and valuing black women’s autobiographical experience, with the aim of showing black women’s constitution as experiencing persons so the reader recognised something of the ‘feltness’ of black women’s subject position.

For contemporary manifestations of black women’s/feminist organising and theorising, there is not yet a generally available, similar act of curation. Heart of the Race (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe, 2018 [1985]) has recently been republished, and Nydia Swaby’s thesis, Moments of Becoming (2017), charts the range and development of black feminist praxis and, importantly, theorises this praxis as diasporic. Issue 108 of Feminist Review (Anim-Addo, Gunaratnam and Scafe, eds., 2014) brought together a collection of essays in a mirror of the by now famous Issue 17—the Black Women’s Issue—from 1984 (Amos et al., eds., 1984). Social media platforms and the world of creative artistic practice are full of heated debate about how to characterise this contemporary activism, under what sign to organise (feminist, womanist, queer, people of colour, QTIPOC, etc.), and with what agenda in mind.

Recent scholarship, activism and commentary by black feminists is documenting and analysing earlier moments of black feminism in Britain (e.g., Fisher, 2012; Swaby, 2014; Remembering Olive Morris Collective ³ ). This has been accompanied by older questions in newer and emergent forms, especially around complicating/destabilising the idea of gender via the foregrounding of trans struggles and queer of colour critique (Davis, 2017). Others have explored Black Feminism in Europe (Emejulu and Sobande, 2019) or considered the strengths and challenges posed by the conceptual toolkit available for feminist work, such as intersectionality, which Lola Okolosie (2014) has argued should become the normative practice for feminist work of all varieties, while Lola Olufemi (2020) has offered a profound analysis of the impact of black feminist activism and theoretical critique on status quo feminism.

In opening with this cursory reminder of some central texts and themes in black feminism, then and now, I briefly indicate the breadth and vibrancy of black feminist praxis in recent decades. Whether thinking of the explosion of activism across a whole range of issues, the reprinting of classics such as Heart of the Race (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe, 2018 [1985]) and Finding a Voice (Wilson, 1978) or the numerous journalistic or scholarly inquiries into black feminist formations in Britain in the 1970s–1990s, black feminism is a topic of interest once again. Sometimes it goes under other names: POC feminism, Womanism, Fugitive Feminism—each of which offers a specific inflection of this thing I am calling black feminism. Given this context, my aim in this article is to consider how black feminism might be conceived—what kind of an object it is, but more importantly how it might be ‘used’ and utilised as a vibrant and well-honed tool in the armory with which we attempt to craft a politics of ethical freedom. My aim is to draw together work from the theoretical archive of black women’s writing with that of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1969, 1982a [1971], 1982b [1971]) and his theorisation of ‘object use’ and ‘play’, as foundation stones in the development of a capacity for ethical relating based on the detoxification of racism’s effects on ‘self’, ‘other’ and the intersubjective field that the space between these constitutes.

The starting point of my argument is that scholarship by black feminists on black feminism brings forth an ensemble of artefacts that become material and intellectual objects (books, articles, exhibitions, etc.). These are acts of curation bringing about artefacts that are then available for scrutiny/characterisation and enable documentation and theorisation of the situated specificity of black feminism as political praxis, artistic creation, academic inquiry and pedagogy. The objects these curations produce address, but are not to be confused with, the black women subjects (individual and collective) whom they centre as full/meaningful persons living their lives/producing and engaging in forms of sociality that are about life living for itself and refusing the normative terms by which black women are usually rendered visible in dominant discourse, scholarship and practice. The object black feminism is representative or reflective of these black womanhoods in the way that narratives story lives but are not those lives—they are post hoc creations that nevertheless speak to a specificity. At the same time, in the world beyond black feminism, this social object (the assembled artefacts that produce a corpus of theory, record, experiential account and political project and indicate acts of becoming) is also psychically apprehended as symbol of ‘the other’ / the ‘not me’ with whom I am in relation. In psychoanalytic terms, it has the potential to become an ‘internal object’—i.e. an imago of and placeholder for a relation that is simultaneously social and psychic. As such, it poses a challenge—social, political, ethical—that turns on a difference between relating and use. This is my focus. It involves an attempt to negotiate a complex terminological road since the terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are already deeply inscribed by and positioned within the very terrain and terms of personhood that black people in general, and black feminists in particular, have resisted/refused/lived outwith. But I am using the term ‘object relating’ and ‘object use’ in the way theorised by Winnicott. I risk readers finding this paradoxical (even unacceptable), but it is a risk I want to take as I hope to show how it can help to illuminate the creative and ethical possibility of black feminism. I also hope that by putting black feminism and Winnicott’s ‘object use’ into dialogue, the demonic and diacritical character of black feminism (Wynter, 1990) can once again do its work of dislodging colonial orthodoxies that continue to reside in ‘mainstream’ feminisms and open up a space of performative creativity.

The article shifts registers, hinting at the shifting modes of engagement comprising black feminism as relational field. In the next two sections, I elaborate my view of black feminism and the idea of acts of curation, and the divergent orientations between black feminism and what I shall variously call feminism-qua-feminism or ‘dominance feminism’ (Halley, 2006) in which there is a ‘consolidated vision’ (Wynter, 1990) of gendering and gendered position. There is a persistent return to the refrain/terrain ‘black feminism’, which is to be heard as the chorus of the piece. My considerations of the divergence between feminism-qua-feminism and black feminism establish my claim that black feminism invites shifting modes of becoming through its project of revealing and contesting the impact of the racial logics and hierarchies of value that structure human population and the constitution and ‘lived experience’ of the black subject in the wake of Atlantic enslavement and the logics of colonial modernity. This allows me to establish ‘black feminism’ as a curated object, leading me, in the fourth section, into consideration of Winnicott’s theorisation of object use. I show how the capacity for object use is a human achievement that opens a potential for a more ethical form of relating premised on the irreducible interrelation between self and other. I show how ‘play’ is a central component of this developing capacity. I then return to the ‘object’ black feminism and consider again its specificity, this time in relation to the space or field of play that is opened up by the distinction between feminism-qua-feminism and black feminism. I argue that, if the reality of this difference can be emotionally and politically faced, and the space between them occupied as a field of ‘play’, then black feminism might be ‘used’ as an object in the coalitional pursuit of personhood ‘otherwise’ (Hartman, 2006)—i.e. increasingly detoxified from the poison of racism and the racial ordering as it has manifested in (infested) feminist community.

‘Mary don’t you cry’—or acts of curation in the making of the object ‘black feminism’

In many ways, both Sudbury’s (1998) book and Mirza’s (1997) collection were acts of curation—curation in the sense of bringing together a range of disparate artefacts and framing them so as to make them legible from a specific analytic vantage point. As author and editor, both Sudbury and Mirza make explicit how they think the field that was black women’s organising, or what Mirza names as ‘Black British Feminism’ (hereafter BBF), is to be understood and thus engaged.

My suggestion that Sudbury and Mirza were involved in acts of curation is a deliberate naming. I am suggesting that they assembled a set of artefacts into a given form framing a way of reading. In this they were acts of constitution—producing and bearing (the hint of birthing and mothering is deliberate) the very field of inquiry being described and analysed. In the case of Mirza’s BBF, this process of bringing into being was as editor steering and encouraging the contributors as they produced their gifts. These were then assembled into a given order, establishing a relation between them and part of the guiding of the reader’s eye. Thus, a series of artefacts—individual articles—become elements in a single object: the book BBF. In Sudbury’s case, the curation gathered a disparate series of groups with a variety of agendas and activities, from which she then selected twelve for detailed case studies from which to develop her analysis. How these groups understood and embraced the concept of ‘black’ varied, its scope expanding or narrowing depending on political ideology, but together they represented a social force called ‘black women organising’. The extent to which they convened and mobilised under the sign ‘feminist’ also varied enormously, and Sudbury named hers a ‘womanist’ analysis. In contrast, Mirza claimed ‘feminist’, but in her curation it was clear that this was not feminism-qua-feminism but declaring something different. Thus, both the naming ‘womanist’ and the specification of blackness as the key to Mirza’s BBF signal my concern as to the character of black feminism and the challenge to object use it poses; but, before developing this line of concern, a few more words about curation are warranted.

Notwithstanding the differences in naming in Mirza’s and Sudbury’s projects, their process of curation pointed to the consolidation of ‘black feminism/black women’s organising in Britain’, as it had developed in the 1970s–1990s as an object. Designating these as acts of curation opens a space that brings into the centre of my concerns the idea of ‘object’. I shall return to this, but first I note the second driver behind my use of the term ‘curation’. It is to point to the critical tension that sits inside any act of curation: how to bring together a variety of artefacts in a way that brings them and the relation between them into view; holds their force and yet does not consign them to the mausoleum. How to curate in a way that retains the here-and-now lived relationality represented by and embodied in the artefact(s) and exceeds it/them, enabling sustained attention to the very social, structural, cultural, ideological conditions that made and continue to make their ongoing existence and development possible, because behind their production sit living, breathing subjects. It is to say that black feminism/women’s organising in Britain is not to be consigned to the death of the archive and is instead to be considered in terms of how it might be used as an epistemological resource for a project aimed at expanding democratic horizons in these desperate times. How, in other words, we might trace the implications of its emergence and development—identify its analytical and political preoccupations in ways that recognise its aliveness and capacity to help reveal the shifting articulations of domination as they roll out and reconfigure around multiple and differentiated constituencies and structure their ‘lived experience’. This then is my focus: what kind of an object is black feminism conceived and perceived as being and, more importantly, how might it be used in a project of democratic realignment within feminist and anti-racist praxis specifically and radical left politics more generally.

Just as with the term ‘curation’, my reference to the term ‘use’ is also deliberate since it introduces an aspect of the theoretical terrain that grounds my concerns in this article. The notion of the use of an object is taken from British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who in a series of articles in the late 1960s, theorised object use as a major quality in interpersonal, interdependent relating that is fundamentally ethical in the sense of engaging the other on the grounds of their autonomous character, being-ness and personhood. Autonomous, that is, from ‘me’/the subject. Winnicott’s (1969) theory of object use is a theory about the development of a capacity to know the difference between me/self and not-me/you, ⁴ and thus to quietly hold your own authority and legitimacy without recourse to solipsism, narcissism or triumphalism yet still recognise the quiet authority and legitimacy of not-me/you. Linked to this theory of object use is Winnicott’s theory of play/playing, which he conceives as an instance of a transitional phenomenon (i.e. a liminal space or bridge between subjective experience and external reality [Perroni, 2014]) in which a process of becoming is facilitated (Winnicott, 1982b [1971]).

‘love me right’—or elaborating black feminism

In what sense can black feminism as it has developed in the diaspora be thought of as an object? As a starting point, I am suggesting that it becomes an object via acts of post hoc curation. Thus, if we take the texts already referred to, one sense in which black feminism is an object is as a corpus of work, an archive of past activism and a set of practices of living and descriptions and analyses of ‘the lived experience of the black’ ⁵ (Fanon, 1952) woman. Black feminism in Britain, as elsewhere and under other names, is also a theoretical and methodological approach to the analysis of contemporary Britain as it bears the weight of its disavowed colonial past on both its present and future horizons. This also has an ethical character.

Carisa Showden (2012, p. 5), in a consideration of the difference between and potential convergence of feminist and queer theory, suggests that feminism (i.e. feminism-qua-feminism) must have a ‘male’/‘female’ and thus has ‘… a certain heterosexual orientation toward the world’. She follows Janet Halley’s (2006) characterisation of what Showden (2012, p. 6) calls ‘dominance feminism’ in noting that such feminism:

… meets three ‘definitional minima’: M>F; M/F; carrying a brief for F. That is, feminism is a theory of subordination and domination (M>F), in a world always and primarily divided by gender (M/F); and because feminism sees women’s interests as subordinated, the function of feminism is to cultivate the grounds for anti-subordination (that is to promote women’s equality relative to men, i.e. to ‘carry a brief for F’). (ibid.)

In this schema, the object that is ‘dominance feminism’ is defined by its theoretical orientation and its political project.

In many ways, the difference between this ‘dominance feminism’—or feminism-qua-feminism, or what, following Sylvia Wynter (1990), can be conceived as feminism as a universalising discourse—and black feminism, has already been suggested in the foregoing. That is, black feminism differs from feminism-qua-feminism / ‘dominance feminism’ because it has a certain racialised orientation to the world. An orientation to a world in which the afterlife of the racial logics of modernity and Atlantic enslavement, indenture, other forms of unfree labour and colonial domination more generally, is felt as vibrantly alive and conceived and theorised as a major structuring dynamic in the here-and-now as well as the there-and-then of modernity. While class is often a key concern of black feminism as it has developed in Britain, the hierarchical ordering of humanity within the logics of ‘race’ assumes a central position in black feminist analyses and theoretical and political interventions, since it is the very logic of race that instituted a foundational principle structuring social relations and processes of subjectivisation in modernity (Patterson, 1982), including the associated processes of gendering. This racialised logic of ordering meant that gendering into masculine and feminine (as differentiated from sexing into male and female) was something only tenuously applied to the marking and making of the enslaved African (see Spillers, 2003 [1987]), or at the very least a hierarchy of differentiated womanhood and manhood (see Wynter, 1990) was variously inscribed on enslaved and other racialised bodies. At one level then, the project of black feminism as a practice of freedom is to unmask the processes and social and psychic effects of this racial ordering of humanity (and indeed land [Bhandar 2018]), including analysing how it is, or indeed is not, also a gendered racialisation. The black feminist project will include seeking out and attempting to proliferate everyday practices of resistance to these processes and refusal of / disidentification with its subjectifying effects. The focus of the black feminist project then is activism and theorisation that insist on the need to elaborate the specific configurations of structural, cultural, discursive, political, economic (Olufemi, 2020) and psychic positionalities as they are locally embedded in the global (Mohanty, 2003) and historical. And it is from this orientation that we can discern black feminism’s ethical project as an orientation that reaches beyond itself. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty puts it:

In other words, this discussion allows me to reemphasise the way that differences are never just ‘differences’ … The challenge is to see how differences allow us to explain the connections and border crossings better and more accurately, how specifying difference allows us to theorize universal concerns more fully. It is this intellectual move that allows for my concern for women of different communities and identities to build coalitions and solidarities across borders. (Mohanty, 2003, p. 505)

Mohanty’s statement is in the context of revisiting her path-breaking essay ‘Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’ (Mohanty, 1984) with the aim of establishing grounds for coalition on the basis of understanding particularity.

Here is a clear articulation of my claim that black feminism is involved in a project of ethical relation. This ethical relation is premised upon two further features of black feminism: that it is diasporic and cannot be contained in or reduced to the borders of a single nation state (Britain or otherwise); and that it must and does constantly change whilst retaining some of its core characteristics. As Suki Ali (2009) has argued, the formation of alliances is central to black feminism, both intra-and extramurally, making it essential for black feminism to simultaneously hold its ideas and be open to change. Here, as well as pointing to the capacity, indeed requirement, that black feminism constantly evolve, Ali, like Mohanty, adroitly invokes the question of ‘use’—black feminism’s ability, when constituted into a social/political object, to be used because it is meaningful to different generations and across diverse constituencies.

I want to take this and think about this question of use and do so along two tracks that I hope I can make analytically converge. One is the theoretical terrain offered by Winnicott. The other is a theoretical clarification and extension of the epistemological, ontological and ‘sociogenic’ (Fanon, 1952; Wynter, 1999) character of black feminism. This is the reference I made above about marking the difference between feminism-qua-feminism with its universalising discourse and black feminism. I do this via the theorisation offered by Wynter in her essay ‘Beyond Miranda’s meanings’ (1990). But let me start with Winnicott and consider what he means by the ‘use of an object’.

‘Do right woman …’—or what is an object and what does it mean to use it?

In arguing that acts of curation constitute black feminism into objects, the reference up to now has been to a social object. However, it is simultaneously a psychic object, or ‘internal object’, that also signals the ‘not-me’ (of e.g., feminism-qua-feminism). It thus registers that the categorical differentiation that structures the social world simultaneously has a psychic life in which ‘internal object’ ‘refers to the internalized representation of an affective [positive and/or negative] connection between the self and an other’ (Aviram, 2020, p. 89); and this relationship may be ‘with an animate or inanimate object, which is satisfying or unsatisfying (good or bad)’ (ibid.). So, whilst in psychoanalytic terms an object is a person, existing in the external world this object can also be a psychic representation of a person/s to which the emerging ego (subject) is oriented. Such an orientation is part of development; indeed the capacity for object use, like the capacity for concern, is a sign of maturation. For those in the British Object Relations traditions (of which the Winnicottian approach is one version), human beings are fundamentally object seeking—there is a phylogenetic impulse towards object relating, i.e. to reaching out beyond narcissistic absorption with self and towards others. But if objects are other people to whom we relate in the external world, they are also internal imagos, i.e. psychic representations of ‘objects’ in the external world. Whilst the ‘travel’ between the internal and external may be facilitated or mediated by what Winnicott (1953) terms ‘transitional objects’—things like blankets, favourite toys— and we could add ‘theories!’, as psychic representations, there is no automatic or total correspondence between the internal object and the external object, though both play a part in structuring the psychic and emotional truth of the individual and their patterns of interaction/relating. Individuals’ practices of being and interaction are orientated towards both internal and external objects, or, more accurately in Winnicottian terms, in the space between the me/not-me, internal/external, i.e. subjective experience and external reality. This is a point that I return to later in relation to Winnicott’s concept of ‘playing/play’.

Perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively (for those more familiar with sociological analysis), object use is distinguished from object relating, with the former developing from the latter, i.e. ‘relating’ is prior to —i.e. less ethical!—the capacity for ‘using’. As humans, we strive for and learn to relate to those who form our objects—the (person) object upon whom we are totally dependent in the first phase of life—and it is from this phylogenic and ontogenic striving that the movement towards object use proceeds. As the infantile ego begins to become integrated through the ongoing process of care, the psychic manifestation of this initially total, then gradually lessening, dependence is a fantasy of omnipotence; an idea that it is the ‘self’, the developing ego, that is in command of all that is within the subject’s world and that she/he/they has/have created their (person) object(s). This means that the object to which the subject is orientated and with whom it interacts is one formed by the projections put into the object by the subject (with her/his developing ego). It is in this sense that the object to which one relates is an object of one’s (the subject’s) own making (and thus my relating is less ethical since it lacks recognition of the object’s autonomy and integrity. At first, this means that in the psyche of the dependent infant (and the infantile part of the adult) there is no difference between me/subject and you/object. In psychic life, I have put bits of me into you, shaped you in the image of my projections, and thus you are me. In this (psychic) process I am simultaneously depleted (I have evacuated parts of me into you) and enriched (since you are also me). This is what Winnicott (1969) calls ‘object relating’. I relate to an object that is my own creation and not different from me. I relate to an (person) object (in Winnicottian terms) that is subjectively perceived or the ‘subjective object’.

‘Object use’ is a different form of relationship between subject/object. It depends on and emerges from the realisation that me/subject and you/object are not in fact the same, that you/object is not the product of my own creation, not a narcissistic reflection of me—given life in the image of my own projections—but exists ‘out there’ beyond me in the ‘external’ world. You/object have your own existence with a life of your own and beyond my omnipotent control. This is a process of psychic differentiation and separation and is itself a developmental achievement but still not enough for me to be able to interact with you in a way that is fully in correspondence with the fact that subject and object (me and you) are autonomous, though occupying a shared external world. For this mode of intersubjective, ethical interaction to occur, something else is required before I am capable of really meeting and greeting you in your autonomy, before I have developed the capacity for object use.

This something else is the mobilisation of my (the subject’s) psychic (emotional) aggression so that I (the subject) ‘destroy’ you—that is I (the subject) destroy(s) the object that is the effect of my/its fantasy omnipotence, the object that is an extension of my/its self in so far as it is full of my (the subject’s) projections and identifications. My psychic attacks belittle you (object); I say ‘you are inadequate, limited, not up to the task of feeding me, of filling me with reflections of myself’. ‘You are not good enough’. But you (the object) ‘survive’ this ‘destruction’ and stay around, insisting on your (the object’s) separate reality, existing in the external world with your own interiority and practices of refusal, and this initiates in the subject a gradual and consolidated sense of the object’s autonomous existence and reality beyond the subject’s projections and identifications. The object can be recognised and found in the reality in which we both exist and share. Now the object is available for use. That is, it is available to the subject for her individual (and collective) ongoing enrichment and development, which the capacity to walk with rather than on or through facilitates. It is an enrichment that emerges in the process of intersubjective and collective life, a process that is always shifting but without resort to mastery and narcissistic omnipotence once more.

Essentially, the object available for and in use has ‘survived’ its ‘destruction’, is not reducible to or dependent for its life or death on ‘me/subject’, my version of reality, because its reality as outside the subject is sustained and respected—it is, in Winnicott’s terms, an ‘object objectively perceived’. Significantly too, while this process of unconscious psychic attack and ‘destruction’ is linked to frustrations of the reality of separateness, it also gives rise to joy, joy at the object’s ‘survival’, a joy because of the quality of ‘… the feeling tone’ (Winnicott, 1969, p. 717) and the ‘object constancy’ (ibid.) that results. In a kind of cyclical psychic fantasy of ‘you’re gone, I’ve killed you, oh hello! How great to see you!’, ⁶ the subject confronts its desire for omnipotent control and its relief at recognising that this is fantasy and that the reality is one of separate existence and ordinary human capacities and limitations.

Importantly for my concerns, between these two positions a potential space for creative, ethical interaction can emerge—a potential space of liminality between me/not-me. For Winnicott, the liminal or, as mentioned earlier, what he refers to as transitional space (or transitional objects) is a central feature of human experience, and one that fosters psychic and emotional growth. It is here that the capacity for full relating-as-use, in the sense outlined above, and indeed cultural experience itself, resides (Winnicott, 1967). Playing is simultaneously a liminal activity that occurs in liminal space—the site between two aspects of human experience, the psychic and the actual external world or the ‘… intermediate state between illusory experience of the “subjective object” and the “object objectively perceived …’ (Borden, 1998, p. 28). It facilitates growth and is a ‘doing’ located in the space between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’—or rather it is neither wholly ‘inside’ nor wholly ‘outside’. This makes playing simultaneously wonderful in its magic and precarious since it sits in ‘the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of control of actual objects. This is the precariousness of magic itself, magic that arises in intimacy, in a relationship that is found to be reliable’ (Winnicott, 1982a [1971], p. 47). To make it clear: the magic derives from the sense that one is in total control as to what happens—think of children as they create a world full of characters whom they command but who are experienced as totally real.

But, again as we can witness when watching children lost in play, it is precarious because the sense of command can collapse so instantly and so easily at the call of an adult to stop, at the collapse of the scene as the dog or cat runs through and disrupts it all—or because of something far more traumatic in circumstances of abuse. The point is that this occupation of a psychic space of command and precariousness (between me/not-me, self and outer reality) is with us throughout our lives, though disavowed and projected into children (the child part of us). Think, for one minute, of the ways in which academics, feminists and black scholars included, can invest their/our beloved theories with fantasies of omnipotent command—as if, once we get the (gender) theory right, all will be in our analytic command! Or how we can disintegrate and retreat into verbal violence when that fantasy of omnipotent theoretical and ontological command collapses, in say, the wake of trans* theories of gender. But to continue briefly with the idea of play. Just as with the capacity for object use, the capacity to play involves two steps: first the presence of a ‘maternal’ object (a primary carer who, through intense proximity has become attuned to the infant/cared for) able to play on the infant’s (cared for) terms, that is on the terms of another. Then, gradually, the ‘maternal’ object brings in her own play. This means that the field of play becomes more complex as it is now constituted in the imaginative space produced by two autonomous but interacting subjects, who, as in use, have their own autonomous existence in the actually existing world. ‘Thus, the way is paved’, writes Winnicott (1982a [1971], p. 48), ‘for a playing together in a relationship’ taking place in a shared external reality. But, because it is a relationship, involving autonomous subjects with their own logics and desires in a shared but hierarchically ordered, power-filled external reality, ‘… playing is always liable to become frightening. Games [whether children’s or adults] and their organisation must be looked at as part of an attempt to forestall the frightening aspect of playing’ (ibid., p. 50). Play, then, is partially linked to the developing capacity for object use, since it helps facilitate the move away from a fantasy of omnipotent control of the object/external world and towards recognition and acceptance of the object’s autonomous and separate existence in the external world. Yet it is always in-process, never a fully completed achievement, and thus it always carries the potential to turn into a nightmare world full of monsters. Its precarity is a function of its location on the line between, on the one hand, the ‘object subjectively perceived’, and, on the other, the ‘object objectively perceived’—that is between my omnipotent control and my inability to control it. It is from this position that one (subject) derives a source of growth/development/enrichment, and the seeming paradox is that it is precisely in this space that creativity emerges, creativity that both requires and facilitates an ethical stance towards the object and, by extension, ethical relating-in-use. Through play, the capacity for object use might develop, and, in object use, both object and subject survive the interplay between love and hate and (to link back to Mohanty and Ali) might move together in a coalition of emancipatory healing based on ethical/political respect for the specificity of each.

‘Till you come back to me’—or back to black feminism

In what ways might this have bearing on the object called black feminism? In what theoretical context does the idea of potential space emerging from the capacity to play, where play refers to the human capacity for joyful subjective experience and creativity whilst also being precarious and full of danger, where it both facilitates object use and points to the danger involved in that, link to the issue of the difference between feminism as universalising discourse and black feminism? It is to this that I now turn.

The idea that black feminism is a project that is ‘attentive to a diasporic present’ (Anim-Addo, 2014, p. 46) that is ripe for sisterly engagement in pursuit of anti-racist democratic transformation has been beautifully and eloquently argued by Joan Anim-Addo. She shows why and how sociological and feminist inquiry is impoverished by its failure to take seriously the knowledge produced by black feminist thought. She delivers a powerful critique and, in the process, delivers sociological/activist persons (subjects) (and their theorisations) who must be heard and taken seriously. In my terms, she signals the challenge of object use posed by black feminism.

Indeed, the centrality that black feminism in Britain, the USA and to some extent the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent has afforded ideas of voice, speaking, articulating, as well as journey, movement/mobility, passage and bridging, is striking. ⁷ Voices were to be made, found and developed in the process of a cultural, intellectual, emotional, psychic journey, whilst this journey involved making and crossing bridges in and through space and time. Never in linear fashion, but in spiral time/space in which then/there might be here/now or what Black Quantum Futurism (2019) call ‘everywhens’. This, then, was only a next step in a long but erased process of reconstruction of self and collective that was precipitated by, and harnessed to, a process of un- and re-learning premised upon a contestatory analysis of the impacts of colonial power and knowledge in all their differential manifestations. And as I hope is already clear, what developed was an archive and series of overlapping constituencies that amounted to a countervailing power to contemporary modes of subjugation. At the same time and in a different mode, journeys and selves were cast from the excavation of African, Asian and Indigenous metaphysics (Mani, 2001; Alexander, 2005; Maparyan, 2006, 2012) in which healing as opposed to contestation is foregrounded as the motor of and pivot around which different subjectivities might be cast. Though overlapping, these pathways and the conceptions of the political they contained, led to different configurations of black feminist subjectivity as depicted in the curations of multiple black women writers and artists. The journeys and the newly accented voices announced a transformation of I and we (or perhaps the Rastafarian enunciation of individual and collective as ‘I and I’—a way of announcing both the spiritual and embodied ‘I’ and the equality of standing/status between ‘me’ and ‘you’—is more appropriate here). Therefore, the subject, the place from which she spoke, and the time of arrival turned out to be unknown in advance, only to be found upon an arrival that, like the notion of ‘return’ however much yearned for (Brand, 2001; Hartman, 2006) can itself never be fully achieved, they can be only journeyed towards in acts of imagination and rememory.

For what black feminism inaugurates is a collective subject via a practice of ‘self-inserting appearance’ (Alarcón, 1990, p. 360) simultaneously claiming a presence even whilst unsettling the ideological and relational elements into which she inserts herself. This has two effects. It makes her an oppositional subject even though her ontological status is yet to be determined. At the same time, this yet-to-be-known-ness charges her with the pedagogical task of articulating the specificities of her beingness, her personhood, and of its relations with ‘others’ intra-psychically and inter-subjectively (Alarcón, 1990). The task is ontological, sociological and pedagogical. It might be thought of as future oriented, grounded in the experiential past and present, ensuring that in the task of coming to know the character, the possibilities and reach of her refashioned, in-process subjectivity are foregrounded, and identification of the paths already trodden and those along which this future (inter)subjectivity might be navigated is required. If ‘speaking/voicing’ assumed a central place in this simultaneous navigation of the past and future through the contours of ‘now’, it calls up a ‘listener’—someone who can pay full attention and hear. Yet, just as coming to voice is complex, so too is listening. As Emilia Perroni (2014, p. 5) notes, listening is complex since it is ‘… always interpretive, partial, subjective, shaped by world views, moods, projections, or “disguises” of various kinds …’. To put it this way makes a connection to the capacity for play and object use, since listening requires the capacity to stay in the place that is not-me and enter a specific site of self/object relating.

In the context of my concerns, it relates to the distinction between feminism as universalising discourse concerning the gendered subject ‘woman’ and black feminism as the discourse with a racialised orientation to the world and what Wynter (1990, p. 363) refers to as the concerns or discourse of the ‘“native” woman’. For Wynter (ibid., p. 364), this distinction is that between speaking gendered content, contest and claim via a ‘consolidated field of meanings’ about gender and ‘woman’, on the one hand, and speaking presence, context and claim from the ground of the hitherto erased ‘native woman’, on the other. The imperative of introducing and foregrounding ‘race’ into, or perhaps more precisely in apposition to, the terrain of ‘gender’ forces a fundamental shift. It means that the previously ‘“silenced ground” of women’ (ibid., p. 363) via ‘patriarchal discourse’ is superseded or becomes secondary to the ‘silenced ground’ of all the world’s ‘natives’—i.e. the majority (albeit subordinated and erased) populations of the globe. It means that the field of play is rearranged in ways that are variously experienced as uncanny, for the consolidated discourse emanating from feminism-qua-feminism, or more welcoming, for black feminism.

As such, development of the capacity to use the object black feminism involves more than a shift to expand an unchanged category and/or discourse of the place of gender in the making of the human, what Wynter (2003) elsewhere theorises as the constitution of ‘Man’ within the emergence of modernity. It involves far more than simply making the category ‘gender’ more capacious for ‘dominance feminism’s’ projections and thus holding in place its omnipotence. Rather, in somewhat of a soft echo of Norma Alarcón (1990) above, it is a shift onto what Wynter terms ‘demonic ground’ (see also McKittrick, 2006)—i.e. the terrain that in the now is indeterminate in advance as to its interpretative logics, terms of intelligibility and place of arrival. It offers a frame of reference which parallels the:

‘demonic models’ posited by physicists who seek to conceive of a vantage point outside the space-time orientation of the humuncular observer. This would be, … in the context of our specific socio-human realities, a ‘demonic model’ outside the ‘consolidated field’ of our present mode of being/feeling/knowing … (Wynter, 1990, p. 364)

That is, outside the consolidated field of dominance feminism’s theorisations of gender and its social effects. This speaks of a fundamental shift in the relation between feminism-qua-feminism and suggests black feminism (alongside other practices of black life constitutive of our personhood) is involved in an irreducible task of constituting the very grounds upon which our subjectivity is formed, our presence acknowledged and our personhood lived and transformed. It involves a repositioning of and in the field in which ‘gendering’ works and is experienced. It is involved in the task of constituting demonic models outside the discursive frames within which current ‘hegemonic interpretative and anti-interpretative models [of gender] are … generated’ (ibid., p. 365).

In shifting the terrain to that of the ‘demonic’, the ‘black’ in black feminism impacts ‘feminism’ in a profound way, for it changes the orientation, value and stress of the field of inquiry under the sign ‘gender’ and thus opens another space of the ontological, epistemological, theoretical, experiential, political and psychic. For Wynter (ibid.), this is what is signalled by the term ‘womanist’, which she names a diacritical move indicating the limits or inadequacy of ‘dominance feminism’ to contain and address the larger question of the impact of a world organised according to the logics of racial value on the process of gendering itself. As diacritical, black feminism (under whatever name) opens a different space.

In arriving at this conceptual, theoretical, political space—the space between ‘feminism’ (as a discourse signalling and privileging gender in the making and valorisation of forms of human life) and ‘black feminism’ (as a discourse signalling and privileging ‘race’ in the making and valorisation of forms of human/non-human life)—we arrive at a space of ‘play’ in the sense outlined above. And this arrival makes it clear just what is at stake in the concept of ‘play’ as linked to black feminism with its theorisation of subjectivity and lived personhood. It makes clear why ‘play’ is simultaneously creative, with a potential to bring subjects into personhood, and dangerously precarious, with a potential to collapse into the terrain of monsters and the erasure or evisceration of persons deemed less than such, indeed as outside the human itself.

In the argument I am attempting to make, it is essential to hold the distinction between the object subjectively perceived and the object objectively perceived, since it is the distinction between the object of relating, i.e. the object that is constituted by and full of our projections, and the object of use that exists independently in the real world—the embodied, sentient, concretely separate person (individual and collective) with whom the subject interacts and who interacts with the subject/me. The task is to hold and follow the intersectional line of inquiry that compels a sustained grasp of the specific positionalities that coalesce around specific constellations of power and produce multiple oppressions and thus experiences, and political visions, and that this is achieved without foreclosing on ‘play’ and the human connection it might make available. Such potential connection emerges because of the unique character of ‘play’ as always both thought and action, as bringing together pre-existing elements in new ways, inner and outer, whilst requiring use of multiple parts of ourselves as we open to new modes of intersubjective encounter (Perroni, 2014, p. 31).

It is the ‘new’, the ‘particular’, that is key since it helps us to grasp the complexities of social and cultural life, raises questions about the psychic effects of this particularity and presses upon us the need for the development of a nuanced, mature understanding of politics and the political. It does not move away from an analytical approach that foregrounds and insists on the need to excavate specific, local configurations of global forces in the making of selves, experiences, collectivities, challenges and resistances. Neither does it cede to a radical pluralism that would render any connection and alliance across particularities impossible and redundant.

… and so—or ‘jump to it’

The point is that black feminism is not, as Audre Lorde (1984) told us, white feminism in black face, but rather has its own historical and sociological reality and attends to its own sociological-political-psychological-ethical subject. This is the subject with a certain racialised orientation to the world (as I suggested earlier), who has developed her toolkit of theorisations and who is the effect of its own praxis. Whilst in the grip of psychic defence (and solipsistic superiority), this is the subject who may be conflated with the object subjectively perceived because full of ‘my’ projections and thus related to. Yet, it is vital to remember, this is an object (subject) who has her own real existence—her own personhood—and who can be a resource beyond her ‘self’ or her own constituency, precisely because she brings into view aspects of the shared reality that is occluded when she is enclosed in whatever terminology and social practice of minoritisation. If sought and found, her historical and sociological positioning can be available for understanding the complexities of the ‘now’, since her theoretical understanding and political claims are available for use in a project aimed at transformation more generally or the spaces of fugitive manoeuvre more specifically. More immediately, her theorisations—the quotidian and more abstract coordinates by which she navigates and generates knowledge of her own conditions—might be available for use more generally to understand the differential constellations of contingent and indeed conjunctural forces that produce ‘me’ and ‘you’. To put it another way: these may become an object for use in the sense that they open an intermediate space of play in which a third/unknown/yet-to-be-discovered might emerge. It might be recognised and used as a facilitating or containing environment which is transitional in that it is neither wholly not me nor wholly me but a space of play that facilitates the emergence of new meanings/understanding and subjects. Such a space of play is theoretical, methodological and empirical, and opens between the gendered subject of the consolidated field of vision and the subjects apprehended in the racialised orientation to the world that comes into view through the diacritical lens of black feminism (operating under whatever name). The space of play then is relocated to a ‘demonic’ ground of inquiry from which new visions and modes of becoming might emerge.

Such emergence becomes possible too because, alongside an expanded socio-cultural-political-geographic imaginary derived from the specificity of intersectional/diasporic location, participants’ minds are now open, at least potentially, to ‘other knowledges’ derived from the ancestral, the spiritual and/or the place of imagination (Philip, 1997; Alexander, 2005; Wekker, 2006; Tinsley, 2010). These are ‘other’ knowledges potentially available as a resource for rememory.

And finally, they offer a tool for analysis of the contemporary conjuncture since its theoretical orientation is towards the contingent/shifting articulation of racisms/racialisation, gendering-degendering, sexing-sexualising, classed-classing subjects and the multiple and overlapping institutional operations that produce and govern the norms of subjectification. In other words, as an object for/in use, black feminism as theory is also intermediate or transitional—occupying that space between the ‘subjective object’ (full of my projections) and the object objectively perceived (i.e. having its own character and autonomy) (Borden, 1998), and thus can be deployed (potentially) in the service of fostering a quality of engagement between parties who are and can accept their separateness and autonomy in unity.

So, to end, I want to say that to greet and work with black feminism as an ever-evolving object for and of use is part of a process of decolonising the academy and democratising scholarship and political analysis. To be capable of object use flows out of a process of democratic maturation against the grain of these neoliberal, desperate times and says ‘Hi! Nice to meet you! Let’s talk and maybe even play’.