Women of Colour Feminism - The Redefinition of Gender Politics
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Certain type of history books love neat categories. The Civil Rights Movement? Black men in suits. Second-wave feminism? White women with placards. But the women who lived at the intersections—Chicanas, Black women, Indigenous women or more generally immigrant women—are harder to fit into into those narratives. The consequence: More often than not, they became marginalised - even by movements they helped to carry.
By the 1980s, those margins started speaking in their own register. The word we—so central to political manifestos—suddenly felt exclusionary. We women usually meant white and middle-class. We Black activists often meant male. The fix wasn’t to abandon solidarity, but to reimagine it. Out of this came a new political category: women of color. Not a demographic box, but a coalition. A way of saying difference can be the foundation of collective strength.
Morrison’s Experiment in Uncertainty
Toni Morrison understood the fragility of categories better than anyone. In her only short story, Recitatif, she gives us two girls—Twyla and Roberta—friends, rivals, doubles. One is Black, the other white. Morrison never tells us which is which. Readers grasp for markers, but each clue collapses into stereotype.
It’s a brilliant move. Morrison shows that race, often treated as natural fact, is produced in memory, language, and power. And by leaving it unresolved, she unsettles the assumption that gender and race can ever be understood in isolation.
A Bridge Made of Words
If Morrison revealed the instability of categories, This Bridge Called My Back (1981) turned that instability into action. Edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, the anthology blended essays, poetry, and testimony from women who were at once central and invisible in their movements.
The “bridge” was a metaphor for survival, but also for power. Donna Kate Rushin’s Bridge Poem captures the exhaustion of always explaining yourself—yet insists on the radical potential of living between worlds. For these writers, difference was not an obstacle to solidarity but its foundation.
The New Mestiza
Gloria Anzaldúa pushed this even further in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Her figure of the “New Mestiza” was not just a cultural type but a way of imagining identity as layered, contradictory, and generative. To live at the border—racial, linguistic, sexual, spiritual—was to develop resilience, creativity, and vision.
Anzaldúa refused the comfort of binaries. Instead, she proposed a third space, where ambiguity itself becomes a resource. It wasn’t easy—she was clear about the strain of constant negotiation—but it was a new kind of strength.
Voices in Verse
Chicana poets like Pat Mora and Bernice Zamora translated this complexity into verse. Mora’s Legal Alien captures the double vision of being both Mexican and American, belonging and not belonging. Zamora’s So Not to Be Mottled describes identity as “infinite division”—a self that resists being neatly packaged. Their work showed that what theory called “fragmentation” was, for many women, the lived reality of daily life.
The Line That Stretches Back
None of this emerged from nowhere. Sojourner Truth was already asking the question in 1851: “Ain’t I a Woman?” Her challenge—that gender and race are inseparable—echoed across centuries, finally crystallizing in the feminist coalitions of the 1980s.
Women of color feminism did not just add a missing piece to the puzzle of American activism. It rewired the whole puzzle, insisting that identity is never singular, never simple, and never a reason to be silent.
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