Queering privilege :: Essays Papers

Queering exclusive rightIn any groups struggle against injustice, a glisten of jealousy and bitterness seems to accompany thoughts of the oppressor and those positioned in places of privileged within structures of domination. broadly speaking it is acknowledged that there are no simple scapegoats upon whom to unequivocally aim blame for all the worlds maladies, tempting as conclusion and accosting such(prenominal)(prenominal) a character is. Despite the growing willingness to let go of old myths of directly responsible villains, there remains a non unrelated urge still to describe and intellectually master (exert tycoon over by gaining knowledge of) those who inhabit structural locations of privilege. Taking the faux pas of Patricia Hill Collins black feminism, a rather nuanced understanding of such characters is developed to remediate know their place. However, the accounts of this sort of simplistic anti-domination critique at long last replicates, in its theorizing, the assimilationist incompleteness of the modes of thought it initially rejects.For people to be structurally positioned in relatively privileged ways means that they insouciantly see benefits and escape uncomfortablenesss as compared to trends in other people. Usually these trends about what is routine and how other people live rely on some insane asylum of a category of normal from which others are understood as departures. A first issue is to determine what a benefit or discomfort would be. By discomfort, of course, I mean to sarcastically understate the range from daily and accidental inconveniences to very intentional brutality that makes up a putting surface experience of grinding oppression that structurally condemns folks as individuals and groups. Similarly, benefits drag in a sizeable range in their particularity, but compose an overarching prevalence of niceties. However, who gets to decide what is oppressive or beneficent might be the effect person, someone higher up, or impersonal criteria, but this is a incredulity for ethics one is tempted to bracket. Some groups, it then seems, are in better places, but who are they? If black women end be defined as a group by first noticing the trends that particular people encounter, such as often being suspected of shoplifting, and then correlating these patterns with their constructed identity (the combination of categories black and woman) (Collins 25-26), then perhaps groups with structural privilege can be understood similarly. The categories of, say, man and white do seem to retrace up with systematic privileges. In Patricia Hill Collins black feminism, some(prenominal) the criticisms and alternative methodologies offer some insights into the nature of a position of privilege and what it means to inhabit it.