Low-Income Women's Standpoint:

Recognizing Poor and Working-Class American Women as

Generators ofResistant Knowledge

by

Holly Ann Larson

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of

Doctor ofPhilosophy

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

August 2003 Copyright by Holly Ann Larson 2003

ii Low-Income Women's Standpoint: Recognizing Poor and Working-Class American Women as Generators ofResistant Knowledge

by Holly Ann Larson

This dissertation was prepared under the direction of the candidate's dissertation advisor, Dr. Jane Caputi, Department of Women's Studies, and has been approved by the members ofHolly Ann Larson's supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty ofThe Dorothy F. Schmidt of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofDoctor of Philosophy.

m ABSTRACT

Author: Holly Ann Larson

Title: Low-Income Women's Standpoint: Recognizing Poor and

Working-Class American Women as Generators ofResistant

Knowledge

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Jane Caputi

Degree: Doctor ofPhilosophy

Year: 2003

This dissertation puts economically disadvantaged American women at the center

of analysis. I turn to standpoint theory to demonstrate that low-income women construct knowledge out of resistance to systemic oppression in their everyday, concrete worlds. In addition, I create a distinct theory on low-income women's standpoint to show that poor

and working-class women are grounded in and produce knowledge from the messiness of

contradictions and the murkiness of ambiguity in the immediate, material world.

Therefore, their forms of resistance is as complex, ambiguous, and messy as the world from which they struggle.

Discerning and analyzing low-income women's standpoint does not create a value hierarchy that places more worth on one form of resistance than on another. Nor does it make an ethical judgment on how low-income women resist or uphold moral absolutism that categorizes their acts of resistance as "good/healthy" or "bad/dysfunctional." Rather, uncovering and examining low-income women's standpoint focuses on how poor and working-class women struggle to be whole, complex beings who daily fight against

lV economic oppression under structural limitations and within contradictory situations.

Low-income women's standpoint theory acknowledges the messiness oflife and the imperfection of humanity. Furthermore, it illustrates that knowledge is an ongoing process of seeking "truth"; there is no one correct way of finding "truth." Hence, low-income women's standpoint theory shows that there is "truth" in the murkiness and confusion of contradictions and ambiguity.

My dissertation is set up as the following: in chapter one, I explain what poor and working-class women's standpoint is and highlight how their resistant knowledge is grounded in their immediate and everyday world; in chapter two, I examine how low-income female performing artists and writers openly express their sexuality as "bad girls" through their art and writing to claim sexual agency; in chapter three, I analyze how low-waged female workers encountering structural limitations negotiate power relations in the workforce; and, in chapter four, I look at how low-income women deal with emotional pain and anger as they resist being crushed by economic and social oppression.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1 Positionality...... 1 Class...... 2 Gender and Class...... 7 Sexuality and Class...... 9 Race and Class...... 13 Intersectionality ofRace, Class, Sexuality, and Gender ...... 17 Heterogeneous Group Identity...... 20 Discerning Low-Income Women's Standpoint ...... 23 Creating a Low-Income Women's Standpoint Theory ...... 25 Methodology...... 26 Methodology on the Positionality ofLow-Income Women ...... 29 The Goals ofThis Dissertation ...... 33

Chapter One: Low-Income Women's Standpoint...... 34 Introduction...... 34 Standpoint Theory...... 37 Proletarian Standpoint...... 39 Feminist Standpoint...... 39 Women's Standpoint...... 41 Black Feminist Standpoint...... 42 Low-Income Women's Standpoint...... 44 Low-Income Women's Standpoint Grounded in the Low...... 46 The Low as a Source ofBeauty and Strength...... 48 The Body as a Site ofKnowledge ...... 52 High!I..ow Knowledge...... 55 Everyday Resistance as Low Knowledge...... 57 Three Realms ofEveryday Resistance ...... 60 Critical Consciousness...... 60 Low-Income Female Intellectuals as Organic Intellectuals ...... 63 Appropriation of Low-Income Women's Knowledge...... 67 Standpoint Allows the "Other" to Gaze Back...... 71 Conclusion ...... 75

Chapter Two: The "Bad Girl" Who Defies White Middle-Class Femininity and Respectability...... 77 Introduction...... 77

V1 Blues and flip-Hop...... 80 The Dialogic Play ofWorking-Class Black Female Artists...... 82 Homosexuality and Black Female Artists...... 84 Claiming the Black Female Body as Erotic Power...... 86 Lil' Kim and White Racist Images of Black Women...... 89 "White Trash" Female Persona...... 93 "White Trash Girl" ...... 101 "White Trash Girl's" Counterself--"Modest Girl" ...... 106 The Sexually Perverse "White Trash" Identity...... 108 Butch/Femme Relationships...... 114 Conclusion...... 122

Chapter Three: Asserting Pride as Discredited and Low-Waged Laborers: Negotiating the Master/Servant Relationship...... 124 Introduction...... 124 Everyday Strategies...... 125 Reading Thoughts...... 127 Emotional Labor...... 130 Waitresses Dealing with Emotional Labor...... 132 Secretaries Dealing with Emotional Labor...... 135 Moral Authority...... 138 Asserting Their Humanness...... 145 Chicanery...... 152 Conclusion ...... '...... 154

Chapter Four: Embracing the Contradictions and Ambiguity...... 156 Introduction...... 156 E1notional Pain...... 157 Transforming Pain...... 162 The Banality of Everyday Pain...... 163 Resistant Anger ...... 167 "Ba d o·rr 1s '" Reststant . Anger ...... 170 Pain and Anger as Part of a Moral Process ...... 175 Future Project on a Standpoint of"Humility" and Hope ...... 176

Works Cited...... 180

Vl1 INTRODUCTION

Positionality:

To resist becoming a disembodied and disembedded thinker/writer, I need to

introduce myself and explain why I am interested in and committed to low-income women's ways of knowing. I am a thirty-two-year-old white working-class woman who

grew up in a low-income community in New York during the recession ofthe '70s and

'80s. Who I am today is very much influenced by my childhood environment: my

blue-collar neighborhood and my working-class family household headed by a single

parent, my mother. My family's daily financial struggles and my day-to-day interaction

with other people living on the margins, trying to get by, made me conscious of economic

oppression and sensitive to other forms of social oppression. My family's vulnerability

kept me raw and alert to what was going on around me. On many occasions, this

vulnerability acted as a bridge that connected me to other people and beings who were

suffering. I also developed strategies and skills out of this vulnerability, such as how to

manage time, handle money, defer gratification, live with disappointment, relate to

authority figures, and deal with deprivation and frustration. These strategies and skills

have become a part of my life, and especially an integral part ofhow I relate to people.

I agree with white working-class feminist writer Karen Kolias who, in her essay

"Class Realities," argues that in order for a low-income woman to live a life beyond mere

survival, she "has to surface all her strengths" and "develop other positive qualities as well" (1975, 33). I experienced this first hand observing how my mother secured a decent

and safe life for my sisters and me. I saw her assertiveness as she spoke to the bill

collectors, declaring her family's right to electricity and heat; I witnessed her patience as

1 we waited for hours on the unemployment line; later, I viewed her resilience as she juggled a full-time and part-time job and family. Now as an adult, I realize that there was so much more that I did not see, that was beyond my childhood purview, on how she developed inner resources to deal with fatigue, depression, abuse, and loneliness.

My mother is not an exception. There are many low-income women who develop important strategies and skills to keep their families together while they struggle with emotional and financial chaos and anguish. Ko lias writes,

Working poor women, starting at an early age, are used to making decisions which affect others and have had to develop confidence in their ability to confront day-to­ day responsibilities. They have to provide needed income, often alone, as well as provide family security and physical welfare. They tend to be strong because they have survived hard economic realities, particularly those who can't depend on men as an additional means of security or support. (31)

White working-class scholar Janet Zandy points out that acknowledging low-income women's strength and determination does not deny oppression; rather, it shifts the focus from poor and working-class women being portrayed as victims to being seen as agents of knowledge who develop critical "strategies for survival and resistance" (1990, 6). And these recognized strategies, Kolias contends, put low-income women in an ideal situation in which they can be role models for feminists, showing them "how to utilize money, power, and organization" (28). Black feminist writer bell hooks, who grew up in a poor southern community, agrees with Kolias, stating that ''when bourgeois white women active in the feminist movement sought role models who possess strength, confidence, assertiveness, and decision-making ability," they should "have chosen to pattern their behavior after that of the working-class women who possess these same qualities" (1984,

88).

Class:

Before I can identifY low-income women as agents ofknowledge and explore and examine their ways ofknowing, class as a socioeconomic and cultural concept must be

2 discussed. Unlike some other countries where class is visible by its association to royal families, prestigious schools, and private residential communities, class in the U.S. is obscured by the American image of an equal, democratic society. As such, class is an extremely fluid and slippery concept in the U.S. And it remains slippery for some working-class female intellectuals who avoid defining it. For example, Carolyn Leste

Law, a white working-class scholar and co-editor of the anthology on working-class female academics, This Fine Place, writes: "Neither Barney nor I is [sic] a sociologist, we have not attempted to define the admittedly troublesome term 'working-class academic"'

(1995, 8). Likewise, in Calling Home, Zandy explains how "[c]lass is masked, hidden behind a national mythology of rugged individualism by the institutionalized confusion of democracy and capitalism" (1990, 2). Yet she fails to unmask the issue of class by not defining it.

Michelle Tokarczyk and Elizabeth Fay, white working-class academics and editors of Working-Class Women in the Academy, also see how class is obscured by its association to an individual's income. They contend that "paychecks belie the blue-collar/ white-collar distinction, and even the difference between salaries versus hourly wages loses significance when skilled workers earn more than professionals" (1993, 4).

Acknowledging then how slippery and evasive class is, they try to characterize who and what is working class, arguing, "The working class often does work that is physically demanding, repetitive, or dangerous" (5). This definition, however, provides little clarity on what class is; it also fails to conceive class as part of a cultural and social power structure.

Cognizant of the fact that the failure to adequately explain and define class keeps it as a slippery and elusive term, I offer the following definition: class is a socioeconomic status and a relationship to the means of production; that is, class is determined by one's job and income, in addition to the social and cultural prestige and power one has in society that is based on education, career, family, neighborhood, among other social factors. In

3 Distinction (1984), sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to class as a formation of different capital: economic, social, cultural, and symbolic. Economic capital refers to economic capacity, such as salary and inherited wealth, that determines if one is able to pay for private elite schools and luxurious holidays. Social capital refers to social networking, such as the people with whom one interacts. Cultural capital refers to cultural tastes, for example, the type ofbooks one reads and the clothes one wears. And symbolic capital refers to cultural capital that has been legitimized as correct and upright and is therefore seen as prestigious and powerful. An example of symbolic capital is a BMW and summer weekend vacations at Martha's Vineyard. These acquisitions of capital are arbitrary, meaning that "when we are born, we enter inherited social space from which comes access to and acquisition of differential amounts of capital assets" (Skeggs 1997, 8-9). Therefore

one does not choose one's class; one is positioned into a class depending upon the economic, social, and cultural capital one has inherited and has acquired over the years.

Despite the fact that one is born into class and that it takes the "right" acquisition of capital to move out of it, Hollywood movies like Maid in Manhattan and Working Girl

continue to depict low-income women who, armed with beauty, grace, and determination, climb completely out of their working-class backgrounds, stepping over the middle class, and settling dreamily into an upper-class lifestyle. Yet this ''Horatio Alger" dream,

claiming that anyone disciplined and determined can climb the socioeconomic ladder two rungs at a time, ignores the fact that, according to economists Alan Krueger and David

Card in Myth and Measurement: The New Economy ofthe Minimum Wage (1995), upward economic and social mobility in the U.S. in the past two decades has become increasingly hard to achieve. On average, Krueger and Card argue that it takes five to six generations to change a family's economic, social, and cultural capital. Therefore, an individual born into a working-class family will most likely remain working-class.

The "Horatio Alger" myth distracts us from recognizing U.S. as a class-segregated society (hooks 2000, vii). Instead, American society is portrayed by the media as middle

4 class. It is easy then to ignore class as a real, tangible social issue. As a result, Zandy argues, "Class identity is easier to obscure and deny than gender and race identity. If you are born into working class and are willing to change your speech, your gestures, your

appearance ... then you might 'pass' as a member ofthe dominant class" (1990, 2). For example, I pass as middle class. Because I have an advanced degree, dress conservatively, and grew up on Long Island (which many non-New Yorkers equate solely with posh

South Hampton), many acquaintances and friends assume I come from a middle-class family. This passage into acquiring middle-class status, however, is not as simple as it appears. One needs money (or hefty loans as in my and many working-class female

intellectuals' case) to obtain the "right" education and to be exposed to the "right" cultural

and social events to acquire the "correct" cultural capital. Regardless of changing one's accent, getting a degree at a technical school or living on the '"wrong" side of the railroad tracks announces that one is not middle class. Writing about how the nouveau-riche New

Jersey couple Tony and Carmela from the HBO's series The Sopranos try to make this passage from working class to middle class, journalist Caryn James comments:

[U]pward mobility happens one rung at a time, and is fraught with problems and anxieties. The finest example is "The Sopranos," which has always been precise about its characters' social positions. Tony and Carmela have proudly sent their daughter, Meadow, to Columbia University, a huge yet plausible social step up . . . . In a painfully realistic scene this season, Meadow's parents come to dinner at the apartment she shares with college friends. It is instantly evident how badly Tony and Carmela fit in, with their gold chains and parochial attitudes.... During a literary discussion Carmela argues angrily, 'I'm sorry, but 'Billy Budd' is not a homosexual book!' and mistakenly thinks the critic Leslie Fiedler is a woman. (2003, 21)

Although Tony and Carmela have the economic means, albeit from illegal and violent business transactions, to securely live as upper middle-class, they completely lack cultural capital, and therefore can never tru]y "pass" as middle class.

Zandy acknowledges that even when one "passes," one "will never belong there"

(1990, 2). Tokarczyk and Fay agree with Zandy's statement, stating that although they

5 have acquired economic, social, and cultural capital, they will never belong as middle class. An advanced degree, a comfortable income, and a middle class residential community, they argue, do not erase their past. They write,

Some people believe that the met that women from the working class have achieved careers indicates that there is mobility in American society; and, hence, class is nonrestrictive. We maintain that there is a definitional problem with this, that people do not pass out of one class into another, although their tastes, expectations, and habits may change as class identity shifts. ( 5)

White working-class female intellectual Saundra Gardner concurs with Tokarczyk and Fay who insist on being identified by their working-class background, contending: "What we were keenly aware of, which many of our middle-class colleagues failed to understand, is that 'education and a good job don't turn a black person white and they don't negate a white working-class person's background'" (1993, 50). However, working-class

intellectuals do gain economic, social, and cultural capital from higher education and university teaching positions. They may feel guilty, insecure, or awkward in such prestigious positions like white working-class scholar Valerie Miner who writes, "Like many other college teachers from working-class homes, I am amazed when I look around and see myself teaching. Sometimes ... I feel like a fraud, fearful that someone will discover I don't belong in front ofthe classroom. I often find it easier to make friends with clerical workers or low-level administrative staff than with other faculty" ( 1993, 81 ).

Nonetheless, they still benefit from these acquisitions of capital.

Without denying her acquired cultural capital and privilege as a highly educated intellectual, hooks affirmed her connection to her black working-class community when she successfully obtained her doctoral degree. She writes, "I finished my education with my allegiance to the working class intact" (2000, 3 7). And despite the economic, social, and cultural capital Zandy, Tokarczyk, Fay, and Gardner have acquired, class consciousness is an integral part oftheir lives. They do not--some would even say, cannot--forget how they and their families struggled and resisted. Tokarczyk, for

6 example, says she can never forget how she had to drop out of graduate school and live

meagerly on a variety oftemporary jobs. She "lived in constant fear that I would lose the

food in my refrigerator during another power outage and would not be able to get

additional food stamps from social services" (314).

Zandy, Fay, Tokarczyk, Gardner, hooks, and many other working-class female

intellectuals claim their working-class identities to assert that indeed they are born into and

belong to a class, as they are born with a gender and race. This claim also signifies that

their ways of knowing are grounded in their working-class experiences, and that they

share a common experiential base of knowledge with other low-income women. And even

though I agree with Gardner that "rather than asking whether I am working class or

middle class, I have come to recognize that I am both" (55), I believe it is important to

claim my working-class identity to affirm and assert that the way I perceive the world is rooted in the daily struggles I encountered as a child and adolescent and the intimate

interaction I had with my blue-collar community. This is why, throughout my dissertation,

I refer to female intellectuals who come :from poor or working-class backgrounds as

low-income female intellectuals. The emphasis is not on their present economic status or

even cultural or social capital they have acquired, but on the economic and material reality they experienced as children, adolescents, and adults that has shaped the way they view

and process the world. Gender and Class:

Although poor and working-class men and women share many experiences in their

struggle against economic oppression and in their insistence on being dignified and respected beings in a classist society, that is, a society that denigrates the poor and working class as lazy and dumb, low-income women encounter unique challenges as females. These challenges are addressed in feminist scholar Diane Pearce's stellar essay,

"Welfare is Not for Women: Why the War on Poverty Cannot Conquer the Feminization ofPoverty." By coining the phrase "the feminization of poverty," Pearce uncovers the

7 reality that women do not experience poverty and economic disparities as men do.

Because women are socialized and expected to be nurturers, the responsibility of family

falls upon their shoulders, while as poor and working-class women, they are expected to

work outside the home for income to economically maintain the family. The situation is much more dire for single low-income women with children who have little or no help

from the children's fathers; single poor mothers solely shoulder the economic and

emotional burden of raising a family on their own.

Low-income women with no children are also expected to assume the dual role of

nurturer and wage earner. Because women are socialized to be nurturers, and are verbally

reprimanded as selfish for not fulfilling what is perceived as a natural mandate to care and

nurture, women with no children still find themselves as the primary caretakers of aging

parents, sick relatives, and, in some cases, a sibling's or cousin's family. And because

child care can be costly and geographically too far without reliable transportation,

low-income women as sisters, aunts, and cousins are expected to step in and help. In an

interview with journalist Lisa Dodson in her acclaimed book Don't Call Us Out ofName,

Vanessa, a twenty-four-year-old African-American woman, contends:

If you are taught to put everybody before yourself, how do you ever get out [of poverty]? How do you achieve something? And look at where it gets you. I always think of Clarence Thomas and his sister [Emma Mae Martin] . . . . Look where he got to, and she stays home with sick relatives and kids ... and she's just another black woman living on the dole. (1998, 43)

Rosemary Bray, who attended Yale around the same time Clarence Thomas was enrolled,

is also acutely aware that because she grew up as a poor working-class black female, she

could have ended up in the same situation as Thomas's sister, Emma Mae Martin. She

writes that ''the truth was she had abandoned her job to care for their ailing aunt .... [H]e

might just as well have held himself to account for his sister's 'dependency.' After all,

where was he when she was becoming a welfare queen?" (1998, 263).

8 The feminization of poverty also reveals that women are still not recognized by the

business and government sectors as the primary breadwinners, even though most poor and working-class women are the sole providers for their families. Feminist scholars Gertrude

Schaffuer Goldberg and Eleanor Kremin argue that the "social welfare system in the

United States actually contributes to the feminization of poverty because it reinforces a traditional family ideology in which men are viewed as breadwinners and women as

economically dependent" (1990, 4-5). This patriarchal structure is reinforced by President

George W. Bush's marriage initiative that counsels women on welfare to marry. Believing that marriage, instead of good paying jobs and economically feasible and available child

care, gets women out of poverty, Bush has promised to allocate $300 million to the

program, while promising no extra funding for childcare and no increase in minimum wage.

Many low-income women must shoulder the financial responsibility of raising a

family on their own. With limited education and work skills, they are ghettoized into pink-collar jobs, such as nurse's aides, secretaries, and waitresses, that pay poorly and

offer no benefits. Since the late 1970s, the workforce has become even more limited for low-income women as the U.S. economy has shifted from an industrial market to a post-industrial one. As decent-paying factory jobs go south to Mexico and overseas to

Asia, poor and working-class women are now competing over low-skilled, low-waged

service sector jobs.

Sexuality a:ud Class:

White working-class feminist scholar Beverly Skeggs notes that the body demarcates the middle class from the working class. She writes,

The body and bodily dispositions carry the markers of social class.... [T]he body is the most indisputable materialization of class tastes. Bodies are the physical sites where the relations of class, gender, race, sexuality and age come together and are em-bodied and practised. A respectable body is white, desexualized,

9 hetero-feminine and usually middle class. Class is always coded through bodily dispositions: the body is the most ubiquitous signifier of class. (1997, 82)

Respectability and femininity, then, are the defining factors that distinguish a middle-class woman from a working-class one. That is, a middle-class woman is perceived as a non-sexual being who may be a colleague, a neighbor, or a mother or wife but never a sexually enticing woman for whom someone else's father, brother, or son lusts. She is never taken as a sexually autonomous being. Instead, she is believed to uphold and honor the cult of domesticity that demands and emphasizes that wholeness and purity of the female character fulfilling her maternal/daughterly duties. In contrast to the ideal middle-class woman is the working-class woman who represents the wanton, dangerous female about whom mothers warn their daughters. She is portrayed by the media as the

"bad girl" with whom boys play with but never marry, and the girl with no future who gets pregnant out of wedlock and spends her life on and off welfare. She is reduced to her body which is hypersexualized and blamed for distracting and corrupting men. Feminist scholar Laura Kipnis notes, "Bodies that ... defY bourgeois sensibilities by being too uncontained and indecorous--these bodies seem to pose multiple threats to social and psychic orders ..." (1997, 114). And the threat this "out-of-control, unmannerly body"

(115) poses is to disrupt the cult of domesticity by decentering the desexualized maternal and wifely one.

Rei:t)ring the value and importance of respectability and femininity, the media manipulated the images of Olympic skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding into this dichotomy of"good middle-class girl" versus "bad working-class girl." Articles in People

Weekly, Time, Maclean's, among numerous other magazines, portrayed Kerrigan as the pretty, wholesome middle-class woman who was victimized by Harding, who was described as a loud, tacky, and low-cultured working-class female. Commenting on the media coverage of Kerrigan and Harding, media scholar Susan Douglas notes,

Kerrigan, the daughter of a welder who had to work severaljobs to support her skating, had her class background either effaced or elevated, as when Newsweek

10 described her as 'the twenty-four-year-old beauty from a middle-class Boston suburb.' Kerrigan has been encased in a hyper-feminized, goody-two-shoes image while Harding, the white-trash pool player from a trailer park, has been cast as something between a female impersonator and a slut. (1994, 2)

Moreover, Douglas notes how Newsweek viewed Harding's body as unfeminine and

unattractive, referring to her corporeal shape as short, muscular, and stocky and her

skating outfits as tacky and cheap. In contrast, Kerrigan, who was upheld as the

mythologized white middle-class feminine beauty, was always presented as tall, lean, and

elegantly dressed in sophisticated and tasteful outfits.

It is true that no woman, whether she is a Nancy Kerrigan or a Tanya Harding, can

fully obtain ideal femininity. Skeggs writes, "The demands of femininity are such that

ideal femininity requires a radical bodily transformation at which virtually every woman is

bound to fail, adding shame to her deficiency" (82). Yet, in a classist and racist society, it

is the lower-class (and dark-skinned) body that is positioned outside of femininity and

respectability to emphasize the purity of whiteness and of a cleansed, desexualized body.

And lacking the money to adorn and beautifY their bodies with middle-class luxuries,

low-income women are reminded of their failure to uphold middle-class aesthetics. For

example, white feminist writer Dorothy Allison in her semi-autobiographical novel

Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and African-American feminist scholar Rosemary Bray in

her memoir Unafraid of the Dark (1998) note how they could not fully identifY with the

pretty, feminine, white female protagonist Scarlet O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. As a poor white trash girl, Allison's character Bone understands that she could never be

Scarlet. Watching her mother who just returned from her job as a waitress, "with her hair

darkened from sweat and her uniform stained" (206), she realized that she is Scarlet's

slave Emma Slattery. "That's who I'd be, that's who we were. I was part ofthe trash down in the mud-stained cabin, fighting with the darkies and stealing ungratefully from

our betters, stupid, coarse, born to shame and death" (206). And Bray, who although admires Scarlet for her resourcefulness when she loses her wealth, realizes that she can be

11 no Scarlet O'Hara; as a working-class black woman, she could never obtain white middle-class femininity. She writes how angered and annoyed she was by Scarlet's white privilege, upper-class arrogance, and southern-belle femininity.

Working-class Chicana scholar Aida Hurtado (1996a,b) also notes how ideal femininity keeps women passive and helpless to male authority and male violence. Many poor and working-class women, in particular, are exposed to male violence on the streets and in their communities. Constrained by the lack of money, low-income women are placed in the most vulnerable conditions. They most likely live in unsafe neighborhoods where rent is low. And they most likely rely on a public transportation system in which they might have to wait for the bus or subway alone at night and/or in dangerous areas. In many cases, they do not rely on male protection but on their own competence, strength, and boldness to keep them safe, or at least minimally so, from their precarious living conditions. For example, working-class Jewish writer Marge Piercy (2002) joined an all-female gang when she was an adolescent. Her gang sisters protected each other. Their loud, "in-your-face," and sexually bold behavior asserted their self-declared power over abusive or failed male authority in their homes and on the streets. And a white working-class woman, Lee, in an interview with feminist scholar Fran Buss, commented on how she learned at an early age to stay alive by being bold and assertive, thus rejecting modesty and femininity. Recalling the time as an adolescent when her male date tried to rape her, Lee mentioned how she "warned him that I was going to bite him, and he didn't let me go so I bit him" (1985, 175). She bit so hard he had to get stitches.

Other working-class women reject femininity and respectability for what they perceive as sexual power. They identjj)r their bodies and sexuality as a site of power and resistance. Allison announces that she will no longer write about "tender, soft, biscuit sex" (1994, 88) to avoid displeasing or upsetting her middle-class audience. And Jewish lesbian writer Joan Nestle (1987), who always felt that she and her working-class lesbian friends were "not good enough" for white middle-class feminists and were labeled as

12 sexual deviants, asserts and takes pride in her outlawed sexuality by openly admitting that she likes to have intercourse with a dildo. And hip-hop singers TLC boldly assert their sexual needs when they demand that they want their men to "kiss both set oflips" (qtd. in

Rose 1994, 173). Race and Class:

Class is also mediated by race and therefore can never be a racially neutral economic issue. In The Social Construction of Whiteness, white feminist scholar Ruth

Frankenberg writes: "Whiteness refers to a set oflocations that are historically, socially, politically, and culturally produced and, moreover, are intrinsically linked to unfolding relations of domination. Naming 'whiteness' displaces it from the unmarked, unnamed status that is itself an effect of its dominance" (1993, 6). Therefore by naming my whiteness, I am able to expose how whiteness is automatically taken as the norm and anything nonwhite is seen as abnormal. Further, I am able to see that a white Western self is a racial being: thus as a white working-class woman, not only do I have a racial identity;

I am assigned a place in the relations of racism (Frankenberg 1993).

And confronting my whiteness, I see how racism is very real and alive in low-income white communities. At family gatherings I heard racist comments, particularly from my uncle and aunt commenting on how blacks and Hispanics were destroying their lily-white blue-collar town. I also remember how an elderly working-class

Italian-American man who lived across the street from me would complain endlessly about the hip-hop music blasting from my African-American neighbor's boom-box, and shout,

"This is not Africa." I always wondered if it were I who was blasting my heavy metal music what he would say. "Go back to EuropeT' But why would he? The music did not offend him as much as the fact that he had black neighbors.

In ''Bloody Footprints," Roxanne Dunbar (1997) writes about her poor white community's racism. Her father, for example, supported the 1968 segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace. His blatant racism mirrored what many people felt

13 in her community. 1 Their racism deeply hurt and angered Dunbar. On the night that

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, she wrote a poem denouncing her people, stating: "I can only wish to see your surly redneck contemptible smile I Turn to terror when you find yourself surrounded by Panthers I Or shot down by a woman too good to even spit on you after" (78). This is a disturbing and angry poem. Pained by the reality that a loving and important civil rights leader was killed by white hatred, she could only see her family as oppressors. Yet later on in her life Dunbar acknowledges that as much as her family and community are oppressors, they have also been oppressed. For example, she recalls as a child how her family was called "Okies," a derogatory name for poor white trash who migrated to the West from the dust bowl storms of Oklahoma during the depression. And when she married a sophisticated upper-class white man, she saw the contempt he and his family had for her people. Her community was portrayed as laughing caricatures, as poorly educated, ill-dressed, and foul-mouthed idiots. She eventually left her husband, unable to tolerate his classist contempt for her people: "I went my own way, away from him, and threw myself into the struggles of my generation, determined never to forsake my class again" (85).

1Calling herself"white trash" and explains that she grew up in a poor "cracker" community in Central Florida, Constance Penley recounts how her family and poor neighbors asserted their white pride, saying that they may be poor and dirty, but at least they were not black. She writes, "If you are white trash, then you must engage in the never-ending labor of distinguishing yourself, of codifYing your behavior so as to clearly signifY a difference from blackness that will, in spite of everything, express some minuscule, if pathetic, measure of your culture's superiority" (1997, 90). This racist attitude not only demonstrates how the feeling of desperation and lack of control misdirects anger towards the most wlnerable; it also illustrates how people negotiate and assert privileges in exchange for power: that is, a poor white woman knows she lacks class power, so she asserts her white privilege to compensate for her sense of powerlessness. This struggle over economic and social privileges among the powerless supports and reifies a hierarchical power structure based on white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. This struggle among the poor over power, however, does not mean that the less economically secure a person is, the more likely she is to be a racist. In Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement, sociologist Kathleen M. Blee (2002) examines women in white supremacist groups noting that, contrary to popular belief, many of the female members were not poor and working-class, but comfortably middle-class women. Her study reminds us that the privileged fight just as hard, perhaps even more ruthlessly, to maintain exclusive power.

14 Straddling the interstices of class and race, I understand how my perceptions of class have been impacted by my whiteness. What this means is that I have experienced economic deprivation as a white person in a society that overall conceals the poverty and

struggling working-class conditions among whites. Although there are more white women than black women on welfare, media bombard us with negative and racist images of poor women of color, particularly black women. White working-class feminist Mary

Childers states, "Another part of that media representation of all black women as poor and uneducated is that the number of poor and uneducated white women in this country is often not acknowledged--to the detriment of both groups and of our collective sense of reality" (1990, 61).

In the introduction to the anthology White Trash, white working-class writers

Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray (1997) comment on how "whiteness" is associated with middle class. They strategically use the expression "white trash" to describe their poor working-class upbringing to highlight that there are impoverished whites in United States.

Further, they point out that the juxtaposition of the words "white" and "trash" dispels the myth that only people of color are economically disadvantaged. They write,

Because the U.S. has an extremely impoverished political language of class, certain racial representations are used as allegories for it. An example would be the standard stereotyping ofblacks and Latinos as poor, while whites and many Asian-Americans are viewed as middle-class. White trash becomes a term which names what seems unnameable: a race (white) which is used to code 'wealth' is coupled with an insult (trash), in this instance, economic waste. (8)

"White trash," then, is a jolting reminder that economic hardship cuts across race lines.

And as a jolting reminder, the expression ''white trash" exposes that "[t]he hidden face of poverty in the United States is the untold stories of millions of poor white people" (hooks

2000, 117).

Yet several working-class African-American feminist scholars (bell hooks 2000,

1991, 1984; Patricia Hill Collins 1998, 1991; Linda Carty 1992; Audre Lorde 1984;

15 Beverly John 1998) point out that blacks are still falsely seen as a monolithic and

impoverished people. hooks contends that white Americans "really believe all black

people are poor no matter how many times they laugh at Bill Cosby, salute Collin Powell,

mimic Will Smith, dance to Brandy and Whitney Houston, or cheer on Michael Jordan"

(2000, 3). Race, unfortunately, obscures class. Although it is true that an upper-class

black woman seen walking in her rich exclusive community by an outsider would most

likely be taken as some white women's cleaning lady, class is still a salient issue in the

black community. Lorde, for example, argues that ignoring class differences by middle­

and upper-class African Americans robs poor and working-class black women of their

energy. By not acknowledging the daily hardships that poor single black mothers living in

East Harlem face trying to feed and clothe their children, middle- and upper-class

African-American women alienate their impoverished sisters, increasing and intensifYing

poor and working-class black women's sense of powerlessness and isolation. Likewise,

hooks comments that as a working-class black intellectual who now "makes a good salary,

who bas no kids, no concrete unchosen responsibilities to anybody other than myself,

primarily in a certain material sense" she should not pretend that her social circumstances are the same as her mother who never completed high school "even though we both have

been victimized by men [and white racism]" (1991, 83).

Other non-white women are also assumed to be from poor and working-class

backgrounds. Gloria Anzaldua (1987, 1981a,b), a Chicana writer who grew up in a poor migrant community in southern Texas, notes how Hispanics who speak English with an accent are seen as uneducated and ill-cultured. They are perceived to be low-class because their accent is taken to mean that they have not been fully assimilated into white culture. Hence, an Anglo-Saxon identity is associated with middle-class cultural and social status. Poet Judith Oritz Cofer (1995), a Puertorican-American woman who grew up in a working-class community, is also reminded of this static and negative portrayal of

Latina women when she arrives early at a restaurant in Miami to give a reading ofher

16 poetry. When a white woman asks her for a beverage, assuming she is the waitress, Cofer

knows that despite the notes in her hand and her professional outfit, Latina women are

automatically taken as low-skilled workers. Equally, Native American writer Louise

Erdrich argues that American Indians are conflated as one homogenous "tribe" living on

Indian reservations that are plagued by alcohoL gambling, and poverty (Louise 1994). Intersectionality ofRace, Class, Sexuality, and Gender:

Low-income women have multiple identities that cannot and should not be

overlooked or minimized to squeeze them into a homogenous group identity. In 1974,

Rita Mae Brown, an active member of the Furies, a working-class lesbian

consciousness-raising group, tried to open up the discussion on feminism by including a

class and race analysis. However, Brown believed that differences ultimately needed to be

erased in order to build a group identity, stating: "The fact is that there are class/race

differences between lesbians and those differences have to be wiped out because they keep

us apart and keep us at each others' throats" (23). Yet erasing differences means that an

individual is expected to compartmentalize her life into neat categories; it is too

methodical, as if saying my identities as a woman, a white person, and a working-class

individual are all separate subgroups. This assumes that, say, at a NOW meeting I am only

a woman, at a global justice function I am only working-class, and at a Rainbow coalition

event I am only white. My class, race, gender, sexuality, and other social bases, such as

age, region, and, (dis)ability, mutually construct each other. That is, my working-class experience is very much shaped by my gender and race. Beverly Smith, a working-class black feminist intellectual, articulates this complexity, noting: "I think for purposes of analysis what we try to do is to break things down and try to separate and compare but in reality, the way women live their lives, those separation just don't work. Women don't live their lives like, 'Well this part is race, and this is class, and this part has to do with women's identities,' so it's confusing" (1981, 116).

17 The intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality cannot be described by the "add-and-stir" approach: one is working-class and female, or working-class and Asian, or working-class and homosexual. Black feminist scholars Beverly John (1997) and

Deborah King ( 1988) argue that the multiplicity and complexity of identities cannot be perceived as an arithmetic problem (race+class+gender+sexuality); rather, they contend that it is more like multiplication (racexclassxgenderxsexuality). King states, "The modifier 'multiple' refers not only to several, simultaneous oppressions but to the multiplicative relationships among them as well" ( 4 7). 2 As a result of these multiple identities, John refers to herself and other black female intellectuals as "Queens of Multiple

Juxtapositions"; they are an amalgam of identities whose lives, John contends, "become a model for the study of human experience" ( 61).

Acknowledging the multiplicity of identities does not mean, however, that race, class, gender, and sexuality have equal weight. Working-class black feminist scholar

Patricia Hill Collins warns that "treating race, class, and gender as if their intersection produces equivalent results for all oppressed groups obscures differences in how race, class, and gender are hierarchically organized ..." (1998, 211). There are times when race is more salient than class. And the fact that race is much more visible and that one cannot hide one's race makes it more pressing at times. hooks writes that "we ought to be willing to allow for the possibility that at different moments in one's life, one issue has

2For example, the issue of sexuality and sexual identity exacerbates the economic oppression that Leslie Feinberg's character Jess in Stone Butch Blues (1993) encounters as a working-class butch living during the pre-Stonewall era in the blue-collar city of Buffalo. The police raids on lesbian/gay bars, the disdain of butch/femme relationships by both feminist and lesbian circles, and the lack ofjob opportunities as an "outed" butch dressed in men's clothes, strip Jess of all forms of security. Feminist writer Cat Moses notes, "Almost every episode in Stone Butch Blues in which a tormented butch questions her gender identity is preceded by an episode of workplace violence or humiliation, a police raid on a bar, or a violent street bashing in a working-class neighborhood. Gender dysphoria in this novel, then, is more a result of the constraints of class than it is of gender binaries or individuals' feelings that they are in the 'wrong' body" (1999, 85). Thus, Moses concludes that Feinberg shows us "that the gendered body may productively be seen as a site of oppression and resistance only when the inseparability of class, gender, and sexuality issues is acknowledged" (91).

18 primacy over another" ( 1994, 171 ). And King argues, "The importance of any factor in

explaining black women's circumstances thus varies depending on the particular aspect of

our lives under consideration and the reference groups to whom we are compared. In

some cases, race may be the more significant predictor of black women's status; in others,

gender or class may be more influential" (1995, 297-98).

Writer Cherrie Moraga argues that sexuality plays a salient and significant role in

her life as a working-class Chicana lesbian. In particular, she notes that her understanding

of the challenges her mother encountered as a poor Mexican-American woman with

limited formal education is grounded in her own lesbianism; that is, being a lesbian in a

homophobic society made her aware of other forms of oppression, in particularly classism.

She writes, "My lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the most about

silence and oppression, and it continues to be the most tactile reminder to me that we are not free human beings" (2000, 44). If she ignored the significance of her sexuality,

Moraga believes she would not have fully understood the economic oppression her mother

and other poor women have encountered. Further, by disclaiming her sexual identity,

Moraga would be in a state of self-denial, thus unable to sincerely and openly connect to

her mother and to other poor and working-class women.

Moraga insists on being whole and free to explore her multiple identities. She

resists severing and compartmentalizing herself Allison also refuses to break down her

life into separate neat categories, stating: "Trying always to know what I am doing and why, choosing to be known as who I am--feminist, queer, working class, and proud of the work I do--is as tricky as it ever was" (1994, 250). Rosario Morales contends that she must resist self-fragmentation to claim her humanness. She writes, "I want to be whole. I want to claim my self to be puertorican, and U.S. american, working class and middle class, housewife and intellectual, feminist, marxist, and anti-imperialist" (1981. 91).

Likewise, Linda Hogan, a Native American who grew up under difficult economic conditions, notes, "For myself, being one of those people who survived, my tribal identity

19 has always been chasing after me, to keep its claims on my body and heart. I can't escape and be whole and real" (2001, 27). It is only by claiming the complexity oftheir multiple selves to achieve wholeness that they can resist oppression and struggle for dignity and self-determination. Lorde articulates this need to be whole, saying: ''My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition"

(1984, 120-21).

Heterogeneous Group Identity:

Acknowledging an individual's multiple identities does not mean that group

affinities cannot exist. Collins insists that we must be careful not to reify the ideology of liberalism that upholds an individual over a group when recognizing the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Intersectionality of social identities, she emphasizes, does not support and strengthen individualism. She writes,

The fluidity that accompanies intersectionality does not mean that groups themselves disappear, to be replaced by an accumulation of decontextualized, unique individuals whose personal complexity makes group-based identities and politics that emerge from group constructions impossible. Instead, the fluidity of boundaries operates as a new level that potentially deepens understanding of how the actual mechanisms of institutional power can change dramatically even while they reproduce long-standing group inequalities of race, class, and gender. (1998, 205-6)

Instead, she argues that "intersectionality provides an interpretive framework" (208) to recognize and understand how all groups are never homogenous and static. There are differences and diversity within groups that are still held together as a collective identity and consciousness grounded in common interests and social relations. "Groups," then, as

social scientist Iris Marion Young contends, "are real not as substances, but as forms of social relations" (1990, 44). That is, low-income women share a group affinity as victims of economic oppression and as impoverished women in a male-dominated society.

20 Identifying low-income women as a group does not mean that race, sexuality, age,

(dis)ability, and other social bases are subsumed by class. These women are not unidimensional, static beings; rather, their self is "multiple, cross-cutting, fluid, and shifting" (Young 48). What this means is that poor black women are not identical to poor white women; nor for that matter are all poor black women encountering the same struggles. As an African-American working-class lesbian, Beverly Smith fuces certain struggles that a poor heterosexual black woman may not encounter. Yet, this does not mean that it is impossible for any of these low-income women of different race, ethnicity, and sexual preference to share a common knowledge rooted in economic oppression. For example, Smith contends that class is a daily reality with which the poor must always deal:

When I think of poverty, I think of constant physical and material oppression. You know, you aren't poor one day and well-to-do the next day. If you're poor it's a constant thing, everyday, everyday. In some ways it's more constant than race because, say you're middle class and you're a Black person who is of course subject to racism, you don't necessarily experience it every single day in the same intensity, or to the same degree. Whereas, poverty is just something you experience constantly. (1981, 115)

Meanwhile hooks found that she had more in common with poor and working-class white

students at the privileged and elite universities she attended. She writes,

When I felt the segregated worlds of my poor and working-class home environments to attend privileged-class schools, I found I often had more in common with white students who shared a similar class background than with privileged class black students who had no experience ofwhat it might mean to lack the funds to anything they wanted to do. No matter our color, students from poor and working-class backgrounds had common experiences history had not taught us to sufficiently name or theoretically articulate. (2000, 119)

Smith and hooks are not dismissing or minimizing race. White racism is a serious, exhausting, and painful reality. Yet, Smith's and hooks' affinity with other low-income women (and men) underlines that indeed poor and working-class women comprise a

(heterogeneous) group and that experiential bases of knowledge are generated from this particular group that have, as hooks points out, remained unnamed.

21 And one of these common historical experiences that characterizes low-income women as a group is the American disdain for the economically dependent. Since the rise of industrial capitalism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the U.S., the impoverished are no longer considered to be an integral part of society. They are perceived and treated as a financial and moral liability on the community. Sociologist

Robert Bellah and his colleagues point out that this new individualism, denouncing dependency, "works out in class terms: the rich are independent adults and the poor are dependent children, and both have only themselves to thank or blame" (1996, xi). It is true, however, that not all dependents have historically been treated the same. Feminist historian Mimi Abramovitz (1996) argues that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries widows, the elderly, and deserted wives were considered the "deserving" poor, while single women, so-called morally loose women, and recalcitrant, rebellious women were seen as the "undeserving" poor. Yet poor white women were always more deserving than poor women of color. During the depression, poor blacks got whatever was left after food and clothes were rationed off by federal and state charity programs to

indigent white families.

Implementing intersectionality as an interpretive framework, we see that low-income women's group affinity is rooted in the historical and social experience that

dependency in U.S. implies "a sufficient warrant to suspend basic rights to privacy, respect, and individual choice" (Young 54). Although these women have not historically

experienced the punitive affect of being dependent in the same way, they all still have encountered a hostile society that looks down upon the poor and sees dependency as a moral weakness and failure. An indigent widowed mother in the early twentieth century, for example, was held in a higher regard than a poor unmarried mother, yet both were still

seen as morally suspicious characters as single women without a male partner and without a middle-class community and education. Moreover, their parenting was closely monitored and critically judged; they were often accused of raising unstable and

22 dysfunctional children who would grow up to become a burden to society (Abramovitz

1996).

Today, there still exists a differentiation between deserving and undeserving dependents, but I would argue that it is positioned more upon physical ability than marital status and race. Under the 1996 Welfare Reform, a physically disabled mother is excused from mandatory training programs and from entering the workforce; however, a physically able mother, regardless of her circumstances, is expected to work and become financially independent within a short period oftime. Yet, despite being labeled deserving or undeserving, the current sociopolitical environment has become increasingly hostile towards all poor women heedless of race, ethnicity, age, and (dis)ability; they are blamed for their own economic deprivation. Discerning Low-Income Women's Standpoint:

My research on uncovering and analyzing low-income women's standpoint includes poor and working-class women of all races, ethnicities, and sexual preferences. I intentionally keep my scope broad enough to look at all American low-income women as generators of knowledge. I am aware of the criticism that claims that my analysis may be too broad, and by grouping all low-income women together I am in danger of presenting them as a homogenous, static group, dismissing or minimizing race and ethnicity. I must emphasize, however, that it is not my intention to do a comparative analysis of racial and ethnic differences among low-income women. I am not interested in how low-income black women generate knowledge differently from, say, working-class Chicana women or white women. White feminist scholar and teacher Wendy Luttrell (1997, 1993a,b, 1988) has done extensive research on this, examining the similarities and differences on how her

African-American and white female adult students construct knowledge.

My focus differs from that ofLuttrell's. First, my scope of interest is not within an educational or formal setting, but outside of it, locating alternative sites ofknowledge, such as in the kitchen, on the streets, and at work. Second, my emphasis is not on the

23 differences among low-income American women, but on their commonality. While acknowledging how multiple identities are intricately woven and that differences indeed exist, I focus specifically on how low-income women generate knowledge out of their experience of and resistance to economic oppression. I believe, as feminist scholar

Catherine Hundleby contends, that there is potential knowledge in the experience of oppression (1997, 28). I tum to Collins's Black Feminist Thought (1991) as a model in

guiding me to discern and analyze low-income women's standpoint.

Collins's stellar and groundbreaking work has demonstrated that important knowledge is created at the periphery of elite white male institutions. By placing

African-American women at the center of analysis and going to the multiple sites where

black women express themselves in blues, poetry, novels, art, narratives, and scholarship,

Collins has synthesized black women's ways of knowing. And these alternative ways of knowing, Collins contends, "[are] a vital part ofthe social relations of domination and resistance (1991, 221). That is, "[b]y portraying African-American women as self-defined,

self-reliant individuals confronting race, gender, and class oppression, Afrocentric feminist thought speaks to the importance that knowledge plays in the empowering oppressed people" (221).

Moreover, by placing black women at the center of analysis, Collins provides an

"epistemological framework that acknowledges the significance of Black women's

everyday vitality, vision, and voice" (King 1992, 512). And this "everyday vitality, vision, and voice" sheds light on how these alternative sites of knowledge possess a special view on and insight into the relations of domination and power that fosters a "paradigmatic shift in how we think about oppression" (Collins 1991, 222). Therefore, borrowing from and building upon Collins's Black Feminist Thought, I place low-income American women at the center of analysis as agents of knowledge. I believe that economic oppression shapes the way they as women think, perceive, and relate to the world around them In chapter

24 one, I will explain further how they generate knowledge and the type of knowledge they construct. Creating a Low-Income Women's Standpoint Theory:

My dissertation focuses on low-income female intellectuals who "forge these individual, unarticulated, yet potentially powerful expressions of everyday consciousness

[among poor and working-class women] into an articulated, self-defined, collective standpoint ..." (Collins 1991, 26). As intellectuals, they make the connection between individual experiences and group consciousness. That is, from the knowledge they distill from low-income women's experiences, they uncover a standpoint that articulates a particular viewpoint and way of knowing on domination and power. However, low-income female intellectuals do more than just uncover a standpoint; they create a

standpoint theory that analyzes poor and working-class women's ways ofknowing.

Hence, throughout my dissertation, I make a distinction between standpoint and standpoint theory. Standpoint refers to group or collective consciousness; standpoint theory refers to an analysis of standpoint or group consciousness, examining how it plays out in society at large.

Feminist scholar Nancy Hartsock defines standpoint theory as "technical theoretical devices that can allow for the creation of accounts of society that can be used to work for more satisfactory social relations" (1997, 370; emphasis mine). Likewise,

Collins states that ''[m]y reading of standpoint theory sees it as an interpretive framework to explicating how knowledge remains central to maintaining and changing unjust systems of power" (1997, 375; emphasis mine). As a low-income female intellectual, I am not only uncovering poor and working-class women's standpoint by examining the individual perspectives and points of view of economically disadvantaged women to name a group consciousness; I am also creating a theory--a technical theoretical device, an interpretive

25 framework--that underscores the messiness of contradictions and the murkiness of

ambiguity3 in low-income women's everyday, concrete worlds. And it is within this material world of contradictions and ambiguity that they resist oppression and generate

knowledge. This is my distinctive contribution to low-income women's standpoint theory.

I will explore this in detail in chapter one. Methodology:

Working-class Native American writer Anita (Max) Valerio remarks that she must never forget her past, her people, her struggles: "I cannot forget and I don't want to. It's

in my blood, my face I my mother's voice I it's in my voice of my speech rhythms/ my

dreams and memories I .. . I it must even be the way I sweat!" (1981, 42). It is through the power oftelling, of recognizing and honoring their ways ofknowing in what Zandy

calls "theoretical narratives" (1995, 6)--poetry, narratives, memoirs, stories, and lyrics-- that low-income female intellectuals, like Valerio, uncover and articulate a particular way of thinking and being. Sociologist Dorothy Smith argues, "Such tacit knowing, of course, becomes a knowledge only at that point when it is entered into the language game of experience, that is, in the course of telling. For the most part, it remains the secret underpinning of everything we do" (1997, 395). But it is not only the telling that is so significant; it is how poor and working-class women tell that reveals their knowledge.

Through their stories, narratives, and dialogues, poor and working-class women use the organic substances oftheir lives--scraps of memory, cloths of events, patches of emotions, and patterns of everyday doing--to weave a quilt of knowledge.

They piece and mend the ordinary and disregarded in their lives into something new that reveals their special knowing. Every fabric square of their lives has significance like a ragged piece of shirt they made with love or an intricate stitch pattern they learned

3In conversation with Dr. Lynn Appleton on 17 June 2003, she referred to this complex position as "messiness of contradictions and murkiness of ambiguity." I use her expression throughout my dissertation.

26 from their grandmothers. Their telling is the written and spoken metaphors of these fabric

squares, woven and pieced together into quilts that low-income women have traditionally

made throughout the centuries to protect their families from the cold, as well as to pass

down their families' histories and knowledge. In "My Mother Pieces Quilts," Teresa

Paloma Acosta, a working-class Chicana poet, sees the special knowing in these fabric

squares, writing: "they were just meant as covers I ... I but it was just that every morning

I awoke to these I October ripened canvasses I passed my hand across their cloth faces I

and began to wonder how you pieced I all these together" (1976, 38). Moreover, hooks

honors the knowledge captured in quilts, stating: "We reclaim their history, call their

names, state their particulars, to gather and remember, to share our inheritance" (1990,

121-22).

Quilts are also made out of the determination and hope oflow-income women who

piece and mend old scraps into new, revived material. Piercy argues that quilts do not

belong in sterile environments, such as museums, that separate women from their quilts.

Observing quilts merely as an object of beauty removes the quilts from the everyday

existence and knowledge of poor and working-class women who created them. In her

poem, "Looking at Quilts," Piercy writes:

Who decided what is useful in its beauty means less than what has no function besides beauty ...? Art without frames: it held parched com, it covered the table where soup misted savor, it covered the bed where the body knit to self and other and the dark wool of dreams . . . . together, alone, she seized her time and made new. (1982, 170-71)

Quilts are more than artifacts; they are cloths pieced together to warm bodies, to cover naked tables, and to share family stories. They have everyday use for the everyday world.

Working-class black writer Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use"

(1994a/1973), like Piercy's poem, highlights how low-income women's knowledge is the

27 fabric stitched and pieced together into quilts for use in the everyday world as blankets, drapes, coats, and furniture coverings. In "Everyday Use," Dee, a young college-educated and world-traveled African-American woman, returns home with her boyfriend. Once embarrassed by the "backwardness" of her mother and sister Maggie,

Dee now takes pride in their poor rural world. Radicalized by black power, Dee, who insists on being called by an African name Wangero, reevaluates all that she has despised and dismissed before (the broken-down house, the old furniture, and the family's quilts), and decides she wants the quilts to keep as an artifact. When her mother tells her that

Maggie will get them, she protests, saying that her sister does not realize how valuable these quilts are as artifacts: "She's probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use" (33). That is exactly what they are made for, the mother insists: "God knows I been saving 'em for long enough with nobody using 'em. I hope she will!" These quilts are a rich legacy of survival and resistance. They ''were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty or more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell's Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece ... was from Great Grandpa Ezra's uniform that he wore in the

Civil War" (32). These quilts made out of dresses and shirts and uniforms offamily members were patched and woven together for the everyday world to comfort, clothe, and protect. Grandma Dee does not want Dee to have them because she fails to recognize and appreciate how these scraps and patches of material have immediate meaning and usage in the everyday world; instead, she gives the quilts to Maggie who will use them to keep her warm and content as she wraps them around her at night.

I draw attention to the significance of quilts because not only are they an alternative form in which low-income women have traditionally explored and expressed their knowledge, but they also provide a theoretical framework through which I read poor and working-class women's poems, memoirs, stories, lyrics, and narratives. The intertextual analysis I am doing throughout my dissertation is based on the assertion that low-income women's writings represent a collective quilt, in which each woman

28 contributes her individual fabric square (text) that is pieced together with other fabric squares by working-class female intellectuals into a body ofknowledge (standpoint). Each fabric square not only speaks to each other but shares important stories about its family and friends, like Grandma Dee's dresses. As a working-class intellectual, I also add and share my fabric square to the body of knowledge. Thus, contributing to and uncovering a standpoint from this collective quilt, I agree with Zandy (1990) who claims that we must read low-income women's writings from inside out. Reading from inside out means that each square fabric (text) can never be separated from the woman who has pieced and mended (written or spoken about) the ordinary and disregarded from her life into a body

(standpoint) of sustenance and resistance. Zandy writes, "Despite its diversity and

unconventional literary forms, working-class literature is not a mass of dangling parts but a collective body part. To see these connections, one has to look from the inside out, that is, through the impulses and intentions of the literature itself' (9-10). Indeed, I am making these connections as I discern and analyze low-income women's standpoint from their writings. Methodology on the Positionality ofLow-lncome Women:

Except for its use of the work of middle-class male and female journalists and

scholars who write about the concerns of poor and working-class women and women in general, my dissertation is exclusively informed by and consists solely of the words and insights oflow-income American women. I intentionally keep my focus on low-income women themselves to hear what they have to say about their own lives in their own words.

All the women in my dissertation either identifY themselves or are identified by me as low-income by the economically disadvantaged backgrounds they come from and/or by the low-waged, low-skilled work they perform. For example, writer Barbara Ehrenreich

(2001) states that she comes from a white working-class family and Tamara Thompson, a white single mother of two young children who earns her living as a waitress, describes

29 her economic struggles to interviewer Alison Owings (2002), thus indicating she is low-income.

However, how Ehrenreich and Thompson and others experience class is in relation to their environment and to their idea of what and who is working-, middle-, and upper-class. On 18 April2003, National Public Radio journalist and commentator

Madeleine Brand reported how several wealthy families do not consider themselves rich; instead, they identuy themselves as middle-class. One woman who lives on an income of a million dollars a year living in a beautiful and luxurious brownstone home contends that because she dresses casually, buys her children's clothes from Lands' End Company, and uses coupons, she is middle-class. Another man who makes three hundred thousand dollars a year argues that because he makes the least amount of money among his friends and lives in a bad section oftown, he is middle-class. Brand's report thus highlights that class identity is subjective: one may be in the wealthiest one percent bracket but still believe that one is and insist on being called middle class.

Brand's report, then, raises the following question concerning my dissertation:

How do I know that the women who refer to themselves as low-income are working-class or come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds? Perhaps they too live in a cozy and luxurious brownstone home but insist on being labeled as working-class. There is a possibility that indeed some of the low-income female intellectuals I refer to throughout my dissertation do live in grand, beautiful homes and make a comfortable income. This is perhaps why Carolyn Leste Law refuses to define who is a working-class academic--the term is complex and contradictory. Ehrenreich, who writes about the concerns and struggles of the working class, including her own working-class family, is forthright about her present privileged economic position. In Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in

America, she notes that she does not "imagine that I am a member of that oppressed working class. My very ability to work tirelessly hour after hour is a product of decades of better-than-average medical care, a high protein diet, and workouts in gyms that charge

30 $400 or $500 a year" (2001, 90). The women, like Ehrenreich, who identifY themselves or whom I identifY as working-class intellectuals are not referring to their present socioeconomic status, but to the economic struggles they experienced as children, adolescents, and young adults.

Yet, regardless of this distinction, how do I know that the low-income women in my dissertation actually experienced economic hardship rather than just thinking or feeling they experienced it in relation to the more financially secure family, friends, and neighbors they grew up with? And would some of these women object to being called low-income?

Indeed this was the case I experienced with a friend. When I explained to her that my dissertation is on low-income women as agents of knowledge, emphasizing ''women like you," she immediately corrected me, saying that she does not identifY herself as low-income. Furthermore, she stressed that she feels uncomfortable and restricted by labels, especially ones she has not chosen for herself

I do not have any definitive responses to these questions raised. I do not know, for example, which Puertorican-American poet Rosario Morales's (1986, 1981) memories of a painful childhood scarred by economic hardship is real or not. That is, I do not know if she writes the way she actually experienced the reality of poverty as a child, or the way she remembers how she felt, which may be different from how she experienced it years earlier. Yet I am not concerned with this question concerning how she remembers her past in contrast to how she once experienced it. What is real to me as a reader is her words that are full of such passion, sincerity, and desperation that I react viscerally to them. It is not my project to judge who are economically, socially, and culturally the bona fide working-class. Rather, my dissertation identifies the women who know what it means to feel and be economically insecure and vulnerable; who know how it is to walk up and down the aisle at the grocery store calculating feverishly in their minds what they can and cannot afford; who know what it means to live from paycheck to paycheck; who know that a broken arm or a decaying tooth is a mini-crisis; and who know so much more what

31 it means to have little in a country that has so much, arrogantly flaunting its wealth and measuring its worth according to its wealth.

At the same time, the economic struggles that low-income women have

encountered are not identical. I am aware, for example, that I grew up in a very different

environment than writer Dorothy Allison who identifies herself and her family as poor white trash. Although my mother, my sisters, and I struggled to get by and always felt the

fear of being just one paycheck away from doom, we lived in an environment that did not

trap us or even suffocate us. And as long as loans were available, my sisters and I knew

we were going to go to college and would eventually move away from our childhood

community. In fact, going to college was as ''natural" and as expected as going to high

school. That was not the case for Allison. In her memoir Skin, she writes about her

family and community, stating: "We were the they everyone talks about--the ungrateful

poor. I grew up trying to run away from the fate that destroyed so many of the people I

loved .... I did not know who I was, only that I did not want to be they, the ones who

are destroyed or dismissed to make the 'real' people, the important people, feel safer"

(1994, 13-14). Allison's childhood environment was marked by pain and social and

economic immobility. Everywhere she looked--the broken-down homes, the dilapidated

schools, the run-down town--reminded her of her own impoverishment and sense of

hopelessness. She spent her childhood and adolescent years trying to figure out how she

was going to escape this pain and immobility.

Regardless of our differences, I identi:(y myself and Allison as low-income female

intellectuals. It is not my intention to homogenize our experiences; rather, I label us as

low-income to focus on the economic struggles we both encountered and on how these

struggles have shaped the way we think, feel, love, and exist. Moreover, it is not my

intention to homogenize all low-income women as belonging to one race or ethnicity. To

avoid subsuming race to class, I identi:(y each poor and working-class woman according to

her race and ethnicity. However, there are some women who do not identi:(y their race

32 and etbnicity in their essays and interviews. In these cases, I only refer to them as low-income women. The Goals of This Dissertation:

Three primary goals guide my dissertation: one, to identify low-income women's sites of resistance where they generate knowledge; two, uncover low-income women's standpoint that highlights this resistant knowledge; and three, to create a theory on low-income women's standpoint that underscores the contradictions and ambiguity in the everyday world out of which poor and working-class women resist social and economic oppression. In chapter one, I define and explain what poor and working-class women's standpoint is and highlight how their resistant knowledge is grounded in their immediate and everyday world. In chapter two, I examine how low-income female performing artists and writers openly express their sexuality as "bad girls" through their art and writing to claim sexual agency. In chapter three, I analyze how low-waged female workers encountering structural limitations negotiate power relations in the workforce. And finally, in chapter four, I look at how poor and working class women deal with emotional pain and anger as they resist being crushed by economic and social oppression. I conclude my dissertation reflecting on a future project on low-income women's standpoint that is rooted in "humility" and hope.

33 CHAPTER ONE

Low-Income Women's Standpoint

Introduction:

My interest in uncovering and analyzing poor and working-class American

women's knowledge that they generate in their immediate, concrete worlds began with the

literature of working-class female intellectuals. The anthologies Working-Class Women in

the Academy (1993) and This Fine Place (1995) and the special editions of Race, Gender

and Class (1996) and Women's Studies Quarterly (1998) discuss the unique challenges

working-class women encounter in universities as students and professors. I identifY with

many of the writers who express disappointment in an academy in which their knowledge

as low-income women is not acknowledged or is dismissed. As a working-class graduate

student, I, too, felt uneasy entering an academy dominated by "high" theory that privileges jargon, abstract thought, and an elite class of thinkers as the intellectual experts. I was

particularly uncomfortable with the esoteric way of thinking, talking, and writing on

human knowledge that occurred within the disciplines of the humanities and social

sciences. The everyday world, such as relationships, work, and family, was presented as

an impersonal, abstract study.

Moreover, I found academia's focus and emphasis on upper socio-cultural and economic mobility at times confusing and unsettling. I was at college because I did not want to experience the life that my mother lived: an economically insecure and exhausting life in which she struggled on her own working numerous dead-end jobs to support three daughters. A college degree then promised me a way out oflow-paying, exploitative labor and out of the monotony and sheer exhaustion of constant economic struggle. But a

34 college degree also meant a rejection of my mother's life. White working-class scholar

Lillian Robinson explains in a conversation with feminist scholar Kate Ellis, stating:

I think that the difference is between these [middle-class] women who reject their mothers' lives for themselves (and who therefore seem to be rejecting their mothers) and women, usually working-class women, for whom options of becoming something other than their mother aren't available .... So rather than it being a normal developmental thing that you reject who your parents are, who your mother is specifically, what you reject is her way of experiencing a woman's life. (1993, 38)

Many working-class female intellectuals (Register 2000; Trevino-Hart 1999; Hollibaugh

2000; Piercy 2002; Allison 1994; Faderman 2003) have also written on how academia felt like a strange world to them, teaching them to reject their families' lives. Their personal experiences, reflecting my experiences in academia, underscore that indeed there is an experientially based knowledge among low-income women. Yet as insightful as these writers are, many stop short of identifYing and explaining an epistemological claim and a way of knowing that they share with other working-class women.

Judith Barker's article, "A White Working Class Perspective on Epistemology," best illustrates how a working-class female intellectual can fail to recognize the knowledge generated by low-income women in "low" theory, that is, in their daily reality expressed through art, language, body, and behavior. Barker notes how uncomfortable she feels using middle-class knowledge to critique and diffuse her male relatives' sexism, commenting: "They have learned that I will use my academic knowledge to overpower their working-class masculine knowledge. While I must admit that I enjoy being able to effectively counter sexist ideology, I also feel uneasy about using a middle-class form of knowledge ... [which] validate(s) a classist conception ofknowledge" (1996, 114). Yet her failure to mention how low-income women deal with the hypermasculinity of working-class men assumes that they are always passive, indifferent, or powerless to it.

Further, she fails to distinguish between a middle-class and working-class way of thinking and knowing: How exactly is low-income women's knowledge different :from that of

35 middle-class women? And why is it assumed that a middle-class form of knowledge is more effective in dismantling sexist ideology?

Barker and other working-class female intellectuals, namely, Janet Zandy (1998,

1995, 1990), Michelle Tokarczyk (1993), and Deb Busman (1998) underscore that class division is not only based on socioeconomic and racial differences, but on epistemological privilege. Yet, they fail to fully explain what knowledge low-income women intellectuals generate and how it constitutes another way of thinking, knowing, being, loving, sharing, feeling, and existing than that taught and recognized in academia. For example, Busman points out how low-income women at the gates ofthe Ivory Towers are encouraged, even expected, to leave behind their compendium of group-based knowledge that is grounded in and constructed from their own personal and collective experiences. She argues,

When middle-class kids enter the university, their journey through the gates is part of an economic and cultural continuum they are expected to follow, and when they are given new "knowledge" to take in, it generally does not disrupt the previous 'knowledge' into which it is "integrated." When working-class students approach these gates, however, they are expected to leave behind their previous ways of knowing.(1998, 83)

Yet what exactly are these "previous ways ofknowing"? She never fully explores this.

And although I know from personal experiences how this passage through those Ivory

Tower's gates is unsettling and, at times, overwhelming, Busman's focus on this journey de-emphasizes the fact that important knowledge generated by poor and working-class women is abandoned or dismissed.

Zandy argues that at the Ivory Tower's gates, "[i]t is important to recognize and name incidents of class prejudice, hatred even, but it is just as important to use those occasions as compost for other projects" (1998, 237). And one ofthese projects must be the discernment and analysis oflow-income women's knowledge if poor and working-class women are going to be acknowledged as generators of important knowledge that offers critical insight into social and human relations and power structures.

36 Undertaking this project, I am extending further the existing scholarship on working-class women's knowledge. I do this by shifting the focus away from the academic threshold where low-income women struggle between working- and middle-class "ideologies" to the personal and intimate lives oflow-income women who construct knowledge outside of academia. Thus, I am not focusing on the passage low-income women make as they navigate through academia as students and professors. Rather, I am interested in the knowledge they construct from their own lives before ever stepping foot --and for many low-income women, never stepping foot--in academia.

Standpoint Theory:

I tum to standpoint theory (Hartsock 1998, 1997, 1983a,b; Collins 1998, 1997,

1991, 1989; Harding 1997, 199la,b; Smith 1997, 1990, 1987) to discern and analyze poor and working-class American women's knowledge. Standpoint theory examines how a group of people, socially positioned by the valences of race, gender, sexuality, class,

(dis)ability, age, and/or nationality, views and experiences the world differently. It also highlights the social conditions a group encounters in power relations, thus emphasizing its

shared common experiences. And out of these shared experiences, a group's way of knowing is constructed. Feminist theorist Sandra Harding argues:

[T]he kind of daily life activities socially assigned to different genders or classes or races within local social systems can provide illuminating possibilities for observing and explaining systemic relations between 'what one does' and 'what one can know.' ... Distinctive gender, class, race, or cultural positions in social orders provide different opportunities and limitations for 'seeing' how the social order works. (1997, 383)

Hence, standpoint theory analyzes knowledge that is generated from "historically shared, group-based experiences" (Collins 1997, 375).4

4coUins explains how group knowledge is formed. She writes, "Groups have a degree of permanence over time such that group realities transcend individual experiences. For example, African Americans as a stigmatized racial group existed long before I was born and will probably continue long after I die. While my individual experiences with institutionalized racism will be unique, the types of opportunities and constraints that I encounter on a daily basis will resemble those confronting African Americans as a

37 Feminist scholar Nancy Hartsock (1983a) notes that standpoint theory is grounded in five claims. First, social relations are shaped by material life; thus, gender, class, race,

(dis )ability, age, sexual preference, and other salient bases of social differences affect how a group of people experiences life. Second, those in power have a "partial and perverse"

(285) view of reality looking from the top down; this view is based on how their privileged material lives are structured. Those subjugated, however, have an "inverse" view from those in power, looking from the bottom up. From this perspective, they have a less partial and more inclusive vision on how social relations function. Third, to remain in power, the ruling elite claim their understanding of reality as the correct and standard way, marginalizing any other view that questions and challenges it. Fourth, because the ruling elite's viewpoint is taken as the status quo, marginal groups must struggle and resist to uncover and express their standpoints. And finally, fifth, standpoints of the oppressed reveal how inhumane social relations have been under the ruling elite, and, as a result, they call for action to address and correct these injustices.

Grounded in these five claims, standpoint theory engages diverse standpoints in an ongoing dialogue to challenge and question each standpoint's viewpoints and perspectives. This process of interrogation and examination is the search for more holistic and inclusive views on social relations. Standpoint theory, then, does not search for a master theory; there is no meta-standpoint that has a complete and holistic view of how the systems of power operate. There are only competing standpoints with partial views.

Feminist scholar Donna Haraway notes that "standpoints of the subjugated are not

'innocent' positions," and are therefore "not exempt from critical re-examination, decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation" ( 1991, 191). Thus, standpoint theory

group" (1997, 375). And in an earlier article, The Social Construction ofBlack Feminist Thought, Collins argues, "As a result of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, apartheid, and other systems of racial domination, Black share a common experience of oppression. These similarities in material conditions have fostered shared Afrocentric values that permeate the family structure, religious institutions, culture, and community life of Blacks" (1989, 755).

38 encourages the constant interaction among diverse standpoints to better understand how power situated on the intersectionality of gender, class, race, sexual preference, age, and/or (dis)ability functions in order for a group of people to envision a more humane world built on economic justice and social commitment.

Proletarian. Stan.dpoin.t:

Karl Marx articulated the earliest well-known theory of class standpoint, arguing that the (male) proletarian class has a unique and more inclusive view on and understanding of economic power structure than the ruling capitalist elite, thus possessing a revolutionary consciousness waiting to be fully realized and acted upon to resist economic oppression. This revolutionary consciousness, he claimed, lies in the "sensuous human activity, practice" (1998/1845, 569) of the working class. That is, he argued that human activity and social relations are an integral part of one's consciousness and subjectivity. And by acknowledging sensuous experience--the labor one provides, how one works, the interaction one engages in through labor--as a critical element of consciousness, Marx looked from below at the day-to-day activities of the oppressed as an important and rich resource to envision and carry out the pursuit of social justice and economic equality. In The German Ideology, Marx, in collaboration with Frederick

Engels, argued that revolutionary consciousness is developed from sensuous activities, stating: "In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven" (42). Hence, liberation is not determined in heaven by the hands of divine power, but on earth by the dirty, overworked, and tired, yet experienced and resistant, hands of the oppressed.

Feminist Standpoint:

Hartsock (1983b) is one ofthe earliest scholars to develop a standpoint theory that goes beyond social class. She builds on Marx's theory of an all-male proletarian class by developing a gender analysis that uncovers a feminist standpoint, incorporating the reality and day-to-day experience of women. She writes,

39 If, to paraphrase Marx, we follow the worker home from the factory, we can once again perceive a change in the 'dramatis personae.' He who before followed behind as the worker, timid and holding back with nothing to expect but a hiding, now strides in front, while a third person, not specifically present in Marx's account of the transactions between capitalist and worker (both of whom are male) follows timidly behind, carrying groceries, baby, and diapers. (234)

The viewpoint of the wife and mother in this scenario who carries the groceries and baby, worrying about and attending to daily reality, is distinct from that of Marx's male proletarian. Whereas she is equally concerned as her husband if he goes on strike, is laid off, or is denied a raise, she is also preoccupied with raising a family and maintaining a household. Regardless of what happens on the factory floor, she still needs to feed and care for her family. Her world, then, is shaped by both production and reproduction; that is, her sense of reality is grounded by the production of the workforce and by the reproduction of establishing and maintaining a family.

A feminist standpoint, then, focuses on women's involvement in the labor of reproduction and production as mothers, wives, and/or daughters. As caretakers, women mediate both worlds of production and reproduction. Maintaining and cleaning the immediate and concrete world of men and children, as well as feeding, comforting, and nurturing them, women do the essential yet invisible labor that sustains their worlds.

Moreover, women's labor relieves men and children from being preoccupied with their day-to-day worlds, providing them the space and time to focus on their own interest and well-being. Marilyn French captures this in her novel The Women's Room (1978). French narrates how the protagonist, Mira, a mother and wife, must constantly clean and maintain the concrete worlds ofher sons and husband. She writes, "Washing the toilet used by three males, and the floor and walls around it, is, Mira thought, coming face to face with necessity. And that is why women were saner than men, did not come up with the mad, absurd schemes men developed: they were in touch with necessity, they had to wash the toilet bowl and floor" (qtd. in Hartsock 1983b, 236). Constantly engaged in and in touch

40 with the concrete world, Mira and other women know how exhausting it is to clean up

after endless messes and how a dirty, unkempt space can create an uninhabitable environment. A feminist standpoint theory therefore claims that from the position of a

dirty toilet bowl, women have a realistic and comprehensive view of how important it is to maintain inhabitable environments that sustain both the productive and reproductive worlds.

Performing the essential labor that sustains the day-to-day worlds of men and

children, women unite mental and manual work. That is, as caretakers, they bridge the

gap between mental and manual labor. Harding observes, "Women's work processes

children, food, all bodies, balky machines, and social relations. It makes possible men's retreat to and appropriation of 'abstract masculinity"' (1991, 130). And feminist scholar

Alison Jaggar notes, "Women's work is interposed between the abstracted modes and the local and particular actualities in which they are necessarily anchored" ( 1983, 3 73). As mediators of men's and children's world, women are constantly engaged in mental and manual labor; they use the hand, brain, and heart to fulfill their roles in the productive and reproductive world (Rose 1983). Women's experiential knowledge then is grounded in the hand, brain, and heart. This knowledge has the potential of creating new epistemological claims that, for example, can advance the field of science, as feminist

scholar Hilary Rose contends. She argues, "A theoretical recognition of caring labor as critical for the production of people is necessary for any adequate materialist analysis of science and is a crucial precondition for an alternative epistemology and method that will help us construct a new science and a new technology" (83). Women's Standpoint:

Women's standpoint theory, in many ways, overlaps with a feminist standpoint theory about which Hartsock, Harding, and Jaggar write. However, sociologist Dorothy

Smith, whose work The Conceptual Practices ofPower (1990) and The Everyday World as Problematic (1987) helped establish women's standpoint theory, disagrees. She claims

41 that ''women's standpoint as I have developed it is not at all the same thing [as a feminist standpoint] and has nothing to do with justifying feminist knowledge. Rather, I am arguing that women's standpoint returns us to the actualities of our lives as we live them

in the local particularities of the everyday/everynight worlds ..." ( 1997, 393 ). Yet,

Smith's comment underscores the similarities, rather than the difference, between women's standpoint and a feminist standpoint. Both locate women as agentic subjects in their material, concrete worlds. That is, women's standpoint and a feminist standpoint are

grounded in the everyday activities of women.

Nonetheless, there is a difference between both standpoints. Women's standpoint theory is not in search ofliberatory knowledge generated out of the day-to-day realities of women; rather, it focuses on and analyzes women's daily routines and habits as sites of

experiential knowledge. In contrast, a feminist standpoint theory derives political knowledge on systemic oppression :from women's immediate, concrete worlds. Hartsock

highlights this difference, stating: "I use the term 'feminist' rather than 'women's

standpoint"' because "[a] feminist standpoint picks up and amplifies the liberatory

possibilities contained in that [everyday] experience" (1983b, 232).5 Black Feminist Standpoint:

Collins (1992) objects to Smith's universal use of"women" as a homogenous

being in women's standpoint. Race, sexuality, and class, Collins argues, must be included when establishing an epistemological standpoint. To erase these differences ignores the

fact that among women there are hierarchical power structures based on white, heterosexual, and class privileges, among other social and political benefits in the U.S.

5Despite this difference, women's standpoint and a feminist standpoint are sometimes used interchangeably. For example, Bettina Aptheker argues in her book Tapestries ofLife that she is interested in uncovering women's standpoint "for an ordering of women's experience as knowledge, for an emancipatory vision rooted in our own grounds" (1989, 15). Her mission, then, is not only to examine the everyday routines and practices of women to discern women's standpoint, but to analyze how these daily activities produce emancipatory knowledge to establish a feminist standpoint.

42 Criticizing Smith for not acknowledging how black women use local ways of knowing to resist oppression, Collins identifies and develops a black feminist standpoint in her groundbreaking book Black Feminist Thought (1991). She focuses on how

African-American women as members of a specific group generate knowledge from their particular everyday worlds fighting multiple oppressions, while expressing self-determination as mothers, othermothers, sisters, daughters, and community members who take pride in their dark-skinned selves and their rich and resilient heritage.

Collins's black feminist standpoint theory provides an epistemological framework for me to build upon as I identify and examine low-income women's standpoint. By challenging Smith's work on women's standpoint, Collins encourages feminist scholars to look even closer at the everyday worlds of"women" and observe and analyze how their particular actualities are indeed not the same. This is what I have done: I locate the everyday worlds of poor and working-class American women mentioned in their memoirs, novels, poems, lyrics, and narratives to examine and explore how they construct knowledge out of their particular actualities as economically disadvantaged women. My use of the word "women" is not singular. The reference to low-income women does not represent only white heterosexual women. On the contrary, my research is informed by poor and working-class women of different sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, region, religion, and other social identities. As stated in the introduction, the aim of my dissertation is to discern and examine low-income American women's standpoint. That is, I am interested in the common experiences that, for example, a working-class Chicana, a low-income lesbian, and an economically disadvantaged white woman share in their resistance against economic and social oppression. It is their commonalities, not differences, that I seek out to uncover and examine their experiential bases of knowledge. I am not denying or ignoring their differences; to focus on their differences is another project, perhaps one I will take up in the future.

43 Low-Income Women's Standpoint:

Poor and working-class women's knowledge is generated outside a formal setting and academic environment. Many working-class female intellectuals (Joanna Kadi 1996;

Janet Zandy 1995, 1990; Mary Cappello 1995; Tillie Olsen 1978; Fran Buss 2000, 1985;

Deborah King 1988; Linda Carty 1992) contend that low-income women's knowledge starkly contrasts with academic knowledge that privileges elite white men's thinking. Elite white male knowledge upholds ''value-free objectivity," or abstract masculinity, that

"requires a notion of the self as a fortress that must be defended against polluting influences as from its social surroundings" (Harding 1991, 158). Thus, working-class female intellectuals contend that academia promotes sterility because knowledge that is upheld as value-free objectivity must be "cleansed" from the knower's mundane world of experiences. Smith claims that this sterility is an outcome of "intellectual housecleaning," in which "[k]nowledge must somehow transcend the local, historical settings to which the knower is necessarily bound ifit is to be 'pure"' (1990, 62).

In other words, academics are expected to uproot themselves from the personal experience grounded in their immediate concrete environment to obtain so-called objective knowledge that is sanctioned by academia as the correct form of knowing. Mundane, day-to-day reality is viewed by scholars as weighing the intellectual down with what is perceived as pettiness and partiality. Pure intellect must rise above the common and banal.

To accomplish this, academics are encouraged to transcend their concrete reality, thus further separating the public from the private domain. And because the private sphere is associated with femininity--intimacy, nurturance, and caretaking--abstract thinking privileges intellectual rigor that exists solely in the public, or masculine, sphere, upholding abstract masculinity.

However, low-income women's standpoint exposes how the physical labor of housecleaning is an integral part of"intellectual housecleaning"; that is, one is able to engage in intellectual activity because one's physical space is organized and cleaned.

44 Because it is mostly women who do the physical labor of cleaning, "intellectual housecleaning" could not exist if it was not for women who remain committed to their personal experience and immediate environment, while actively engaging in their material reality by organizing and cleaning the spaces they and others occupy. Simply put, women sustain men's intellectual and physical world. It is women who enable men to escape into the world of abstraction where they can further remove themselves from daily experiences.

Women's concrete activities, such as cleaning, cooking, and caring, support men's realm of abstruse thinking. Working-class African-American writer Toni Cade Bambara's protagonist Velma in The Salt Eaters best describes how men can escape from their immediate surroundings as she thinks aloud about her husband:

'Not a clue, my friends, as to how the eggs, bacon and biscuits come to appear before him every morning. He makes up lists, see, of all the things he wants done and posts this list on the refrigerator door just like there were little kitchen fairies and yard elves and other magic creatures to get all these things done.' Velma was thinking 'abstractionist' summed him up, a perfect label for the habit, the unmindful gap between want and done, demand and get. (1980, 31)

Women are the magical "fairies" performing these routine activities that free men to disengage from their concrete surroundings and run off to their offices and work sites.

Looking closely at the roles women perform, we see that "[t]here are human activities, intentions, and relations that are not apparent as such in the actual material conditions of our work" (Smith 1990, 26). By exposing how abstract masculinity is supported by concrete, day-to-day activities, the interdependency of human relations is revealed: women washing the clothes that their fathers, husbands, and sons are wearing as they sit in their clean offices that other women have dusted and organized, while other female workers minimize the distractions in these men's lives by answering their phone calls and mail. The male intellectual ensconced in his private study would have a difficult time living the life of the mind if he had to do the grocery shopping, drive his daughter to swimming lessons, pick up clothes from the cleaners, and prepare dinner. Grounded in the

45 concrete reality of mundane tasks, his immediate world could very well lead his way of knowing into one that is less removed from and less disconnected with his physical

surroundings.

Yet ifwe invoke Collins by shifting the focus a bit to further examine Smith's

argument that we must look closely at human relations to see who is sustaining the intellectual housecleaning, indeed we see women, but it is low-income women, and in the most oppressive, exploitative labor, Third World women of color, who are doing much of the undesirable yet necessary labor that sustains life. It is important to acknowledge this because low-income women mediate and sustain the world for middle- and upper-class women, particularly white women, as much as women as a class do for men as a class. So we can see how a fictitious Dr. Carla Jones, for example, keeps her husband, a busy professional, organized and well-rested by managing all the household responsibilities, but it is the live-in maid who cleans, cooks, and takes care of the children who gives Dr. Jones the time and space to pursue her own career. Low-Income Women's Standpoint Grounded in the Low:

Poor and working-class women's standpoint focuses on the mundane routines and practices ofthe everyday world, such as cooking and cleaning. In Western society, anything that is associated with the immediate concrete world is referred to as low and has little, if any, cultural value. In contrast, anything that is removed and refined from the immediate concrete world is referred to as high and has much cultural value. White working-class feminist writer Barbara Mor, in collaboration with Monica Sjoo, explains this dualism of the low and high, stating: "Patriarchy divides life into higher and lower categories, labeled 'spirit' versus 'nature,' or 'mind' versus 'matter' --and typically in this alienated symbolism, the superior 'spirit/mind' is male (and/or white), while the inferior

'nature/matter' is female (and/or black)" (1991, 16). The low then is the "denigration of all that is associated with the feminine" (Caputi 2001, 2): nature, female, body, dark, and emotion. And the high is the elevation of all that is associated with the masculine: culture,

46 male, mind, white, and reason. Thus, the low is feminine-embodied experiences that are directly connected to the local and material actualities of the everyday world, and its obverse, the high, is abstract masculinity that removes itself from the quotidian experiences ofthe everyday world. Low-income women's standpoint theory exposes this dualism of Western thought that favors and privileges abstract masculinity (the high) over feminine-embodied experiences (the low).

Western dualism of the high and low, ecofeminist Val Plumwood contends, "is not just a distinction or a dichotomy" (1993, 47), but a hierarchical relationship that makes mutuality and equality between male/female, reason/emotion, white/dark, mind/body, and culture/nature impossible. Plumwood explains,

Dualism is a relation of separation and domination inscribed and naturalised in culture and characterised by radical exclusion, distancing and opposition between orders constructed as systematically higher and lower, as inferior and superior, as ruler and ruled, which treats the division as part of the natures of beings construed not merely as different but as belonging to radically different orders or kinds, and hence as not open to change. (47-48)

Thus the low is not only perceived as being inferior to the high, but is also seen as being a completely different and separate entity from the high. That is, the immediate concrete world associated with nature, emotion, female, dark, and body and the abstract world associated with culture, reason, male, white, and mind are understood "as belonging to radically different orders" ( 48).

Poor and working-class women's standpoint theory refutes this dualistic separation, showing that the low not only has value, but is an integral part of the high that constitutes our humanity. That is, the refined and abstract world is attached to the messiness, chaos, and confusion of the everyday world. A boss, for example, can remove himself from the disorder ofhis office because his secretary cleans up after him. His productivity and efficiency in the abstract world is dependent upon her labor that maintains and sustains order and structure. Thus, he is not removed from the low, from

47 the everyday activities that deal with the immediate concrete world; rather, it is his secretary who mediates and buffers the low for him. 6

The Low as a Source of Beauty and Strength:

In "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," working-class black feminist writer Alice

Walker (1994b/1974) looks low to recognize how her mother cultivated resilience and wisdom as she grew plants and flowers in her garden. By dropping her gaze, Walker

observes the "energetic resonance, vibrational phenomenon" (Quinn 1992, 28) in the ordinary lives of other black women. What she sees is a rich legacy of creative black mothers and grandmothers who struggled to keep their souls and hope alive by planting gardens and making quilts. Under brutal conditions such as the physical and psychological humiliation of slavery and Jim Crow laws, African-American foremothers sought a way to maintain a sense of self through art and creative labor. By creating art and cultivating life,

Walker's ancestors developed an outlet within their everyday lives to express and release their pain, frustration, and anger. And in the face of racial hatred and devastating poverty, their everyday practices of planting gardens and making quilts became sites of resistance

and self-determination.

African-American feminist scholar Barbara Christian also looks low. By dropping her gaze, she sees the everyday sites of resistance, such as in language and stories, that generate a rich source of knowledge that poor African-Americans, since the days of

6working-class Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros's character Esperanza in House on Mango Street expresses the importance of acknowledging the low, saying: "People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don't look down at all except to be content to live on hills. They have nothing to do with last week's garbage or fear of rats" (1989, 86). Esperanza understands that our physical reality is at the center of our own humanness. The corporate executive in his tailored suit may think he is important and omnipotent. But if he were to look low, he would be encouraged to see that underneath his tailored suit is a fallible body that defecates and catches diseases and that exists within the interconnected web of life that is energetically and organically connected to the garbage it generates and to the rats it fears. Stripped of material wealth and ostentatious symbols and names of prestige, the naked individual's vulnerability is exposed to himself and the world. There is nothing to conceal his basic needs and desires. Nor is there anything to hide his dependency on others, revealing how this defecating and germ-infested body does not live as a self-contained, self-bounded entity.

48 slavery, have used to help them understand and survive brutal racism and dire poverty.

She argues that "our theorizing" created out of common and ordinary lives "is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language

.... How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?" ( 1986, 52). Christian, then, refers to the low as everyday sites of resistance generating a knowledge of self-definition and self-determination among poor blacks. Therefore by focusing on the low, poor and working-class women's standpoint reveals how everyday acts can create and sustain resilience and strengthen human and social relations in the midst of pain, agony, and deprivation.

Acknowledging how her and Christian's black ancestors theorized out of their own lives and created art out of their immediate, concrete worlds to give meaning and purpose to their lives, Walker challenges the association of creativity and art with white privileged individuals. She (1983) recalls that, when she was a student at Oberlin University, a white man from the local town asked her what she wanted to become. When she responded that she wanted to be a poet, he advised her to pick another profession stating that a farmer's daughter does not become a poet. Thinking about his response, Walker writes that even though he is right that, as a fu:rmer's daughter, she faces insurmountable obstacles to becoming a poet like Keats, not every poet is or should be a replica of Keats. She claims that "it is narrow thinking, indeed to believe that a Keats is the only kind of poet one would want to grow up to be" (18). Measuring every potential poet against Keats not only eliminates many who are not born with economic, gender, and male privileges, but it also discredits diverse forms of poetry that explore and explain different knowledge claims that are considered to be beneath the "Keats-standard." Thus, by refuting Keats as the prototype for aspiring poets, Walker throws into question who decides what constitutes poetry and, for that matter, who decides what is "good" poetry? She rejects those

49 standards set by academics. Instead, she encourages us to look low and recognize the diversity of talented poets in our everyday world.7

Walker contends that we fail to see the beauty, strength, passion, and special knowing in everyday, unglamorous lives when we only look high. Thinking about "those millions of black women who were not Phillis Wheatley, or Lucy Terry or Frances Harper or Zora Hurston or Nella Larsen or Bessie Smith" (1994b/1967, 45) made Walker realize how much was missing from her scope of vision: "I found, while thinking about the fur-reaching world of the creative black women, that often the truest answer to a question that really matters can be found very close" (45). And, ironically, by expanding her vision,

Walker sees the beauty closest to her that is around her and literally beneath her feet as she steps over flowers and dirt, understanding how her mother's garden helped cultivate a richer, more meaningful life for her: "Because ofher creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen ofblooms--sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena ... and on and on" (48).

Working-class African-American writer Gwendolyn Brooks's protagonist Maud

Martha can also see the beauty and knowledge in the ordinary and common. Maud

Martha does not see sunflowers and petunias and roses, but dandelions, tons of them littering her backyard. She admires dandelions for their simple beauty: "Yellow jewels for everyday, studding the patched green dress of her back yard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a

7For example, Mos Def, a highly respected hip-hop artist, is known within the black community as both a rap singer and a poet, yet is not recognized as a poet outside of the hip-hop culture. The Nuyorican Poets are also another example of the rich diversity of working-class Puertorican-American poets in New York City that defY the "Keatings" replica. Yet journalist Mireya Navarro comments that "despite the vibrant scene and the poets' increasing opportunities to read, teach and be published, the work remains largely marginalized, some poets said. Most of it is not read by mainstream critics and scholars, does not find its way into major literary journals or magazines that publish poetry and is underrepresented in bookstores, they said" (2002, B3).

50 picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower" (1953, 2).

These simple flowers also have special meaning for Chicana union activist Maria

Elena Lucas. Resisting the hatred and racism of white farm owners who look down upon poor Mexican-American workers as an ignorant, uncultivated people useful only for cheap

labor, Maria Elena writes in her diary recalling how "my grandmother would tell me we

were Farm worker flowers and she would call me 'My Dandelion' because she'd say we

were like Dandelions, that the wind would blow us into the drifting winds and we'd go all

different directions and go land somewhere, only to start all over again" (1993, 51).

Maria Elena takes solace in her grandmother's words and in the sight of dandelions

because they remind her that her people's knowledge--their language, stories, songs,

faith--cannot be destroyed; it is as ubiquitous and fertile as dandelions. Tillie Olsen

(1989/1934), a working-class Russian-American who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, also

acknowledges the power and knowledge in the ordinariness, and how it gives life meaning

and purpose through the metaphor of dandelions. Olsen describes in her novella

Yonnondio how a mother, Annie, is able to keep beauty and passion alive for her daughter

Mazie despite the devastating poverty they live through during the Depression by making

perfume out of dandelions and by weaving dandelions into necklaces.

For Maud Martha, Maria Elena, and Annie, dandelions are their assurances that there is dignity, resistance, and special knowing in the common, that one does not have to

be rich, famous, beautiful, or brilliant to have them Although Maud Martha knows that

she is seen as a nobody for being a big, dark-skinned black wife and mother living in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago, she recognizes her own worth and importance: "She was going to keep herself to herself She did not want fame. She did not want to be a 'star.'

... What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that" (21-22). Acknowledging that she is one of many women who struggle to create a

51 satisfying life for their furnilies, Maud Martha believes she has something simple, yet important, to contribute to humankind. What she, like Maria Elena and Annie, offers is her own understanding and acceptance of our humanity: how the low is an integral part of her and how she exists in an interconnected web of life. Hence, the dandelion she so much admires for its simple beauty is a reflection ofher wholeness.8

The Body as a Site of Knowledge:

The low is a set of experiences out of which knowledge is formed. In particular, the low is recognized as physical experiences ofthe body that is part ofthe concrete, everyday world that generates knowledge. Spiritual activist and working-class Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua highlights the significance ofthe body in the process of

constructing knowledge, noting how '"[ o ]ur mind, our flesh, our energy system are all connected" (2000, 151 ). One cannot achieve wholeness, she argues, solely through reason. It also has to be worked out in the flesh. She contends, "You can't go off into a

disincarnate sphere and work it out. You have to work it out in a body. You have to work it out in life. If we were some other life form then maybe we could work it out in a

spirit" (124-25). But we are not, and therefore we must embrace the body--its flesh and blood--as a spiritual, yet concrete, entity that constructs knowledge.

8How quick one may be, however, to discredit Maud Martha's, Maria Elena's, and Annie's ways of knowing expressed by their love and admiration for dandelions as too simplistic, too ordinary for analysis. Moreover, what are such simple beautiful flowers to them are weeds to many. And because they are perceived as useless weeds, many homeowners poison the water system by eradicating dandelions with pesticides to keep their well-trimmed lawns luscious green. But Maud Martha's, Maria Elena's, and Annie's love for dandelions is not merely an aesthetic one; they see value and purpose in these weeds. In the University of California School ofPublic Health's Wellness Letter (February 1990), dandelions are listed as a plant rich with nutrients: Vitamin A, D, copper, cobalt, zinc, and baron, which make dandelions one of the richest vegetable sources available ("Why"). Clearly then, Maud Martha's, Maria Elena's, and Annie's love for dandelions is not triviaL It is a sad irony that many people continue to pollute their families and neighbors with chemicals to kill a plant that, so rich in nutrients, is such a powerful sustainer of life. Their love for dandelions highlights this ignorance and refusal to see knowledge and sustenance in the low.

52 By "working it out in the body," Anzaldua claims that knowledge begins with the body. She writes, "We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal; intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli :from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to 'real' events" (1987, 59-60). That is, personal experiences dwell within the body where the person holistically feels the presence of these experiences and observes how they affect her spiritually, physically, and psychologically. And whether consciously or unconsciously understood, these feelings are then transformed into the initial stages of knowledge development.

Feminist scholar Hilary Rose argues that women's knowledge begins with the actualities oftheir lives--menstruation, menopause, abortion, breast cancer, breast feeding--that women combine with objectivity to generate new knowledge. She writes,

[M]enstruation, which so many women experience as distressing or at best uncomfortable, has generated a tremendous amount of collective discussion, study, and writing. A preeminent characteristic of these investigations lies in their fusing of subjective and objective knowledge in such a way as to make new knowledge. Cartesian dualism, biological determinism, and social constructionism fade when faced with the necessity of integrating and interpreting the personal experience ofbleeding, pain, and tension. (1983, 88)

Specifically, Anzaldua notes in "La Prieta" (198lb) how the physical pain she experienced from menstruating constructed new knowledge. Her pain was particularly difficult to tolerate because Anzaldua had begun to menstruate at the age of three months. As a little girl Anzaldua was constantly conscious of her body by the menstrual cramps and swelling she experienced and by the uncomfortable rags pinned to her panties to absorb her menstrual blood. As a result, she felt different from her peers. Anzaldua writes, "The whole time growing up I felt that I was not ofthis earth. An alien fromanother planet-­ rd been dropped on my mother's lap" (199). And because her menstruating body was at the center ofher reality, ofher consciousness, Anzaldua learned at an early age to interact and engage with the world through her corporeal presence. Thus, thinking and feeling

53 with her menstruating body, she developed "'an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind which feelings reside/hide" (1987, 60). This awareness has enabled Anzaldua to "walk into a house and I know whether it is empty or occupied. I feel the lingering charge in the air of a recent fight or lovemaking or depression. I sense the emotions someone near is emitting--whether friendly or threatening" ( 61 ).

Anzaldua's current struggle with diabetes and gastrointestinal reflex also demonstrates how she generates knowledge through her body. Anzaldua contends that her physical illnesses "have impacted me totally. My body has played a large role in shaping my identity" (2000, 288). Because her diabetes, in particular, has a direct impact on her body--the sugar level, the swelling, the nausea, the exhaustion--Anzaldua explains that she must always listen attentively to and work with her body if she is going to function psychologically, physically, and intellectually. Further, Anzaldua notes that her struggle with diabetes and gastrointestinal reflex reminds her that she can never escape her body, that who she is and how she perceives the world are internalized within the body.

Her bouts of throwing up and having diarrhea are therefore a constant reminder that her identity as a great thinker and writer cannot be removed from her defecating and vomiting body. She writes, "I might have been thinking myself a 'Big Shot,' as a writer on the fringes of the academy. I never got into the 'Star' mentality but there were certain temptations. The diabetes just knocked all that out. I had to go back to basics

..." (289).

In The Cancer Journals, black working-class poet Audre Lorde (1980) also identifies the body as a critical site of knowledge. Undergoing a radical mastectomy, losing her right breast to cancer, Lorde views and experiences life as, she calls herself, "a one-breasted woman" (65). In order to live and love her one-breasted body, she must confront her pain, anger, and grief over this loss. It is through this process of dealing with her newly changed and healing body that Lorde begins to recognize and understand how

54 Western society treats cancer as a shameful disease caused by personal actions. As a result, cancer survivors are encouraged to hide their disease. Lorde, in particular, is told numerous times by nurses that if she wears a prosthesis, no one will even know she had cancer and a mastectomy. Listening to the nurse's words, Lorde thinks, "Her message was, you are just as good as you were before because you can look exactly the same"

( 42). But Lorde does not want to pretend that nothing traumatic and painful happened to her body. Lorde's one-breasted body constantly informs her that her body was attacked by a deadly disease. Furthermore, her body is a proven fact that no one can guarantee to be cancer-free. She writes, "The happiest person in this country cannot help breathing in smokers' cigarette fumes, auto exhaust, and airborne chemical dust, nor avoid drinking the water, and eating the food" (75). Hence, Lorde's cancer-stricken body challenges the fallacy that the high is detached from the low, that one can completely and successfully remove oneself :from the immediate, concrete world of wastes. Lorde's radical mastectomy also challenges static images of the perfect body: her one-breasted body is capable of feeling and expressing as much passion and desire as her former two-breasted body.

High/Low Knowledge:

Knowledge is metaphorically and literally a body of experiences that establishes

"truth." Aristotle claimed in Metaphysics (350 BCE) that there are two types of knowledge: propositional and practical. Propositional, or high, knowledge is "knowing thaf' from scientific formulae, mathematical calculations, and classical texts. Practical, or low, knowledge is "knowing how'' :from experience and observation. He argued that both are important for "Man" (humans) to gain wisdom and truth. Yet, as feminist scholars

Linda Alcoff and Vrinda Dalmiya note, "Since Descartes [of the 17th century], epistemology has restricted its principal de:finiendum to propositional knowledge. This nearly exclusive focus on propositional knowledge has had a significant impact on the types of epistemologies developed ..." (1993, 220). For example, midwives' low

55 knowledge (knowing how from personal experience and empathy) was discredited by medical doctors' high knowledge (knowing that from medical books) during the rise of medicine in the 18th and 19th centuries (224-26). Thus, high knowledge that privileges

"intellectually housecleaned," abstract thought and esoteric scholarly texts is acknowledged as the exclusive form of knowledge.

In modern Western thought, high and low continue to be seen as incompatible.

Yet high knowledge is informed by low knowledge. For example, Jesusita Aragon, a poor

Chicana midwife, mentions how doctors throughout her long career would regularly visit to observe her perform delivery on women in labor, analyzing her various techniques, as well as asking her important medical questions about women's anatomy, the placenta, and the umbilical cord. She notes, "Once a doctor come from Santa Fe.... He wanted to know how I used the olive oil and how I held the baby. He asks me about the cord and what do I have to do with the cord when the baby come. He asks me so many questions.

Other doctors come too" (Buss 2000, 72). In modem medicine, however, Jesusita lacks

medical authority as a midwife. Although her ways of knowing provide important medical

information, they have been discredited as "superstitious" and "folk-like."

Separated from the low, high knowledge is cleansed from any trace of human

experience. That is, the high is removed from the ambiguity and contradictions of

everyday life. Instead, it is a realm of sterility where moral absolutism is the dominant way

of thinking. Thus, high knowledge polarizes information and experience into ethical

categories of"good" and "bad." In contrast, low knowledge embraces the ambiguity,

confusion, and contradictions of the material, concrete world. It acknowledges the

messiness of life and the imperfection of humanity. Moreover, it understands that

knowledge is an ongoing process of seeking "truth"; there is no one correct (good) way of

finding "truth." Thus, low knowledge resists a simplistic categorization of"good" and

"bad." As such, low knowledge shows that there is "truth" in the murkiness and

confusion of contradictions and ambiguity.

56 Everyday Resistance as Low Knowledge:

Low-income women's standpoint highlights that poor and working-class women's

low knowledge is constructed from their daily experiences as economically disadvantaged

persons who struggle in their immediate, concrete worlds. In particular, it focuses on the

knowledge they generate from resistance. Yet, low-income women's acts of resistance

are still overlooked or dismissed as mundane activities. In order to understand the

significance of their resistance and the knowledge they produce from it, feminist scholar

Bettina Aptheker argues that we need to reconceptualize the meaning of ••resistance."

She writes:

Our ideas about resistance in the conventional sense have been tied to our ideas about progress. When we think of resistance we think about the ways in which progressive social changes will be gained, and most often we measure the success of a resistance movement by the seep of the changes it effects .... Likewise, in the traditional understanding of resistance, it is assumed that change is social rather than individual, political rather than personal, and resistance implies a movement embracing large numbers of people in conscious alliance for a common goal. (1989, 170-71)

Thus, as long as we understand resistance as a part of the dominant ideology, low-income women's so-called small, mundane acts of resistance will continue to be dismissed.

Sociologist James Scott claims that non-traditional forms of resistance are overlooked or dismissed as a result of a "poverty stricken view of political action" ( 1989,

4). He states:

Both [liberal-democratic and radical] views concentrate on formal, open, political activity and on the role of elites--whether conservative officialdom or a revolutionary vanguard. What they miss is the nearly continuous, informal, un­ declared, disguised forms of autonomous resistance by lower classes: forms of politics that I call 'everyday resistance.' ( 4)

Therefore the rich terrain of everyday resistance of the low--that is, of small, day-to-day acts that openly or covertly refute those in power--is overlooked. Scott identifies some of these everyday acts of resistance as "foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, feigned ignorance, desertion, pilfering ... and so on" (5).

57 Low-income women's everyday resistance "'does not come out of an understanding of one or another social theory, and it is not informed by experience :in conventional politics. It is a resistance that exists outside the parameters ofthose politics and outside the purview of any of the traditional definitions of progress and social change"

(Aptheker 173). Poor and working-class women's immediate, concrete worlds--where they struggle to survive and thrive as mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers, and laborers--shape their everyday resistance; their forms of resistance are framed by how much maneuvering they can do under structural limitations. For example, a secretary can outwit her boss :into getting more money or from doing more work without challenging the power structure: her boss is still :in control and she is still a subordinate under his control. As long as she does not threaten the power structure, her job as the secretary remains relatively safe. 9 Thus, Aptheker reminds us that resistance "is not necessarily or

:intrinsically oppositional; it is not necessarily or intrinsically contesting for power" (173).

Moreover, Scott notes that sometimes by not openly opposing and challenging those :in power, everyday resistance may very well be reifY:ing the power structure. He writes, "Everyday resistance, then, by not openly contesting the dominant norms oflaw, custom, politeness, deference, loyalty, and so on, leaves the dominant in command of the public stage" and it "leaves dominant symbolic structures :intact" (28). Thus, Scott concurs with Aptheker's analysis that resistance is not always liberatory; there are structural limitations that some forms of resistance can never change and there are negative consequences as a result of resistance. Hence, resistance can be full of contradictions.

9 James Scott states, "The relative safety-and it is only a relative safety-of everyday forms of resistance has much to do with the small scale ofthe action" (1989, 6). Thus, the constraining environment that low-income work and live in shapes the way they resist. Many low-income women working under oppressive authority win not openly resist by directly telling their bosses what they really think and feel. Their livelihood depends on their jobs. However, this does not mean that they are rendered totally powerless. They may resist against abusive and humiliating treatment through indirect means, such as jamming the photocopy machine or intentionally making the boss's coffee too hot.

58 Low-income women's standpoint theory underscores the contradictions in everyday resistance by picking up where a feminist standpoint and women's standpoint left off. That is, my analysis of poor and working-class women's standpoint focuses not only on the liberatory acts of resistance, but also on the non-liberatory acts of resistance that remain below the purview of feminist standpoint theorists, like Hartsock and Harding. In addition, I identify both the liberatory and non-hberatory experiences in low-income women's standpoint that women's standpoint fails to identify. Therefore, low-income women's standpoint theory does not fit neatly into a scholarly category. Rather, it is grounded in messy contradictions and murky ambiguity in which a particular action may be liberatory in one setting, but not in another. Hence, it can be both liberatory and non-liberatory. For example, in chapter two I examine how the "bad girl" persona can protect low-income women who must navigate the streets on their own in unsafe neighborhoods. The "in-your-face" attitude keeps them alert and tough (hence, it's a liberatory act). 10 However, in chapter three, I explore how the "bad girl" persona can also prevent them from holding down a job (hence, it's a non-liberatory act).

Low-income women's standpoint theory pushes feminist and women's standpoint to include other realities that are full of contradictions and ambiguity. Furthermore, low-income women's standpoint theory "explore(s) female empowerment from the perspective of what" poor and working-class women find empowering, "as opposed to what has been disempowering, and irrespective ofwhat is supposed to be empowering ..."

(Walker 1995, XXXVI). Poor and working-class women's viewpoints and insights are at the very center oflow-income women's standpoint. Hence, it is not about what they are told

10In "Kicking Ass," working-class Filipina-American writer Veena Cabreros-Sud argues, "No one protected me when a loved one cracked my head on a public street one night; not even the college-educated, Upper West Side white women strolling by and pretending not to see. I don't like getting hit either, but what are you gonna do when someone grabs your tits? Meekly whisper you won't stoop to your attacker's level? And what level exactly is that? ... [We must] acknowledge, respect, and allow for 'aggressive' forms of resistance instead of strapping on moral straightjackets ... which we 'women' must squeeze into" (1995, 44).

59 empowerment is according to the middle class, but rather what they think and feel is empowerment as poor and working-class women. Therefore, low-income women's standpoint theory is not about creating a value hierarchy that places more worth on one form of resistance than on another. Moreover, it is not about making an ethical judgment on how low-income women resist. Rather, it is about how poor and working-class women struggle against oppression under structural limitations and within contradicting situations out of their need to be whole and complex beings. Three Realms ofEveryday Resistance:

Within the epistemological parameters of social relations, knowledge cannot be uncovered without "subjectivity located in its body and located in a definite and particular spatiotemporal existence ..."(Smith 1987, 87). That is, the way one thinks, acts, lives, and feels in the everyday world as a physical, corporeal being is the basis of knowledge.

Knowledge, therefore, begins with experiences "of the local practices of our everyday/ everynight worlds. It is for the most part ... a knowing that is the very texture of our daily/nightly living in what we know how to do, how we go about things, and what we can get done" (1997, 394). Thus, what appears to be insignificant and mundane practices and routines is, in fact, an integral part of low knowledge.

Poor and working-class women's standpoint locates these common and banal practices and routines to examine how poor and working-class women generate knowledge. My dissertation specifically focuses on low-income women's sites of resistance in the everyday world. In particular, I examine three realms of everyday resistance: the body, economics, and emotions. Critical Consciousness:

Standpoint theory makes the distinction between the first and second levels of knowledge. The first level is what Collins (1998, 1991) calls ''taken-for-granted knowledge," Smith (1990, 1987) labels as "perception," and Hartsock (1998, 1983a,b) and Harding (199la,b) see as "viewpoint." The second level ofknowledge articulates a

60 group consciousness, creating a standpoint. The first level is perceptions and viewpoints

that, for example, low-income women express in conversations and narratives, even when

they are not aware that there is something special in the way they think and act. On the

second level, these perceptions and viewpoints are then developed into a standpoint by

low-income female intellectuals writing about them. Both levels are equally important:

that is, there could be no second level that unearths a standpoint without the tacit knowing

in the first level. So even though it is low-income female intellectuals writing about and

from a low-income women's standpoint, their knowledge is rooted in the tacit knowing of

other poor and working-class women who are not intellectuals.

The distinction between first and second level knowledge highlights that one is not

born into a standpoint; rather, one achieves it, which means that the tacit knowing at the

first level must be identified and articulated in order to establish a standpoint at the second

level (Hartsock 1983a,b). Thus, poor and working-class women do not have biological

rights to low-income women's standpoint; nor are all impoverished women grounded in

this standpoint. For example, Debra Dickerson (2000) recalls her refusal as a child and

young adult living in the impoverished ghettos of St. Louis to identify with low-income

women's standpoint until years later when she was able to recognize the resilience and

strength of her poor black community. Writing about her refusal to identify with poor

blacks, Dickerson recounts:

I 'knew' some other things, however. I knew that people were poor by choice. I knew that the civil rights movement had ended racism and inequality.... I was not 'black'; I was a 'human being' who was looking forward to voting for Ronald Reagan in the next election. I had no use for the alcoholics, the unwed mothers, the high school dropouts of my black working-class childhood and, after a youth spent in self-effacing, Southern Baptist Misogynist Silence, had become a woman with the courage to say all ofthat and oh so much more. (ix)

Low-income women's standpoint has to be struggled for and .achieved, which, in the case of Dickerson, took several years of stoic pain and a final collapse from utter exhaustion before she realized that this was where she needed to be: face to face with the low. In her

61 ··. memoir, she writes, "I was exhausted. Worn out by my own life. The effort of dragging

myself from the working class to the middle class, though successful, had nearly killed me.

. . . [I]t shouldn't have to be this hard, I realized. But even if it has to be this hard, society

should acknowledge the structural disadvantages so many face and ameliorate them as

much as possible" (140).

Because no person is born into a standpoint, we cannot assume that all poor and

working-class women are grounded in low-income women's standpoint. For example, a

working-class relative of mine claims that most women on welfare are lazy and

irresponsible, and she accuses them of taking advantage of hardworking tax-paying

citizens like hersel£ She neither identifies nor empathizes with poor and working-class

women. Her attitude towards poor women on assistance has been shaped by dominant

culture that denigrates anyone who is economically dependent. Collins explains,

"Domination operates by seducing, pressuring, or forcing ... members of subordinated

groups to replace individual and cultural ways ofknowing with the dominant group's

specialized thought" (1991, 229).

My relative is, unfortunately, not an exception. There are other poor and

working-class women who do not identifY with, and may not even acknowledge, a

low-income women's standpoint. For ''their relations appear upside-down as in a camera

obscura" (Marx 1998/1845, 42), in which they may identifY or align themselves with elite

power instead of other economically disadvantaged women who encounter similar

day-to-day struggles. 11 The more they resist becoming the "Other," the more they

objectifY low-income women as the "Other" as a way to distance themselves from being

identified as a member of a subordinate group.

11 Journalist David Brooks argues that several Americans are affected by this camera obscura, identifYing with the rich when they are barely paying their bills. He writes, "Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest I percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them" (2003, WK15).

62 Epistemology, then, cannot be conflated with ontology; that is, the production of knowledge cannot be determined by or equated to one's origin or nature of being.

Political visionary Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks argues that one has to struggle to obtain critical consciousness; it does not occur without resistance. He writes,

It is not enough to know the ensemble of relations as they exist at any given time as a given system. They must be known genetically, in the movement of their formation For each individual is the synthesis not only of existing relations, but ofhistory ofthese relations. He [she] is a precis of all the past. It will be said that what each individual can change is very little, considering his [her] strength. This is true up to a point. But when the individual can associate himself [herself] with all the other individuals who want the same changes, ... [he/she] can obtain a change which is far more radical than at first sight ever seemed possible. (1971/ 1933,353)

Gramsci is not solely speaking about political action. He notes that "one should understand not only the ensemble of scientific ideas applied industrially (which is the normal meaning of the word) but also the 'mental' instruments, philosophical knowledge"

(353). What this means is that for an individual to obtain critical consciousness, she must be aware of how her life is shaped by both personal and institutional factors. Thus, she understands her poverty not as an isolated or individual problem, but as a systemic one that affects millions of other poor American women due to institutional oppression. And as long as she sees herself as an isolated entity, and not as a "precis of the past," she cannot achieve critical consciousness.

Low-Income Female Intellectuals as Organic Intellectuals:

Gramsci calls the individual who has achieved critical consciousness and is able to uncover and theorize a standpoint out of everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge an

"organic intellectual." An organic intellectual is committed to her community in its struggle against oppression. Her responsibility is to help her community members fully understand the complexity of their oppression on a personal and institutional level and guide them in developing critical consciousness to resist oppression. Gramsci writes, "For a mass of people to be led to think coherently and in the same coherent fashion about the

63 real present worl~ is a 'philosophical' event fur more important and 'original' than the discovery by some philosophical 'genius' of a truth which remains the property of small groups of intellectuals" (325). As an organic intellectual she is not a "genius" who stands above others in her brilliance. Rather, she is an integral part of a "philosophical event" that embodies both the community's collective struggle against oppression and its body of knowledge produced out of this resistance.

And this knowledge generated out of resistance begins with the community; it is constructed from the community's immediate concrete world. An organic intellectual is a part of this communal knowledge. She builds upon this existing body ofknowledge.

Gramsci argues:

A philosophy of praxis cannot be present itself at the outset in a polemical and critical guise, as superseding the existing mode of thinking and existing concrete thought (the existing cultural world). First of all, therefore, it must be a criticism of 'common sense,' basing itself initially, however, on common sense in order to demonstrate that 'everyone' is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone's individual life, but of renovating and making 'critical' an already existing activity. (330-31)

Hence, the experiential bases ofknowledge do not originate from the intellectual, but from the low--the local and material actualities of the community.

As a working-class intellectual, Barbara Ehrenreich never forgets how she has been influenced by her white working-class family. She notes that "sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who'd had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear" (2001, 2). As a working-class intellectual, she sees her intellectual activities as a social commitment and communal duty.

Bambara (1990/1980) also sees herself as an organic intellectual. In "What It is I

Think I'm Doing Anyhow," Bambara recounts returning to her childhood neighborhood after establishing herself as an accomplished writer. Her neighbors come up to her, not to congratulate her and hold her above them as if she is exceptional in her success, but to

64 gently remind her that her service as a person who can write is useful to others who need letters written to hounding bill collectors, forlorn lovers, and far away relatives. Bambara never forgets that her skill as a writer cannot replace or subvert the skills of her neighbors, as she barters letter writing for hair weaving, potato dumplings, and herbal teas.

Intellectual work then should be guided by loving intelligence--the understanding that an individual is not an isolated 'cognitive' entity ofher own, but an organic member of a group of people that teaches and nurtures her; she cannot be whole without her black community and working-class identity.

Low-income female intellectuals, like Ehremeich and Bambara, acknowledge that, although they may sign their names on their essays and books, their writing is a product of communal knowledge and effort. Although they are now economically stable as accomplished intellectuals, they refuse to be uplifted or displaced from their working-class communities. They insist on being organic intellectuals who are deeply rooted in their working-class identities. And as organic intellectuals they acknowledge that the knowledge they generate and theorize about originates from the low in the local and material actualities oflow-income communities.

Yet we cannot assume that this alliance between the organic intellectual and her community happens naturally or unproblematically. In a book review of Collins's Black

Feminist Thought, sociologist Deborah King ponders, "Assuming that most intellectuals are well educated, [presently] middle and upper-middle class, ... [w]hat biases, omissions, and misunderstandings might occur in their rearticulation of other Black women's lives and standpoints? (1991, 513). This question equally applies to low-income female intellectuals discerning a poor and working-class women's standpoint. It cannot be assumed that all female intellectuals from poor and working-class backgrounds are committed to maintaining an allegiance to low-income communities. Those who choose to pass into middle class do so and may never be seen as ever belonging to the working class. These female intellectuals, however, are not the ones discerning low-income

65 women's standpoint. Why would they if they have no interest in or commitment to their working-class communities? But for those of us who do, the following question arises:

Have university education, material comfort, and social status prevented us from fully understanding or recognizing the viewpoints and taken-for-granted knowledge of poor and working-class women?

I write this question as I sit in front of my computer in a quiet room surrounded by books, while my grandfather, who lives five miles from my home, is in bed sick. If it were not the labor of a homecare aide to help him--prepare meals, do the shopping, administer his medication--I would not have the time or space to write and do research. It is this low-income woman's labor that relieves me of my domestic responsibilities to complete my studies. Moreover, I am able to pursue a doctoral degree because I am single with no children and live at home; therefore I do not need to work full-time. In addition, I have no other time-consuming responsibilities that prevent me from fully focusing on my studies. I am in a privileged situation. To deny this would be untrue to my grandfather's aide and to other poor and working-class women who do not have the time, space, money, and education to spend their days--whether they wanted to or not--reading, thinking, and writing.

So should I and other low-income female intellectuals be the ones to uncover and articulate a poor and working-class women's standpoint? I respond with yet another question: If not us, then whom? Many poor and working-class women do not have the tools to discern a standpoint. Although they are agents of knowledge as my dissertation is dedicated to demonstrating, they do not have the critical thinking skills to examine, analyze, decode, and investigate their viewpoints. It is because I now have the time, space, money, and education to spend my days building upon these skills that I am in a position to uncover and write about a low-income women's standpoint. Yet it is my awareness of where I come from and of the struggles I have encountered that reminds me of the responsibility I have to my community.

66 This means that at this very moment as I write I am cognizant of my grandfather's aide who is probably preparing his dinner. It is not my responsibility as an organic intellectual to speak for her; no one can ever speak for her, except herself But it is my responsibility to include her in my research and writing, render her experiences visible, and recognize her everyday practices and routines as sites of self-definition and self-determination out of which she generates knowledge. Neither I nor any other low-income female intellectual can claim to fully understand the challenges she encounters as a low-paid working-class woman. Instead, we declare that indeed there is knowledge that emerges from her life and the lives of other poor and working-class women. We therefore place low-income women's experiences and immediate concrete world at the center of our analysis. Appropriation of Low-Income Women's Knowledge:

One of the reasons to place poor and working-class women at the center of analysis is to see that although they are not recognized as generators of resistant knowledge, their knowledge still informs scholars and academics. In particular, Collins comments on how a particular individual or group is credited for a knowledge claim that is shared and informed by others. She writes, "Many of my students think that questions concerning knowledge and power relations originated with French philosopher Michel

Foucault. However, in 1945, sociologist Robert Merton described this sociological subfield ..." (1998, xvili-xix). But why stop here? Who influenced or informed Merton's analysis of how those in power define what is legitimate knowledge and what is not, and therefore determine what history books we read, news coverage we hear, medical science we trust and support? Did a nonacademic individual or community influence his theory on knowledge and power relations? Perhaps Merton was the first, or one ofthe first, to write it down as an academic, but it is hard to believe that this has not been--dare I say it--common knowledge, ordinary ways of knowing, among those who lack power, who are systemically denied access to certain institutions and therefore do not acquire the

67 so-called right knowledge to have power?

Constancy Penley (1997), for example, argues that her white trash upbringing provided her insights into the complex relation between power and knowledge. She writes:

I cannot imagine any better preparation for grasping the intricacies of contemporary theory and cultural studies than negotiating a Florida cracker childhood and adolescence. I understood the gist of structuralist binaries, semiosis, the linguistic nature of the unconscious, the disciplinary microorganization of power, and the distinguishing operations of taste and culture long before I left the groves of central Florida for the groves of academe. (89-90)

It is important to point out the shoulder supporting Foucault, in this case Merton's. But upon whose shoulder is Merton standing? Could some unknown "cracker" be the fulcrum of his analysis? Perhaps we will never know but by establishing low-income women's standpoint we could see how scholars and academics are informed by, build knowledge upon, and theorize out of poor and working-class women's experiential bases of knowledge.

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofidentity (1990) is an example ofhow scholars appropriate low-income women's knowledge. Butler's writing is so dense with jargon that it is, with no exaggeration, completely inaccessible to a non-academic audience. 12 Yet, interestingly, her analysis of gender "performance" originates from working-class butch/femme and gay male communities. Even before the

12Joanna Kadi, who grew up in an Arab working-class household, writes in Thinking Class about her disappointment in and anger towards higher education. She mentions how she felt lost and intimidated by academic language. She notes, "Abstract and impersonal, these essays stood three times removed from concrete reality of working-class life .... My hunch solidified after examining academic attraction to and use of postmodern theory and language. This horrible mix of distorted language and casual appropriation of our ideas allowed me once and for all to dismiss the ideology about stupid workers. As far as I can tell, postmodern theoreticians say nothing new, but their inaccessible language makes it appear as though they do. For example, they're fascinated with the notion that multiple realities exist in society, and they've written and theorized extensively about this. Pul-lease. Everybody in my neighborhood, including the mechanics who had to sniff carbon monoxide in tiny, enclosed garages all day long, grasped that idea with no problem. We lived it. We had our reality, the bosses has theirs, and we understood them both .... But I've never seen postmodernists attribute these ideas to the people of color and/or working-class people who've lived and understood them for centuries" (1996, 46).

68 Stonewall riot in 1969 and many decades before queer studies, butch/femme couples and the transgendered and gay male communities have deconstructed gender, showing that it is not biologically determined but an erotic choice. Working-class poet and scholar Judith

Grahn explains, "Butchness attaches to the female gender certain qualities previously

'owned' by the stereotype for maleness: qualities of physical and intellectual strength, forthrightness, honesty, and assertiveness. These may have nothing to do with actual behavior of actual persons--these are attributes of designated roles" (1995, 19).

Furthermore, Grahn, self-identified as a butch, notes in one of her early relationships with a femme how she and her lover would both "perform" the role of the butch at different periods in their relationship when one of them needed to be assertive and take charge. She states, "It was as though we kept between us, trading him [butch identity] back and forth as needed" (19).

Butler builds her argument on gender performativity out ofbutcb/femme couples, like that of Grahn's. Yet, ironically, Butler's main interlocutor throughout Gender

Trouble is Michel Foucault, not working-class hutches and femmes in urban gay/lesbian and transgendered communities. She further isolates and alienates them by writing in high theory, removing any "trace" that working-class butch/femme couples influenced her scholarship. One of the women she alienates is Red Jordan Arobateau, a working-class transgendered female-to-male butch. Arobateau is a prolific low-brow writer who has written extensively on gender and eroticism over the past four decades. She has produced over forty books and short stories, yet she is still unknown beyond the San Francisco Bay area. She writes, "Ifreaders haven't heard of me, it's not any fault of mine. It's because after years of not being accepted in the '60s and '70s by straight publishing houses and later in the '70s and '80s by feminists .... I have suffered one ofthe most insidious forms of abuse of all--to be overlooked for half a lifetime" (1996, 3).

Lacking the "right" acclaimed credentials, Arobateau has no power within publishing companies or among academic circles to help publish her writing on gender and

69 sexuality. Christian (1990, 1986) affirms this dilemma of not having the right credentials or the so-called correct knowledge, commenting on how knowledge and power relations in academia have been determined by the endless race for esoteric theory. She notes that

"it is difficult to ignore this new takeover, since theory has become a commodity which helps determine whether we are hired or promoted in academic institutions--worse, whether we are heard at all" (1986, 52). Hence, this race for high theory renders invisible those, like Arobateau, who refuse or do not know how to speak and write in heavy academic language.

As illustrated with Butler's and Arobateau's writing, there is a deepening gap between high and low theory. Christian argues that this rift has become more severe in the past two decades, noting that "even as we moved the high, the low persisted, in fact moved further and further apart" (1997, 54). High theory creates a distance from the low--the immediate concrete world and everyday practices and routines. Heavy use of jargon and convoluted academic prose are ways to use the low as a study or object of analysis, while removing any traces of the low that scholars initially began with and built out o£ Jargon therefore is a result of scholarship being "intellectually housecleaned" from the low, from the messiness of contradictions and chaos that exist in the everyday world.

This type of disconnection from the everyday world also affects how low theory

(literature, poems, narratives, memoirs) is received in academia. It is becoming commodified and manufactured as 'hip' academic material that is severed from the day-to-day reality and struggles it grew out o£ Collins addresses this appropriation ofthe low. She writes,

Who could have anticipated how deeply the combination of racial desegregation and drugs, violence, and hopelessness in poor African-American neighborhoods would tear the very fabric of Black civil society? Who could have predicted that the texts of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and other prominent African-American women thinkers would be commodified, circulated, and often celebrated in institutions ofhigher education while African-American enrollment drops in those same institutions? (1998, 191)

70 The incorporation of the low into academia in a way that removes it from material and social conditions cleanses it of its messy contradictions and murky ambiguity. Thus,

Morrison's Beloved, as Collins indicates, can be read for an English course assignment without the student making a connection between the literature she/he is reading and the fact that there are more poor young black men in jail then in college. The student does not have to see this contradiction in her/his education.

A telling and egregious example of the complete commodification and depoliticization ofliterature is Laura Bush's literary symposium series at the White House.

In "White House Letters; Quietly, the First Lady Builds a Literary Room ofHer Own," journalist Elisabeth Bumiller notes how Mrs. Bush keeps herself busy inviting diverse writers, even those who are staunchly anti-Bush, to the White House, while her husband occupies himself with possible regime change in Iraq (2002, Al). For the symposium on

Western writer in October 2002, Mrs. Bush invited writer Patricia Nelson Limerick who, in her novels, is critical of wealthy and corrupt families who make their money from oil.

Immediately accepting the invitation, Limerick compliments Mrs. Bush for being so audacious and well-read in her selection ofbooks, admitting that "I did Mrs. Bush a terrible disservice thinking that maybe she didn't know" so much about literature. Yet what is absent in this article and in Limerick's comment is the political role oil has played in the Bush administration and in the Bush family. Instead, Mrs. Bush responds with her usual blase "good girl'' smile, stating: "There is nothing political about American literature." Indeed, literature that is removed from the everyday world is "intellectually housecleaned" from the messiness of contradictions and the murkiness of ambiguity. As a result, literature is rendered lifeless. Standpoint Allows the "Other" to Gaze Back:

Middle- and upper-class men and women can use low-income women's standpoint as a "perverse identity," as Harding (199lb) explains, to see through poor and working-class women's eyes how they perceive and experience the world. Perverse

71 identities make low-income women's standpoint available to others. Harding calls this borrowing identity "perverse" because it is not natural in that it works against the power structure that benefits the very people who are adopting this standpoint. For example, white women, adopting a perverse identity of black feminist thought, must speak out against the racist establishment that privileges them as white individuals. Anzaldua notes that as difficult as this process may be it is necessary for "one ... to leave the permanent boundaries of a fixed self, literally 'leave' oneself and see oneself through the eyes of the

Other" ( 1990b, 14 5) in order to achieve a more liberatory and ho listie position that reveals the full intricacy and interdependency of human relations. For example, white middle-class feminist theologian Carter Heyward is aware ofhow economic insecurity and oppression has a direct impact on an individual's emotiona~ spiritual, psychologic~ and physical well-being. She writes that when she was in recovery for alcoholism and bulimia,

I began to see that the 'cloud' hanging over me as a child was class injury. By class injury, I mean an amorphous blend of economic fear, insecurity, and shame that permeated middle-class U.S. cultures .... I began to understand this cloud and sadness not as an emotional problem that belonged uniquely to either my family or me but rather as a sign of our radical alienation--that is, a social, economic, and political problem that truly mystifies the emotiona~ spiritu~ and physical well-being of all segments of our society. (1995, 79)

Heyward is not claiming to fully understand what it means to be working class; nor does she pretend that she has encountered the same struggles that poor women daily confront.

What she highlights is class consciousness. By confronting the pain of class injury, she examines her life and sees how her awareness of class has affected and shaped her ways of thinking. Although middle-class, Heyward takes on what Harding ( 1991 b) refers to as a

"perverse identity" positioning herself in low-income women's standpoint.

Used as a perverse identity, low-income women's standpoint has the potential to subvert a master/servant relationship, allowing the servant as the Other to gaze back. By gazing back, Smith claims we see the world from the bottom up, instead of the top down.

She notes that the master's gaze sees only a servant that is an extension of himself and his

72 desires; however, in the servant's gaze, the entire social structure is revealed. "The invisibility of that relation from the master's standpoint is a product of the organization of the relation between master and servant. ... For the servant there is the master, the servant's labor producing the object, and there is the simplicity of the relation between the master and the object. The totality of the set of relations is visible" (1987, 79).

Privileging the gaze of the servant, Harding writes, "It starts thought in the perspective from the life of the Other, allowing the Other to gaze back 'shamelessly' at whomsoever he chooses" (199lb, 150). And this is why Williams's parents taught her to look

"shamelessly" back to assert her worth: "My parents were always telling me to look up at the world; ... to hold my ground; to insist on the right to my presence no matter what.

They told me that in this culture you have to look people in the eyes because that's how you tell them you're their equal" (1988, 11 ).

Allison, also rooted in poor and working-class women's standpoint, learned the power of the gaze from her mother. Allison writes,

'Never back down', my mama taught me. 'Never drop your eyes. People look at you like a dog, you dog them.' I had laughed and tried to emulate her, to stare back at hatred and stare down contempt. . . . Like mama, I learned to gaze at the world with my scars and outrage plainly revealed, determined not to hide, not to drop my head or admit defeat. It was good training for a child of the Southern working poor, better training for an adolescent lesbian .... (1994, 229-30)

Reclaiming and finding strength in her so-called blemished self as a white trash femme,

Allison stares back without blinking, affirming self-dignity and self-worth. Allison realizes that to stare back, to "dog them" with her gaze that demands equality and respect, she must be willing to look honestly at her life without sugarcoating it. To gaze back she must first gaze within and recognize and name the knowing from her own life.

Gazing back also declares that one refuses to be obliterated by the authority, language, and knowledge ofthe master. Williams (1991) explains that in a healthy and reciprocal relationship in which both individuals equally play the master and servant role in

73 the sense of giving and receiving, each person invests her 'self into the other to create

friendship and human bonding. Thus, a woman looking at her lover sees a piece of herself

and feels a communal bond in her lover's presence. Yet, Williams points out, in a

hierarchical power relationship the disadvantaged person always falls into the servant role, never being served by the master. These non-reciprocal, unbalanced, and unhealthy

relationships create psychic violence. The self that is invested in the master is not reflected

back with dignity and love; instead, the servant sees a reflection of the master and

eventually her image ofherselfbecomes that which is seen by the master. As a result, the

oppressor exists inside the oppressed's psyche equating the "I" with "your master" (66).

Thus by gazing back to claim self power and declare autonomy, the servant asserts

self-worth and protects herself from psychic violence. Her "I" remains intact.

And gazing back with dignity and pride, refusing to be a victim of psychic

violence, poor and working-class women are engaged with other male and female

writers/thinkers/activists of the middle and upper class who challenge and refute elite

power. As mentioned earlier, there is no such thing as a meta-standpoint, that is, no one

theory is complete and whole on its own. All standpoints should be engaged in an

ongoing dialogue challenging and borrowing from each other in the name of "justice

making" (Heyward 1995).

In constant dialogue with other diverse standpoints, low-income women's

standpoint shares its unwavering message: Look low. Looking low acknowledges the

passion, creativity, and determination in everyday resistance. This is expressed in the

documentary I Am Woman: Voices ofPower (2000). I was taken back by Alice Walker's

succinct yet powerful words about how black women (many of whom are from poor or

working-class backgrounds) think about those in power and what they are doing with it.

She says, "We have seen through so much ofthe culture, and we are not impressed."13

13Dr. Jane Caputi told me about this tape and especially about Alice Walker's remark (2 December 2002).

74 How true this is for many low-income women. They are not impressed with how the high is being used to reinforce elite power. Moreover, they are not impressed with how the high is severed from their everyday lives and material actualities, how the high has contributed little to the fight against systemic oppression, and how the high falsely claims to be above the messiness of contradictions and the murkiness of ambiguity. This is why low-income women's standpoint continues to insist that we look low. Conclusion:

The importance of describing poor and working-class women's standpoint can be expressed by Grahn's poem, "The Common Woman." She writes,

... the common woman is as common as good bread as common as when you couldn't go on but did. For all the world we didn't know we held in common all along the common woman is as common as the best of bread and will rise and will become strong--I swear it to you .... (1980, 73)

The ordinary and common are typically passed over as insignificant details in the background. Yet, as Grahn points out, the common woman, like bread, can rise and declare that she is not minor detail nor mere background support for the middle and upper

class. Rising from below, a low-income women's standpoint renders her resistant knowledge visible teaching us the value of and dignity in human struggle.

Working-class intellectual Mary Cappello contends that American society can learn

and benefit from low-income women's standpoint. She argues, "A working-class person's

daily thoughts, a shoemaker's poetry, may be just the resources higher education needs to

divine itself, to plumb the depths of its mechanism of exclusion, its refusal to know or to find marginal knowledge(s), in the best sense ofthe word, useful" (1995, 133; emphasis

I am indebted to her for helping me conceptualize just how brilliant and powerful Walker's comment is.

75 mine). "To divine itself," then, academia, as well as other educational institutions, must acknowledge that the low and high are both parts of being "truly" human; that without the low, the high provides only a partial view ofhuman relations and systems of power. And

"to divine itself," scholarship must expand to recognize and include low-income women's resistant knowledge generated from the common, everyday practices and routines of the low that inform how we as human beings love, live, hurt, fear, yearn, work, and exist with contradictions and ambiguity in our immediate concrete worlds.

76 CHAPTER TWO

The "Bad Girl" Who Defies White Middle-Class Femininity and Respectability

Introduction:

Writer Leora Tanenbaum notes how "bad girls" are sexual outcasts who are perceived as low-class. In particular, she explains how the label "slut" reinforces the image ofheterosexual "bad girls" as uncouth, undisciplined, and licentious. She writes,

Regardless ofher fumily's actual economic status, the 'slut' is thought to be 'low-class' and 'trampy,' the kind of girl who wears gobs ofmakeup and whose voluptuous curves threaten to explode the fabric of her tight clothes. She lacks the polish of the 'good' girl, who keeps her sexuality reigned in and discreet ... and who will one day marry a nice middle-class man and raise a nice middle-class family. The 'slut' is thought to be a girl without a future. (1999, xvi)

"Slut" is a derogatory name for heterosexual women who fail or refuse to uphold middle-class values and strive to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. Slut-bashing is meant to denigrate and humiliate them.

"Bad girls" also refers to women who do not practice conventionally acceptable sex and express proper sexuality. Feminist scholar Gayle Rubin in "Thinking Sex" argues that any sexual behavior that offends and defies white middle-class femininity and respectability is denigrated as low status. She states,

Individuals whose behavior stands high in this hierarchy [of sexual respectability] are rewarded with certified mental health, respectability, legality, social and physical mobility, institutional support, and material benefits. As sexual behaviors or occupations fall lower on the scale, the individuals who practice them are subjected to a presumption of mental illness, disreputability, criminality, restricted social and physical mobility, loss of institutional support, and economic sanctions. (1984, 279)

77 "Bad girls," stigmatized as deviant low-class women, encounter the wrath of society for not displaying and carrying out white middle-class femininity and respectability and are economically and socially punished as a result.

Low-income women, positioned as the sexual Other to white middle-class women, have historically been stigmatized as "bad girls." Working-class feminist scholar Beverley

Skeggs (1997) explains how the image ofworking-class women was socially constructed as the sexually active and morally corrupted Other to highlight the so-called purity and chastity of white middle-class women. Thus the emphasis on low-income women's hypersexualization was a political and social tool to reinforce the cult of domesticity that valorized white middle-class femininity and respectability. Skeggs argues, "At the core of all articulations ofthe working class was the discursive construct ofthe ... middle-class family .... Observation and interpretation of the sexual behaviour of working-class women on the basis of their appearance was central to the production of middle-class conceptualization" (5).

Some low-income women refuse to feel humiliated and disempowered by being

cast as the sexual Other. They proudly identify with their "bad girl" image and attempt to

claim empowerment as sexual outlaws. As "bad girls" who assert sexual autonomy and pleasure, they refuse to be seen as victims. Their insistence on affirming female sexuality

as powerful, pleasurable, and autonomous shows the tension between sexual abuse and

exploitation and sexual pleasure and power in women's lives and in the women's

movement. That is, low-income women's "bad girl" personae argue that the body of feminist literature on female sexuality should not solely focus on exploitation and violence;

sexual pleasure and autonomy must also be recognized and celebrated within feminist

scholarship. White working-class lesbian activist Amber Hollibaugh expresses this, stating that "a feminism that does not speak to sexual pleasure has little to offer women in the here and now" (qtd. in Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson 1983, 468).

78 Anthropologist Carole Vance contends that "bad girls" challenge feminists to see that "[w]omen's actual sexual experience is more complicated, more difficult to grasp, more unsettling" (1984, 5) than to perceive women as victims of sex. Further, she states:

"The truth is that the rich brew of our experience contains elements of pleasure and oppression, happiness and humiliation. Rather than regard this ambiguity as confusion or false consciousness, we should use it as a source-book to examine how women experience

sexual desire, fantasy, and action" (6). Therefore, women should not "wait until a zone of

safety is established to begin to explore and organize for pleasure" and "cede it as an

arena, to give it up, and to admit that we are weaker and more frightened than our

enemies ever imagined" (24 ). The "bad girl" persona is a constant reminder that

"feminism must reach deeply into women's pleasure and draw on this energy'' (24).

Poor and working-class women's standpoint theory shows that low-income female

performing artists and writers who identify with the "bad girl" image refuse to sanitize and

refine the female body and female sexuality. Instead, they attempt to assert and affirm

their sexuality through their art, writing, and lifestyle, being "bad girls" who shock, upset,

and challenge middle-class notions of proper sexual behavior. They "play" and signify on

the hypersexualization and on the sexual demonization oflow-class women. By candidly,

sometimes even vulgarly, discussing sex and bodily secretions, such as menstrual blood,

vaginal fluid, feces, and urine, sexually resistant poor and working-class female artists and

writers affirm the power oftheir own sexuality.

Moreover, their lyrics, words, images, and behavior are provocative and

confrontational so as to expose female sexuality as powerful and bold. In chapter two, I

examine how blues and hip-hop, the "white trash" female persona, sexual perversity, and

butch/femme relationships are identified by low-income female artists and writers as sites

of resistance against middle-class femininity and respectability where they attempt to

assert their sexuality, affirm sexual pleasure, and claim sexual autonomy as "bad girls." In

addition, I look at the contradictions in their everyday resistance and at the structural

79 limitations they encounter as women in a male-dominated society. Although I distinguish between their acts of resistance as liberatory and non-liberatory, it is not my intention to prove that low-income female artists and writers can or cannot successfully celebrate and claim their sexuality in their everyday resistance. This is contrary to low-income women's standpoint theory that shows that resistance is not inherently liberatory and that one form of resistance can be liberatory in one setting and non-hberatory in another situation. Blues and Hip-Hop:

Working-class black female sexuality is expressed and celebrated in blues and hip-hop. bell hooks, a working-class black feminist intellectual, contends, "Contemporary popular music is one ofthe primary cultural locations for discussions ofblack sexuality"

(1992, 63). Moreover, black feminist scholar and activist Angela Davis (1998) argues that

African-American music has always played a critical role in the black community, creating

a public space in which pertinent issues such as institutional racism and sexism and sexual roles and autonomy are discussed. Further, Davis points out that a salient characteristic of

African-American music is its dialogic nature; that is, music, acting as a public forum for

its community, provides an ongoing dialogue addressing the needs and concerns of its people. A song, hymn, or chant, for example, may be sung by an individual, but it is not

an isolated piece existing and understood as a singular work; it is another voice, another

view, another comment among many in an ongoing dialogue. This communal voice is

known as versioning, the invocation of other voices to help formulate and articulate what

one needs to say (Roberts 1996, 143). Versioning plays a rich and historical role in the

African-American community; it is the social process supporting a communal dialogue.

Blues and hip-hop are a part of this vast and historical conversation; they are an artistic

space for working-class African Americans, in particular for working-class black women, to discuss sexuality.

Blues opposes the respectable, desexualized facade ofthe emerging middle-class black community; it provides an alternative view to and understanding of sex and sexuality

80 as a private, quiet, and discreet act by celebrating the physicality and pleasure of sexuality.

Blues is aptly described by Alice Walkers' character Shug Avery in The Color Purple who says that "folks git to thinking about a good screw" when they listen to blues. "That's the reason they call what us sing the devil's music. Devils love to fuck" (1982, 120). Blues also boldly explores and celebrates taboo subjects, such as female sexuality, homosexuality, and hard partying and drinking. Davis writes, "Counter to this

[middle-class sexuality and respectability] has been the historical affmnation of sexuality as a part of working-class oppositional consciousness in the black community. This was a defining characteristic of women's blues" (1998, 131 ). As a result, during the 1920s at the height of Harlem Renaissance, blues was criticized as childish, raw, and primitive by middle- and upper-class blacks.

Moreover, black female blues artists helped carve out a space for

African-American men and women to discuss, debate, and negotiate sexual roles. For

four hundred years during slavery, African Americans had little, if any, control over their

sexual lives. With the end of slavery, "sexuality," as Davis notes, "was one of the most

tangible domains in which emancipation was acted upon and through which its meanings

were expressed" (4). Women's blues has expanded the discussion directly addressing the

sexual needs and longings of black women.

Black female rap is musically and thematically a continuation of women's blues.

Hip-hop artist Queen Latifah affirms this, saying, "We can go way back to the roaring

'20s, to black women blues singer. Blues is rap, just singing it" ( qtd. in Rose 1990, 16).

Moreover, Tricia Rose, a professor of Africana history who comes from a black working-class background, notes: "Similar to women's blues, they [black female hip-hop

songs] are caustic, witty, and aggressive warnings directed at men and at other women who might be seduced by them in the future" (1994, 155). Like women's blues, where

"Gertrude Rainey and Bessie Smith helped carve out new space in which black working-class people could gather and experience themselves as a community" (Davis

81 1998, 137), black female hip-hop artists are also carving out a space for low-income black women to assert and affirm their sexuality, fully engaged in this dialogic relationship. It is a form of versioning in which black female rappers invoke other voices, in several cases words and lyrics of sexist male rappers, to defuse what they have said in an attempt to reclaim those misogynist word(s) as a form of empowerment. For example, Tanisha

Michelle and Lyndah ofBytches With Problems (BWP), sometimes referred to as Bytches

With Attitude, have reclaimed the word "bitch" that several male rappers use to refer to black women. By respelling the word "bitch" with a "y," they have declared ownership of this word as an indication that "black women rappers signifY on heterosexual male desire .

. . . They are challenging patriarchal assumptions that interpret open display of female-controlled sexuality as a threat to male privilege and power" (Rose 1994, 173).

Hence, through versioning and expressing their sexuality, many black women hip-hop artists "strut their stuff," exposing and asserting their sexuality in a constant dialogue with male rappers.

The Dialogic Play of Working-Class Black Female Artists:

We see this dialogic play in Roxanne Shante's song "Roxanne's Revenge," written and recorded in 1989 in response to fellow male rappers UTFO's release "Roxanne

Roxanne." UTFO's song is based on a true experience in which a beautiful woman named

Roxanne "dissed" the crew members ofUTFO. They accuse her of being "stuck up,"

"[c]ause she wouldn't give a guy like me no rap." They tried to smooth talk her "[b]ut stuck up Roxanne paid me no mind I ... she stood me up, Roxanne, Roxanne." In response, Shante rapped her version ofRoxanne, whom she portrayed as being unimpressed by UTFO, stating in a mockery tone: "I met this dude with the name of a hat I I didn't give him no rap I but then he got real mad I And he got tired I You know, if he worked for me he would be fired." Shante's Roxanne declares her sexual independence, letting it be known that she is in charge ofher sexuality, choosing how, when, and with whom she will express her sexual desires.

82 Likewise, we see the same dialogic play between Salt 'N' Pepa and Doug E. Fresh and Rick Slick. Responding to Fresh and Slick's "The Show," rapping about using women for their sexual pleasure, Salt 'N' Pepa assert: "Sandy, we'll be breaking hearts, ya know I . .. But Douglas and Richie won't like it (So?) I Come on then, let's stop the show." And they go on rapping about a smooth talker dressed in Gucci suit with a fake gold tooth who thought he could bulldoze any woman he wanted, but instead he was told,

"Stupid, dude!" and how he "hurt two of my family, you won't get another."

Rose (1994) contends that black female rappers are not reacting to what male rappers put out; instead, they are declaring a space for themselves to assert and claim their sexuality. She writes,

By paying close attention to female rappers, we can gain some insight into how young African-American women provide for themselves a relatively safe free-play zone where they creatively address questions of sexual power, the reality of truncated economic opportunity, and the pain of racism and sexism. (146)

For example, Queen Latifah's hit "Ladies First" declares the power of black women. She asserts, "Some think we can't flow (can't flow) I Stereotypes they got to go (got to go) I

I'm gonna mess around and flip the scene into reverse I With what? I With a little touch of ladies first." In the video, sung along with fellow rapper Monie Love, portraits and video clips of five powerful black women activists, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Madam

C.J. Walker, Angela Davis, and Winnie Mandela, are shown in the background, and throughout the video we see black resistance inspired by African-American women.

Queen Latifah and other black female hip-hop artists are building upon their blues mothers, namely Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, to articulate female sexual independence.

In "Young Woman Blues," Smith sang about women's need to explore without being tied down to domestic obligations. She stated, "No time to marry, no time to settle down I

I'm a young woman and ain't done runnin' 'round" ( qtd. in Davis 1998, 17). As Davis points out, Smith was challenging the cult of domesticity, daring to envision another life, one full of adventure and sexual autonomy. Ma Rainey also asserted women's equal

83 footing with men in declaring a life that is full of :fun and pleasure. In "Barrel House

Blues," she repositioned black women as the equal counterpart of black men: "Papa likes his sherry, mama likes her port I Papa likes to shimmy, mama likes to sport I Papa likes his bourbon, mama likes her gin I Papa likes his outside women, mama likes her outside men"

( qtd. in Davis 22).

Homosexuality and Black Female Artists:

It must be noted, however, that black female hip-hop artists part from their blues mothers on the issue of homosexuality. Women rappers almost exclusively focus on heterosexual relationships and on sexual politics between men and women.

Homosexuality is still treated as a "taboo" issue within the hip-hop community. 14

Although Queen Latifah has said numerous times that the black community needs to fight sexism, racism, and homophobia collectively, her songs and music videos, like other black female rappers, are predominantly focused on heterosexual courting. Yet in the past five to six years there have been small acts of resistance against homophobia by a few black female hip-hop artists. Queen Latifah's songs, for example, may deal with heterosexuality, but as an artist she has consistently refused to be straightjacketed by the fear of homosexuality. She joined Melissa Etheridge and k.d. lang in a benefit concert for gays and lesbians. She even played a lesbian character, Cleo, in F. Gary Gary's 1996 film Set It

14Homosexuality challenges and threatens the myth around black masculinity in hip-hop culture that glorifies and celebrates black male virility and dominance. Part of this hypermasculine creation in the hip-hop culture is a response to a white racist society that fears black men. In addition, writer George Nelson in Hip Hop America (1998) argues that homosexuality is not "authentically" African (and African-American); thus he perceives homosexuality as an European perversion that is infiltrating black communities. Furthermore, he argues that the commercial success of rap music has resulted in its "emasculation," undermining black manhood. Unfortunately, Nelson's remarks highlights how rap is still associated with black heterosexuality and black masculinity despite the many talented women rappers who have emerged in the past decade. Tricia Rose writes, "To define rap's emergence as a reassertion of black manhood not only affirms the equation of male heterosexuality with manhood, but also renders sustained and substantial female pleasure and participation in hip hop invisible or impossible" (1994, 151). Hence, integrating homosexual artists within mainstream hip-hop culture is seen by many as "emasculating" and "feminizing" black men who are perceived to be in danger of being "emasculated" by a white racist society.

84 Off. And when she was asked in an interview about her views on homosexuality, she responded: "It's normal to me and my family. Everybody wants to act like they don't know anybody gay, but they do. First, they've got somebody in their family, probably, so don't even trip like it don't exist" (qtd. in Mayo 2001, 58).

There is another "Queen" who also refuses to be boxed in by heterosexist norms:

Queen Pen. Her song "Girlfriend," released in 1998, is the first rap song that openly and shamelessly deals with lesbianism. In "Girlfriend," Queen Pen raps about how a man's

"girl" may be his, but last night she was her "girl." She sings, "So while you [male lover] be yappin' and talkin to your friends I ... she slid the number, what you gettin mad at me for I she said she was single when she closed my car door I . .. And ifi choose to jerk her off then it's all on me I See you claimed that was your girl, well that's not how it seems."

Although the song breaks ground in the hip-hop community by its obvious reference to

lesbianism, it still is not completely liberated from sexist views on how lovers act in

relationships. By Queen Pen referring to her one-night "girlfriend" as her "girl" who was

some man's "girl" the night before, she reifies the sexist image of the man or the male role

being dominant and the woman or female role as submissive. Thus, low-income women's

standpoint theory shows the complexity and ambiguity in Queen Pen's resistance to the

male-dominated and heterosexist hip-hop culture. Her resistance is both liberatory and

non-liberatory: she challenges heterosexism and homophobism while supporting sexism in

the black community.

Since the song's debut, Queen Pen, a mother of three young children, has been

asked incessantly about her sexuality. Like Queen Latifah, she has remained evasive,

telling journalist Laura Jamison that her sexuality is no one's business, although

nonchalantly stating that she occasionally patronizes lesbian bars where women always try

to pick her up (1998, A34). In contrast, their blues mothers, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith,

openly revealed their bisexuality. For example, Ma Rainey boldly explored her attraction

to and lust for women in her song '"Prove It on Me Blues." She sang,

85 They said I do it, ain't no body caught me Sure gotto prove it on me Went out last night with a crowd of my friends They must've been women 'cause I don't like no men It's true I wear a collar and a tie ... Wear my clothes just like a fan Talk to the gals just like any old man. ( qtd. in Davis 39)

Ma Rainey addressed poignant and controversial issues, especially for her era about lesbianism and on butch/femme roles. She alluded to dressing up in a suit, talking to her women like a man. Hence, Ma Rainey not only subverted the good girl/bad girl dichotomy, but challenged male/female gender roles. Ma Rainey was not alone in her gender-bending exploration. Blues singer Gladys Bentley was known during the 1920s and 1930s as ''Harlem's favorite 'bulldagger"' (Clayton 1996, 51). "Wearing box ties,

Etonjackets, and short straight hair, Gladys created a sensation wherever she went" (51).

She was as effective in challenging static notions and myopic understanding of gender and sexuality as Ma Rainey. I will explore working-class butch/femme and gendered roles later in the chapter.

Claiming the Black Female Body as Erotic Power:

Although black female rappers are extremely reticent about addressing gender-bending issues and lesbianism, they have extended the role of women's blues by exploring and celebrating the black female body. Many hip-hop women artists identuy the heterosexual black female body as a site of erotic power, particularly the black butt. 15 For example, Salt 'N' Pepa take pride in their black bottoms. In the rap song "Shake Your

Thang (It's Your Thing)," they tell black women to shake their asses as much as they want

15hooks (1992) notes that the black female body has been hypersexualized and mocked as the sexual Other. The best known case, and perhaps one of the most egregious, is the sexual commodification of a native South African woman Saartjie Bartman. Known by white Europeans as the Hottentot Venus, Bartman was portrayed as a sexual freak during the early nineteenth century who was forced to parade naked in circuses in England and France to display her large buttocks and genitalia. After she died in 1815, her sexual organs were put on display and remained showcased until several years ago. And it was not until the summer of2002 that her body was finally brought back to South Africa for a burial.

86 because they have every right to do so if they wish, noting that no one owns their bodies or can dictate how they express their sexuality. Moreover, they are affirming the sexual power in the black buttocks; they are sexual, dynamic, and playful. Salt 'N' Pepa sing,

"It's my thing, and I'll swing it the way I feel/ With a little seduction and some sex appeal

I . .. It's my thing and I shake it crazy I Don't try and tell me how to party I It's my dance, yup, and it's my body I The shirt I wear may be low cut I My jeans fit nice, it shows off my butt."

Further, in the music video of"Shake Your Thang," Salt 'N' Pepa look directly at male viewers in the dance club where they are seductively moving their asses, noting: "A guy touch my body? I just put him in check." Later, they stare directly and proudly at male police officers after they get arrested for indecent behavior, smiling and laughing flirtatiously at the officers during the mug shots. They arrest the male gaze by shamelessly gazing back. And indeed they succeed in replacing the surveilling and authoritarian male gaze with the shameless female gaze when they are released from jail, in complete control oftheir bodies and sexuality. Salt 'N' Pepa continue shaking and flaunting their black butts, declaring their sexual autonomy and right to sexual pleasure by looking straight into the gaze of men without cowering. This assertion of sexual independence is articulated by

Salt in the People magazine, announcing: "We're feminists ...We're doing something that only guys are expected to do and do in' it RIGHT!" ( qtd. in Roberts 1996, 150).

"In song lyrics," hooks notes, '"the butt' is talked about in ways that attempt to challenge racist assumptions that suggest it is an ugly sign of inferiority, even as it remains a sexualized sign" (1992, 63). She acknowledges how "the 'butt' could be once again worshipped as an erotic seat of pleasure and excitement" (64). Feminist scholar Sandra

Lieb points out that blues singer Gertrude (Ma) Rainey resisted white standards of beauty and middle-class African-American notions of respectability in her music, shamelessly referring to her big black body as a site of pleasure. Lieb observes how being shameless

"Ma Rainey could be both big and sexy, both maternal and erotic" (1981, 170). Ma

87 Rainey celebrated and affirmed the erotic power of her black body in her song and dance

"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom." Lieb recalls how Ma Rainey would dance wildly, gyrating and shaking her bottom as the male chorus voice would sing "Ah, boys, I'm gonna I show you the best. Ma Rainey's gonna show I you her black bottom!" Ma Rainey would dance and sing, "I done showed y' all my black bottom I You ought to learn that dance. I 'Ma

Rainey's Black Bottom." Like Salt 'N' Pepa, who declare they will "shake their thang" where and when they please, so did their predecessor Ma Rainey, owning her sexuality.

Further, this dance and song is about initiating boys into sex, how Ma Rainey taught black boys how to handle and please women's black bottoms.

Ma Rainey also directly and unambiguously stated her sexual needs and desires in her blues song "Down in the Basement." In this song, she let her male lover know that she was not satisfied with all that "highbrow stuff"; she wanted to go low to achieve sexual pleasure. She sang:

I've gotta man, piano hound, Plays anything that's goin' around When he plays that highbrow stuff, I shout, 'Brother, that's enough!' So take me to the basement, that's as low as I can go, I want something low-down, Daddy, want it nice and slow, I will shimmy from A to Z, if you'll play that thing for me. ( qtd. in Lieb 1981, 146)

"Low" here is associated with cunnilingus and vaginal sex, which shifts the focus from the phallus to the vagina and clitoris; it is also, as Lieb points out, "carr[ying] a connotation of literal earthiness: being close to the ground, and thus to physical life ... "(146).

"Low-down" makes a connection between women's genitalia and earth, revealing the eros in the sheer physicality of pleasure and life force in both.

Likewise, Ida Cox, singing "One Hour Man," asserted her sexual demands, insisting that she did not want a "one minute papa," but a man who took his time to sexually please her. She forewarned a future male lover about what she expected,

88 accepting nothing less than a "one hour man." She sang, "Set your alarm clock papa, one hour that's proper" (qtd. in Carby 1990, 247). Moreover, she challenged a man's sexual role taking the initiative by making all the moves, insisting that "[h]e needn't ever take the lead, I Cause I work on the long time plan." Black feminist scholar Hazel Carby notes how Cox, through her music, "undermine[d] mythologies of phallic power and establishe[d] a series of woman-centered heterosexual demand" (247) asserting her sexual needs and desires.

Ma Rainey's and Ida Cox's progeny Bytches With Problems (BWP) are also shameless in expressing their sexuality in their 1991 debut record, The Bytches, with provocative songs as "Is the Pussy Still Good?," "Cotex,~' "Two-Minute Brother," and

"Teach 'Em." Known for their forceful and raw attack on misogynist male rappers who valorize the penis, BWP acknowledge and demand female sexual fulfillinent. In "Teach

'Em," they decenter the penis as the site of pleasure and replace it with the erogenous zones of the female body. As articulated in Ma Rainey's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,"

BWP teach their male lovers the art of cunnilingus. They sing, "Make like Moses and part my pussy like the red sea I and slide that fat tongue inside me!" And when their red sea is not parted and stroked and appreciated, BWP, invoking Cox's "One Hour Man," vociferously responds in their song, "Two-Minute Brother": "Is this all I get? Is this

supposed to be good dick? Damn!" Again, without any hesitation, they let it be known that women have sexual needs and desires, and a two-minute intercourse, resulting in premature ejaculation, simply will not be tolerated.

Lil' Kim and White Racist Images ofBlack Women:

Lil' Kim is as shameless as BWP in her preference for cunnilingus. Engaged in a dialogic play with other male rappers who touch, play, and sing about their penis with little, if any repercussions, Lil' Kim boldly responds in her mockery song "Suck My Dick," insisting that her little dick (clit) be sucked too, forcing them to acknowledge female sexuality. "All I wanna do is get my pussy sucked .... Just lay me on this bed and give

89 me some head." In particular, we see this dialogic play between Lil' Kim and Dr. Dre. In his 1993 release, "Bitches Ain't Shit," Dr. Dre raps about his right to a blowjob as "[l]ong as my muthafuckin' pockets was fat I I didn't give a fuck where the bitches was at." Lil'

Kim, proudly calling herself"Bitch," responds in her album Notorious B./. G., in the song

"Queen Bitch Part II," declaring: "Wanna battle? I Better call an end to all that shit I You legit? Spit a bar I What? See I won the show." She insists that ifDr. Dre wants a blowjob, then he better first give one to his ladies: "I'mma tell you know, just like I told you last year I Niggas ain't stickin' unless they lick the kitten, huh I Too many bitches just be

licking the dick."

Indeed Lil' Kim in Notorious B./. G. asserts her right to sexual pleasure. Yet low-income women's standpoint theory shows the messy contradictions and murky

ambiguity in this assertion. It underscores that these graphic and sex-saturated lyrics may not be about sexual empowerment and that Lil' Kim may not have control over her "bad

girl" image. The complexity and contradictions ofLil' Kim's resistance raise the following

questions. Is she willingly playing into sexist and racist stereotypes by enacting the role of

"Jezebel," the sexually potent but denigrated black woman? Even if she is aware of how

African-American women have historically been portrayed as lustful by white racists

institutions, especially by the media, does Lil' Kim still have any control over the

representation of black women in the political economy? Finally, can she be sexually

empowered playing the role of the "Jezebel"?

Analyzing sexist and racist images of black women, working-class African­

American feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins (1991) contends that black female agency

was historically intertwined in a national and international political economy and central in the construction and reification of whiteness. Therefore, Collins argues that black female

sexuality must always be contextualized within "the historical legacy of the triad of pornography, prostitution, and the institutionalized rape ofBlack women" (179). As such, we see the denigration and exploitation of African-American women portrayed as sexual

90 animals during slavery who were displayed on auction blocks for white men to observe, touch, and buy (Collins 1991; Davis 1974; Walker 1981).

Moreover, Davis argues that during slavery African-American women were not seen as feminine working in the fields side by side with black men. She writes that ''the black women had to be released from the chains of the myth of femininity .... In order to function as a slave, the black woman had to be annulled as woman, that is, as woman in her historical stance of wardship under the entire male hierarchy. The sheer force of things rendered her equal to her man" (1974, 7). Stripped then from womanhood, black women were positioned in opposition to white women by a white racist society to foil the desired traits offragility, purity, and genteelness ofwhite middle-class femininity.

African-American scholar Bonnie Thorton Dill confirms this, stating that these images of

black womanhood still stand true today. She writes, "A dominant image of black women as 'beasts of burden' stands in direct contrast to American ideals of womanhood: fragile, white, and not too bright" (1979, 553). Hence, black womanhood, conceived as the negation of white middle-class femininity and respectability, is still looked upon as an

impure sexual stain to highlight the purity and sexual naivete of white women.

Aware, then, of how black female sexuality and womanhood is still grounded in

''the historical legacy ofthe triad of pornography, prostitution, and institutionalized rape"

(Collins 1991, 179), bell hooks, in her essay "Madonna" (1992), argues that in a white

supremacist, capitalist society, non-white female artists, like Lil' Kim, have more confining and restrictive artistic roles in which they can express their sexuality than their white female counterparts. For example, the singer Madonna, who grew up in a working-class

Italian-American family, identifies with the economic, social, and sexual struggles within the working-class African-American community, and therefore appropriates and plays on black culture to embody the sexual persona of the oversexed black body to resist white middle-class femininity and respectability. Yet after a decade of"being" and celebrating the role of the hypersexualized Other, Madonna can still play the role of a respectable

91 woman. Insisting on being called Mrs. Richie, Madonna is the wife of a blonde haired, blue-eyed British film director Guy Richie and mother of a blonde haired, blue-eyed little

British boy and a half-Latina daughter whose Latina roots are being purified and whitewashed at an exclusive and elite British school. Many may remember Madonna for her provocative videos, particular]y her crotch-groping masturbating gestures, but she can still be today Mrs. Richie, the well-behaved and respected Anglo-Saxon wife and mother.

That is, she can be a late '80s, early '90s "bad girl" embracing her working-class

"hot-blooded" Mediterranean identity and embodying a sexual black persona and a late

'90s and early twentieth-first century "good girl" displaying her borrowed Anglo-Saxon self

Lil' Kim and other working-class black artists do not have white femininity to fall back on. Moreover, historian Nell Painter contends, "The sexually promiscuous black girl

... represents the mirror image of the white woman on the pedestal. Together, white and black women stand for woman as Madonna and as whore" (1992, 209). Low-income women's standpoint theory underscores that Lil' Kim's "Jezebel" image may be reinscribing black women as sexually promiscuous and perverse beings who possess uncontrolled animal lust that contrasts with the purity and chastity of white middle-class femininity and respectability. As such, Lil' Kim may be unwittingly, and perhaps even unwillingly, trapping herself in the "bad girl" image that has historically been associated with black female sexuality.

Furthermore, feminist critic Connie Gaines Hayes points out that although Lil' Kim is shameless in demanding sexual pleasure, declaring her sexuality as boldly and proudly as male rappers, this does not mean that Lil' Kim has succeeded in claiming an equal space in the music industry with male artists. Nor does it mean that she has successfully subverted the good girl/bad girl dichotomy and liberated herself from the Madonna/whore dichotomy achieving sexual autonomy. It is a man's world, she admits, and the phallus is still at the center. She writes,

92 Men can talk anyway they want, conduct themselves in any manner they want, date, abuse and misuse any woman they want and still be considered a man or should I say 'the man.' ... Once a woman dates, abuses and misuses a man, wears provocative clothing, lets vulgar profanities slip from her ladylike lips, she is quickly labeled a ho, skeezer or just plain stank. (1997, A3)

And this is why, Hayes remarks, Lil' Kim must watch out for herself because "you are being stereotyped by your own selection oflyrics" (A3). Hayes concludes then that Lil'

Kim and other female rappers cannot behave the same as men because they lack male privilege. Men will still get respect regardless of their sexual behavior, women simply will not.

Poor and working-class women's standpoint theory highlights all these contradictions in Lil' Kim's acts of sexual resistance. It does not deny that Lil' Kim's everyday resistance is non-h'beratory and problematic; however, this does not mean that she fails to get sexual pleasure and satisfaction from her resistance. Nor does this mean that she is automatically void of sexual empowerment. Rather, low-income women's standpoint theory underlines that both positions--that ofLil' Kim, Bytches With Attitude, and Ma Rainey who claim sexual empowerment by embracing their "bad girl" personae and that of Collins, Walker, and Hayes who contend that the black female body continues to be objectified, sexualized, and eroticized for (white) male pleasure--have valid points. "White Trash" Female Persona:

Working-class scholars Analee Newitz and Matt Wray (1997) contend that the label "white trash" is both a racialized and class-laden one. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the height of the eugenics movement, "white trash" referred to poor whites who lived in the impoverished rural areas of U.S. They were seen as a separate and inferior people within the white community. The U.S. Eugenics Records Office from the

1880s to 1920s categorized them as "genetic defects" who were "incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy, and stupid" (2).

93 "White trash" no longer refers to only the poor whites in rural America. Since the urban explosion after the Second World War, sociologist John Hartigan, Jr. (1997) notes that poor whites living in urban America have been labeled as "white trash." Analyzing

"white trash" in Detroit, he notes: "'White trash' is not simply a stereotype or a false and mistaken preconception. Rather, it delineates a discourse of difference whereby class identities are relationally formulated. The social differences embodied by white trash do not exist in a vacuum; they are elements that the white middle class relies upon to distinguish themselves from the lower orders: 'We are not that"' (51). "White trash," therefore, refers to just not any rural or urban poor white person, but to the poorest of the poor within the white community who lack social respect and cultural dignity. They are usually depicted as those who reside in dilapidated homes and trailers with run-down cars parked on their unkempt lawns. And they are seen as spending idle hours sitting on their front door steps drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon. They are the bane of the neighborhood with their so-called loud and uncouth manners. Thus, Hartigan, Jr. points out that "white trash," as a class marker, "locates 'those people' both in their homes and in the imaginary of more 'respectable whites"' (50).

"White trash" stereotypes as sexually promiscuous, hard drinkers, and foul-mouthed, continue to reverberate in today's popular culture. 16 Yet, in "White Hot

l6The television network CBS is in the process of developing a reality show, tentatively called The Real Beverly Hill Hillbillies, that is based on the 1960s ''The Beverly Hillbillies" sitcom. CBS producers will transport a poor white "hillbilly'' family from an Appalachian community into in a rich and luxurious home in a plush California neighborhood, and fihn how they adjust to their new socially and economically privileged lifestyle. Outraged by this, novelist John O'Brien, who grew up in a working-class Appalachian community in West Virginia, writes in a New York Times Op-ed piece how the vicious stereotypes of poor rural whites are being supported by a major network. Moreover, he explains that these stereotypes were created by the rich and powerful industrialists in the late 19th century who wanted to control rural land for coal and other natural resources. To justifY their dominance over the local people, the rich industrialists claimed that the rural people were "white savages" who needed to be civilized. He notes, "Many in the southern Appalachians are certainly poor, but the poverty grew out of the vagaries of the coal market and outsiders' control of resources. Industrialists and others, however, blamed the people for their own poverty, and this myth continues because it is entertaining to the Americans beyond the mountains. Some of the region's middle-class writers continue to churn out Gothic hillbilly tales, the descendants oflocal-color stories" (2003, A29).

94 Trash" (1994), journalist Tad Friend argues that the early 1990s marked a decade of celebrating, instead of condemning, ''white trash" behavior. There have been a series of

''white trash" televisions programs, such as Married. . . With Children, the Simpsons,

and Roseanne, and popular culture icons, such as Amy Fischer, Tonya Harding, and

Howard Stern, who symbolize America's increasing interest in and attraction to ''white trash" culture. Friend states, "White-trash culture commands to 'squeal like a pig!' And

we're oinking" (26).

Moreover, Friend contends that although "the label white trash has been applied to

selective members of the white underclass--a rapidly growing group," today, "white trash

best encapsulates the galloping sleaze that has overrun both rural and urban America.

And it's also the phrase that best gives voice to the stifled longing of the well-to-do, who

covet what they perceive as the spontaneous authenticity of the poor" (24). For example,

Friend quotes film producer John Waters who glorifies white trash lifestyle, stating: "In

the summer in Baltimore, whole families live outside on their front steps. They watch TV

in their bras and underwear, and if someone comes by, they give them the finger. I'm jealous of their confidence and their alarming taste--they're just freer than I am; they don't

worry as much" (24). Waters depicts an idyllic insouciance among the poor white

underclass. Very little bothers them, he argues. And as untouchables, they are

"untouched" by the demands and values of middle-class society. They have not been

corrupted by money and ego. Thus, according to Waters, to be ''white trash" is to be

authentically "hip" and countercultured. To be called "white trash," then, among the rich

and beautiful, may very well be a compliment suggesting that one is outside the greed and

artificiality of money and glamour. Within this context, ''white trash" identity is used as a

form of social power.

Waters romanticizes ''white trash" culture, failing to acknowledge how poverty can harden and destroy an individual. Low-income women who identifY themselves as

''white trash" know that there is nothing romantic and idyllic about their daily struggles.

95 Yet they attempt to reclaim "white trash" as an identity of pride and honor to publicly announce to society that they are not inferior to and crushed by the socially respected middle class. They play and signifY on these putative self-empowering notions of"white trash," claiming to be untouched and uncorrupted by middle-class values. They assert their "bad girl" image and wear their "white trash" identity as a badge of pride. As "white trash," they publicly and loudly refuse to uphold white middle-class femininity and respectability by unsettling and disturbing those around them in their attempt to claim sexual autonomy. They are brash and bold to convey to the world that no one owns their bodies and controls their sexuality.

Roseanne Barr, as herself and as her television character, is one such low-income woman who takes pride in her "white trash" identity. In the successful sitcom named after her, aired from 1988 to 1997, she plays Roseanne Conner who shocks and entertains

American viewers with her "in-your-face," and, at times, vulgar statements and behavior.

She is anything but respectable and feminine: she is overweight, poorly dressed in baggy,

Kmart-style clothes, and obnoxiously loud. She epitomizes the opposite of a respectable middle-class disciplined body, which is presently recognized as thin, trimmed, and evenly tanned. Skeggs notes how "[c]lass is always coded through bodily dispositions: the body is the most ubiquitous signifier of class" (1997, 82). For example, Roseanne's defiance of white middle-class femininity and respectability is demonstrated with her loud, heavy body in the opening credits for the early series. It shows Roseanne surrounded by her family sitting around the kitchen table scrambling chaotically for Chinese food from several open white cartons, and then we hear Roseanne laugh loudly as she reads the message from her fortune cookie.

Her "white trash" identity is at the forefront of each episode: she snorts, belches, howls, spits, and swears. She is nothing like other pretty, well-trimmed, and respected middle-class mothers and wives on television. Writer and producer Rosanne Freed comments on how Roseanne Barr refuses to play the role of the "sweetly, de-sexualized"

96 (1999, 90) middle-class mother. Instead, her character "rudely confesses the burdens of female anatomy, its cramps and dishpan hands and stretched-marked cleavage yearning to breathe free" (90).

In particular, as herself and her television character, Roseanne talks about menstruation. In her biography, she mocks the conservative administration of Reagan and

Bush, stating that U.S. needs new blood in the White House. She writes, "What we need is a woman, a mother of President, and I'm going to run someday, and my campaign motto will be 'Let's vote for Rosie, and put some new blood in the White House--every twenty-eight days"' (1989, 117). Likewise, on her TV show, her character comforts her daughter Darlene, a tomboy, who has begun menstruating. She assures her that "[i]t's not a disease. It's something to celebrate. You've become a full-fledged member of the

Woman Race" (qtd. in Rowe 1995, 87).

Moreover, throughout the sitcom's nine seasons, Roseanne Barr reveals the fictional Conner family's so-called dirty laundry to the public: unemployment, mental illness, poor paying jobs, alcoholism, abortion, and teenage pregnancy. For example, on one of the very last shows, Roseanne is expecting a fourth child; her other three children,

Betsy, Darlene, and DJ are full grown. It is an unexpected pregnancy, but her husband

Dan and she decide to have the baby, and are now looking forward to raising the child.

Then Darlene becomes pregnant from her longtime boyfriend. Realizing that she will be having a child around the same time her daughter will be giving birth to her grandchild,

Roseanne says to Dan that this means that we are 'just about the white-trashiest family in

America," and then they high-five one another (qtd. in Rowe 1995).

Roseanne, in her public persona, also deals with many of these issues and talks openly about her own sexual and domestic abuse. Feminist writer Elayne Rapping notes how Rosanne Barr refuses to uphold white middle-class femininity and respectability by concealing these sensitive and private matters. She writes, "Much of what Roseanne confesses to--about incest, wife abuse, mental illness, obesity, prostitution,

97 lesbianism--makes people uncomfortable. It's tacky, embarrassing, improper, declasse to discuss these issues in public" (1994, pars. 24). Roseanne refuses to be a quiet and compliant "good girl." Rapping argues, "She is the ultimate bad girl, the woman who shouts out to the entire world every angry, nasty, shameful truth and emotion she feels about the lives of women, especially poor women, in America today" (pars. 23; emphasis mine).

Roseanne's shamelessness in asserting her "white trash" sexuality and identity by humorously and unabashedly disrespecting middle-class standards provokes art and film critic Elvis Mitchell to criticize the television program for flagrantly displaying "this kind of arrogance," referring to the series as "1040EZ, low-income, no deductions" (1989, 47).

Mitchell fails to realize that Roseanne asserts her "white trash" female sexuality through such bold behavior, reaching out to other so-called "1040EZ" people, whom Alan King describes as the "hopeless underclass ofthe female sex. The polyester-clad, overweight occupants of the slow track. Fast-food waitresses, factory workers, housewives .... The despised, the jilted, the underpaid"; Roseanne simply calls them the coolest people around

(qtd. in Rowe 1995, 57). Thus, Mitchell does not realize that the laugh is on him; that this is exactly what Roseanne wants to do: piss him off by refusing to be respectable.

But New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd argues that the laugh is on those who are duped to believe that Roseanne Barr represents white working-class women. She writes, "She promotes herself as a tribune of blue-collar women, while she lives the profligate, plastic-surgeried life of a spoiled start" ( 1995, 11 ). Dowd points our that by the end of the sitcom, Roseanne is not a heavy-set, poorly dressed, and tired-looking woman, but a slimmed, trimmed, tanned, and stylishly dressed one. From stomach stapling and face lifts, Roseanne has transformed a disrespecting, "white trash" body to a respectful middle-classed body. Media journalist Caryn James therefore questions, ''How can a rich, powerful, surgically revamped Hollywood star remain a working-class heroine?

(1996, Cl3). Likewise, how can Roseanne hold on to her "white trash" identity? By her

98 character winning lots of money, James notes. On the last show, Roseanne Conner wins

$108 million dollars. Asked by what she is going to do with the money, Roseanne says without hesitating, "I'm getting me a ton of plastic surgery" (qtd. in James, C13).

Roseanne reveals through humor that she is aware of how her character and she herself have physically changed. But she is also, as Rapping points out, exposing so-called private matters that respectable middle-class individuals usually do not expose. Indeed, there is something "trashy" in exposing how one gets sliced and cut to look beautiful. 17

Feminist writer Kylie Murphy (2001) contends that believing beauty is natural, and not a cultural concept, is a middle-class notion. To expose that beauty is not conceived as natural, that the economically privileged can ''buy" their so-called "natural" beauty, is to expose how much time, energy, and money the middle- and upper-class have invested in being and remaining beautiful, as well as expose how much power they reap :from being beautiful. 18

Yet I am less interested in Roseanne remaining a working-class heroine than in whether she supports hegemonic and patriarchal views of beauty. How can Roseanne claim sexual autonomy by wearing her ''white trash" badge of pride if she now rejects that

''white trash" body? In analyzing the physical transformation of another ''white trash"

female persona, Courtney Love, Murphy argues that cosmetic surgery is not simply about

becoming beautiful to find a desired male partner. It is about having access to other

17 On a special Oprah show (11 November 2002), Oprah interviews three Hollywood respectable and feminine "divas"--Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep--who appear in the Oscar-nominated movie The Hours. She asks over tea and cookies how they stay fit and beautiful. AU are silent. Oprah tries to get information from them, but they remain silent. Finally, Kidman says, "I swim." This is the most information we get. We hear nothing ofbotox and other cosmetic applications, diet r~en, personal trainers, and perhaps even plastic surgery. 1 Kylie Murphy argues that the accusations that punk singer Courtney Love is a sell-out for her physical make-over is a "middle-class sensibility." She writes, "Embedded in the criticism of Love's make-over is the demand that beauty be naturaL ... Love is accused of advertising faulty goods. She is a crumbling house dressed up with a fresh lick of paint. The artifice of her appearance does not reflect her natural or inner beauty'' (sec. 3). Thus, the accusation against Love, Murphy contends, is that she is not "authentically" middle class; she is white trash, hence she is lying to everyone, including herself, that by appearance she can pass as middle class.

99 realms of social and economic power. She writes, "A well groomed surface has the ability to grant women the discursive power of authority (it grants their voice more legitimacy), as well as the possibility of social mobility within patriarchal structures. Knowing how to marshal the weaponry of artifice is a form of cultural capital"( sec. 3). And therefore,

Murphy states, "Love's physical transformation demonstrates a disciplined mobilisation of bodily surface. She is knowingly altering her appearance so as to provide herself with more economic power" (sec. 3). Yet, at the same time, Murphy is aware that

"[m]ake-over feminism is not a political template. It is clearly imbricated in patriarchal

systems that cause pain to women ... but at least it allows women some social mobility.

It has the potential to provide a sense of empowerment" (sec. 3).

Roseanne and Love both have been called "ugly" and "unfeminine" throughout their lives. In her biography, Roseanne (1989) mentions how name calling such as "fatso" during her childhood pained her. Equally, Love notes how her late husband, Kurt Cobain,

singer of the successful grunge-band Nirvana, was supposed to marry a beautiful woman.

She was the "ugly" woman he was not supposed to marry. She says, "Here's this new rock star--Kurt--and he's supposed to be married to a model and he's married to me"

(qtd. in Murphy, sec. 2). Roseanne and Courtney are both aware of how they are perceived as unattractive women in Western society, and despite their "white trash" selves who act like they don't give a damn, they do care because "ugly" women are constantly reminded, Murphy argues, that they are "'taking up space reserved for the traditionally

attractive woman" (sec. 3). Love's 1991 song, "Pretty on the Inside" captures this struggle she, Roseanne, and other unattractive women who dezy middle-class femininity and respectability encounter between asserting their '"white trash" personae and needing to be pretty and respectable to gain more social power. They may be "'ugly ugly from the back" and take pride in their '"ugly slut kiss girl" selfbut "[t]here is no power (like) my pretty power." And so they try to claim both: "My pretty power my ugly I Slut kiss girl ..

. ." Thus, low-income women's standpoint theory shows the contradictions and ambiguity

100 in Roseanne's and Love's celebrating their "white trash" personae to resist middle-class femininity and respectability, while "beautifying" their "white trash" selves to gain more economic and social power.19

"White Trash Girl":

Jennifer Reeder, a working-class white woman who grew up with White Castle hamburgers and memorabilia decorating her family's house, also wears the label "white trash" as a badge ofhonor. As a performing artist and graduate student, she created an alter-ego, "White Trash Girl," to express through art her pride in her working-class background and her resistance to middle- and upper-class cultural values. She asserts her

sexuality through acknowledging and celebrating the low--feces, urine, discharge, menstrual blood, vomit, and sweat. Reeder sees power in low culture, contending that

'"[l]ow' is a form of cultural terrorism--it is an effective way to be completely outside of the power structure while at the same time exerting a violent (and violating) force against it" (1997, 16). She notes how her "White Trash Girl" persona helped her survive graduate

school at the elite University of Chicago where she felt looked down upon for having the wrong cultural and aesthetic tastes. Thus, "White Trash Girl" has given Reeder a sense of

identity and meaning in asserting and affirming her sexuality from the low.

Moreover, Reeder's "White Trash Girl" revels in her lack of cultural capital: she has the wrong social and cultural connections, education, and tastes. Lacking social and cultural capital, she is the epitome oflow culture: she drinks beer instead of wine, reads trashy erotic novels instead of intellectual books, and wears cheap and seductive clothes instead of conservative tailored outfits. Moreover, "White Trash Girl" takes joy and pride

19In Courtney Love: The Real Story (1997), biographer Poppy Brite notes that before Love seriously thought about being a singer, she wanted to be an actress. She starred in a couple low-grade movies, but never as the leading actress. Her so-called "ugliness" kept her trapped in peripheral female roles. Brite writes, "Courtney ... made a brief, miserable attempt to revive her acting career, hanging out with Brat Packers and reading for movies like Less Than Zero, Casual Sex?, and Earth Girls are Easy. An agent told her she was a cross between Madonna and Fanny Brice. She kept getting offered funny-fat-girl roles instead ofthe romantic leads she wanted" (92; emphasis mine).

101 in being the lady ofthe low. She associates with "the politics ofthe gross" (Reeder 1997,

16). ''Nobody fucks with White Trash; she fucks with you. She's a mean mama with a scatological sensibility, a right hook, and skin thick as cheap vinyl when it comes to public opinion. Fuck me? No, fuck you" (Kipnis and Reeder 1997, 115). And ifyou fuck with her, she throws the low at you. There is no way to hide from her; she is in your face,

dressed in her skimpy, cheap outfits and with too much makeup on her face, shamelessly telling you exactly what she thinks.

Finding power in the low, "White Trash Girl" takes pride in her bodily secretions

and is shameless in acknowledging them. Openly talking about her own piss, vomit, and

blood, she reminds those around her that they are not above the low; they too defecate

and urinate just like she does. She shows the folly in those who try to dissociate from the

low. For example, she recalls how her ex-boyfriend believed, even expected, as an

upper-class, Ivy-college-educated man, that he could permanently remove himself from

the low. Reeder writes about how her "White Trash Girl" persona handled this situation:

I scrubbed [with her ex-boyfriend's toothbrush] that filthy bowl spotless, even under the rim--the same toilet I had bled into earlier in the week, puked into the night before, and defecated into that morning. Knowing that every day that white, well-bred, uptight, Ivy League motherfucker, sticks a blood-, puke-, shit-, and piss-covered toothbrush into his smug little mouth, moreover, knowing that I had everything to do with it, is immeasurably satisfYing. ( 16)

Reeder takes delight in this form of"cultural terrorism" because she knows that her

well-respected ex-boyfriend can never escape the low, especially now when he brushes his

teeth. He may never know, but "White Trash Girl" knows--knows that the low is in his

mouth, on his tongue, between his teeth.

Instead of privileging and honoring the cleansed, socially respected middle-class

body that removes itself from its own natural waste, disassociating from it, Reeder

acknowledges her lower-class body that produces and smells of secretions. She writes,

[T]here's the idea that only the lower-class 'smells.' The upper class don't shit or smell or anything, but the lower class can shit or barf and puke and acknowledge

102 it. So White Trash Girl uses all those low-class body functions against other people .... It's about being able to say, yeah, I'm like that. I smell, I have a body--and what of it? What are you trying to say about it? Like yeah, so I menstruate, so what? (Kipnis and Reeder 124)

"White Trash Girl" refuses to feel ashamed and embarrassed about or hatred for her menstruating, odorous body. She reclaims her low-class body as a site of resistance

against middle-class femininity and respectability.

Low-income women's standpoint theory highlights the contradictions in Reeder's

"White Trash Girl's" everyday resistance. Her use ofthe low as "cultural terrorism" to

show the futility, absurdity, and arrogance in disassociating from the low as a form of

resistance is problematic. She lashes out to humiliate and mock those who try to obtain middle-class femininity and respectability. Therefore her resistance is non-hberatory. Yet, this does not mean that it is ineffective. Rejecting middle-class femininity and respectability, albeit humiliating those who uphold proper sexuality and a cleansed self,

Reeder is refusing to be a "good girl." And by playing a "bad girl," rejecting the passivity

and coyness of "good girl," Reeder's "White Trash Girl" is not a compliant victim to male violence and dominance. She will strike back by screaming, farting, spitting, pulling hair,

scratching, or whatever it takes to protect herself from being abused and exploited without

feeling embarrassed or guilty.

Like Reeder's "White Trash Gir4" writer Louise DeSalvo (1996) adamantly refuses to be victimized or abused, wearing her "bad girl" image as a badge of protection and courage. Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s as a working-class Italian-American,

DeSalvo was considered a "slut" by her classmates. Although she felt uncomfortable and embarrassed by being considered sexually loose, she also recalls feeling liberated by her

"bad girl" identity. No longer having to worry about obeying male authority to maintain a respectable reputation, DeSalvo had the freedom to explore her sexuality. As a result, she shamelessly pursued sexually satisfYing encounters.

103 The "bad girl" image also gave DeSalvo the courage and the social space to declare the power and significance of her sexual sel£ She writes, "In high school I was incredibly autonomous, and in a fiery kind of way. Nobody could shit on me. No boy could be abusive to me. The minute there was a hint of abuse, any kind of verbal crapping around, I was out. I had no investment in being a martyr. And I was really ferocious about it" (Tannebaum 53). Thus, by refusing to sacrifice or efface her sexual self upholding the good girl image, DeSalvo had always known '"that in the long run I was going to be way better off than these little compulsory heterosexual girls running around in these fraudulent relationships, who were doing essentially the same thing I was doing but in a socially acceptable way" (55).

In contrast to Reeder's and DeSalvo's shamelessness in both asserting and protecting their sexual selves, feminist writer Robin Warshaw notes in I Never Called It

Rape ( 1988) how many white middle-class young women, dating handsome, socially respected men who later became sexually aggressive and physically violent towards them, felt unsure ofhow to protect themselves. Some even questioned if they had the right to defend themselves. Moreover, several women mentioned that they were embarrassed to make a scene or afraid to hurt their boyfriends' or male acquaintances' feelings, and therefore did not defend themselves, thus becoming rape victims. Warshaw identifies women who are encouraged by family, friends, and society to be nice passive girls as

"safe" victims. She writes,

The average woman, when faced with an impending acquaintance rape, is unable to use the full force ofher real power to fight back. That's because ... she was raised not to believe in that power or to think that she had the right to assert it, especially against a socially acceptable man. Most girls are still being brought up to think like this. (53)

Because middle-class femininity insists on women focusing on and occupying themselves with men, worrying about how they are perceived by the opposite sex and about not hurting their feelings or making them angry, women are kept passive and powerless to

104 male violence. To prevent being helpless and vulnerable to male violence, Warshaw insists that women reject middle-class femininity and fight back. She encourages women to make a scene and embarrass and hurt their male aggressors if necessary. Do anything it takes, she urges, to keep the abuser away.

Specifically, one of the recommendation Warshaw makes is for women to

"[d]estroy his idea of'seduction"' (159). She states, "You might try to do physical things to turn him off: Urinate on the floor, pick your nose, belch, pass gas, even vomit--anything to break his perception that what is happening is a 'seduction"' (159-60). Interestingly, this anti-rape behavior she is encouraging women to act out when in crisis is that of

"White Trash Girl" Personifying the low by shamelessly and openly talking about the blood gushing out of her vagina, the smelly shit she just took, or the funky odor under her hairy armpits, "White Trash Girl" refuses to be ashamed ofher female body. By declaring pride in her menstruating, defecating, urinating, discharging, belching, and stinking body,

"White Trash Girl" is asserting her sexual autonomy. That is, she refuses to be reduced to a lifeless sex object for male pleasure.

In her poem, "The Best Defense is Offensive," Marge Piercy supports "White

Trash Girl's" shameless "bad girl" persona that revels in the low in mockery of middle-class values as an "offensive" strategy. As a member of an all-female gang as an adolescent in her rough working-class Detroit neighborhood, Piercy had to be tough and

self-assertive in order to protect herself and her sister gang members; meek and coy behavior would have left them exposed and vulnerable to the violence they constantly encountered on the streets. Thus Piercy knows how strategic the low is in offending and unsettling those in power, identifying the low as a defense mechanism against aggression.

She writes, "Sometimes only the stark I will to disgust I prevents our being consumed: I there are clearly times I when we must make a stink I to survive" (1982, 101). It is the

105 stink of the "bad girl" who refuses to be victimized. In order to survive, she must offend.

Hence, her source of strength lies in the low amidst bodily secretions.20

"White Trash Girl's" Counterself--" Modest Girl":

Wendy Shalit, author of Return To Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (1999), takes issue with the "bad girl" persona. She claims that it is "bad girls" who have no

social protection against male violence. Only by upholding middle-class femininity and respectability, she insists, will women get the respect they deserve and be protected

against male aggression. Shalit is right that the so-called "bad girls" are seen as

"unrapable" by the middle-class court system and by society at large and therefore are never believed to be raped. Tanenbaum notes in her book Slut! that none of the female

survivors of rape she interviewed who were labeled as "sluts" reported it to the police,

family, or friends. They knew only too well that seen as "bad girls" no one would believe

them or would hold them responsible.

Furthermore, Shalit notes that today, three decades after the sexual revolution,

women are encouraged to overtly and freely express their sexuality as would any liberated

man. As a result, she contends, there is no frame of reference for a woman to say "no."

That is, without female modesty, men assume that women are sexually available and

unattached and therefore all women are potentially casual sex partners. "No," then as she

explains, is muted over the "Yes" of sexual liberation. To prevent women being set up as

unrecognized rape victims without male protection, women need to "return to modesty"

and be "good girls," Shalit concludes. But Shalit fails to realize that "good girls" are as

20Feminist ethicist and theologian Traci West notes that public and private institutions working on behalf of African-American girls' and women's interests need to encourage them to be defiant. She writes about the importance "of unruly behavior in girls and women that fuels a defiant spirit in them .... In particular, we must teach and reward audacious and insubordinate qualities in black girls and women in ways that confirm a propensity to disobey the social dictates of male dominance and white supremacy'' (1999, 194; emphasis mine). Being a bad girl, then, who disobeys male authority and defies sexual and racial aggression on the (black) female body is not reactionary, immature, or senseless. It literally saves female lives; moreover, the bad girl persona that challenges and undermines male authority and white supremacy refuses to be fragmented and victimized, demanding to be seen as a whole, autonomous being.

106 vulnerable to rape as "bad girls"; moreover, Warshaw and West point out, that "good girls" who are afraid to fight back or make a scene are "safe" victims.

Moreover, by upholding the "good (modest) girl" who demonstrates middle-class respectability and femininity over the "bad (low-class) girl," Shalit is still trapped in the

Madonna/whore dichotomy. In an either/or dyad, she positions her demure and strait-laced woman--I'll call her "Modest Girl"--as "White Trash Girl's" counterself. That is, if"White Trash Girl" is considered unrapable and therefore is never recognized as a victim, then "Modest Girl" is believed to be rapable, and therefore targeted frequently to

be a victim. Shalit's "cartel of virtues" may then very well be encouraging women to be

"safe" victims. Men rape women regardless of their economic, social, and cultural

background. Men rape women who are sexually assertive and sexually modest. And

unfortunately many raped victims/survivors find out that even though they were sexually modest and reserved, they are still accused for showing too much skin or being too

friendly with the perpetrator, and therefore responsible for the rape. In contrast to what

Shalit claims, female modesty does not guarantee male protection or full legal protection

for rape victims/survivors. Thus, by encouraging women to return to modesty does not

prevent them from being raped or from being doubted as rape victims/survivors; it simply prevents women from defending themselves by not "reward[ing] audacious and

insubordinate qualities" (West 194). "Modest Girl" is no alternative. She simply reinforces a male power structure based on the "White Trash Girl"/ "Modest Girl"

paradigm that punishes "trampy" low-class female behavior that protects women against male violence and rewards respectable middle-class female behavior that renders women vulnerable. 21

21 Studies done by working-class Australian social scientist Rosemary Pringle (1988) on young women at secretarial school and British feminist scholar Angela McRobbie (1991, 1978) on young female students at high school and trade school show why low-income girls and young women, like Reeder and DeSalvo, assert their sexuality by playing the role of the "bad girl" as a way to resist middle-class standards. Both studies illustrate how working-class female students reject Shalit's "Modest Girl" as a role model.

107 The Sexually Perverse "White Trash" Identity:

In 1981, Dorothy Allison, proudly identifYing herself as queer "white trash," co-founded the Lesbian Sex Mafia that celebrated sadomasochism, fetishism, pornography, and butch/femme as erotic choices in response to what she claimed was the women's movement refusing to accept certain sexual practices that eroticize power as a personal choice. Speaking at the Barnard Conference on sexuality several months later in

1982, Allison criticized the limitations of feminism, arguing that it still upheld middle-class values on sex and sexuality, preventing women from openly and honestly discussing and taking pleasure in sex. Asserting the pleasure in and power ofher working-class

"outlawed" sexuality, she stated: "I am a lesbian; I occasionally do s/m sex; I like anal sex;

I like dildos; I have two silk dresses and very high heels; I do public sex, fuck at night in bars, and come very loudly. You must face all these things and what they mean. I work in this movement and I'm here for the duration, so you have to talk to me" ( qtd. in Moira

1982, 23). And indeed Allison has continued to challenge the movement, exploring and expanding the discussion on sexuality by acknowledging and celebrating her "white trash"

sexuality as a source of power and creativity, commenting to Queer Studies theorist

Michael Rowe that "what is strongest about my work ... [is] that fearlessness about examining truth and being forthright about sexuality" (1994, 21).

Low-income young women identifY with Reeder's "White Trash Girl" as both an identity of oppression and liberation. Believing that they are looked down upon as trashy and troubled by their middle-class teachers, they respond back with pride by claiming the "bad girl" image as a badge of honor. They intentionally dress sexually, wear too much makeup, talk loudly, and flirt endlessly to assert and affirm their sexuality. Their overt sexual behaviors are a strategic method to retaliate at what they perceive as a personal attack on their working-class identity. Like "White Trash Girl," they throw the low as a form of cultural terrorism at their teachers to upset and unsettle them by playing the "bad girl" who exerts pride and strength in her sexuality. Moreover, they see no sexual liberation and personal agency in "Modest Girl." To them, she is a sexually frustrated, inhibited prude who lacks the courage to speak up and protect herself. In their world, "Modest Girl" would never survive. She would not even know how to navigate the streets to get to and from school. It is a cruel irony, then, that in their day-to-day world, "Modest Girl" is a weak woman who sets herself up as a "safe" victim, but in the school system she is favored and rewarded for her passivity.

108 In one particular writing, Skin, Allison recounts how her former middle-class female lovers felt raw sexual hunger and lust, but abruptly disassociated from it or denied it, fearful of the consequences of not upholding respectable and proper sexual behaviors.

They were fearful of working-class women like herself, Allison argues, who were sexually forthright in the pleasure they wanted to receive and give. She writes of her lover Bobby who "loved the aura of acceptability, the possibility of finally being bourgeois, civilized, and respectable. I was the uncivilized thing in Bobby's life" (1994, 120). Never seen as respectable and civilized as a "white trash" femme, even by her male family members,

Allison claims that her outlaw sexual identity has liberated her from the middle-class regulations on sex. Further, she even refers to her outlaw sexuality as an advantage, contending that it has given her personal insight into the political and social structure of sex and sexuality (Rowe 1994). So though "Bobby believed lust was a trashy lower-class impulse, and she so wanted to be nothing like that" (Skin 120), Allison, as a sexual outcast, can claim and own the pleasure in all those "trashy lower-class impulses."

Located in the low (socially, economically, culturally, and sexually), Allison does not have to prove anything to maintain femininity and respectability.

Allison plays on the hypersexualization and demonization of low-class women.

She embodies outlaw sexuality as a way to humanize and reveal the erotic knowledge and

passion in her identity as a so-called sexual deviant. And, although she admits how painful

it was for her to be called "a pimp for the pornographic-incest society" (Rowe 1994, 10)

by other feminists for advocating pornography, Allison has repeatedly emphasized in her

writing how her "trashy" sexuality and open exploration of erotic choices have

empowered her. However, low-income women's standpoint theory points out that Allison

fails to acknowledge that individual empowerment may come at the cost of collective

disempowerment. That is, what she finds individually satisfying, exciting, and

empowering, degrades, objectifies, and disempowers other women. For example, white

working-class writer Kim Barnes in her memoir, Hunger for the World (2000), recalls

109 how she was sexually exploited and victimized by a former boyfriend, Dave, who introduced her to the underground world of pornography, prostitution, and fetishism.

Feeling powerless over Dave and the sex industry, Barnes was not capable of resisting the objectification ofher body and the commodification of sex.

Despite the objectification and violation of women like Barnes, Constance Penley

(1997) argues that she asserts her "white trash" sexuality by enjoying pornography.

Contending that the anti-pornography movement is led by white middle-class women,

Penley believes that pornography expresses the sexual fantasies and lives of the lower class. Moreover, Penley states that pornography is not only an erotic choice for sexual exploration and adventure, but a liberating space where men and women can be active sexual agents in asserting and demanding sexual pleasure. She writes that "pornography is a vital source of countercultural ideas about sexuality and sexual roles, whether those ideas are picked up by the more legitimized areas of culture or not" (1 06).

In pornography, she argues, women do not have to pretend to be good, respectable girls who do not like sex. Moreover, she contends that men do not want women to be sexually passive; men want women to be as assertive and as interested in sex and sexual pleasure as much as they are. And the trashier pornography is, that is, the further removed it is from middle-class sensibilities, the more liberating it is for both men

and women, she argues, because they can freely engage in sexual acts without worrying

about upholding middle-class respectability. Penley cites Hustler as an example,

contending that unlike Playboy and Penthouse, the former explores the eroticization of the

low in all its form; it does not clean up its photo shots and articles that depict the

messiness and unattractiveness of sex and the body. Penley's argument, then, is the trashier the sex, the more liberated it is from sexist images of the perfect female body and

from antiquated middle-class images of clean, missionary-style sex.

Low-income women's standpoint theory shows that Penley may find sexual power

in asserting her working-class female sexuality by indulging in the trashiness of

110 pornography, but she has not addressed how other poor and working-class women would also find this empowering, particularly women with disabilities and women of color.

Would a disabled working-class woman find pictures of paraplegic women forced to bear the brunt of whippings and scarring, without having the physical capability to resist or flee, sexy and exciting? Would a poor African-American woman find photos of black women used as sexual props to foil the purity and innocence of white women liberating? Equally troubling, writer Alice Walker notes how "the black woman has served as the primary pornographic 'outlet' for white men in Europe and America. We need only think ofthe black women used as breeders, raped for the pleasure and profit of their owners" ( 1981,

42). Penley's endorsement of trashy, working-class pornography fails to address the vicious racism it embodies.

Penley's argument also suffers from what hooks calls "phallic mindset." That is, as hooks argues,

The eroticization of sex as degradation, especially dick-sucking, and the equation of that chosen 'degradation' with pleasure is merely an unimaginative reworking of stale patriarchal, pornographic funtasies that do not become more exciting or liberatory, if women are the agents of their projection and realization. (1994, 80)

Penley does not conceive an alternative space where women can freely, safely, and shamelessly express their sexuality outside a power structure and no longer be forced--consciously or unconsciously--to play out sexist and racist scripted roles. Further,

Penley's contention that pornography acknowledges and affirms a working-class sensibility unproblematically collapses the difference between, as hooks points out, degradation and erotic power.

In response, Cherrie Moraga, I believe, who finds erotic power and pleasure in the low, would not support Penley's analysis of Hustler, although she has argued that pornography can be a site to experience intense eroticism and desire. Moraga, a working-class Chicana, is aware of how women of color are sexually positioned in a white racist society. And although she acknowledges that there can be pleasure in s/m sex, as a

111 woman of color she knows that the question of power can never be divorced from race

and gender. She raises the following questions, addressing the issue of power and white

supremacy: "So how does one build a sexual politic that incorporates this complexity?

For example, what does it mean that some images and acts of s/m sex mirror actual acts of

violence visited upon people of color, Jews, and women as a group--and that some Jewish

women and women of color are sexually stimulated by these?" (1982, 23). Interestingly,

Moraga does not answer any of her questions. They remain open-ended, which, in itself,

is problematic because the question of power and sex is not fully addressed.

What Moraga fails to address and Allison and Penley dismiss is the fact that sex is

not a private act. Feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys contends that ''the bedroom is far from

private; it is an arena in which power relationship between men and women [or between

same-sex lovers] is most revealingly played out" (1996, pars. 14). One can physically

shut the bedroom door to the outside world and be alone with a lover, but it is much harder to mentally shut out centuries ofWestem history that denigrates the female body

and fears and mistrusts female sexuality.22 Moreover, it is difficult to mentally shut out

ubiquitous images of sex that eroticizes dominance and submission and violence. This is

why working-class feminist poet Audre Lorde, in an interview on sadomasochism, speaks

out against it. She states, "I do not believe that sexuality is separate from living. As a

minority woman, I know that dominance and subordination are not bedroom issues ....

Even in play, to affirm that the exertion of power over powerlessness is erotic, is

22In the preface to The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman's Nature (1993), Nancy Tuana writes that there are "five major beliefs about woman's nature generally accepted by Western philosophers, theologians, and scientists from the classical period to the nineteenth century. These are that: woman is less perfect than man, woman possess inferior rational capacities, woman has a defective moral sense, man is the primary creative force, [and] woman is in need of control" (x-xi). One of the many philosophers and scientists Tuana analyzes is Austrian theorist Otto Weininger (1880-1903), who claims in his book Sex and Character that women are incapable of thinking reasonably and therefore they must always be under male authority and surveillance. Further, Weininger argues that women are by nature promiscuous, stating: "To put it bluntly, man possesses sexual organs; her sexual organs possess woman" (65).

112 empowering, is to set the emotional and social stage for the continuation of that relationship politically, socially, and economically" (qtd. in Menashe 2001, 3).

The division between sexual pleasure and sexual danger appears to collapse in

''bad girls"' sexual acts and representation, such as s/m, butch/femme, and pornography.

For example, feminist writer Ann Menashe comments that in a patriarchal society,

master/servant sex roles and domestic violence are many times seen as being

indistinguishable. She notes, "For if pain is a 'turn-on' and bruises can be fun, maybe

women who stay with men (or women) who dominate, batter, and abuse them are really

content and somehow 'choose' their subordination. That's what they've [abusers] been

telling us all along" (2001, 3). Contrary, then, to what Allison and Penley argue, the line

between voluntary and involuntary participation in dominant/submissive sexual acts is not

easily identified, especially when pain, suffering, crying, and begging in s/m and other

power/powerless sex acts are not signs of abuse but excitement.

To clearly identify that line between voluntary and involuntary participation,

Jeffreys argues that we need a new word to describe sexual arousal that does not connote

sexual pleasure. The con:flation of the two is extremely dangerous because women

constantly live with the danger of sexual violence. She writes,

Because women's sexuality develops in this context of sexual terrorism, we can eroticize our fear, our terrified bonding. All sexual arousal and release is not necessarily positive. Women can experience orgasms while being sexually abused in childhood, in rape, or in prostitution. Our language has only words like pleasure and enjoyment to describe sexual feelings, no words to describe those feelings are sexual but that we do not like, feelings that come from experience, dreams, or fantasies about degradation or rape and cause distress despite arousal. (1996, pars. 38)

Thus, understanding that we need to distinguish between "female pleasure" that preserves

women's dignity and explores women's deeply felt sexual longings and passions and

"sexual arousal" that focuses solely on a physical sensation regardless of circumstances,

Penley's argument that Hustler provides an alternative space for women to claim their

113 sexuality falls short. Hustler is solely concerned with sexual arousal, not female pleasure.

Moreover, Hustler does not explore a free space where men and women, as equal sexual partners, reenact power roles outside of male surveillance and domination. Hustler creates a male space, and centers male pleasure at its center. We can see, therefore, that the question of power and sex, that Penley conveniently avoids, is a complex issue for working-class women, especially for heterosexual working-class women who are sexually intimate with men.

Low-income women's standpoint theory underscores the messiness of contradictions and the murkiness of ambiguity in the issues of sex and power. It argues that Allison and Penley, like Lil' Kim, may very well feel self-empowered from "bad girls"' sexual acts and representations. Pornography, sadomasochism, and other outlawed sexual activities and representations as sites of sexual resistance may give Allison and Penley sexual excitement and individual empowerment. Yet low-income women's standpoint theory highlights that this sense of personal empowerment may come at the cost of collective disempowerment. Butch/Femme Relationships:

The erotic that Penley confuses with male-dominated and male-oriented pornography, is, according to working-class feminist scholars Elizabeth Kennedy and

Madeline Davis (1993), an essential element of working-class butch/femme communities.

Existing outside of male sexuality, working-class butch/femme couples exude an erotic power that unites them as lesbians and protects them in a heterosexist, homophobic society. IdentifYing herself as a femme, Amber Hollibaugh explains that "erotic identities are not just behaviors or individual sexual actions; they reflect a much broader fabric that is the weave and crux of our very personhood, a way of mediating and measuring all that we experience, all that we can interpret through the language of our bodies, our histories, our eyes, our hips, our intelligence, our willful, desiring selves" (2000, 258).

114 Working-class feminist scholar Lillian Faderman (1991) notes that after World

War II, lesbians in the U.S. had to practically create their own unique sexual identity and build their own lesbian community, having very few American role models to build upon.

For working-class butch/femme couples, the erotic played a central role in creating their lesbian society and continues to play an important role in sustaining their community today. Analyzing the butch/femme community in Buffalo, New York, :from the 1930s through the 1950s, Kennedy and Davis argue that what distinguished these lesbians :from middle-class lesbians was "a distinctive lesbian eroticism'' ( 191) that recognized female

sexuality independent of men and emphasized the importance of female sexual pleasure.

Female eroticism was at the very center ofthese working-class butch/femme relationships.

The butch/femme relationship today is still "built around the female body and made

pleasing the fern absolutely central, the focus of sexuality" (379).

Moreover, Faderman contends that lesbianism became visible through

working-class hutches and femmes :from the 1930s through the 1950s who socialized

openly at gay/lesbian bars. Unlike middle- and upper-class lesbians who could privately

meet in their homes or at exclusive clubs, working-class hutches and femmes could not.

Most did not own homes and therefore had to meet at "dyke" bars to socialize and build a

community. Creating their own sub-culture at bars, working-class hutches and femmes

distinguished themselves from other lesbian communities by their apparel and gendered

roles. Butches dressed in men's clothing. Faderman notes that during the 1950s, many

tried to look like James Dean, wearing rolled-up dungarees and combing their short hair

back into a grease, slick look. The femmes dressed in skirts and high heels and wore

makeup and perfume to accentuate their femininity. Together, the butch/femme dyad

announced to the world that they were sexual and erotic.

The working-class butch from the 1930s to 1950s were the most visible among

lesbians. Her identity challenged middle-class notions of respectability and femininity.

Moreover, she visibly refused to uphold respectable gender roles. Unlike middle- and

115 upper-class hutches who had professional jobs and therefore had to hide their sexual desires and identity behind respectable middle-class personas, working-class hutches refused to live a double life. They were the first to blur the division between their public and private lives (Kennedy and Davis 1993; Faderman 1991 ). In addition, the butch identity exposed the class difference between butch women and lesbians. Whereas working-class hutches refused to blend in and be seen as respectable middle-class women, lesbians could be mistaken for heterosexual women, especially if they were feminine. A butch in workboots and flannel shirt therefore identified her body as a site of resistance to a heterosexual, middle-class society.

In her memoir, Restricted Country, Joan Nestle (1987), a working-class Jewish femme, recalls how the butch/femme partnership in the 1950s was charged with erotic power. She writes, "Butch-fern women made Lesbians visible in a terrifyingly clear way in a historical period when there was no movement protection for them. Their appearance spoke of erotic independence ..." (101). Likewise, Hollibaugh recounts how erotically electrifying the butch/femme couple was years later in the 1970s and 1980s. Commenting about a previous butch lover, she states how "[s]trolling together as a butch/femme couple, we were an erotic, magnetic moving target for all the sexual, envy, and ignorance of this culture" (260). Both Nestle and Hollibaugh claim eroticism at the center of a butch/femme dyad. The butch/femme couple complemented one another with the butch in her handsome masculine attire and the femme in her attractive feminine clothing. They exuded sexual passion and desire as two women in masculine and feminine gendered roles.

Yet Faderman claims that these roles :from the 1930s through the 1950s were also problematic. Strict gender roles were enforced within working-class butch/femme communities. She writes, "Being neither butch nor femme was not an option if one wanted to be part of the young or working-class lesbian sub-culture. Those who refused to choose learned quickly that they were unwelcome" (168). Butches were expected to act and dress masculine; femmes were to act and dress feminine. A butch was ridiculed if

116 she wore makeup or a dress; likewise, a femme was mocked if she neglected to beautify

herself Faderman points out that "butch/femme style of dress was not much different

from working-class male and female style; descriptive terms in relationships were often

modeled on heterosexual language, since no other appropriate words existed to convey

commitment and responsibility ..." (169). As such, hutches commonly referred to their

partners as "wives" and as "their femmes." And performing the role ofhusband, they

were responsible of socially designated "male" duties, such as being the primary

breadwinner and taking out the garbage and fixing broken-down furniture and household

appliances. Their ''wives" were expected to perform "feminine" roles: cook, clean, and

care.

Moreover, Faderman argues that butch/femme couples looked upon heterosexual

couples as a model for committed and long-term relationships. Because they were

basically creating a distinct working-class lesbian community on their own, they only had

heterosexual relationships to compare and contrast themselves to. For example, one butch

woman commenting about her lesbian community in the 1950s, said: "The problem was

that the only models we had for our relationships were those of the traditional female-male

[roles] and we were too busy trying to survive in a hostile world to have time to create

new roles for ourselves" ( qtd. in Faderman 167). Thus, before the counterculture

movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s when gender roles were rigorously questioned

and challenged, a butch had to be in control of the relationship. She was seen as the

dominant figure who was expected to sexually please "her" femme. Many hutches were

"stone hutches" who expressed little emotion and did not allow to be their female lovers to

make love to them. They had to prevent themselves from being "feminized" and turned

into a "pussy" (Faderman 170).

However, Kennedy and Davis contend that "stone hutches" remained emotionally

and sexually untouchable not so much to uphold heterosexual male/female roles, but to protect themselves from the hatred and abuse they daily encountered in a heterosexist,

117 homophobic, and sexist society. They appeared tough and strong because ifthey were

seen as weak and vulnerable to the outside heterosexual world, they could easily be victimized and crushed. Moreover, they appeared in control in their lesbian community to

protect their lovers from the sexual harassment they encountered on the streets from

heterosexual men who would regularly assault femmes in front of their hutches to humiliate them and to assert their male privilege.

Also disagreeing with Faderman's analysis ofbutch/femme relationships as

imitating heterosexual roles, Judy Grahn (1995), self-identified as a butch, argues that the

butch/femme couple was never a mimicry of heterosexuality. The butch is masculine, but

not male; the femme is feminine, not female. Moreover, she contends that the erotic

underlines the existence of another sexual relationship that exists outside of

heterosexuality and male power that is exclusively between two women in masculine and

feminine gendered roles. What makes a butch/femme relationship unique, she notes, is its

lesbian eroticism.

Working-class fern writer Nisa Donnelly acknowledges and celebrates the erotic in

her novel A Bar Novel. The protagonist, Babe, proudly claims the erotic as a life force in

her relationships with femmes as a working-class butch. After hearing a radical lesbian

feminist college professor, Alice Woods, speak on how butch/femme women are

undermining the women's movement in her manifesto called "Butches and Femmes: The

Real Enemies ofLesbian-Feminism," Babe says, "Sounds to me like all your fancy labels

are good for is to try and make us [lesbians] respectable. You ashamed of what you are,

lady?" (1989, 215-16). Fearful ofher own erotic power, Alice never replies. Babe's

lover, Matty, a college graduate working under the tutelage of Alice, explains to Babe that

she does not fully understand the challenges lesbians and feminists confront to change the

patriarchal system. Yet Babe reminds Matty that the lesbian-feminist community is built

upon the backs of working-class butch women like herself and their femme lovers.

118 The erotic power brought them together when they faced public arrests and

humiliation by vice squads and now sustains them as women who want to love each other

openly and honestly. Babe refuses to disown and be ashamed of the erotic by hiding

behind a respectable middle-class persona. She argues that butch/femme women do not

have be closeted anymore because "[w]e've always been respectable and low-down

ass-kickers .... We're respectable because we survived. And we survived because we

knew how to kick ass. And we'll be here long after Alice and the rest of 'em has gone

home" (218). To denounce the erotic for middle-class respectability and femininity is to

destroy the very foundation of the working-class lesbian and butch/femme community.

Babe insists that this community has survived public and private acts of humiliations and

violence because they refused to feel shame. By overtly expressing their lesbian sexual

desires, butch/femme couples have announced to the world their pride in and respect for

their sexual selves.

An African-American working-class transgendered butch writer Red Jordan

Arobateau also explores the erotic as healing power between butch/femme lovers in her

novel Lucy and Mickey. Mickey is a butch in the 1950s who is constantly mocked and

harassed. She has a difficult time finding a job because she is visibly butch, and cannot

even go to a restaurant, department store, or movie theater without being labeled a sexual

deviant. It is this constant battle with a heterosexist and sexist society that wears Mickey

down. But it is her lover, Lucy, who helps heal her and gives her the endurance and hope to face another day of gender warfare. Arobateau writes, "Mickey had forgotten her pain

overnight. Lucy was beside her, close, warm. Together they could withstand straight

people's hate & the ego wars of men. The butch felt a pang ofjoy, the so-longed for

freshness ofthis morning" (1995, 115).

The erotic keeps Mickey alive. Sex and desire are a way for her to stay connected, to feel pleasure amidst so much pain. When everything else is falling a part in Mickey's and her lover's life--no job, no food, no respect from their neighbors--they have each

119 other and the power to give each other temporary relief from the pain through sex. ''Sex.

That's all they had" (Lucy 291). In each othees arms, feeling the heat, tasting the salty perspiration, and hearing the murmurs of pleasure from their bodies, is where they become alive again, empowered by the erotic power generated between them. Mickey recalls this power, thinking of how her lover "moved inside me, and heard me moan knowing she had the power to love me. The power to affect another human being" (127). Without sex, without the erotic, Mickey would be broken down by a hostile society that fears and misunderstands her.

The caresses, kissing, and fondling also celebrates the physicality and earthiness of the female body. Aware of the erotic power she exchanges with her butch lover,

Hollibaugh writes, "I expose myself for her to appreciate. I open myself out for her to see what's possible for her to love in me that's female. I want her to respond to it" (2000,

75). The femaleness that she intimately entrusts to her love, reveals the low--menstrual blood, vaginal discretion, pubic hair. It is this femaleness that Mickey identifies as the

center of eroticism. Making love to Lucy, Mickey "slid down to the sea--tasting the

entranceway of life, by which all humankind is born ..." (127). Moreover, Mickey sees how menstrual blood erotically connects her to all the lovers in her life. Thinking of a

former lover Lisa, Mickey recalls how "her body is sticky from Lisa's love. Blood on the

sheets. She is menstruating & it's in my mouth, and smeared over my cunt where I've

loved her" (117). The female body is seen as an intense erogenous zone full of erotic passion.

Yet this intense erotic connection Mickey feels with another lover Lucy is also violent. The line between eroticism and violence begins to blur in Arobateau's narration

of Mickey sexually dominating and inflicting pain on Lucy. Mickey feels her butchness threatened by poverty, by straight men on the streets who mock her, and by the police who sexually harass her. Moreover, she feels "feminized" by her economic and social powerlessness. Although sex is a way to assuage her pain living in a heterosexist,

120 homophobic, and sexist society, it is also a struggle for power. Mickey asserts power in the bedroom that she cannot assert on the streets. Arobateau writes how her protagonist

begins to use sex as a way to claim a "masculine" identity and male power: "Mickey lost

her confidence & began using her nightly fuck to get between Lucy's leg and have sex

with her until she was raw" (262). Some nights Lucy was in so much pain that she

pleaded Mickey to stop: "PLEASE MICKEY! NO MORE! You're so rough, you keep

doing it! I don't know why! What are you trying to prove? I've never had a man as

rough as you are, or do it so much!" (263).

Another novel that explores the erotic in pre-Stonewall butch/femme relationships

is Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues (1993). Feinberg's protagonist is Jess, a

working-class butch, who feels an erotic connection between her and her femme lover

Teresa but denies herself the pleasure ofhaving an orgasm. She refuses to be made love

to; it is she who is always on top, giving pleasure, but never receiving pleasure. She is

told by her mentor Butch Al that it is the butch's duty to fulfill the sexual pleasure of her

femme lover. She shows Jess how to make love to a femme with a dildo. Yet, she is

never told that it is important for her body to feel the excitement and desire of her lover's

caresses. This is taboo for many hutches who claim that they have to be like stone to

protect themselves from being soft and vulnerable--that is, feminine--to male violence and

male authority. This denial of pleasure, of being alive in her body, keeps Jess

disconnected from herself and her lover.

Poor and working-class women's standpoint theory shows that the erotic as a site

of resistance is full of contradictions and ambiguity. It underscores that the erotic is both

an expression of power and dominance and of emotional and sexual connection between

butch and femme lovers. In particular, during the pre-Stonewall era, the "butch-fern erotic

culture contained few sanctions against women's expression of sexuality" (Kennedy and

Davis 193). Yet, the erotic was hutches' exploration and celebration of femmes'

sexuality, not their own. And at times the erotic was confused with violence by hutches

121 who felt "emasculated" by a sexist and homophobic society that they used sex to assert

and claim power over their femme lovers. Hence, poor and working-class women's

standpoint theory highlights that sex continues to be a space of contention in the

butch/femme community where patriarchal power is both asserted and challenged.

Conclusion:

Low-income women's standpoint theory underlines the contradictions in the

everyday resistance of working-class female artists and writers who embrace and celebrate

their "bad girl" personae. Their sexual resistance does not provide easy, neat categories

for feminists: at times their forms of resistance are hberatory; yet, at other times, they are

non-liberatory. The contradictions and ambiguity oflow-income women's resistance

show the continuum of feminism Hence, poor and working-class women's standpoint

theory indicates that feminism cannot be a static identity or a rigid concept.

Low-income female performing artists' and writers' "bad girl" personae highlight

the shift from second wave feminism to third wave feminism that focuses on women's

contradictory and complex identities and viewpoints. Writing on third wave feminism,

Rebecca Walker (1995) argues that "bad girls" "push at all our notions of what is good

and bad, correct and incorrect behavior and ideology for a feminist" (xxxv). "Bad girls"

live with contradictions and ambiguity. They may be women who are sexually aroused by pornography and sadomasochism, while understanding how men continue to exploit and

objectifY women. They also may be women who love misogynist, sex-saturated rap music and still demand respect as women from the hip-hop community.

Low-income women who take pride and pleasure in their "bad girl" personae are not only defying middle-class femininity and respectability; they are also asserting their right to sexual pleasure, fulfillment, and independence. In a male-dominated world where women must live with the daily reality of sexual danger, low-income female artists and writers affirming their "bad girl" identity through music, performing art, and writing remind us that we must not forfeit our erotic energy and sexual autonomy to fear.

122 Although the sexual practices and explorations ofLil' Kim, Courtney Love, Dorothy

Allison, and Red Jordan Arobateau are full of contradictions and ambiguity, they still challenge us to see female sexuality and the female body as a site of sexual autonomy and sexual pleasure.

Moreover, "bad girls" show us that life is rich with complexity; everyday we live with the messiness of contradictions and the murkiness of ambiguity. Low-income women's standpoint theory refuses to simplifY our lives and efface contradictions from our daily routines. Equally, it refuses to turn to dogmatism to deal with contradictions and ambiguity. Instead, low-income women's standpoint theory insists that we need to listen to and learn from "bad girls," like Lil' Kim and Dorothy Allison, to understand what these contradictions are, why they exist, and how individuals and groups of people deal with them. Out of this resistant knowledge, we can "explore the ways that choices or actions seemingly at odds with mainstream ideas of femiirism push us to new definitions and understandings of female empowerment and social change" (Walker xxxvi-xxxvii). And by taking "bad girls" seriously, Walker writes: "I hope that in accepting contradiction and ambiguity, in using and much more than we use either/or, these [bad girls'] voices can help us continue to shape a political force more concerned with mandating and cultivating freedom than with policing morality" (xxxv). Thus, low-income women's sites of sexual resistance may not always be empowering and liberating, but they are still important locations feminists can build out of to understand the challenges women face and the numerous and contradicting ways women deal with these challenges as "outlaws who demand to exist whole and intact, without cutting or censoring parts of themselves: an instinct I consider to be the very best legacy of feminism" (Walker xxxv).

123 CHAPTER THREE

Asserting Pride as Discredited and Low-Waged Laborers:

Negotiating the Master/Servant Relationship

Introduction:

Low-income women in the service sector industry, as waitresses, housecleaners, nurse's aides, and secretaries, do more than clean tables, floors, bodies, and cabinet files.

They maintain social order; that is, their labor helps create and sustain an organized, structured social environment. Commenting on how poorly paid housecleaners provide

social order, working-class feminist writer Barbara Ehrenreich argues that advertisements by cleaning agencies promise to return domestic bliss to the home, even save marriages.

She writes, "Enter then, the cleaning lady as dea ex machina, restoring tranquility as well as order to the home. Marriage counselors recommend her as an alternative to squabbling, as do many within the cleaning industry itself' (2000, pars. 11 ).

Both poor and working-class women's physical and emotional labor are essential for a healthy and functioning society; yet, their physical labor is dismissed as unskilled and their emotional labor is not even acknowledged, remaining invisible work. And despite their critical roles as mediators, transformers, and sustainers, caring for and protecting lives, low-income women are placed in the historical role as the servant who is not recognized as a whole and independent being in a master/servant relationship. Whereas domestic chores such as cleaning, washing, cooking, organizing, doing errands, and shopping performed by mothers and wives are taken for granted as natural, thus considered as non-labor, these same tasks done by low-status, minimum-waged female

124 workers are perceived universally as discredited labor because of their association with slavery and indentured servitude (Rollins 1985).

In the U.S., work that engages in the maintenance ofbodies and social spaces automatically plays upon the American historical memory of indentured servitude in its early colonial years, slavery that existed until1865, and the fashionable use of servants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to distinguish the new (white and black) middle class

(Ehrenreich and English 1978; Rollins 1985). Moreover, this type oflabor cannot be separated from the U.S.'s racial politics, in which a white supremacist capitalistic

American society has ghettoized economically disadvantaged people of color (today, immigrants and first and second American-born generations from Third World countries) into the lowest paying and least respected jobs.

The master/servant paradigm still exists today; however, it does not exclusively apply to domestic work. Many poor and working-class women working in low-waged and so-called low-skilled labor are treated as servants and are seen as adjuncts to their masters. They are expected to carry out the historical role of servants who must put their needs behind those of their masters. We particularly see this type of relationship play out between bosses and secretaries and customers and waitresses.

Moreover, the master/servant relationship conceals the fact that the master is dependent on the labor and recognition of the servant. Many poor and working-class women are conscious of the nature of this relationship in which they are positioned as servants. That is, they are aware that their labor--no matter how unappreciated and underpaid their work is--keeps their masters functioning and prospering. Thus, these low-income women do not see themselves as servants but as a rich, yet unrecognized, resource. Everyday Strategies:

In an upwardly mobile society, in which "the site of power must distance itself from the site of shit" (LaPorte 1993, 42), low-income female laborers are expected and

125 needed to clean up wastes, buffering the middle and upper class from their own concrete reality. The masters arrogate power to create and reinforce a master/servant relationship in which the powerful elite position themselves as dominant using subordinates to distance themselves from the low. In response to this relationship, many poor and working-class women refuse to be seen as servants, asserting pride in themselves and dignity in their labor. And although they are aware of how they have been socially and economically positioned as the weak "bondswomen," they are anything but sycophantic and servile.

Low-income women's standpoint theory shows that many poor and working-class women have developed a sharp and discerning eye for power structures from closely observing and analyzing their employers, customers, and clients. Understanding how these unequal power relations operate is critical for their survival as discredited, low-paid workers. By watching and listening attentively, they develop a diversity of day-to-day strategies to deal with demanding employers and demeaning and difficult clients and customers. Sociologist James Scott refers to these strategies as "the prosaic but constant struggle against exploitation" using "everyday form(s) of resistance" (1985, 29). These prosaic strategies are not about creating collective resistance for political organizations and unions. Rather, they are individual tactics low-waged female workers develop to help them endure demanding and difficult employers, customers, and clients.

As individual tactics, these strategies "require little or no coordination or planning; they often represent a form of individual self-help; and they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite norms" (Scott 1985, 29). Moreover, these strategies are mostly "informal often covert, and concerned largely with immediate, de facto gains" (33). Thus, these everyday, prosaic strategies allow low-income women to resist abusive authority and oppressive work environments despite the structural limitations they face as economically disadvantaged women who need their jobs for rent and groceries. They are conscious ofthe type of maneuvering and negotiating they can do in the master/servant relationship without losing their jobs. Thus, poor and working-class

126 women's standpoint theory underscores the inherent contradiction in low-waged female workers' everyday resistance: they can negotiate but not subvert the master/servant relationship. The employer ultimately has the power. This does not mean, however, that

they are powerless and that their resistance is useless. Instead, this means that low-waged

female workers have to become even more alert to and conscious of their work

environment and work relationship with employers, customers, and clients to protect themselves from exploitative work conditions. I. Reading Thoughts:

Low-waged female workers construct resistant knowledge on how to function and

endure in unequal power relations in many ways, including becoming efficient readers of

facial expressions and body language. They develop a quick, discerning eye that catches

every detail of their employers, clients, and customers that remains unnoticed by the privileged. Explaining why poor black women have become efficient readers of facial expressions, working-class poet and writer Audre Lorde contends that "in order to

survive, those of us for whom oppression is as american as apple pie have always had to

be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor ..."

(1984, 114). Knowing how the master thinks and operates is, then, a question of survival.

In her groundbreaking research on African-American female domestic workers in

Between Women, Judith Rollins illustrates how the black domestics resisted being objectified by their white middle-class female employers. They sharpened their skills of reading their employers' facial expressions and body language as a way to know what their bosses were thinking in order to be on guard and prepared to protect themselves against their employers' erratic behavior, demanding requests, and overbearing presence.

Rollins observes how these women knew the minutiae oftheir employers' social lives and cuhural tastes such as how they dressed and behaved whereas their employers knew very little about their housecleaners. She writes,

127 Domestics were able to describe in precise detail the personalities, habits, moods, and tastes of the women they had worked for. (The descriptions employers gave were, by comparison, less complex and insightful--not, it seemed to me, because employers were any less capable of analyzing personalities but rather because they had less need to study the nuances of their domestics.) (213)

The employers had no reason to be conscious of their domestic workers because oftheir privileged status; that is, the domestics entered the employers' world to perform a service, not vice versa. Therefore positioned as servants, the domestic workers learned how to manage and get the most out of an unfavorable power relation by closely examining the behaviors of their employers and reevaluating and defining for themselves their own laboring roles and personal relationship with their bosses. Understanding power relations was how they endured being treated as unskilled, cheap, and discredited workers.

In "The Naked Face," writer Malcolm Gladwell (2002) credits scientists Paul

Ekman and Wallace Friesen with developing a taxonomy of facial expressions, categorizing a range of forty-two facial movements. Their work has gained sufficient recognition and support from academic communities to legitimize reading faces as a science. Gladwell notes that this new science demonstrates that "[w]hat appears to be a kind of magical, effortless intuition about faces, then, may not really be effortless and magical at all. This kind of intuition is a product of desire and effort" ( 48). Yet, as

Gladwell points out, even before reading thoughts was considered a science, the disempowered and abused have developed the ability to read facial expressions to remain alive in hostile environments.

Further, Gladwell argues that it is not in the interest of the privileged to read thoughts. For example, it does not serve an employer to read his secretary's thoughts because he would feel obliged to act on the hidden messages. He states, "What would the boss gain by reading the subtle and contradictory microexpressions on his secretary's face?

... He would be obliged to do something, or say something, or feel something that might otherwise be avoided entirely" (49). The secretary, however, invests time and energy into reading her boss's thoughts because her endurance depends upon meeting his needs, and

128 because it provides her information on how to negotiate her role as the servant. Thus, working-class feminist theorist Aida Hurtado contends that in contrast to the secretary,

"[t]he powerful have the privilege to ignore and therefore make invisible those with less power" (1996a, 129).

Rosalie Rodrigue in her memoir recounts how she was expected as a cruise stewardess to read her customers' facial expressions and figure out their needs to make their holiday as successful and enjoyable as possible. She writes that "it is the stewardess who must be the dignified, efficient one, or as one guest put it, a little philosopher. That wasn't quite right--just one who has made a study of trying to understand people" (1953,

94). It was her responsibility to indefatigably mother and nurse the passengers, attending to their needs without her actions being officially expressed. If she saw passengers looking sick, bored, or angered she immediately intervened, evaluating what they needed and promptly acting upon their needs. She even recalls playing referee in familial disputes and mending relationships of quarrelsome couples who had never spent twenty-four hours together in their lives.

Likewise, a domestic worker, Mrs. Taniguchi, claims that one of her primary roles as a housecleaner is to figure out the likes and dislikes of her female employers. She says,

I concluded after working for awhile, that the most important thing in this type of job is to think of and be able to predict the feelings of the lady of the house. She would teach me how to do certain things in the beginning, but after a month or two, I gradually came to learn the person's likes, tastes, and ideas .... In that way, I can become more intimate with the lady of the house in a natural way, and the job itself, becomes more interesting .... (Glenn 1988, 69)

Mrs. Taniguchi and Rodrigue provide keen insight into how low-income female workers are required to do much more than physical labor. It is the emotional, or invisible, labor that demands that they become efficient readers of facial expressions and body language to please and comfort their employers and customers. Moreover, they are expected to care and nurture without appearing that they are working. That is, if it appears that they are

129 performing emotional labor then the labor itselfloses its effect, as well as strains their relationships with their bosses. For example, if a secretary lets her employer know that she does not want to listen to his marital problems, she may be fired. Or if she agrees to pick up his clothes from the dry cleaners but informs her boss that it is not part of the formal duties for which she was hired, openly revealing the psychological dimension of the master/servant relationship, she may find herself working in a hostile environment or being denied an annual salary increase.

Emotional Labor

If it was simply a matter ofhousecleaners sanitizing the bathrooms, secretaries typing memos, and waitresses serving food then clocking out and returning home, there would be a less complex and onerous master/servant relationship. But many low-income women are doing much more than this: they are wiping dirty tables and nurturing the tired

souls of their customers; writing down messages and listening to their boss's financial

problems; scrubbing toilet bowls and intervening in their employer's family disputes to make peace between feuding family members. Moreover, in an upward-aspiring society

that promises happiness and success in the removal from the messiness, chaos, and

unpredictability of the everyday world, low-income women are needed to mediate and transform the lives of the middle and upper class. That is, for example, a waitress' role is to take down orders and promptly bring her customers' food in a timely and orderly

matter. Yet her role is also to allow the customers to be pampered, served, and

temporarily relieved from the banality of everyday activities of preparing food and washing

dirtied tables, plates, and silverware. Describing the various emotional labor she performs

as a waitress, Debra Ginsberg writes, "As a general rule, consumers expect their servers to

be emotionally available enough to pamper them into a feeling ofwell-being that will last

for at least the duration of their meal. I doubt that some of these patrons would expect

the same from their closest relatives" (2000, 112). Ginsberg is conscious ofhow

waitresses are expected by their customers to always appear emotionally and energetically

130 expansive and available. Thus, in order to understand, fulfill, and, even, negotiate their roles in performing emotional labor, poor and working-class women must develop and strengthen their skill in reading thoughts.

In The Managed Heart (1983), feminist sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explores emotional labor by examining airflight stewardesses. She argues that the biggest challenge they encounter as stewardesses is not so much the physical labor, although standing on their feet during the entire flight in a small, enclosed space serving cranky or difficult passengers is quite demanding and exhausting; it is the emotional labor in which they are expected by airline companies to sell themselves as a product. Their constant smiles, kind words, and gentle touch are their product, regardless of what they may sincerely feel. They are expected to act out and express certain "commercialized" feelings that their company deems appropriate and marketable in a competitive capitalist industry.

Thus, they are told to imagine the passengers' section on the plane as their living rooms in which they are the hostesses entertaining and satisfying their guests. Hochschild refers to these acted-out feelings as "deep acting"; that is, this emotive labor requires them to not

superficially perform these feelings but to actually believe that they sincerely feel these emotions. What can sometimes result, she argues, is self-alienation.

Indeed, this is the case for several of the stewardesses Hochschild interviews.

These women express alarm and dismay over not knowing who they are instead of who they should be, performing emotive duties as the perpetually pleasant air hostess. A sex therapist, Melanie Matthews, who has treated many female flight attendants, comments on how they are unable to identify their sexual desires, saying: "These women don't ever get the chance to decide who they are, and this shows up in their sexual life. They play the part of the ultra-female, of someone who takes an interest in others, and they don't get the chance to explore the other sides oftheir character and to discover their own needs, sexual or otherwise" (Hochschild 83).

131 Waitresses Dealing with Emotional Labor

In Dishing It Out, feminist social scientist Greta FoffPaules contends,

"Researchers [such as Hochschild] of emotionally controlling labor, like many observers of women have tended to focus on the exploitive policies of the workplace, while deemphasizing the ways in which workers respond to or protect themselves against exploitation" (1991, 163). She claims that low-waged female workers as waitresses resist being positioned as the servant, fighting to assert their independence and autonomy. Their resistance, she states, indicates that they are able to distinguish between their role as the servant that they are expected to perform and their defiant self that refuses to see itself as the servant.

Equally significant, she argues that the waitresses' ability to read their customers' thoughts can frame the master/servant relationship as a game; that is, they are constantly reminded that they are acting out a particular role to fulfill the needs of a customer. Thus, they see themselves acting out the role of a servant, rather than being a servant.

Working-class writer Dorothy Allison comments how her mother, who was a waitress for forty years, knew exactly what she was doing flashing a bright smile to her customers, fulfilling her role as the attentive, caring server, yet never identifying herself as a servant.

Allison writes, "Mama was never confused about who she was or what she was offering across the counter. It's just a job. People need their lunch served with a smile and a quick hand. Don't need to know your business--if you're tired or sick or didn't get any sleep for worrying. Just smile and get them what they need" (1995, 26).

Interviewing waitresses at the low-budget restaurant Route in New Jersey, Paules insists that "the waitress does not internalize an image of service as servitude and self as servant. In times of stress she sees her work as war and herself as soldier. In times of peace she sees her work as a private enterprise and herself as entrepreneur" ( 162). The ability oflow-income women to read facial expressions and body language to understand exactly where they stand in the master/servant relationship provides them with resistant

132 knowledge on how to deal with the undocumented, invisible work in which they are expected to care for and pamper their employers, customers, and clients without alienating their selves. Hence, Paules claims that "the waitress monitors her projected personality and manipulates her feelings in the course of social interaction, but she does so knowingly and in her own interests. This manipulation of self does not induce self-alienation or emotional disorientation" (162).

In particular, Paules contends that the "manipulation of self' means pleasing customers through reading their thoughts to acquire a more generous tip. Interpreting facial expressions and body language and using emotions to fulfill those interpreted needs is an economic strategy or an entrepreneurial maneuver. For example, one of the waitresses Paules interviews asserts: "This is my motto: 'You sit in my station at Route,

I'll sell you the world. I'll tell you anything you want to hear"' (150). This is confirmed by Ginsberg who claims in her memoir that she was constantly conscious of her emotions, using them strategically to reap money. She argues, "Most of my success at the table has been determined by how much information I've been willing to give ... [and] also my willingness to take an active interest in the lives of my customers while they are at my table. My ability to take care of my customers in this way speaks of my personal ability to nurture, to live up to the predetermined expectation my customer has of me" (258). Both the Route waitress and Ginsberg do not see themselves as servants who alienate themselves in acting out scripted roles, but rather as savvy business people who are marketing an image of themselves as caring and nurturing waitresses.

But what if, after nurturing and pampering her customer, the waitress is left with no tip or an insulting amount? The ability to interpret her customer's needs and to act out certain feelings to achieve meeting those needs does not guarantee a larger tip, nor does it prevent her from feeling used and unappreciated. And the fact that a substantial amount ofher income comes from tips means that she is at the mercy of the customer's kindness and generosity. Thus tipping reinforces the master/servant relationship. Low-income

133 women's standpoint theory shows low-waged female workers' everyday strategies strained by structural limitations. Positioned as servants, they cannot avoid this contradictory situation in which no matter how much they resist, their masters have the ultimate power.

Waitresses face serious limitations as low-waged female workers. Simply put, they are economically dependent on their jobs. Although waitress Reka Nagy asserted her worth by responding to a customer's insulting tip by writing on his American Express receipt "amateur tipper," she was immediately fired (Owings 2002, 101). And although another waitress Suz Kling was able to speak up for herself more frequently because

"[h]aving two jobs gave Suz freedom to 'push the envelope' more than others could ..."

(274), she still encountered structural limitations. Owings comments that "a price was extracted" (274), noting how Suz depleted herselfby pleasing her customers. Suz expresses her exhaustion, saying: "I have nothing left to give. If somebody asks me anything, like what is the weather going to be tomorrow, I might burst into tears.

Everybody has sucked out all the juice. I've given crayons to the kids, I've cleaned up the kiddie litter on the floor. 'Cinderella will be out in a minute.' I'm going to crack" (274).

Another waitress, Melinda, mentions how she spends her waitressing days swallowing her customers' rude, insulting remarks, noting that she always tries "to be the better person ... [i]n that way, I can be a waitress and feel I am a really good person"

(Owings 115). Being a good person to Melinda is indistinguishable from being a good waitress, which means that every time she successfully pleases her customers she is a good person. Although Melinda tries to always please her customers in order to feel like a good person, she is aware ofher customers' unrealistic demands and their difficult, self-centered

behaviors. She understands that she will never be able to completely satisfY them.

Moreover, she is conscious of the master/servant relationship that places her in a servile position: she will always do the pleasing and her customers will always make the demands.

Yet, despite her insight in this power structure, Melinda is still required to perform the

134 role of the servant. What this indicates is that low-waged female workers' awareness of their role as the servant does not, in itself, liberate them from the emotional demands of their labor.

Yet, Paules contends that there is a breaking point for the waitresses she

interviewed at Route. It is true that they will never be in positions of power, but, she

argues, this does not mean that they swallow their anger or tolerate customers' rude

behavior. When situations arise in which customers are too demanding or obnoxious,

many waitresses break free from their acting roles by revealing that they are aware of the

master/servant relationship, indicating to the customers that this power relation is only a

game to them. And as players in a game, they are not fawning or servile, but in fact

intelligent, cognizant beings who are aware of how they are positioned in the power

relation with their customers. The waitresses' personality and level of frustration

determine how they reveal this game: they may return insulting remarks, shout back, or

simply give bad service. One waitress, in particular, whose customer inappropriately

screamed at her for an unsatisfied meal, said to the woman: "'I could care less if you eat

or don 't eat. ... And you see this?' And I took her check and I ripped it apart" (Paules

38). Meanwhile, another waitress followed her customers out and handed back the

change they left her as a tip to embarrass them for the small amount of money they left her

(42).

Secretaries Dealing with Emotional Labor

Female secretaries are by class and gender socially and economically positioned

beneath their employers. Observing secretaries' abilities to resist their servile role in a

master/servant relationship, working-class sociologist Rosemary Pringle argues, "While

secretaries are at all sorts of structural disadvantages in relation to bosses they are not

hapless victims: a variety of strategies of power and resistance are open to them" (1988,

27). According to Pringle, one of the ways secretaries resist seeing themselves as servants

is through emotional labor. Many claim that it is they as secretaries who do the most

135 important work, identifying their emotional labor as critical to maintaining an organized and smoothly operated office. And through emotional labor, feminist scholar Mary Ann

Wichroski notes, they "de-toxify bureaucratic work settings in which so much of

American life is embedded" (1994, 40). By playing a range of roles as the sexy mistress, doting daughter, faithful wife, and nurturing mother, low-income women understand that their labor is important for creating a friendly and personal environment. Although they are placed in these roles, there is still room for role playing in which they can redefine themselves as the boss's "Other." For example, Pringle notes that some secretaries replace the master/servant discourse (in which the boss is subject, the secretary object) with a mother/son discourse (in which the boss is now object, the secretary is subject).

However, the boss will get his needs met, not the secretary's, regardless if she is the sexy mistress or nurturing mother. Moreover, ifthe boss's needs are not met, the secretary may be out of a job.

Secretaries perform the role of'"mother-confessors' and 'sounding-boards' for those who need someone to listen" (Wichroski 37). Aware that an essential part of their labor is to be attentive and available to care and nurture, these women are anything but passive caretakers. Not only are they actively reading the emotions and thoughts of their employers and clients, they are also in possession of sensitive and private information that makes their position even more valuable. Joan Nestle, a working-class writer and activist, recalls how her mother, as a low-paying bookkeeper, strategically acquired as much personal and professional information on her boss as possible to protect herself from being fired; she knew too much for her employer to simply ignore or fire her. Nestle writes,

"Like all those in bondage, my mother laughed at the master's dependency, at his vanities.

She recorded his tax write-offs, his stealing from the business, his use of call girls ... she was feared as a woman who know too much" ( 1987, 84-85).

Moreover, secretaries frequently see their employers as "infantile" and unable to function without the clerical work they do and the caring and nurturing they provide as the

136 adult figure. For example, Greta. a secretary for a private doctor, notes how indispensable she is, commenting that her employer cannot operate a single day without her. Speaking about the time she was ill and spent the day at home, she mentions how "I got three phone calls that day from him. [While I was] laying in bed, he called me, 'Miss Greta, I can't find this, I can't find that"' (Johnson 2002, 53). Another secretary, Jill, comments on how her boss has temper tantrums and how she has learned to deal with him as if she is handling a little spoiled boy, scolding him when necessary to cahn him down and putting him back to work, even calling his wife when he gets out ofhand (53).

Stephanie's work relationship with her boss, Richard, resembles Greta's and Jill's.

Interviewing Stephanie, Pringle learns that Richard is so unorganized and unable to concentrate for a long period of time on his projects that Stephanie and his wife create a schedule for him and communicate frequently between the two keeping each other abreast of his work progress. Yet, Stephanie comments that this form of control she and his wife have over her employer's work life is never spelled out. That is, Richard would be too threatened if he was conscious of the fact that his work success depends on his secretary's labor. As a result, Stephanie can never be direct. Illustrating how she strategically and gently asserts her control, Stephanie notes that "if Richard is the only one who can answer the query ... then I sort through the files to get out the information he might need ....

And just sort of sit down with him ... lock him in his room and say, this and this happened, remember this relates to ... stuff like that" (Pringle 36).

Low-income women's standpoint theory underscores that although Stephanie negotiates her role in the master/servant relationship, she cannot totally break free from it.

It is true that secretaries, like waitresses, have room to maneuver, as Pringle points out, stating that "[p]ower relations have constantly to be reproduced in order to be maintained.

However solid the 'structures' might look they are not set in stone" (28). Yet, there is only so much maneuvering secretaries can do in a unequal power relation. They will never be recognized as a social, or even cognitive, equal to their employers.

137 II. Moral Authority:

Poor and working-class women may feel they have moral authority over their employers, customers, and clients whom they view as self-centered and self-consumed.

Moreover, they believe their lives stand as models to the greedy and arrogant who, they claim, live spiritually corrupted and poisoned lives. For example, many African-American domestics describe their white female employers as lazy, weak, and emotionally distraught women. Live-in maid Josephine Hunter contends, "The average white woman in the south is lazy" (Buss 1985, 33). This is echoed by writer Mary Monroe's character, Annette, in

God Don't Like Ugly who states: "I used to wonder what white women were good for.

Most of the women mama worked for told her a lot of their business. They all seemed to be having an affair or seeing a therapist. They couldn't clean their own houses or take care of their own kids or even cook. They sound pretty useless to me" (2000, 22).

Moreover, many black domestics, acting upon their moral authority, feel it is their duty to teach parenting skills to their employers. Zenobra King argues that one ofher roles as a domestic is to teach her employers how to parent. She mentions an ugly family dispute between her employer and the employer's daughter, and how she had to intervene, saying: "I separated them. I sent the daughter to one room and the mother to the other and talked to both of them and I brought them back together" (Dilll980, 120). Rollins also observes how African-American domestics see themselves as having strong parental skills, and consider human relations as their forte. She notes that "no domestic I interviewed or observed gave any indication she believed herself inferior to her employers.

(A few even indicated they considered themselves superior in their more humane value system and in some of their capabilities, particularly childraising)" (170).

Feminist scholar Bonnie Thornton Dill concurs, stating that from her research on

African-American domestic workers, "they describe themselves as exercising power on behalf of the parents and teaching the children to obey them and respect their parents"

(1980, 120). And valuing themselves as possessing important insight on human relations,

138 in particular family relationships, many low-income women indicate that they would not want the life of their employers. They express their need and desire to live an economically comfortable life, but strongly voice their distaste for their employers' lifestyle. For example, one woman says, '"Oh, I wouldn't like switching places with her because I have noticed that although people are very, very rich and they have everything, they are very unhappy underneath and it sometimes shows on them. I don't want to be unhappy. I don't know, I just don't admire them.... But if I was to change life with them, I would like to have just a little bit of they money, that's all"' (1988, 50). This domestic worker makes a distinction between money and success: her female employer lives an economically privileged, yet an emotionally dysfunctional, life. Thus, according to the domestic worker, her employer does not have a successful life, despite her money.

Moreover, by making this distinction, the domestic worker is able to assert pride in what

she views as her modest yet sincere life and dignity in her honest labor.

Furthermore, many of these black domestic workers assert pride in how they can

get important information from their employers on how to give their children a better

education. For example, one domestic worker who is not formally educated mentions how she is always asking questions about her employer's children--what books they are reading, what their hobbies are, what they are learning in school--to provide her a context

on how her children should be educated (Dill 1980). Another domestic worker says about her job, "Well what I like most about it, the things that I weren't able to go to school to

do for my children. I could kinda pattern from the families that I worked for, so that I

could give my children the best of my abilities" (1983, 144). And Corrine Raines, who worked for more than thirty years as a domestic, mentions that "so many people have

gotten their education by it, and it isn't any disgrace .... I wasn't embarrassed that I'd done that [housework]" (1988, 36), especially because she helped fund her children's

education. Thus, low-income women's standpoint theory shows the contradictions and ambiguity in domestic work by highlighting how domestics see their work as both a

139 laborious task and an opportunity. Moreover, asserting their moral authority, they see themselves in control despite being socially and economically positioned as servants.

Many low-income women also assert moral authority as nurses' and homecare

aides, contending that it is they who are actively involved in their patients' well-being, and,

as such, they have earned the moral authority as nurturers and caretakers to determine

what is best for their clients. Yet working-class feminist scholar Beverley Skeggs (1997)

argues that it is not any low-income woman who can claim moral authority as a caretaker.

The sexually assertive working-class woman, like Lil' Kim, who takes pride in her female

body and sexual prowess lacks social and cultural capital and therefore lacks moral

authority as well. She would either not be hired or be quickly fired as an aide. And it is

questionable if Jennifer Reeder's "White Trash Girl" would even give a damn. If she did

care and wanted to nurture, then it would be under her conditions and on her time.

Consequently, "White Trash Girl" would never get hired. Thus, low-income women's

standpoint theory underlines the contradiction in poor and working-class women's

everyday resistance. That is, Courtney Love's "in-your-face" attitude protects her from

being passive in response to male violence, but it prevents her from holding down a job,

especially as a caretaker.

Ironically, it is Wendy Shalit's "Modest Girl" who would most likely be hired and

be successful as a caretaker. She may lack street knowledge and not know how to survive

the violence and sexual harassment in the poor sections of Detroit that Marge Piercy and

Debra Dickerson had to endure as teenagers. "Modest Girl" may also not know how (or

simply refuse) to use her sexuality to get her bills paid at the end of the month when the

money runs out. Yet "Modest Girl" does know how to be respectable and feminine by

being a reliable and responsible caretaker. Skeggs explains that working in the caring

industry as nurses' and homecare aides, poor and working-class women can desexualize

themselves by being portrayed as a mommy-nurturing figure. She writes, "The 'caring

self is both a performance and a technique used to generate valuations of responsibility

140 and respectability. Doing caring, that is their caring practices, are fundamental to their concept of the sel£ ... To speak as a caring person produces an identity of value for the sel:f, which also capitalizes on prior female experience" (69).

And capitalizing on female experience as a caretaker, "Modest Girl" claims her moral authority by becoming a skillful reader of thoughts; that is, she takes pride in her respectable caring selfthat understands--or at least claims to understand--the wants and needs ofher clients. And although they are never seen in the health industry as experts or professionals or even as knowledgeable workers, nurses' and homecare aides still gain a certain amount of respect and recognition as caretakers from society in general. Skeggs notes how "[t]he importance placed on moral responsibility" through caretaking

"generates a form of productive power whereby working-class women can gain positions of respect and responsibility from being seen to care" (54).

This does not mean, however, that aides see the act of caring as solely a way to gain social and cultural capital. They may very well feel genuine care and empathy for their clients. For example, Onnie Lee Logan, a midwife for almost six decades, mentioned how she could identify with pregnant women in labor and understand the pain they were going through in order to give them effective care and comfort. She recounted,

I tell you one thing that's very impo'tant that I do that the doctors don't do and the nurses doesn't do because they doesn't take time to do it. And that is I'm with my patients at all times with a smile and keepin her feelin good with kind words . . . . It's from my heart and they can feel me .... What she's going through with I'm going through right along with her. (1989, 140)

Likewise, Jesusita, also an experienced and well-respected midwife in her poor Chicano community in Nevada mentioned how she was particularly able to comfort and alleviate the fear and pain of unwed mothers in labor because she too had her first child out of wedlock. Resented and hated by her family members, she was forced to raise her child on her own with no help. Thus, through her own personal experience, she was able to read

141 the fear, loneliness, grief, and hopelessness on these young women's faces and try to comfort them as much as possible (Buss 2000).

Generating human knowledge through their emotional interaction and bonding with clients, many low-income women as caretakers place much value on holistic medicine. For example, medical practitioner Elizabeth Elliot (1991) notes that several of the aides she interviewed believed that their clients needed touch therapy, that is, the massaging and caressing of ailing bodies with loving, gentle touch. They mentioned how important beauty school would be for their work. Yet, when they mentioned it to a supervisor, the idea was quickly dismissed as trivial. Elliot writes,

The claim by the nurse's aides that this is suitable training for their work, and, in fact, can be seen to be therapeutic is not taken seriously by officials of the health care industry or any other health industry for that matter, who fail to see the relation between grooming, cleanliness and care of sick people. These skills, which can be of therapeutic value in many cases, are perceived as too basic, too associated with popular women's culture and debased by the fact that they are performed by low-status women of color. (61-62)

Elliot's comment highlights how low-income women's human knowledge is dismissed as simplistic and banal. But the fact remains that they have critical insight on holistic medicine and on the maintenance and care of people and communities. They understand the importance of beautifYing an ailing body by touching it, massaging lotion on it, applying make up on it, and adorning it with jewelry.

Moreover, as Dorothy Smith points out, it is predominantly women as nurses and aides who constantly interact with clients. They know more about the daily routines and aches and pains of clients than doctors do. She writes, "To a large extent women have at various points direct and immediate contact with the actual life situation of the patient, before it has been cleaned up and tidied up, in all it complexity ..." (1987, 84). And through daily contact with their clients, many aides see the value in human touch. So although homecare aides lack credentials and formal academic training, they still identify

142 themselves as a legitimate source of human knowledge, knowing what is best for their clients by claiming moral authority as caretakers.

Many of the women Elliot interviewed identifY their work as homecare aides as natural and simple, though physically demanding; however, they are not claiming these jobs are unskilled. For example, Terisita, an aide, says: "I was trained because I was a mother. And with three kids, who doesn't know how to take care of someone sick? When a person is sick, they are like a child anyway" ( 65). She is not belittling her role as a homecare aide, but rather valuing her role as a mother. Further, Elliot points out how

Terisita is particularly attentive and empathetic to her clients, closely reading their thoughts to know how to appropriately care for them. Elliot writes, "Terisita could anticipate her patient's needs in an expert manner. She knew when her patient, John, who had AIDS, would start to tire and be in pain. She would watch the time, prepare medicine ahead and gently suggest he take a nap" ( 65). The caring and nurturing that T erisita and other aides provide is indeed skillful work; the empathy they feel and express comes from their skill in reading thoughts and feelings that they have polished as mothers and working-class laborers. Moreover, the human knowledge they construct in reading thoughts, as well as from personally understanding how it feels to be the underdog in power relations, gives them critical information on how to respond to their clients' needs.

I also know from personal experiences as an aide working for mentally and physically handicapped adults for four years with the United Cerebral Palsy Association that it was my feeling of sincere care that helped me read my clients' facial expressions and body language when they were either unable to speak or express their needs and wants.

For example, I knew when Fred, a client who could not speak, see, or hear, was lonely.

He would slightly rock back and forth until someone sat next to him, holding his hand.

And for Katie, I knew when she was going to have a seizure by the glaze in her eyes and her sullen mood. I was constantly attentive to them because that was my responsibility as

143 a caretaker, but I was acutely aware oftheir body language and facial expressions because

I truly cared if Fred was sad or if Katie was physically uncomfortable.

However, not all of my female co-workers had the same relationship with their clients. Several workers intentionally had a strict professional relationship with their clients, referring to themselves as "'aides" and the people they worked for as "clients" or

"patients" to create an emotional distance; it was a strategy to help them endure the physical and emotional strain of working with the developmentally disabled. They came to work, did eight hours oflabor, then left. Despite this, they were not less reliable or responsible workers than I was. The major difference I found was that many were less exhausted and burned out than I was because they were not emotionally attached to their

clients and were able to leave their work behind every time they clocked out.

These particular aide workers communicated to their clients out of resistant knowledge to protect themselves from being emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically

depleted. For example, a co-worker and friend of mine who worked as a UCPA aide for

several years dealt with her clients' emotions strategically, not personally. When a

particular client was in pain, she would offer a scientific reason and explain to him that the

discomfort would only be temporary; she would not identiiy with his pain. She had to

create this emotional distance. She was in an unstable marriage with a young child she

was practically raising on her own. Simply put, she was emotionally exhausted before she

even began her shifts as an aide. Resistant knowledge kept her able to manage another

emotionally demanding day taking care of physically and emotionally needy individuals.

Also, resistant knowledge is at times necessary to protect caretakers from giving

too much ofthemselves--their love, sincerity, care, and sweat--to an industry that shows

little value for them. The health care··industry is a multi-billion dollar enterprise with a

large and money-trailing lobbying force on Capitol Hill that appropriates and

commercializes caring and nurturing as a profit tool. Moreover, caring is seen as an

intuitive feminine act, thus women in the caring industry are seen as performing non-labor.

144 Elliot points out that indeed '"[c]apitalismromanticizes then commodifies' these emotion, cognitive skills, whether called 'maternal thinking' or 'mother wit', used in sickness care .

. ." (66). They make $6 to $8 an hour, with no health benefits or pension plan "taking on the tasks," New York Times columnist Bob Herbert notes, "that most people, even close relatives, shun" (2002, A27).

Many aides express their anger being treated as cheap, disposable labor. Mrs.

Bowens mentions that she enjoys her job and finds it rewarding, saying: "What I like most is giving her [the client] love and warmth and treating her like a human being" (Feldman

1990, 39). Yet, she is reminded every time she picks up her "skimpy" paycheck how the caring she gives has little value in a highly advanced capitalistic and patriarchal society.

She succinctly remarks, "Low wages degrade and anger me" (33). Although she is providing critical and genuine care, it is commodified as a "cheap" product that women

"naturally" provide, thus requiring no skills. Thus, low-income women's standpoint theory shows the importance of human knowledge that provides low-waged female workers insight on human relations, but it underscores how essential resistant knowledge is to shield them from the emotional and physical wear and tear of being caretakers. III. Asserting Their Humanness:

Many poor and working-class women are able to dissociate from their low-status jobs, differentiating between who they are as family and community members and how they are positioned as the servant at work. For example, Ginsberg takes pride in her role as a writer and mother. Waitressing, she claims, gives her more free time to focus on her writing and be home with her young son. And Rollins notes in her interview with a black domestic worker, Ann Ryder, that she "seems to separate her sense of self--strong and intact--from her assessment ofher occupation--low and valueless. Her identity is based on something else (her church activity? her family?), something not apparent from our interview. But this distancing of herself from her job works to keep her self-esteem intact,

145 a mechanism she apparently has used all of her life, evidenced by the fuct that she remembered few ofher employers' names ..." (1985, 146).

This ability to recognize themselves as other than how they are perceived and treated as a low-waged, low-skilled worker is not as evident or as easy as one may assume. Wichroski notes, "Because the work interaction is part of the service itself, the worker's identity becomes an integral part ofthe service" (34). This is demonstrated by

Ginsberg who recounts how a couple she regularly serves as a waitress and with whom

she is friendly is unable to recognize her outside of the restaurant. She ponders, "I must

assume, therefore, that I am doing a good job at playing my part. And my part is

determined not so much by how well I perform my job but by how close I am to the image

of waitress that these two have in their minds. I've played it so well, in fact, that they are

completely unable to attach an identity to me outside ofthe restaurant" (243). Another

waitress states with frustration, "'They [customers] look at me like 'Oh my God. They

have parents?' It's sometimes like we're not human" (Paules 133).

Customers have such a difficult time conceptualizing waitresses outside their role

as server and outside the master/servant relationship because, as Paules points out, their

humanness is concealed. They are prohibited from eating, drinking, and smoking in

public, as well as using the patron's bathroom This is true for many other low-waged

jobs. Secretaries are prohibited from eating at their desks, chewing gum, or sucking on

candy. Housecleaners are expected to eat before or after but never during their job. And

my grandfather was recently scolded by a board member in his residential community for

giving a glass of water to a landscape worker. This concealment indicates that so-called

low-skilled and low-paid workers are to solely focus on mediating and transforming the

everyday concrete worlds of their clients, customers, and employers.

By exposing their own humanness, low-income women disrupt the master/servant

relationship; that is, by revealing their own needs and desires as the servant, they challenge

the very notion that only the master can have needs and wants. Moreover, they position

146 themselves alongside the master by illustrating that, as human beings, they too are complex beings who dream, hope, fear, and love. Yet, as stated earlier, it is not in the interest of the master to read the thoughts ofthe servant because he would have to recognize that his servant has equal needs, desires, and dreams. Thus, as Ehrenreich comments, this concealment oflow-income women's humanness results in the women becoming the labor they perform in the public's eye. Referring to her own personal

experience as a housecleaner with the Maids company in Maine, she writes on how she was shown a video on a body-attached vacuum cleaner that is worn on the male inventor's

back, claiming: "See I am the vacuum cleaner" (2001, 74). She observes how "the

inventor returns to the theme of human/machine merger: when properly strapped in, we

too will be vacuum cleaners, constrained only by the cord that attached us to an electrical

outlet, and vacuum cleaners don't have back aches" (74). This video makes the point

directly and cogently: Maids housecleaners are only of value if they can perform labor as

efficiently and quickly as a vacuum; hence there is no need to distinguish them from their

labor.

So how do these women resist becoming their labor, losing their humanness in the

master/servant relationship? They strategically dissociate themselves from the role of the

servant by declaring that they have the final say for whom they will work and serve. For

example, one domestic worker asserted: "I'll never be rich. I don't care how much they

are going to pay me, you know. I don't care. If there is an uncomfortable feeling or they

think I'm just a housework person, I'm not going to work. Even if they pay me 50 dollars

an hour, no! (Glenn 1988, 68). And Rollins recalls how one woman left a note to her

employer, stating: "I came here to work today. But I started in your bathroom and

realized that ifI scrubbed that toilet one more time, I would flip. I'm sorry to give you

such short notice. I won't be back" (83). By refusing to work for just anybody under

unfavorable conditions, these women are asserting that they as individuals are not for sale; they will not compromise their integrity and self-worth for money.

147 Low-income women's standpoint theory highlights that there is nothing romantic in these acts of resistance because for most, if not all, of these women money is needed for the bare essentials such as food and rent. Being able to turn down a job to save their integrity and sense of worth may mean not being able to feed or clothe their children. Yet, low-income women's standpoint shows that by allowing themselves to have the final say on whether to work for a particular employer or serve a particular customer, poor and working-class women assert their own humanness. Poet and writer Judy Grahn captures this spirit of self-survival and self-dignity in her poem "Common Woman," writing about

Ella, a waitress "in a square apron Highway 80" who "keeps her mind the way men I keep a knife--keen to strip the game I down to her size I ... [and] turns away the smaller tips, out of pride" ( 1980, 63). Pride reminds her that she is worth more than those pennies on the dirty counter, as well as affirms her need to defend herselfby standing up to obnoxious and arrogant customers.

Poor and working-class women's standpoint theory also asserts that their children's lives have more value than their labor, and if they were ever to choose between their children's well-being and their employers' or customers', their families would always

be first. For example, Jean, a mother of five who desperately needs her job at the food-processing plant, mentions that the work policy is strict. Two lateness means an

automatic frring. Yet, she asserts, "But ifl get a phone call and one of my kids is sick, you better believe I'm out ofhere" (Schein 1995, 70). Likewise, Elizabeth Ray, a domestic worker, recalls the time her fifteen-year old son telephoned her at work to say he was sick.

When her employer found out that her son called, she began lecturing Ray. In response,

Ray announced, "Since my son can't call ..., I'm not obligated to you in no kind of way.

My child comes first and I want you to know it. He comes even before you and your family--and I want you to know that!" (Rollin 1985, 145).

To assert their worth, other low-income women insist on being treated as

professionals. Marlene, who operates a daycare center in her home, insists on being seen

148 and respected as an entrepreneur running her own business. She says, "The worst thing about this job is some of the parents' attitudes. It's like they're trying to tell me what they want, and that is not how this works. I am not their employee. It is a profession....

When they call me a babysitter I say, 'I'm not a babysitter: I don't sit on your kids'"

(Johnson 57). Likewise, feminist scholar Mary Romero observes in her interview with

Chicana housekeepers how they refuse to be equated with what is perceived as unskilled and undesirable labor. They adamantly refuse to be called a maid. For example, Mrs.

Fernandez mentions how her employer's children "started to introduce me to their friends as their maid.... I would say, 'I'm not your maid. I've come to [only] clean your house

..." (1988, 87). Furthermore, Romero notes that these women refer to themselves as professionals and call their employers clients or vendors, repositioning themselves in the master/servant relationship. Thus, "[b]y identifYing themselves as professional housekeepers, the women emphasized their special skills and knowledge and situated their

work among male-dominated jobs that are treated as semiskilled, such as carpet cleaning"

(87).

To insist on being treated as professionals, some low-income women refuse to do

certain tasks. Homecare aides and housecleaners, in particular, refer to the floor as a

physical barrier to indicate the type of labor they will engage in, as well as to symbolize

their separation as a respected and dignified individual from this socially denigrated labor.

The floor is an important benchmark because it represents the lowest form of work. That

is, the value and worth oflabor is literally measured by how far removed it is from the

ground. The least respected job, then, is sweeping and cleaning floors, whereas the most

respected is the total removal from the ground, or from the low, such as those of

professional labor in which one works on desks. Thus, by refusing to do labor that brings

them closer to the floor, these low-income women are, in fact, declaring that they see

themselves as respected and valued workers.

149 Yet someone has to do this labor. Someone has to clean the floors, scrub the toilet bowls, and sweep the streets that most people, including poor and working-class, do not want to do. These low-income women who refuse to clean the floors may be asserting their worth by not performing certain undesirable tasks, but at the same time they are reifYing a social power structure that intensifies its exploitation of and disrespect for workers as they are further positioned at the bottom of the work/pay scale. It is true that a nurse's aide, for example, who tells her client that she does not do floors is protecting herself from this very power structure that humiliates and exploits the poor and so-called unskilled. But claiming she will not do "this" type of labor indicates that it is below her and on]y someone who has less skill, and perhaps even perceived as having less self-worth, would perform this work. Hence, the maid who comes in and cleans the floors is not seen by the aide as her equal but an inferior worker performing less valued labor.

However, it is very possible that this aide who refuses to do floors, may not be devaluing the labor ofhousecleaners but establishing boundaries declaring that she is not a cheap, expendable worker. In a profit-driven industry that views her labor as a commodity and in a society that places little value on the work she performs as an aide, she has minimal protection from exploitation. In many cases, if she does not insist that she is not a servant readily available to perform any task that needs to be done, no matter how exhausting or undesirable it is, then no one will remind her client and the caring industry that she is not a warm body existing for another individual's convenience. As a result, she must rely upon herself to assert her worth and establish from the very beginning of the client-aide relationship what she will and will not do to prevent herself from being exploited.

Low-income women's standpoint theory underlines the possibility that an aide's refusal to do certain chores may be both devaluing the work housecleaners do and valuing the labor she performs as a caretaker. In her research, Elliot notes that most of the female aides she interviewed identify themselves as nurses who are involved with the health and

150 comfort of their clients, and thus are willing to engage in extra activities that nurture their patients, such as polishing fingernails and styling hair, but adamantly refuse to clean floors.

Mentioning the type of tasks she does during the day as an aide, Ethel says: "I pat her legs

with lotion you know the little personal things, brush her hair, polish her nails. I don't do

cleaning, I don't do floors--there are maids for that" (1991, 46-47). Insisting that she is

not a maid, Ethel is demanding to be treated as a professional. She equates work that

resembles what a nurse does as more respectable than that which a housecleaner does

because she is working within a power structure that identifies housecleaning as unskilled

and nursing as skilled; thus her insistence on being called as a nurse may simply be how

she validates the labor she does.

Interestingly, housecleaners who actually do and are required to clean the floor,

still use the floor as the lowest denominator, insisting that they clean with a mop, and not

on their knees. Hence, there is still some distance, no matter how little, between

themselves and the floor. Yet it is not a question ofthem upholding the social power

hierarchy by making sure that they are at least positioned above someone else, thus falsely

claiming to have more worth and value than another individual. Rather, they are

strategically drawing a distinction between their bodies and the floor, demanding that they

do not become indistinguishable from their labor; that is, a domestic on her knees and

hands scrubbing the floor "merges" with it, thus having as little value as the ground. More

importantly, they are protecting their bodies by refusing to scrub the floors on their knees

and hands. As a result, one woman states, "I didn't do everything those folks told me to

do. Some I did and some I didn't. They would tell me to get on my knees and scrub the

floor and I didn't do it I didn't mess up my knees. I told one lady, 'My knees aren't for

scrubbing. My knees are made to bend and walk on.' ... I took care of myself' (Rollins

142).

Unfortunately, Ehrenreich (2000, 2001) points out that cleaning agencies continue

to pride themselves on providing their clients with cleaning ladies who scrub and polish

151 the :floor the "old :fushioned way" --on their hands and knees. The total obliteration of housecleaners as autonomous, complete beings to be repackaged and advertised as their

labor, as indistinguishable from a cleaned floor, is in capital demand. And as the middle

class become even busier and more overextended, working longer hours to live grand

lifestyles or to simply pay for basic necessities, the need for domestic help increases. As a

result, there are now more cleaning companies competing against each other, and the way

they try to out compete one another is by advertising how servile their workers are

(Ehremeich 2001 ). IV. Chicanery:

Another way low-income women resist the overwhelming demands being placed

on them as servants is to appear simple-minded or to intentionally make mistakes. This

form of chicanery is not simply a scheme to manage heavy and exhausting work loads, but

a critical strategy to survive a hostile environment in which poor and working-class

women are used as cheap, replaceable labor and, in particular, low-income women of

color, who are the most vulnerable to exploitation, are seen as accessible and expendable

labor. For example, Anne Ryder, a domestic worker who was already overloaded with

numerous cleaning tasks, intentionally screwed up on the laundry to avoid doing an

additional chore. In an interview, she tells Rollins: ''I did do the washing for her for a long

time. But I got tired of it. So I didn't half rinse the soap out.... I got it [wash load]

brown, then she told me she was going to get a woman in to do days' work. ... But I

could get it nice, you know; but I didn't want to get it nice .... So I messed up on the

laundry.... I had to take care of myself' (143).

Another woman recalls how she played on the word "girl," explaining to her boss

that she did not clean the floors because she said her girl cleans it on her knees and hands,

and since she is a lady she only cleans the floor with a mop: "She had a daughter who was ten years old, and I know I'm not her girl, I'm just the lady who came to do the days'

work. So I said, 'Well, you said your girl cleans the floor, and I'm not your girl. ... '

152 'Wel4' she said, 'tomorrow I'll go out and buy a mop.' So, ... I said, 'Why don't you just let me go down in the basement and bring the mop up?"' (Dill1988, 40). Through chicanery, this domestic worker exposes how her employer has tried to fool her by hiding the mop in the basement, forcing her to clean the floor on her hands and knees. Yet, she switches it around and identifies her boss as the fool by letting her know exactly where the mop is.

Being aware ofthe power relation between their employers and customers and themselves as low-waged laborers, poor and working-class women know how power operates and how it is distributed. Hence, having critical insight into power relationships, they know how to fool without being fooled themselves. In particular, they are not fooled by lateral promotions. Many job promotions are in name only, offering minimal wage increase, no real managerial power or authority, and more onerous responsibilities. A waitress at the restaurant Route in New Jersey recalls how she was asked by a manager to become an assistant. She simply responded by laughing (Paules 105). Similarly, other waitresses at Route also laughed when confronted by their managers about a promotion; some became angry at the idea that they were seen as gullible enough to even take the promotion seriously. Paules observes, "The 'failure' of the waitress to pursue a managerial career in the restaurant testifies to her ability to evaluate the structure of rewards critically: to look beyond a promising title to a reality of petty tasks" (129).

Concurring with Paules's analysis, Johnson points out that her research reveals that

"[m]ost women were reluctant to become supervisors, because supervising denied them the easy companionship and emotional support of other women" (54). Without any real power and managerial protection, low-income women as supervisors jeopardize their safety network of female co-workers, and without this network, the work environment is no longer supportive or even tolerable enough for them to endure difficuh and tedious labor conditions. As a result, poor and working-class women must be cognizant of how power is used in order to fool and not be fooled.

153 Conclusion:

Feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker writes, "To focus on women's resistance as it exists within the parameters of their daily lives is not to celebrate the confinement or to romanticize the enormity ofthe damaged inflicted. It is to acknowledge the meaning women invest in their daily lives, ... to acknowledge that many women are indeed activists who have ... 'walked purposefully in and out of the front door of their lives"'

(1989, 175). Indeed, this is the purpose and goal oflow-income women's standpoint theory--to show poor and working-class women as generators of resistant knowledge within the parameters of their daily lives. And by closely looking at their lives, specifically observing them within the workforce, low-income women's standpoint theory shows that low-waged female workers generate resistant knowledge to protect themselves from being exploited as cheap, disposable labor. Moreover, it highlights the significance of their everyday, prosaic resistance to help them endure oppressive authority and abusive work environments.

Although these everyday, prosaic strategies function as individual tactics for personal resistance, they also can be used for collective resistance. For example, at a

Clinique factory where I worked for a few months, the assembly line supervisor suddenly increased the production rate. After an exhausting week of trying to keep up with the pace shoving mascara and lipstick into cosmetic bags, my co-workers and I intentionally skipped every third or fourth cosmetic bag that was placed in tandem on the assembly belt for us to fill to let the supervisor know that we were not going to be more productive at a quicker pace. After an entire day of insubordination that created chaos (those at the next line did not know which bags were filled or not for packaging) the production rate was lowered to where it was a week earlier.

As effective as we were in resisting the increase in production rate, our actions were limited. Although our immediate work situation improved, there were no long-lasting structural changes. We were only ten to fifteen workers out of two hundred

154 or more in that particular plant. There was very little we could influence without planning and coordinating among all the employees. Moreover, we directed our anger and frustration at our supervisor who had minimal managerial power. Furthermore, it was not she who made the decision to increase the pace. It was her boss's boss. She was one of us--a low-waged worker expected to follow orders. My experience underscores the limitations of everyday resistance. If poor and working-class women are going to make any real changes in the master/servant relationship, they have to work collectively.

Moreover, only collective resistance through unionization and political organization can sustain labor reforms.

Low-income women's standpoint theory does not deny this reality nor does it romanticize or valorize individual acts of resistance. While acknowledging the importance of collective resistance, low-income women's standpoint theory also shows the importance of individual resistance. It underscores the fact that collective resistance grows out of and is inspired by individual insubordination. Working-class

African-American writer Toni Cade Bambara claims that these everyday resistance constitutes the foundation for building a social revolution. That is, Bambara contends, social revolutions grow out of personal revolutions. She writes, "We'd better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships.

Mouth don't win the war. It don't even win the people. Neither does haste, urgency, and stretch-out-now insistence .... If your house ain't in order, you ain't in order" (1970,

110). Thus, if the individuals are revolutionary, the movement can be revolutionary. Poor and working-class women are in an ideal state for political action. They put "their houses in order" by negotiating their role as servants in the master/servant relationship, strategizing under structural limitations while dealing with contradicting situations.

Organic intellectuals can step in to help low-income women plan and coordinate their everyday resistance into a collective political force.

155 CHAPTER FOUR Embracing the Contradictions and Ambiguity

Introduction:

In Landscape for a Good Woman (1986), white British writer Carolyn Steedman explores her working-class childhood. She does not write about working-class community, class solidarity, collective resistance. Instead, she writes about her lonely, strong-minded, and materialistic mother. She recalls how her mother was more concerned with buying clothes than with the working-class struggle. Steedman also remembers how her mother read her fairy tales about poor little girls who grew up to marry rich, handsome princes. Her mother's life defies the homogenous "working-class stories" that celebrate class sacrifice and heroism. She writes, "The story--my mother's story, a hundred thousand others--cannot be absorbed into the central one: it is both its disruption and its essential counterpoint: this is a drama of class" (22).

Steedman warns that the refusal to acknowledge the contradictions and ambiguity in the everyday lives of the working class as they deal with economic oppression supports the belief that their lives are not worthy of analysis. She writes,

When the sons of the working-class, who have made their escape from this landscape ofpsychological simplicity, put so much effort into accepting and celebrating it, into delineating a background of uniformity and passivity, in which pain, loss, love, anxiety and desire are washed over with a patina of stolid emotional sameness, then something important, and odd, and possibly promising of startling revelation, is actually going on.... [It is a] refusal of a complicated psychology to those living in conditions of material distress .... (12; emphasis mine)

156 Her mother, then, is a constant reminder that we must resist the simplification and

reduction of the working class. We must acknowledge the ''complicated psychology" of

the economically disadvantaged in their struggle against economic and social oppression.

Cognizant of the "complicated psychology" of the working class, I look at how

poor and working-class women deal and live with emotional pain and anger that are

expressed in chapters two and three. For example, how does Mrs. Bowens, a nurse's aide

whom we met in chapter three, deal with her pain and anger every time she picks up her

meager paycheck that reminds her how her labor is perceived as cheap and unimportant?

Likewise, in chapter two, how do the working-class high school students in Angie

McRobbie's research deal with their pain and anger at being seen as "trashy" and dumb

when they are told by their teachers that they will end up as low-waged laborers?

Low-income women's standpoint theory states that poor and working-class

women are neither powerless victims nor stoic heroines. The false duality between

victimization and heroism problematically sets low-income women up as either powerless

or powerful, overlooking their everyday resistance. Feminist theologian Traci West argues

that the victim/heroine duality equates victimization with total passivity and heroism with

the complete absence of oppression. She writes:

When this rigid victim-agency duality is accepted, victim status is conflated with powerlessness which, of course, effaces acts of resistance. Likewise, victimization usually encourages shame in women when it is understood as the absence of agency. To counter this process of erasure and shaming, and to more adequately capture the intricate fabric of women's realities, a resistance paradigm ... must include the roles ofboth victims and agent. (161)

Thus, low-income women can be victims of economic and social oppression and

experience pain and feel anger and still have agency over their lives. Emotional Pain:

There is nothing romantic or noble about pain. I remember feeling disconcerted

and frightened by the pain my mother experienced as a single parent struggling to raise her

157 children on a very limited income. She became overwhelmed, fearful, and saddened when she could not meet our material needs. She was particularly anxious around Christmas time. My sisters and I felt our mother's stress and anxiety over how she was going to pay for presents and still be able to pay the house bills and groceries. Moreover, it did not help that my mother consistently got laid off from her seasonal job right before Christmas.

As much as we looked forward to Christmas day with presents underneath the tree, we, in return, were pained that our mother was under so much economic and psychological stress. In "Destitution," Puertorican-American poet Rosario Morales also recalls feeling her parents' pain over their economic burdens, writing: "Their anxiety was the breath of life to me, their hunger flavored my milk" (1986, 94). She recounts, "When I was young I always knew when my parents were out of money. I would sense it like the angle ofthe sun as winter approaches. I wanted to store nuts in the ground the way my father stores crackers and cereal, rice and cans, cupboards full, fridge full, underwear packed tight in drawers" (95).

Emotional pain can be extremely disconcerting, discomforting, and even debilitating. Many poor and working-class women constantly experience emotional pain caused by economic oppression. 23 Social scientist Lillian Rubin, who grew up in a working-class community, contends that "in the working class, the process of building a family, of making a living for it, of nurturing and maintaining the individuals in it 'costs worlds of pain'" (1976, 215). For example, Tabitha, a single mother, struggled not only to raise her son on welfare, but to resist falling deeper and deeper into a depression. In an interview with feminist writer Lisa Dodson, she recalls: "I cried myself to sleep every

23In "Depressive Symptoms Among Women Receiving Welfure," researcher Mary Jo Coiro (2001) notes that low-income women are at a particularly high risk for depression. She found that forty-five to sixty percent of mothers who were documented by the Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale as depressed were low-income women (1). Her own research confirms this high percentage, stating: "The excessive levels of depression among low-income mothers are alarming, particularly since these women are very rarely treated with medication or therapy" (2).

158 night. I felt misery creeping into my baby but I couldn't stop. I was all alone and I had nothing, nobody. It was his little smile in the morning when I turned over and saw him, that was the only sunshine in my life for years" (1998, 101 ). And Lee, a white working-class mother of six children, describes how it felt being in a depression for years:

"Agony or misery or terror or anything else can only be sharp for a short period oftime, and when you're in a long drawn out period of misery, it gets to where it is just sort of blur .... The edges are not sharp and you just know you go to bed miserable, you wake up miserable, and it's just another damn miserable day and you get through it" (Buss

1985, 187).

But some do not "get through it," or barely so. A few of the Puertorican­

American women about whom journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003) writes do not make it. For example, Lourdes, a mother of four children, was unable to stay off drugs

and alcohol. She felt so powerless over her environment--the poverty, violence,

passionless sex, abusive boyfriends--that the only way she could deal with the pain was to

remain constantly numb. Her addiction to heroin got so bad that she could no longer

mother her two younger children, Cesar and Jessica. They were left on their own and

eventually ended up in jail. Her son's girlfriend Coco, raising four children on her own,

also had not figured out how to "get through it." LeBlanc notes, "Every opportunity

Coco seized on improved her life, but sustaining the improvements proved impossible

against the backslide of poverty" (336). No matter how hard Coco tried, she kept

dragging her fumily from one violent, uninhabitable project to another, living among crack

and cocaine addicts and roaches. Feeling so vulnerable and exposed to the harsh living

conditions, Coco would periodically fall into a depression.

Another poor Puertorican woman, Christine, tried desperately to "get through" her

pain but failed. At the beginning of a series of interviews that lasted five years by feminist journalist LynNell Hancock (2002), Christine was a single mother of three young children

and pregnant with her fourth child. She was in love with the fourth baby's father and

159 wanted to stay off drugs and create a stable family life with her children and lover. But she was so overwhelmed by the daily economic struggles in her life that she succumbed to her addiction and eventually lost custody ofher children. Expressing how powerless she

felt over her addiction, Christine said: "I wanted to quit, but I couldn't. I couldn't go cold turkey, because the baby could die .... Every time I needed a fix, I could feel the baby knot up in my stomach, withdrawing. I couldn't believe I was doing this. It was horrible.

Horrible, I hated it when people did that to their babies. And now I was" ( 68-69).

These women did not successfully "get through" the pain; they were consumed by

their pain. As Hancock reports at the end of five years, Christine wanted to get her

children back from the state but was still unable to stabilize herself And LeBlanc writes

that Lourdes was barely functioning when she ended her series of interviews that lasted

twelve years. She noted how Lourdes spent her days eating, sleeping, and getting high.

These women were devastated by their constant pain.

At times the pain was also too much for Coco and Jessica to handle. During these

harrowing times, they spent their days isolating themselves and taking their pain out on

their bodies: Jessica scarred her body and Coco picked at her face. Yet, there were times

when they were not always paralyzed by pain. They turned to each other for guidance and

comfort. They watched one another's children, lent one another money, and exchanged

letters and words of encouragement. When Jessica was in jail, Coco sent a Mother's Day

card to her each year knowing how sad and lonely she felt being away from her children.

And when Coco was upset by her boyfriend's indifference and irresponsibility, Jessica

called to console her. Moreover, Coco and Jessica were still able to enjoy life. They both

loved music and dancing. Occasionally, they would dress up and go to night clubs. And

they took delight in everyday routines, such as watching their favorite television shows

and making their favorite meals.

Low-income women's standpoint theory shows the contradictions and ambiguity

in how poor and working-class women live day-to-day with emotional pain. It refutes the

160 dichotomy of pain and pleasure; that is, low-income women's standpoint theory underlines that economically disadvantaged women can experience pain and pleasure. Many times

Coco and Jessica expressed their distress and fear over their and their children's future,

living every day with instability and insecurity. Yet, the next moment they could both talk

proudly of their children's accomplishments or speak excitedly about a new man in their

lives. Thus, low-income women's standpoint theory emphasizes that we cannot

categorize these women into neat categories that designate them as either victims or as

heroines. Like Steedman's mother, their lives resist simplification.

Moreover, low-income women's standpoint theory refuses to judge women like

Lourdes and Christine who are crushed by pain. That is, it does not label these women as

pathological or dysfunctional. It does not deny that many live chaotic, hard, and

distraught lives. Yet, low-income women's standpoint theory resists against moral

absolutism It shows the messiness of contradictions and the murkiness of ambiguity of

economically disadvantaged women's lives.24 For example, Lourdes is an ineffective

mother strung out on drugs most of the time. But there are a few times when Lourdes is

able to feel and express her care and love for her children and grandchildren, such as

cooking their fuvorite meals. This is the Lourdes whom her daughter Jessica loves.

Labeling Lourdes as a poor drug addict mother denies the full complexity of her humanity.

Low-income women's standpoint theory does not overlook Lourde's drug addiction and

her ineffective parenting, but it sees more to her than a pathetic, disheveled woman

hovering in a dark alley comer injecting heroin in her arm Thus, poor and working-class

24Writer/Interviewer Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003) underscores this standpoint of contradiction and ambiguity when she writes, "Since there were few real options for mobility, people in Coco's [and Lourdes' and Christine's] world measured improvement in microscopic increments ofbetter-than­ whatever-was-worse. These tangible gradations mattered more than the cliched language of success that floated blandly out of everyone's mouth, like fugitive sentiments from a Hallmark card.... Family fights indoors--even if everyone could hear them--were better than taking private business to the streets. Heroin was bad, but crack was worse. A girl who had four kids by two boys was better than a girl who had four by three.... Mothers who went dubbing and didn't yell at their kids the next tired day were better than mothers who did" (32).

161 women's standpoint theory challenges the sterility of high knowledge and moral

absolutism that categorize economically disadvantaged women into a victim/failure and heroine/victor dichotomy. Instead, it tells us to drop our gaze and look low and see the

full humanity of women like Lourdes. Transforming Pain:

In Borderlands, working-class Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua explores how she

experiences and transforms pain into growth in the Coatlicue State. The Coatlicue is an

Aztec goddess who symbolizes the unity of opposite forces: she is the "duality in life, a

synthesis of duality, and a third perspective ..." (1989, 68). That is, Anzaldua explains,

"Coatlicue depicts the contradictory ... she is a symbol of the fusion of opposites: the

eagle and the serpent, heaven and the underworld, life and death, mobility and immobility,

beauty and horror" (69). And it is in Coatlicue State where Anzaldua confronts and

embraces her pain in order to realize that life and renewal can be borne from pain.

Through this transformation, she achieve a new consciousness--mestiza consciousness-­

that locates her outside the duality of opposing forces.

Some poor and working-class women are also able to transform their pain into

critical consciousness. For example, Maria Elena Lucas, a Chicana farm worker, believes

that her pain can connect her to others to fight against economic exploitation and

hardship. She asserts, "Maybe if we didn't have a thing to worry about, we wouldn't have

this feeling, this kind ofbeliefthat's so powerful that we want to make social change and

fight for justice for the rest. Maybe that will keep us going" (Buss 1993, 245). Lucas's

daily struggle with poverty--freezing in an unheated trailer, working long hours on the

field, then later in the kitchen, and disappointing her children with her inability to provide

for their material needs--constantly reminds her that she and other laborers are being

exploited. Instead of paralyzing her, the pain keeps her conscious of racial and economic

injustices. She has become an active union worker, fighting for better wages, living

arrangement, and health benefits. Lucas believes that social change can be borne out of

162 pain and, as a poor Chicana laborer, she willingly claims her critical role in the fight against oppression.

Working-class Native American writer Linda Hogan argues that there is renewal out of pain. She writes, "As with Sedna [a sea goddess], the girl whose lost fingers became seals and whales, life sometimes comes out of tragedy" (2001, 49). Equally, working-class Chicana writer Cherrie Moraga writes, "Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation" (1983, 115). And working-class

African-American writer bell hooks writes, "I say remember the pain because I believe true resistance begins with people confronting pain, whether it's theirs or somebody else's, and wanting to do something to change it. . . . Pain is a catalyst for change, for working to change" (1990, 215). For them, emotional pain can provide opportunities for self-exploration that are life-affirming and lead to social and political resistance. The Banality of Everyday Pain:

Yet, for many low-income women, there is no transformation, no breakthrough, no

Coatlicue State. They experience emotional pain in a very ordinary way; that is, pain is a

banal part of their lives. There is nothing dramatic or transformative about their pain.

Rather, it is like living with a toothache--a constant dull, throbbing sensation.25 At the

25The issue of teeth is a common theme I came across as I read through low-income women's memoirs, narratives, stories, lyrics, and poems. Many poor and working-class women expressed a sense of anguish and powerlessness as they described their rotting and crooked teeth. Lacking money, they either lived with cracked and decayed teeth until they and family members were able to save enough money for dental treatment or they got their teeth extracted which was much cheaper than dental care. Working-class Jewish writer Marge Piercy, for example, recalls: "My teeth were rotting in my mouth, mostly from poor diet, so I chewed aspirin to control the pain. We never went to the dentist; it did not occur to me as an option. My mother had gone once when I was eleven and had all her teeth pulled. She returned disheveled and bleeding, in great pain. With poor people, they just pulled your teeth" (2002, 63). Meanwhile Chicana writer Elva Trevino Hart recalls, "Routine medical care, check-ups, and exams were not part of our growing up. A tooth with a too-large cavity was extracted, rather than filled, as this was cheaper" (1999, 69). Native American poet Linda Hogan recounts, "I was, as a child, painfully shy and vulnerable, and unable to speak. ... My teeth had rotted, black and decayed, and other students teased me, taunting me with the unkind names children put together" (2001, 43). And white working-class intellectual Barbara Ehreurheich writes about how "[o ]ne of my [housecleaning] teammates gets frantic

163 same time, this dull, throbbing sensation does not prevent them from feeling moments of joy in/from their lives, no matter how ephemeral it may be. Low-income women's

standpoint theory highlights that poor and working-class women can express pain about,

for example, being denied welfare benefits, but can also express joy when talking about a new lover in their lives. Hence, it underscores how low-income women live day-to-day with the messiness of contradicting emotions.

White working-class writer Carolyn Chute captures this ambiguity in The Beans of

Egypt, Maine (1985). One of her poor rural characters is Maria Bean, ex-wife of Rubie

Bean, a violent and vicious man. Maria was beaten so ruthlessly by Rubie that she had

several of her teeth knocked out and several bones in her body broken. She eventually

divorced him despite his threats ofharming her. She is a single mother struggling to raise her children on her own as a low-waged worker. Rubie refuses to give her child support; the financial responsibilities are solely upon her shoulders.

There is nothing extraordinary or even special about Maria's life; she experiences

no transformation, has no breakthroughs, enters no Coatlicue State. Maria lives a banal

life: rushes off to work, goes grocery shopping on her way home, prepares dinner, and watches television before going to bed. Throughout the day she struggles with emotional

pain--the fear of not being able to pay her bills, of Rubie showing up at her door drunk, of

being forever lonely. Yet in the midst of pain, Maria seeks love. Despite the scars on her

body constantly reminding her of the violence that men are capable of doing, she does not

give up on finding love.

about a painfully impacted wisdom and keeps making calls from our houses to try to locate a source of free dental care" (2001, 80). These are only some of the harrowing stories I read on the painful, rotting teeth low-income women have had to experience. The conditions of poor and working-class women's teeth underline the numerous financial obstacles and set backs they have had to deal with in their lives that cause emotional pain. Decaying, aching teeth, then, are an apt metaphor for the constant pain low-income women endure.

164 Maria tries to woo Buzzy Atkinson, a married man with ten children. She has hired him as a handyman to help her organize her unkempt yard. She makes him brownies and puts on her favorite pink blouse and tight jeans to seduce him. She tells him about

Rubie's temper, takes out her false teeth to show where he hit her, and begs him to kiss her. But he leaves in a hurry disturbed by her false teeth, her sorrowful and violent stories about Rubie, and her desperate need to be loved. There is something pathetic and fundamentally sad about Maria. She has been deeply scarred emotionally and physically.

And her wooing a poor married man with ten children is sad and disturbing. Yet poor and working-class women's standpoint theory underscores that Maria is much more than a pitiful, lonely, pathetic woman. She is a woman who had enough courage to end a violent

marriage by walking away from an abuser who, although he savagely beat her, paid the

bills and provided her some economic security. She is also a woman who refuses to give

up on love, despite her broken body. Thus, to refuse to see Maria as more than a

dysfunctional, victimized individual is to deny her her humanity.26 Hence, low-income

women's standpoint theory underlines the messiness of contradictions and the murkiness

of ambiguity in poor and working-class women's lives. It emphasizes how complex and

complicated low-income women's lives are and that they should not be denied a

"complicated psychology."

26During the early nineties, there was a burgeoning of self-help literature and twelve-step programs. For example, John Bradshaw's Homecoming (1991) encouraged us to confront our "dysfunctional" self and Melody Beatty's Codependent No More (1989) helped us overcome our "self-defeating," "'codependent" behaviors. Many people continue to fmd emotional salvage and insights from these self.help books and from attending twelve-step programs. Low-income women's standpoint recognizes their importance, yet it underlines that there is something fundamentally wrong in simplifYing and reducing complex and complicated lives into one-size-fits-aU labels. Moreover, it highlights that loaded words such as "dysfunctional" and "unhealthy" need to be broken down. Counseling battered African-American women, Traci West (1999) notes that there are numerous reasons why abused women stay with their abusers. One of the reason may be to remain alive. That is, they know that their lives are in immediate danger once they leave. Thus, she argues, what appears to be "self-defeating" and "dysfunctional" behavior is really quite the contrary. These women know for the time being that in order to be "functional" (that is, to remain alive) they need to stay in the abused relationship until they have a safe network set up.

165 In "I Stand Here Ironing," white working-class writer Tillie Olsen looks at how a mother handles the pain of not being able to provide economic stability for her oldest daughter. As the mother irons, she thinks about the comment her daughter's teacher made

concerning her daughter's bouts of depression. She feels sorrow and regret, wishing she

could have prevented this, yet she is aware ofher own limitations. As if responding to the teacher, she says: "We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I

was a young mother, I was a distracted mother.... My wisdom came too late. She has

much in her and probably nothing will come of it" (1961, 88). Her pain in not being able

to provide adequate financial and emotional support is as heavy as the iron she moves

back and forth. Yet she does not think ofherselfas a bad mother; she was simply

inexperienced and overwhelmed and distraught by being abandoned by her husband with

an infant to raise on her own. There is no transformation, no breakthrough, no Coatlicue

State. Like many other low-income women, she lives with the contradictions and

ambiguity of trying to make the most of her life, while being limited by the economical

limitations in her life. And like many other economically disadvantaged women, she lives

with the pain, while carrying on with life. She says, "Let her be. So all that is in her will

not bloom--but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by" (88-89).

"Still the Same Me" (2001), a song by the African-American female a cappella

band Sweet Honey in the Rock, articulates the mother's response in "I Stand Here

Ironing" that life still goes on despite the pain. Their lyrics speak not about the

exploration of Coatlicue State where pain can be transformed. Rather, they speak about a

simple, mundane need to learn how to cope with pain, living with it on a day-to-day basis.

Still gotta get up in the morning Well enough said about that

You may feel blue Feeling so bad Pulling the covers up over your head Well enough said about that

166 Still gotta get up in the morning Well let's get out ofbed Put on your clothes Get yourself out the door

This song highlights how poor and working-class women continue on with their lives as best they can in the face of economic and social oppression, struggling not to be crushed

by pain. Moreover, it shows the ordinariness of poor and working-class women's

determination and strength to endure and carry on with life by getting up out ofbed,

opening the door, and going to a job that they may hate or seeing a case worker they

resent, or numerous other situations that humiliate and degrade them. There is nothing heroic or dramatic about these mundane events. Rather, the song acknowledges the

necessity of prosaic, everyday routines that provide some structure in low-income

women's lives as they endure pain. That is, without these daily routines, poor and

working-class women are faced with what appears to be endless time--hours that merge

into days and days that merge into weeks--with no reason to wake up and be productive

throughout the day. Resistant Anger:

Anger can also help poor and working-class women endure pain, chaos, and

deprivation as they resist systemic oppression. For example, working-class Native

American poet Chrystos describes her anger as a crutch that keeps her resistance against

oppression mobile and active. In the poem '"I Walk in the History of My People," she

writes:

There are women locked in my joints ... My tendons stretched with brittle anger do not look like white roots of peace In my marrow are hungry faces who live on land the whites don't want ... Anger is my crutch I hold myself upright with it My knee is wounded See How I Am Still Walking. (1981, 57)

167 Still gotta get up in the morning Well let's get out ofbed Put on your clothes Get yourself out the door

This song highlights how poor and working-class women continue on with their lives as best they can in the face of economic and social oppression, struggling not to be crushed

by pain. Moreover, it shows the ordinariness of poor and working-class women's

determination and strength to endure and carry on with life by getting up out ofbed,

opening the door, and going to a job that they may hate or seeing a case worker they

resent, or numerous other situations that humiliate and degrade them. There is nothing heroic or dramatic about these mundane events. Rather, the song acknowledges the

necessity of prosaic, everyday routines that provide some structure in low-income

women's lives as they endure pain. That is, without these daily routines, poor and

working-class women are faced with what appears to be endless time--hours that merge

into days and days that merge into weeks--with no reason to wake up and be productive

throughout the day. Resistant Anger:

Anger can also help poor and working-class women endure pain, chaos, and

deprivation as they resist systemic oppression. For example, working-class Native

American poet Chrystos describes her anger as a crutch that keeps her resistance against

oppression mobile and active. In the poem '"I Walk in the History of My People," she

writes:

There are women locked in my joints ... My tendons stretched with brittle anger do not look like white roots of peace In my marrow are hungry faces who live on land the whites don't want ... Anger is my crutch I hold myself upright with it My knee is wounded See How I Am Still Walking. (1981, 57)

167 her own will" (165). Further, strategic silence as opposed to passive silence may, in fact, be a form of voice to express anger. Working-class Chicana feminist Aida Hurtado contends, "Silence is a powerful weapon when it can be controlled. It is akin to camouflaging oneself when at war in an open field; playing possum at strategic times causes the power ofthe silent one to be underestimated" (1996b, 382). For example, a poor African-American woman with limited formal education who frequently attends her daughter's PTA meetings, comments on how angry she becomes when educated middle-class teachers and other parents speak to her as if she is a stupid black woman. In resistance, she refuses to speak to anyone with whom she does not feel comfortable. She

says, "I refuse to talk with anyone who won't listen.... It's silence that we travel in until we find that person that makes us feel we can share who we truly are without crying or

feeling ashamed" (Goldberger 1996, 346). For her, speaking to someone acknowledges that person's worth, therefore by strategically staying silent, she is declaring another

message: "You are not worth my time or effort."

Allison Jaggar notes that anger can also be strategically used as an unconventional

emotion, or, as she defines it, an "outlaw" emotion (1989, 167). That is, anger can

denounce obsequiousness, embarrassment, and intimidation, when one is expected to be

subservient, ashamed, and fearful. Women on welfare, for example, express "outlaw"

anger over inadequate payments, unfair requirements, and humiliating evaluations, instead

of feeling grateful or ashamed for government "handouts." Luscious, an African­

American woman on welfare, expressed her "outlaw" anger over the welfare system's

punitive policies and petty allowances, admitting that she and other women on welfare

"cheat" to make extra money--they baby-sit and houseclean without reporting it to the

government. She says, "I say this [snaps her fingers] to the law. You're breaking the law

by making sure you and your kids don't starve on the street--well, that's not my law"

(Dodson 141). What Luscious is saying through her anger is that she and her children

deserve to live with dignity and respect, and that she refuses to allow the welfare system

169 to sacrifice her family's well-being. Her anger affirms that she will not be broken or pacified by the system

But low-income women's standpoint theory shows that Luscious and other women on welfare have to temper or hide their anger when they are dealing with case workers.

An angry, self-affirming woman may lose her benefits if she upsets or disrespects her case worker. In Hands to Work (2002), Hancock writes that the 1996 welfare reforms have created a hostile, uncaring environment that expects total compliance. With a five-year lifetime limit, poor women on assistance are aggressively pushed into the workforce.

There is little tolerance and forgiveness for women who do not appear to be obedient and obsequious. One of the women Hancock interviewed was Brenda, a black mother raising two children on her own. One of the most challenging issues Brenda confronted was tempering her anger and appearing to listen gratefully and obediently to her case workers who frequently monitored her spending habits, visited her home, and checked the type of food she had in her refrigerator. Brenda even learned to dress down and display a neutral facial expression for meetings with her case workers. Observing how Brenda was trying to manage these degrading and intrusive regulations on her life, Hancock writes, "Brenda tried to funnel her anger into a furious diary. It wouldn't be easy to keep her dignity intact in this place" (25). To receive assistance, Brenda was limited in how and where she expressed her anger, channeling her "outlaw" emotion into her diary, free from the gaze of case workers.

"Bad Girls"' Resistant Anger:

Working-class performing artist Karen Finley (1991) uses anger as a creative force to dismantle unjust and abusive structural power in her one-woman performances. She provides her female audience a space where they can vicariously explore their resistant anger through her as she acts out scenes dealing with victimization. For example, one of the themes Finley frequently examines in her performances is rape. She shows her audience the raw pain, confusio~ and anger of rape victims. Moreover, she reveals to her

170 audience that female anger in response to violence is just and necessary in order to resist abuse. In an interview with feminist writer Andrea Juno, she comments: ''I'm angry, but I feel like I'm doing something about it--so it feels good. And that's what a lot of my work is about: trying to get people angry so that they'll do something about it" ( 49; emphasis mine).

Likewise, Marge Piercy refers to resistant anger as "good," understanding that anger can be empowering when acted upon. She writes, "Anger storms I between me and things, I transfiguring, I transforming I A good anger acted upon I is beautiful as lightning I and swift with power" (1982, 88). Equally, Lorde refers to resistant anger as healthy and constructive, as opposed to a destructive anger that demoralizes or imposes guilt.

Resistant "anger," she writes, "is loaded with information and energy" (1984, 127) that lets individuals and communities know that they have been wronged.

Yet, low-income women's standpoint theory shows the contradictions and ambiguity in resistant anger. Contrary to what Piercy and Lorde say, resistant anger is not always "good" or healthy or constructive; it can demoralize and impose guilt. Moreover, it can be destructive and violent. A case in point is Jennifer Reeder's angry "White Trash

Girl" who uses the "low"--her menstruating, defecating, discharging female body--as "a form of cultural terrorism" to disturb people. Reeder claims that "it is an effective way to be completely outside of the power structure while at the same time exerting a violent

(and violating) force against it" (1997, 16). And ifyou upset or annoy her, "White Trash

Girl" will "throw a big toxic blood clot on you" (Kipnis and Reeder 1997, 127). She does not care who she offends. She will freely and loudly let anyone who appears to be upholding middle-class etiquette know exactly what she thinks, no matter how raw, mean, and abrasive her words and comments are. So beware, "White Trash Girl" is always saying, you might be next. And if you happen to cross her path, she may burp in your face or release an odorous fart while commenting on how offensive your middle-class attire is to her.

171 Punk Rock singer Jennifer Blowdryer's "white trash" female persona is just as offensive and abrasive. Like Reeder's "White Trash Girl," she is angry over the constant social and economic pressure to achieve a successful and materially rewarding middle-class lifestyle. Rejecting upper-class mobility, Blowdryer takes pride in her

"downward spiral" as "white trash," claiming that her "role [is] often not that of a pacifist victim, but a hardy participant" (1997, 22). And on this downward spiral she lashes out at any individual who comes in contact with her. For example, she writes how she and her friends often "got physically ejected from parties we'd weaseled our way into. Once I was literally thrown down the stairs by a gay poet/hustler, and shrieked ... 'Shut up, you faggot!"' ( 49).

Moreover, Blowdryer, like "White Trash Girl," is hard and brittle. She is a loner who sees no worth in rich, nurturing human relations. In her memoir, White Trash

Debutante (1997), she prides herself on being hard, drunk, loud, and obnoxious. Any friendship she creates is temporary, lasting long enough to embolden her image as "white trash." For example, she writes an unflattering description of a high school friend who years later became a respectable middle-class Christian. Blowdryer says, "A fat mulatto girl who was so convinced she was Scottish that she had picked out her family tartan, a closet fag with bleeding oozing acne, and a few white kids on too many drugs to care who they socialized with. That was high school. We had a desperate campiness on our side to save us" (24). Blowdryer does not care ifher words offend or hurt this person; she is only interested in upsetting and unsettling the middle class or anyone who identifies or aspires to be middle class. 27

27Reeder's and Blowdryer's "white trash" female personae may very well be flaunting a form of white pride. That is, "white trash" historically refers to not only a denigrated and despised class and caste of people within the white community, but to a poor group of whites who have throughout American history terrorized African-Americans and other people of color. For example, in Where We Stand: Class Matters, hooks notes how she was taught to keep away from her ''white trash" neighbors. "While they did not bother us and we did not bother them, we feared them. I never felt that they feared us" (2000, 113). She and her community were fearful that her ''white trash" neighbors would direct their anger at blacks. And

172 Yet low-income women's standpoint theory indicates that even though Reeder's and Blowdryer's anger is demoralizing and demeaning, it also protects them from being vulnerable to class contempt and male aggression. Reeder's "White Trash Girl" and

Blowdryer have declared their "white trash" bodies and "in-your-face" attitudes as sites of resistance against the constant demands of middle-class femininity and respectability.

They offend before being offended. That is, they stare down the so-called respectable middle-class people who look at ''White Trash Girl" and Blowdryer with disgust. They never give anyone an opportunity to insult or speak unkindly of them because "White

Trash Girl" and Blowdryer make sure they are the ones who speak up first to hurl insults.

Moreover, refusing to play the quiet, passive, obedient "good girl," they stand up to men's

aggression. They are able to look men in their eyes without flinching. They make it

known that they will not be cowed; they will spit, fart, defecate, urinate, and belch to

unsettle male authority.

Courtney Love is another "bad girl" who has also spat, cursed, and belched in

defiance of middle-class femininity and respectability to upset male musicians and

producers who profit from and support the male-dominated music industry.28 In 1993,

Love told off music producer Steve Albini, who referred to her as an unattractive

"hosebeat" (Brite 1997, 156). Love is aware that to make it big as a female artist in the

music industry, she needs to be attractive. Cognizant of this, she explains why she dislikes

today, hooks writes, ''we are witnessing a resurgence of white supremacist thinking among disenfranchised classes of white people. These extremist groups respond to misinformation circulated by privileged whites that suggests that black people are getting ahead financially ... and they are taught to blame black folks for their plight" (115). 28Writers Joanne Gottlieband Gayle Wald note how female musicians in the 1980s and early 1990s punk/grunge scene were overlooked by the male-dominated music industry. They write, ''First, though punk was more open to the participation of women, its subsequent incarnations reified both the aU-male band structure and the use of punk musical style as a vehicle for the expression of a generalized male anger and rebellion. Second, though women bands were formed throughout the eighties, especially on the West Coast, they nevertheless received little recognition in the music press. As a result, the recent media hype belies the fact that some ofthese women bands have been around for more than a decade" (1993, pars. 13).

173 Albini and flaunts her "white trash" self around him to unsettle and annoy him: "The only way Steve Albini would think I was a perfect"' woman would be if I "had big tits and small hoop earrings, wore black turtlenecks, had all matching luggage, and never said a word" (156).

Being attractive is particularly painful for Love who was told throughout her adolescence and early adulthood that she was ugly. During her late teen years exploring

London, she was frequently told by Pete Burns, band member of Dead or Alive, that she and her friend were "The Ugly Americans" (Brite 54). And there were several times when

Love, desperate for money, was not hired as a stripper because she was overweight.

Numerous times Love had been socially and economically marginalized because she was not a pretty, feminine "girl." This marginalization made her even angrier. Biographer

Poppy Brite notes that in retaliation against middle-class beauty standards, Love once

"shaved her head .... She was sick of other people deciding how she should look, how she should act" ( 49).

Love's anger is expressed in her 1995 album Live Through This. All songs on this album are harrowing, exposing how we are a society where violence against women has

become banal. Moreover, her songs criticize and mock female passivity and helplessness in the face of male violence and exploitation. Feminist scholar Melisse Lafrance explains,

The listener is quite literally forced to experience extremes of her culture's violences and psychoses by hearing Love recount her protagonist's experiences of physical, sexual. and psychological abuse. Through both embodied and discursive demonstration, Love indicts the ideals and practices of dominant femininity by enacting them to the point where their destructive potential is revealed for all to see. (2002, 107)

For example, the song "Miss World" shows the danger of middle-class femininity and respectability that is upheld to such an extreme that it encourages women to become

completely self-alienated. And having no self to defend, women become easy targets of male aggression. Love sings, "I am a girl you know, can't look you in the eye I I am a girl

174 you know, so sick I cannot try I ... I am Miss World, somebody kill me I ... I am Miss

World, watch me break and watch me bum." Too modest and too well-behaved, Miss

World, as the regal representation of"good girls," does not know how to protect and defend herself: because she has been taught not to shamelessly stare back at men and resist their dominance and abuse. Miss World is a perfect victim.

Indeed, "White Trash Girl's," Blowdryer's, and Love's resistant anger is their battling shield to help them fight middle-class femininity and respectability; nonetheless, it is not liberatory. Their "bad girl" personae will eventually bum them out. Blowdryer realizes this when she describes in her memoir two tough former female band members.

She notes how they look worn out and suffer from back and neck ailments at thirty-six years of age. At such a young age, they have burnt themselves out living as "bad girls" who spend their waking hours fighting. Too many battles, too many drugs, and too many enemies have exhausted them. Blowdryer knows that she will end up looking and

suffering like them if she does not slow down and find some refuge from her own anger.

And feeling constant anger and emotional pain, Love has abused alcohol and drugs. She temporarily lost custody ofher child as a result of her substance abuse. Thus, low-income women's standpoint theory underscores the contradiction in how "White Trash Girl's"

Blowdryer's, and Love's anger announces to the world that they will not be passive and

silent victims, but it makes them victims of their own combative behaviors. Pain and Anger as Part of a Moral Process:

In ''Poems are not Luxuries," Lorde writes, "The white fathers told us, 'I think therefore I am,' and the black mothers in each of us--the poets--whisper in our dreams, 'I feel therefore I can be free"' (1977, 9). To listen to our black mothers within us is to recognize that our lives are not objects that can be analyzed as if they were foreign

specimens examined underneath a microscope. Instead, our lives are made up of multiple

and complex layers of feelings and actions. Our white fathers peel away these feelings and actions from our lives. And as each layer of feelings and actions is peeled away and

175 analyzed, our lives become unrecognizable; there are only individual layers of isolated acts

and behaviors categorized as "good" or "bad." Hence, our white fathers uphold moral

absolutism that privileges the neatness and predictability of"rational" categories over the

messiness and chaos of feelings and actions.

Low-income women's standpoint theory rejects the moral absolutism of privileged white male thinkers who deny poor and working-class women a "complicated

psychology." Our white fathers of rational thought judge the lives oflow-income women

in their cleaned and tidied offices sitting behind organized desks. Removed from the

messiness of contradictions and the murkiness of ambiguity, they are able to divide and

group poor and working-class women into "good/healthy" and "bad/dysfunctional"

categories. Yet from the low, from the immediate concrete world, there are no sanitized

and clearly defined categories. The everyday world is full of contradictions and ambiguity

and is therefore free from moral absolutism Thus, our black mothers whisper in our

dreams that we can be free because our feelings and actions have no one definitive

meaning or a destined end result; instead, our feelings and actions are a part of a moral

process.

Futu:re Pmject on a Standpoint of Humility and Hope:

Unlike the middle- and upper-class who have the economic, social, and cultural

capital to distance themselves from the low--from the despised, the dismissed, the

distrusted--poor and working-class women constantly live with the low. And living

day-to-day with the low, they encounter the messiness of contradictions and the murkiness

of ambiguity. They do not escape into high knowledge of moral absolutism that sanitizes

contradictions and ambiguity into cleansed and neatly defined categories. Instead, poor

and working-class women generate low knowledge from their complicated and complex material worlds.

Spending the past year writing on low-income women as generators of resistant knowledge, I have come to realize that many economically disadvantaged women have

176 humility that helps them deal with the constant messiness of contradictions and murkiness of ambiguity in their everyday lives. That is, they resist day-to-day against systemic oppression in search of wholeness and truth in contradictions and ambiguity. An important part of the process to find wholeness and truth is about having humility. I refer not to the common usage ofthe word humility that is defined by Random House

Webster's College Dictionary (1992 ed.) as having a "modest opinion of one's own importance; meekness." Rather, I am going to use a concept of humility that refers to its etymological meaning humilis, which is defined as "low, lowly, akin to humus," or a "dark organic material in soils, produced by the decomposition of vegetable or animal matter."

Thus, the word humility, derived :from humilis which is akin to humus, is in reference to a dark organic material that is capable of fertilizing soil and creating life. Humility, then,

:from the perspective of the low, recognizes that every being is nourished and sustained by the low as well as acknowledges that every being is an integral part of the low (Caputi

2001; Mor 1991). As such, humility refutes the hierarchical dualism of modern Western thought that privileges the high over the low.

I refer to an individual who has humility as someone who is grounded in the low and acknowledges and experiences her humanness as a part of the messiness of contradictions and the murkiness of ambiguity. I therefore equate humility with humanness/wholeness to mark a radical shift :from its :frequent usage that "equates humility with submission--women to men, darker skin to lighter skin, the world to American. The word even calls up a certain image--a passive woman divorced :from her own needs, desires, and power" (Berger 2002, 41). For example, legal scholar and commentary writer

Patricia Williams, who comes :from a black working-class community, criticizes how the media avoid addressing racial, social, and economic injustices by using the word humility to signifY passivity. For example, she notes how the media celebrate Oseola McCarty, a poor African-American woman, who saved $150,000 over seventy-five years washing laundry and donated the full amount to the University of Southern Mississippi to fund

177 black students. The media refer to McCarty's contribution as an act of humility, commending her for her self-sacrificing and honest labor while ignoring the fact that for seventy-five years she was an underpaid, overworked laundress. The meaning of humility, then, according to mainstream media, as Williams points out, is understood as tolerating exploitation and poverty in the name of sincerity and sacrifice without demanding equality or resisting racial and economic oppression. Yet Williams queries: "[A]re there really people in the world who believe that it never occurred to Oseola McCarty that washing clothes was a dead-end job? Why rush to declare 75 years ofwashing other people's dirty drawers a blessing? As though never getting 'mine' were the answer to everyone else's prayer" (1996, A27). These questions illuminate that the word humility is being used to push an economic agenda that favors the privileged and overlooks systemic abuses of racism, sexism, and economic exploitation.

In contrast to self-denigration, the word humility can be reclaimed to value the low as an integral part of a person's humanness/wholeness. However, the humility that I envision cannot happen without including its philosophical companion, hope. Hope is the belief and conviction that something rewarding, satisfying, and empowering can come out of the low and can come out of the messiness of contradictions and the murkiness of ambiguity. It is hope that helps women, like McCarty, endure years of exhausting labor.

According to Williams, McCarty's hope that one day in the future the world will be better--equal, just, and prosperous--for African-American children gave her the strength and determination to face yet another day of cleaning and folding clothes for slave wages.

Williams argues, "Perhaps if we listened closely to the voices of so many who slaved their lives away, we might find not only the tenaciously held faith that there was, at the end of the line, a heaven for them but also a vision of a future that would be different for us all, the children of their inconceivably generous aspirations" (A27). This vision, then, is inspired and sustained by the everyday resistance oflow-income women. It is a

178 vision that recognizes truth and meaning in the messiness of the everyday material world that is full of contradictions and ambiguity. Hence, it is a vision of humility and hope.

My dissertation is also about humility and hope. As such, it is a humble dissertation that has no grand or brilliant message. There is nothing larger-than-life or extraordinary about it. It has a simple message written in a simple matter. This simplicity does not mean that it is insignificant. Low-income women's standpoint theory shows the contrary: that there is value, worth, and knowledge in simplicity--in the simple routines and practices and in the prosaic, everyday resistance of poor and working-class women.

The simple message reverberating throughout my dissertation is to look low and see how our humanity is rooted at the juncture of"good" and "bad," "right" and "wrong,"

"liberated" and "non-liberated" where there is no moral absolutism and sterile perfection.

And at this juncture, "[h]umility is necessary to become great or big enough to accept this new era we are entering. Humility and simplicity stamp one with the mark of greatness" (Rodrigue 1953, foreword). To be big enough and be great do not mean that one escapes the low and claims that one is in any way more special or more significant than another being. It means, as working-class Chicana poet Pat Mora writes, that we have the "courage to face the fact that we all have ten toes, get sleepy at night, get scared in the dark. Some families, some cities, some states, and even some countries foolishly convince themselves that they are better than others" (1993, 140). To have humility then is to admit that we are fallible and limited beings who need one another. In the current political climate in the U.S., we need to learn from poor and working-class women about humility and hope. We need to learn how to value the low that nurtures and sustains our humanity and inspires a vision of a promising, life-affirming future. In a quick-paced, credential-obsessed, highly advanced capitalistic and competitive society that tells us to always aim high, humility reminds us that we also need to aim low or we will lose a fundamental part of ourselves--our humanity.

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