Another Letter Long Delayed:On Unsound Epistemological Practices and Reductive Inclusion
This paper is an effort toward conceptual transparency around toxic inclusivity in academic feminism and the kinds of care it lacks toward, what amounts to, bad knowledge production practices. In this paper, we claim that some of the forms of reductive inclusion that ought to be avoided are epistemologically unsound practices that propagate disempowering, false, and/or distortive messages about targets of inclusion. We take reductive inclusion to be inclusion that treats the targets of inclusion as plot devices and/or as means to a narrative end. These practices should be avoided in order to work toward a range of coalitional possibilities between differently situated populations with social justice aims. Moreover, we are concerned with making clear that toxic inclusion is a type of bad scholarship. The reductive inclusions to avoid articulated in this paper are (1) interpolation and (2) ossification. Interpolation involves executing "inclusion" with formal, instead of substantive, overtures. Ossification, however, establishes parasitic relations of inclusion that present a skeleton of one's targets for inclusion that reduces whole groups to [End Page 51] serve the purpose of the narrator. Through a discussion of Audre Lorde's "An Open Letter to Mary Daly" (1979), we explain Lorde's brilliant and succinct critique of Daly as exemplifying interpolation and ossification. Ultimately, this paper adds to diverse Black feminist literatures on effective coalitions and gestures toward potential rules for engagement across difference in our story telling.
This letter has been delayed because of my grave reluctance to reach out to you, for what I want us to chew upon here is neither easy nor simple. The history of white women who are unable to hear Black women's words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging.
INTRODUCTION
In light of recent controversies in academic feminism, it behooves us to offer a sustained treatment of toxic inclusion. Toxic inclusion, here, refers to forms of reductive inclusion that result from (and promote) unsound epistemological practices. Here, we explore two forms of toxic inclusion, i.e. interpolation and ossification, so that we might suggest that part of "the work" of academic feminisms concerns pursuing and executing careful practices of inclusion. But mostly, we are concerned with making clear that toxic inclusion is a type of bad scholarship. In our estimation, when people are accused of citing too little and/or too poorly women of color scholarship, they respond to those charges with the right to be as bad of a scholar as they want to be. We confess, this may not be what they think they are saying but given the salient concerns that can be identified in the accusations, that is a reasonable interpretation of an all-too-common response.
For example, when someone makes a charge that a scholar's citational practices are "off," it isn't only an issue of bad citational practices. Rather, the charge is actually more substantive. The charge, on our account, also includes the claim that one is practicing unsound epistemological practices or, in other words, have engaged in bad scholarship in ways that are distinctly problematic. And when those charged with toxic inclusion or bad epistemological practices respond with doubling down and, essentially, saying, "I can be as bad of a scholar as I want to be!" then we get closer to the suspicion that prompted the conflict in the first place. At the point of doubling down on bad scholarship, the conflict exposes a present fear within the challenger. That is, it exposes a marked lack of care by the scholar engaging in bad scholarship. Not only does the doubling-down scholar demonstrate a lack of care, which manifests in the doubling down, but neither did they take care, which is what prompted the conflict in the first place. That is, they did not proceed with requisite caution to ensure they followed good epistemological practices in producing their scholarship. It is this failure to proceed with [End Page 52] care, i.e. not meeting the demand of taking care in good scholarship, that we aim to highlight here.1
As such, this paper is an effort toward conceptual transparency around toxic inclusivity in academic feminism and the kinds of care it lacks toward avoiding what amounts to bad knowledge production practices. And so, like our foremothers before us, we write yet another paper so that our lack of patience with bad epistemological practices can be yet again made legible in the face of accusations of "being too sensitive" or "being unreasonable."2
Of course, the problem of toxic inclusivity in academic feminism is not new. In 1979, Audre Lorde penned "An Open Letter to Mary Daly" to address her friend's simultaneous erasure and reduction of Black women in her new book, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978). Lorde challenges Mary Daly's decision to ground her work in images of white goddesses while excluding African/African-descendant goddesses and including Black women only "as victims and preyers-upon each other," among other concerns later detailed (Lorde 2007, 67). Her open letter succinctly calls Daly and other readers to think critically about the ways Black women are pushed to the periphery even as white feminists mention and/or cite Black women. While white feminists have historically excluded Black women in their universal theories of women's condition under patriarchy, they also often engage in reductive inclusion of Black women's work and lives. Reductive inclusion, here, refers to inclusion that treats targets of inclusion as plot devices and/or as means to a narrative end. It is an open question whether reductive inclusion is always bad or toxic. However, in normative social and political theory, such as in feminist theory, there are many species of reductive inclusion that one should actively avoid.
In this paper, we work toward the project of naming and highlighting forms of reductive inclusion that should be avoided. We claim that some of the forms of reductive inclusion that ought to be avoided are the ones that are actually epistemologically unsound practices that propagate disempowering, false, and/or distortive messages about targets of inclusion. To be clear, we are concerned with reductive inclusions that are actually epistemologically unsound practices that forward false beliefs, misinformation, and/or false impressions, while simultaneously casting these things as "truth," "reality," or simple descriptions of "the way things are." In other [End Page 53] words, part of our answer to "what is problematic about systematically bad citational practices (specifically about a particular population)" is the fact that they are epistemologically unsound practices spreading false beliefs, misinformation, and false impressions of our worlds.3 But it is simply the case for us, two Black feminist epistemologists, that some forms of reductive inclusion are forms of inclusion that are toxic, in part, because they amount to bad epistemological practices, willful or otherwise. As such, one should refrain from indulging in them.
Here we outline two forms of reductive inclusion that should be avoided. These are: (1) interpolation and (2) ossification. Importantly, we highlight that these practices of reductive inclusion are epistemologically unsound and should be avoided. And we also claim that for being epistemologically unsound, some forms of reductive inclusion are toxic. This paper proceeds in two parts. First, we describe and detail the two forms of reductive inclusion that we highlight here. Second, we tell a story about why reductive inclusions that are epistemologically unsound ought to be avoided because they are forms of toxic inclusion. We conclude with a call to attend to targets of inclusion more thoroughly so as to avoid problematic reductive inclusion.
AUDRE LORDE'S OPEN LETTER
Interpolation and ossification are two epistemologically unsound practices of reductive inclusion. We offer brief summaries of the general character of those problematic inclusionary practices. We do this in order to obtain as much clarity as we can about what we mean by epistemologically unsound practices of reductive inclusion. One of the risks of papers like this is that it might give license to people to never attempt substantive inclusion of relevant populations other than one's own in their research. In order to partly stave off such uptake of this paper, we try to be very thorough in highlighting the forms of inclusion we find problematic. It is not our intention here to stymy coalition and/or inclusive scholarship by definitional stop. Rather, it is our intention to identify modes of toxic inclusion that produce (and reproduce) false information and misleading descriptions as well as hinder fruitful and effective coalitional efforts and possibilities. We also believe these kinds of explorations are necessary for needed "rule books of engagement" across difference that every generation has to revise, construct, and reimagine for their current times. [End Page 54]
Interpolation, here, refers to executing "inclusion" with formal overtures instead of substantive engagement. That is to say, this form of inclusion is mostly inclusion "by word" and not "by content." In the face of accusations of interpolation, the person charged often responds with the "but I mentioned you!" defense, as if mere mention can stand for substantive engagement with the "mentioned" populations. This form of reductive inclusion is very common. Part of what makes it epistemologically unsound is that it presents the author falsely and, in turn, presents the author's product falsely. For example, the product is presented as being equally useful to (and illuminating of) all the mentioned populations when that is far from the truth. This kind of inclusivity has a debilitating effect on the capacity to recognize sites of coalition, because they are represented as sites of similarities instead of sites of significant difference. As such, interpolation compromises one's capacity to be a good coalitional partner because it relies on self-deception and misinformation.4
Ossification establishes parasitic relations of inclusion by presenting a skeleton of one's targets for inclusion that reduces whole groups to fragments and elevates carefully curated fragments to represent whole groups in order to serve the purpose of the narrator. This form of reductive inclusion is particularly common. What is epistemologically unsound about this form of reductive inclusion is that it presents targets for inclusion in ways that at once represents no one/nothing and everyone/everything in the relevant group. For example, even when one identifies with the group being targeted for inclusion, one can find oneself asking, "who are these people being included in this narrative?" The caricatures offered in accounts performing ossification are often so distorted that it is unclear who is being referred to, if anyone.5
Ossification, however, is far more difficult to address than interpolation. This is because this form of inclusion is almost impossible to address directly. One can [End Page 55] always say, "well, I didn't mean you when I referenced 'those people'."6 But, and this is key, it is unclear that this form of inclusion ever means to refer to anyone, even as it pretends to do so. Rather, it refers to a phantasm or apparition created for some purpose that is often indifferent to and debilitating for the very populations being targeted for inclusion. There is a distinct lack of care, i.e. the concern needed to produce the empathy necessary to actually identify with targets of inclusion, that is harder to address than the faux inclusion of interpolation. Ossification might be seen to offer a more substantive inclusion than interpolation, but its failings might mark a more substantive lack of care in the form of a parasitic relation that generates apparitions for their (and their audience's) consumption (hooks 1992).
These two forms of reductive inclusion range from generally problematic to seriously problematic. Audre Lorde's "An Open Letter to Mary Daly" takes up each of these moves as problems in Mary Daly's book, Gyn/Ecology. Lorde draws out Daly's exclusion of African goddesses and her limited discussion of some Black women as problematic. Her critique of Daly brilliantly illustrates interpolation and ossification. In what follows, we offer more detail on these two forms of reductive inclusion so as to story their toxicity.
INTERPOLATION
Audre Lorde identifies interpolation in Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology. Daly injects a quote from Audre Lorde that may be interchangeable for any vague insertion of a Black woman in the text. Lorde is troubled by this misuse, writing to Daly:
For my part, I felt that you had in fact misused my words, utilized them only to testify against myself as a woman of Color. For my words which you used were no more, no less, illustrative of this chapter than "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" or any number of my other poems might have been of many other parts of Gyn/Ecology.
Daly utilizes Lorde's words which may seem "inclusive" at first glance, but her use is a weightless injection that folds into the account's marginalization of Black women as mere victims. In the above quote, Lorde expresses concern for the generic injection and misuse of her work in a discussion on a controversial topic. This leads her to question Daly's relationship to Black women's scholarship. She powerfully asks Daly:
Have you read my work, and the work of other Black women, for what it could give you? Or did you hunt through only to find words that would legitimize your chapter on African genital mutilation in the eyes of other Black women? And if so, then why not use our words to legitimize or illustrate the other places where we connect in our being and [End Page 56] becoming? If, on the other hand, it was not Black women you were attempting to reach, in what way did our words illustrate your point for white women?
The four questions suggest that Lorde's critique is more than commentary on poor citational practices, though it includes that. Lorde questions the selective use, or misuse, of Black women's work to legitimize one's project without giving serious, scholarly attention to Black women's work. One can inject the words of well-known Black feminists, for example, into their work to mime inclusion of Black women while turning away from serious engagement with Black women on the discussion at hand. The content of Black women's work is absent from the book except in the chapter Daly writes about so-called "African genital mutilation." We are not brought forth as collaborators in the work, as with other citations, but merely as "native informants" to legitimize writings on some population of Black women. This reductive insertion of Black women into one's work in order to give a false impression of inclusion, to then usher a narrative that the significant portions of the included population might take as false, is what we are calling interpolation.8
Interpolation refers to reductively inserting a given population into one's work in order to give a false impression of inclusion. The reductive injection of "all Black women," for example, into an account often presents the experiences of "Black women" as generally the same as the theorizer and generally the same as each other. However, interpolation may never be so blatant. It also includes more subtle textual performances that indicate that "Black women experience some phenomenon x as well." In such instances, for example, the x of the account [End Page 57] is a complicated site of similarities and differences and the mere mentioning of x obscures those complexities. In this way, interpolation makes a strange play on difference. There is enough acknowledgment of difference to require some form of "special attention," no matter how marginal; but that acknowledgment aims at overlooking those differences for a common story. There are, at least, two ways of including a given group into a narrative via interpolation. They include: inclusion via universalizing tendencies and inclusion via generalizing translation. In both cases, one's targets of inclusion are conceived as different enough to need specific acknowledgment but are then folded into the narrative so that those differences can be recoded as not-so-different at all.9
universalizing tendencies
Naming the strategies she sees in the uptake of Kimberlé Crenshaw's work on intersectionality, Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd notes a universalizing tendency in feminist work that relies on interpolation as a reductive inclusion in "Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post–Black Feminist Era" (2012). She contends that "the universalizing tendency occurs when activists or other political actors suggest that a particular issue goes beyond the experience of women of color and is relevant to a broader community of women, the effect of which is to typically highlight the plight of white women and not that of black women" (Alexander-Floyd 2012, 8). These particular universalizing tendencies work by pivoting away from nuances that intersectionality scholars highlight in order to expand understandings of patriarchy to a universal conception of "women" that erases many would-be relevant groups. One can maintain that one's account is inclusive of, for example, "Black women" because one means to address the plight of "all women under patriarchy" while pivoting away from the particularities of the theories of (and for) Black womenkind. In cases such as these, actual Black women are at once present and absent in the narratives offered of "our" circumstances.
generalizing translation
Interpolation may also take the form of inclusion through translation that ultimately renders targets for inclusion unknowable on their own terms. In "The Occult of True Black Womanhood," Ann DuCille identifies this strategy in literary texts that seek to translate African American literature to fit into a general account of human experience (1994). Analyzing Adrienne Rich's nameless Black mother and John Callahan's silent Black male trickster, DuCille proclaims that
… a critical posturing that means to celebrate a literature to my mind actually demeans it by leveling and universalizing it … the white scholar understands "the African-American experience" not in its own [End Page 58] right, not on its own terms, but because he can make it like his own. With his voice, he can translate another's silence into his speech. He speaks through and for the Other.
DuCille calls attention to the translation of Black people in Rich and Callahan's texts as demeaning, rather than celebratory. She argues that each author conjures a Black person in a service role as key to their enlightenment and matriculation into adulthood by translating their interactions (DuCille 1994, 613–15). The silent Black people are described as teaching the white authors about motherhood as patriarchal and about manhood, respectively. While each author interpolates a silent Black person from their past to narrate their personal growth, Rich utilizes her interpolation in a text critiquing the objectification of women as mothers (DuCille 1994, 613). In Of Woman Born (1976), Rich critiques reducing women to their labor and advocates for women speaking for themselves. DuCille thus notes that Rich's "attempt to thrust motherhood upon a childless black woman domestic worker are all the more ironic" (DuCille 1994, 613). This inclusion is a kind of faux engagement where, whatever the content of Black women's lives and conditions, its translatability to generalities of experiences away from their own experiences appears to be always available and legitimate.
Let us be clear, we are under no illusion that generalities can be removed from certain forms of communication and some languages. It can be argued that anything written is available for generalities of translation. In fact, we accept that view. However, there are certain narrative performances that are required for this practice to not be misleading about the particularities being transformed into generalities. The problem is not generalities per se. The problem is the toxic inclusion of "Black women" into universalizing tropes organized and produced to illuminate the experiences of other groups, e.g. white women, so that our own experiences are obscured and misleadingly tied to a set of experiences where there are significant differences.10
epistemological failings of interpolation
Ultimately, interpolation is particularly concerning because of its epistemological failings. As noted earlier, we take epistemologically unsound practices to refer to any practice that forwards false beliefs, misinformation, and/or false impressions, while simultaneously casting them as "truth," "reality," or "matter-of-fact existence." Reductive inclusion as interpolation is an epistemologically unsound practice as it presents targets for inclusion falsely, i.e. filtered through ill-fitting moves toward generality that forward more misinformation than they stymy. The author falsely presents themselves as attentive to the target(s) of inclusion, which gives the false impression of an "inclusive" author and an "inclusive" narrative. Mere mention and flimsy extensions are examples of reductive inclusion that can [End Page 59] be toxic insofar as they are also misleading and, at times, problematically rely on falsehoods.
The practice of interpolation attempts to garner endorsement for the narrative's content and inclusiveness via the very targets of inclusion it misrepresents. The charge of false presentation prompts many to defend themselves with "but I included you," for example, when asked about the inclusivity of their position(s). The author's narrative, then, is similarly epistemologically unsound as the practice of interpolation relies on misinformation and/or false impressions to construct the narrative and then to defend its mere performance of inclusivity. Interpolation, in this account, works as inclusion via universalizing tendencies and/or inclusion via generalizing translation, and it is an epistemologically unsound practice that produces false information that is then defended by misleading performances of inclusivity. Said another way, interpolation, here, is an epistemologically unsound practice as the narrative leans on false impressions of inclusivity to present a generalized account as equally viable for all those marshalled within it. This is an example of the kind of toxic inclusion that should be avoided.
OSSIFICATION
In addition to interpolation, Audre Lorde identifies ossification as a major problem in Daly's book project. Ossification, on our account, is a kind of toxic inclusion that presents carefully curated fragments of one's target of inclusion to generate a skeletal representation of them for a narrative purpose other than doing justice by one's targets of inclusion. For example, Lorde critiques how Daly limits her discussion concerning Black women's experiences to a fragmented account of so-called "female mutilation." She explains:
Well, I thought, Mary has made a conscious decision to narrow her scope and to deal only with the ecology of western european women. Then I came to the first three chapters of your Second Passage, and it was obvious that you were dealing with noneuropean women, but only as victims and preyers-upon each other. I began to feel my history and my mythic background distorted by the absence of any images of my foremothers in power. … Mary, I ask that you be aware of how this serves the destructive forces of racism and separation between women—the assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background, and that nonwhite women and our herstories are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of victimization. I ask that you be aware of the effect that this dismissal has upon the community of Black women and other women of Color, and how it devalues your own words.
Lorde's concerns here point to the ossification of Black women's herstory and context in Mary Daly's work. Targeted populations of Black women are represented as [End Page 60] either problems or victims, while Western European women are depicted as having "herstories" of powerful goddesses. The need for new mythologies of empowerment is not a particularly original idea. Re-membering a "lost" pantheon was also promoted by many Black feminists, Audre Lorde, chief among them. So, on Lorde's account, why weren't the relevant Black women's inquiries engaged in a way that would place them on equal footing with white women? Lorde, in the above quote asks, why were Black women reduced to two possible roles, predator or victim, but never empowered being? Who was the "metaethics of radical feminism" for exactly? Who is having justice done by them and who is serving as the fodder for that project? Why?
Zora Neale Hurston claims that reductive inclusions like ossification generate an "unnatural history" as a plausible rendering of a given state of affairs. The "unnatural" history is precisely such because it is imminently implausible (1950). The epistemological failings of generating implausible realities at the level of narrative performance should be obvious, but they typically aren't. When accused of ossification, the defense is often "I took you seriously in my work! A rendering of your life and realities is in there." This defense never realizes that, though we may only ever be able to narrate in pieces, the pieces chosen can remove important depth and complexity from one's targets of inclusion or portend that no such depth exists. To explain this, Hurston writes:
The answer lies in what we may call THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF UNNATURAL HISTORY. This is an intangible built in folk belief. It is assumed that all non-Anglo-Saxons are uncomplicated stereotypes. Everybody knows all about them. They are lay figures mounted in the museum where all may take them in at a glance. They are made of bent wires without insides at all. So how could anybody write a book about the non-existent?
(1950, 86)
This is the exact same charge Lorde levels at Mary Daly. She asks: are Black women only ever actors assigned a role in dramas without any sort of authorial control? Or will one's curated narrative, i.e. the performance of one's text, continue to communicate the implausible folk belief that Black women have nothing substantive to say about our own empowerment, particularly their empowerment via myth and mythology?11
In ossification, targets of inclusion become ornaments for consumption. Lorde explains that Daly's invocation and positioning of Black women was so skeletal that one should wonder what role Black women were playing in the account at all. She suggests that the narrative juxtaposition of white women in power and Black women in predation/victimization roles, for example, performs a devaluation of Black women's herstories. It reduces their invocation to ornamentation all [End Page 61] the while gesturing to a "deep" connection that is nowhere established.12 As Lorde notes in the last quoted line, the move undermines Daly's stated aim to address the complexity of "women's ecology." Lorde's challenge to Daly is not just about her citational practices, though it includes that. It is also about what Daly chose to cite and why. When citation practices produce misleading pictures of one's targets of inclusion that give the impression that the target population for inclusion did not seriously engage one's topic of discussion (and, hence, must be spoken about and not engaged with), then ossification is most likely at work.13
Ossification establishes parasitic relations of inclusion that present a partial skeleton of one's targets for inclusion that reduces whole groups to fragments and elevates carefully curated fragments to represent whole groups to serve the purpose of the narrator. Black feminists have long pointed out a historical practice of relegating Black women's experiences to the margins of social and legal intelligibility, while simultaneously propelling us to heightened visibility, e.g. as in a curated display at a colonial museum (Collins 1991; Combahee River Collective 1995; Cooper 1992; Crenshaw 1989, 1992). Where Black womenkind are not erased entirely from dominant social and political narrations and theory, for example, Black feminists note a pattern of reductive references to Black womenkind that present a skeleton that ultimately disappears us in the author's project (via reductive representation), while substantively relying on Black women's "presence" for an ill-gained legitimacy to comment beyond one's expertise. There is one particular mechanism we will draw attention to here that produces reductive inclusion via ossification. It concerns ornamentation via the commodification of difference.14 [End Page 62]
ornamentalized commodification of difference
Again, ossification in feminist theory is a kind of reductive inclusion that presents carefully curated fragments of one's target of inclusion to generate a skeletal representation of them for a narrative purpose other than doing justice by one's targets of inclusion. bell hooks calls this move a commodification of difference, "wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other's history through a process of decontextualization" (hooks 1992, 31). For hooks, the commodification of difference is about both what one consumes and how and why one consumes it. Ossification, as a form of reductive inclusion in the Lorde/Daly exchange, concerns not only what Daly chooses to cite but how and why she chooses to cite it. If an inclusion performs an ossification, it first ornamentalizes a complex population for "show," all the while reducing the significance of the context and histories of one's targets of inclusion for the sake and benefit of a different population. This form of reductive inclusion is toxic. It is toxic because it rests on (and is authorized by) conjuring skeletal and misleading articulations that are masqueraded as "fair renderings" for the sake of doing justice by another group besides one's targets of inclusion. And it does so by forwarding as plausible implausible renderings of one's targets of inclusion. Ones that say there are no books written about any given subject matter that concerns us. We have no sustained inquiries. We are simply, macabre puppets made of "wires without insides at all" (Hurston 1950, 86).15
Another good example of ossification can be found in, "Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill" by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who highlights the case of Anita Hill as a form of reductive inclusion that is toxic (1992). During the US Senate confirmation hearing for soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, news broke that Thomas was accused of sexually harassing his former employee, Anita Hill. National debate erupted as different groups came to the defense of either Clarence Thomas or Anita Hill. Crenshaw argues that Anita Hill's story is appropriated by white feminists and antiracists to fit their narratives while eliding Hill's experience as a Black woman. The dominant feminist defense of Anita Hill attempts to de-race Hill as simply a woman who experienced sexual harassment in her workplace. And the antiracist [End Page 63] argument in support of Thomas denies Hill's testimony as a racist ploy to deny a Black man a seat on the US Supreme Court. Crenshaw writes that
Anita Hill was primarily presented to the American public as simply a woman complaining about sexual harassment … While many elements of the dominant feminist discourse about gender power and sexuality clearly did apply to Anita Hill—for example, the tradition of impugning charges of sexual aggression with baseless allegations of psychic delusions or vengeful spite—the grounding the critique on white women meant that, in a sense, Hill (and Thomas) had to be deraced, so that they could be represented as actors in a recognizable story of sexual harassment.
Anita Hill's story, then, is repackaged as a partial skeleton of her experience of sexual harassment that reduces her experience and context as a kind of Black woman, in order to fit the dominant feminist discourse about sexual harassment. Sexual harassment as both raced and gendered, in this case, is covertly marked as too different from dominant white feminist discourse on sexual harassment to be intelligible. While Hill is the focus of the public discussion, her experiences of sexual harassment as a kind of Black woman are reduced to a fragmented, de-raced narrative. The public story becomes a skeletal appropriation of Hill's story that in turn reifies exclusionary feminist discourse on sexual harassment that erases discussions of race and in turn, some Black women.
This ornamentalized commodification of difference as ossification is subtly distinct from interpolation through a universalizing tendency. Ossification of Black women in feminist theory includes a direct, substantial (parasitic) engagement with Black women, while interpolation through a universalizing tendency is a mere generic mention of Black women, for example. The latter may forego mentioning a specific Black woman's experience or a specific Black feminist theorist to refer to Black women generally under a universalizing narrative. Ossification can similarly dissolve Black women's experiences into a universalizing narrative, but the presentation of a partial skeleton of a Black woman's experience is key to substantiating a particular project. A story is extracted and retained as a story to be told, but Anita Hill's complicated situation is significantly decontextualized. Hence, Crenshaw illustrates that the reductive inclusion of Black women via ossification can occur such that their marked difference becomes unknowable despite being used as the reference point. Ossification, in this account, is the appropriation of Anita Hill's story that fragments her story to fit a frame that erases the complexity of her experience as a Black woman. Crenshaw asks, was there any concern for what it would mean to do justice by Anita Hill as a "Black woman?"
Anita Hill's treatment as articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw demonstrates a broader pattern by which Black women can appear as ossified in feminist work to be used as bridges to highlight the experiences of other women. Ann DuCille refers to this strategy as using Black women as maps to others' experiences in "The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies" (1994). She examines an overwhelming pattern in white feminist and [End Page 64] Black male scholarship that centers white women and Black men to the exclusion of Black women except where using a Black woman as an example helps underscore a point about the centered group. In other words, Black women's experiences are not woven into the account, but are referenced as a leaping-off point from which to discuss white women's or Black men's oppression. DuCille explains that in this strategy, "the texts of black women must be readable as maps, indexes to someone else's experience, subject to a seemingly endless process of translation and transference" (DuCille 1994, 623). She finds that Black women's experiences and positions are presented in skeleton form to serve as maps to others' experiences. Black women are thus disappeared through the ossification, as the skeleton serves a mere narrative stitching role. This kind of inclusion via ossification is epistemologically unsound and, on our account, is toxic. We explore this in the next section.
In interpolation (inclusion via universalizing tendencies and inclusion via generalizing translation), targets of inclusion may not need to be substantively included. But for ossification via commodification of difference and ornamentation, the story needs to be in some significant way "about" the so-called included group. That is to say, the story is, in some nontrivial way, about the targets of inclusion. Yet at some point, their actual place in the narrative was relegated to merely "being included" instead of its actually "being about" them. That is, where interpolation is a type of inclusion that goes awry because of modes of reductivism, ossification is a reductivism that goes awry because of modes of inclusion. Ossification is a form of reductive storytelling, where the story dis-places its "subjects of analysis" as "targets of inclusion."16 As a phenomenon, it is as difficult to address as it is to describe. It includes both failing to "take care" and another form of disaffection that is difficult to name. For the sake of this account, we will just continue to refer to it as a general "lack of care" that is often more active than one might assume.
epistemological failings of ossification
Ossification, then, is a practice with significant epistemological failings. While it is more difficult to address than interpolation, ossification is similarly epistemologically unsound. The skeleton of one's targets of inclusion is fragmented such that it presents targets for inclusion in ways that at once represents no one/nothing and everyone/everything in the relevant group. That is, it forwards misinformation about one's targets of inclusion in content and presents an implausible reality as plausible in performance (i.e., ornamentation). This epistemologically unsound practice lacks sufficient rigor. Again, epistemologically unsound refers to any practices that [End Page 65] forward false beliefs, misinformation, and/or false impressions, while simultaneously casting them as "truth," "reality," and/or "matter-of-fact existence." Hence, ossification is a troubling epistemologically unsound practice that at once represents no one/nothing and everyone/everything in the relevant group, while also forwarding implausible assumptions about one's target of inclusion.17 But it also does this for the sake of doing justice for other populations (recall: ornametalized, commodification of difference). Though ossification rarely, if ever, occurs without a commodification of difference, it is the ornamentation in ossification that is truly problematic on our account.
It is important to note that ossification is often coupled with interpolation such that one can mislead readers about the inclusive associations in the project while concurrently backgrounding Black women's herstories and agency, for instance. In this way, ossification typically includes all the epistemological failings of interpolation. In fact, it may be tempting to imagine they are the same thing. The difference we are attempting to tease out is in the performance of the inclusion, not in the content. They do often look the same. But when a population is added onto a list of relevant populations for an analysis that does not involve substantive engagement with (and about) those populations, then this is a fairly thin level of inclusion. It comes with serious epistemological failings, but they are not the same as when one substantively engages and produces an "unnatural" (read also as "colonial") museum of history.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this paper, we seek to name and highlight forms of inclusion that are reductive for being epistemologically unsound. They should be avoided in order to work toward a range of coalitional possibilities between differently situated populations with social justice aims. We take reductive inclusion as inclusion that treats the targets of inclusion as plot devices and/or as means to a narrative end. Importantly, we claim that the forms of reductive inclusion that ought to be avoided are the ones that are toxic because they propagate disempowering false and/or distortive messages about one's targets of inclusion. We take epistemologically unsound practices [End Page 66] to refer to any practices that forward false beliefs, misinformation, and/or false impressions, while simultaneously casting them as "truth," "reality," and/or "matter-of-fact existence." The toxic inclusions to avoid articulated in this paper are (1) interpolation and (2) ossification. Interpolation involves executing "inclusion" with formal, instead of substantive, overtures. Ossification, however, establishes parasitic relations of inclusion that present a skeleton of one's targets for inclusion that reduces whole groups to serve the purpose of the narrator. Through a discussion of Audre Lorde's "An Open Letter to Mary Daly" (1979), we explain Lorde's brilliant and succinct critique of Daly as exemplifying interpolation and ossification. Ultimately, this paper adds to diverse Black feminist literatures on effective coalitional efforts in academic feminism as well as gestures toward potential rules for engagement across difference.
While our articulation of two epistemologically unsound practices of reductive inclusion, i.e. toxic inclusions, highlights problematic research practices, one may object that reductive inclusions are simply a result of the need to narrow one's scope of research. Drawing connections between one's account and one's targets of inclusion requires crafty context-sculpting which is inherently exclusionary. In other words, the objection is that toxic inclusion, as we've presented, is a general risk of research that one cannot avoid. While we cannot detail the continuous machinations of colonialism, racism, heteropatriarchy, and other systems of oppression in research practices here, we will note this objection fails to address an author's (conscious or unconscious) decision to construct their targets of inclusion as problematic peripheral through reductive inclusions. Reductive inclusions, as we've presented here, are not unavoidable risks of attempted inclusive research. Notably, there are a number of authors who write projects with social justice aims without reductively including their targets of inclusion. Consider the essays and poems in This Bridge Called My Back (1981), for instance. The research focus and context-sculpting one does for their project that engages in problematic reductive inclusions sets up a core/periphery relationship. Targets of inclusion are not genuinely and robustly included, in part, because the author's narrowed project is not crafted to include them. Audre Lorde notes this tension in her letter to Mary Daly when she first thinks perhaps Daly simply narrowed her focus to Western European women, then later reads her Second Passage which makes it obvious Daly means to extend her scope to non-European women (Lorde 2007, 67). Daly's conception of women centers European and European-descended women such that this group is the core from which all other women play peripheral support roles.18 Thus, practices of reductive inclusion can be (and should be avoided), [End Page 67] in part, by renegotiating how one constructs the scope of one's project such that targets of inclusion are not positioned as aberrations and/or substantively absent from a project that they are otherwise present in.
As social justice-oriented people reflect on effective coalitional efforts and engagement across difference and across time and geopolitical landscapes, Mary Daly's response to Audre Lorde may be instructive for these efforts. Daly takes seriously Lorde's critiques, recognizes what is nonresponsive to the critiques, and seeks to expand her practices as explained in the following excerpt:
Clearly there is no simple response possible to the matters you raise in your letter. I wrote Gyn/Ecology out of the insights and materials most accessible to me at the time. When I dealt with myth I used commonly available sources to find what were the controlling symbols behind judeo-christian myth in order to trace a direct line to the myths which legitimate the technological horror show. But of course to point out this restriction in the first passage is not really to answer your letter. You have made your point very strongly and you most definitely do have a point. I could speculate on how Gyn/Ecology would have been affected had we corresponded about this before the manuscript went to press, but it doesn't seem creativity-conducing to look backward. There is only now and the hope of breaking the barriers between us—of constantly expanding the vision.
(Daly 1979)
We take Daly's response to be a good example of how one can respond to these kinds of things. One can gesture to the structural limitations on our work, but that explanation is not an excuse. It just may be the case that good social justice academic work will need to be a genuine, coalitional effort from this point on. But that will only be possible when one recognizes that, running concurrently with structural constraints, there exists the potential inevitability of epistemologically unsound practices. In normative social and political theory, like feminist theory, one should take seriously the aim of avoiding interpolation and ossification. These [End Page 68] forms of reductive inclusions are epistemologically unsound and work against coalitional possibilities. In our estimation, they can be stymied only by coalitional efforts.
REFERENCES
Footnotes
1. To be clear, in our estimation, for some forms of toxic inclusion, one can pull apart the charge of "lack of care" from failing to "take care." The most pernicious forms of toxic inclusion include both lack of care and failing to take care. But other forms are merely failing to take care, which can be prompted by many things.
2. We are structural Black feminists. That means we are sympathetic to the observations that toxic inclusion is often prompted, not by so-called rotten character, but by structural constraints on time along with pressures to produce in today's academy. In fact, we subscribe to these descriptors (and others) for how scholars have, in so many ways, ceased to have the time to "take care." But that in no way lessens the effect and existence of toxic inclusion. It is unfortunate that structural realities work to produce bad scholarship, but it does no one any favors to pretend those results are not problematic just because they appear to be structurally inevitable. Simply put, we cannot change what we refuse to acknowledge.
3. We know that description alone won't motivate folks to "do better" on these issues. The long history of descriptions from women of color of these kinds of problems and the consistent and persistent problem of citations, for example, says that words on a page will never fix this. But we are not necessarily writing this paper to "fix" anyone. We are keen to pursue conceptual transparency of a critique of bad citational practices. In other words, we are working to get a better understanding of what we do when we levy critiques of bad citational practices, for example, and why we do it.
4. Sites of coalition, on our account, refers to concerns, issues, circumstances, and places where our similarities generate similar concerns, while our differences promote different agendas, demands, and/or outcomes. These coalitional spaces are rife with structural dependence and potential conflict (Dotson 2018). The potential and degree of conflict in coalitions depends on the kinds and shapes of relevant differences. Not all coalitions are conflict-rich, but many are. What an act of interpolation indicates, often rightly, is some form of structural dependence among the "mentioned" populations, but it misses the many potential sites of conflict that are independent of the similarities born of shared structural dependence.
5. A textbook example of this is for an interlocutor to express, "All Black feminists believe …" and then include no citation. Anything that starts this way, i.e. "All Black feminists believe …," should always be doubted. We have never met two Black feminists alike on almost any point (including whether gender is central or, more precisely, on the question of what it means to say that "gender" is or is not central). Anything that begins with invoking a large group and then penning one position on them is guilty of ossification. The failure to cite simply compounds error with obscurantist practice and often leads one to believe that the ascribed position is so ambient as to not need such trivialities as citation. This entire drama is epistemologically unsound, as it distorts, misrepresents, and forwards false information about one's targets of inclusion.
6. As Audre Lorde explains, we might file this one alongside, "Some of my best friends are …" (Lorde 2007, 63).
7. We are not attempting to weigh in on (or endorse) Audre Lorde's or Mary Daly's framing and/or positions on so-called genital mutilation. This is one domain of life and investigation where myth outstretches fact in the United States. As such, it is difficult, without profound research that we have not executed, to weigh in substantively for academic audiences. In other words, we only aim to highlight Lorde's drawing attention to how her work was used and not what it was used to try to understand. Though there is much that can (and could) be said concerning the content, we are not in a position to say it.
8. Nora Berenstain finds this form of reductive inclusion in Kate Manne's recent book, Down Girl (Mind, fzy082, 点击下载, published January 14, 2019). Berenstain finds that the references to women of color (and their works) are marshalled into a narrative that clearly does not intend to seriously include women of color or else some of the details of the main account would read differently. This includes, for instance, the notion of dehumanization, which fails to sufficiently account for racialized aspects of this dynamic. We found Berenstain's critique plausible as it is something that, quite frankly, many white feminists are prone to do. Even the title of this special issue can be critiqued in the way Berenstain critiques Down Girl. White feminists theorize from their own experience, though Manne is to be commended for attempting to substantively acknowledge this. From that inquiry, white feminists often recognize some similarities in structural conditions (which can accurately describe conditions of structural dependencies between us), but then from these similarities imagine a universal condition that allows them to marshal work of women of color without appropriately attending to the gap between their experiences and some of ours (which is a practice that obscures relevant differences). The details of our accounts are obscured and the conditions of our lives that lead to those details are also obscured. In other words, important similarities are used to obscure equally important differences. Reliance on inappropriate mechanisms of universality, in our estimation, is one avenue for epistemologically unsound practices with respect to reductive inclusions.
9. A good analysis of these kinds of moves around difference and similarities can be found in Uma Narayan's Dislocating Cultures (Narayan 1997).
10. For a detailed treatment of this point, see Spillers (1984).
11. See, for example, Lorde 1982; Haden, Middleton, and Robinson 1995; and just about anything written by Zora Neale Hurston.
12. It is important to note that on Lorde's account, such a connection could have been established—through the reclamation of powerful female goddesses in multiple cultures—but it wasn't. The projects by Black women who do similar work simply weren't sought out, weren't recognized as doing the same work, were never seriously engaged, and, more to the point, were not selected for inclusion on the basis of their substantive engagement with the relevant subject matter. One often hears claims that one "does not know" about "all" the sources available for one's point. While that is surely frequently true, Audre Lorde, who is well aware that Mary Daly has read her work and engaged with her on these very topics, is unwilling to grant Daly this excuse. And it bears noting that Daly is unwilling to seriously grant herself this excuse. We return to this in the conclusion.
13. But there are at least two levels of ossification at work here. There is the ossification entailed by Daly's parasitic use of Black women to lend authority to a commentary from a Western white woman on a cultural practice that is not consonant with the norms of Western cultures. And there is an erasure of the reality that many Black women, especially in the United States, have no (or very little) connection to "female circumcision" practices. Whatever "Black women" means is surely too wide. We are a diverse population. And whatever some US Black women's words, like those of Audre Lorde, can aid in illuminating, it surely doesn't include cultural practices of "female circumcision" by identitarian fiat. In other words, not only are Black women not substantively included as anything other than predators and victims, but some US Black women are also invoked in a conversation that we cannot speak with authority on. And the places where we might have had something to contribute, the author fails to take those Black women authors seriously on those matters.
14. Though we draw attention to only one mechanism of ossification, this is not meant to indicate there is only one mechanism of ossification. We are providing this mechanism by way of exemplifying the phenomenon, not providing an exhaustive rendering of its operations.
15. And if one fails to understand one's authoring of "others" this way, it is prime time one learns to understand it this way. There are only so many ways this warning can be sent before outrage (or just plain rage) becomes warranted at its every manifestation. We have entered into an era where people are tired of having to send this message to every bad scholar that sits down to write about something where ossification is their main narrative strategy. One should continue to expect "call-outs" on this. There have been too many warnings sent and far too much damage, yes, damage, done. It is still a folk belief that anything a white narrator has come up with is in some way "new" or "complete" or just plain "better" in and of itself. Stop. Just stop this epistemic imperialism. See note 16 for more on this. See also Camisha Russell's 2019 essay, "On Black Women, 'In Defense of Transracialism,' and Imperial Harm," Hypatia 34:3 (176–94).
16. There are a great deal of thorny questions about whether the narration of "subjects of analysis" is ever legitimate. Feminist and decolonial research ethics is shot through with all the oppressive and colonial machinations that produce "study" in Western academies. Still, until that regime falls, it behooves us to distinguish between an extension of one's research, i.e. an included or added consideration, and the subject of one's research, i.e. the center stage of one's efforts.
17. It should also be noted that the reductive inclusion practice of ossification is not simply an isolated act of reductive inclusion. Rather, there is a historical and structural backdrop that supports this practice. As Elena Ruíz and Kristie Dotson explain in "On the Politics of Coalition," one's interpretation of a multistable, social phenomenon is dependent on one's perspectival perception, goals, and its social effect and one's relations to it (2017). The backdrop of historical "epistemic imperialism" that sustains how social power shapes the way one knows is crucial here (Ruíz and Dotson 2017, 5). Ossification, in part, relies on the epistemologically unsound notion that one can know a whole group through the presentation of its skeleton. The "matter-of-fact" or "common sense" presupposition that the reduced group is the presented curated fragments rests on epistemic imperialism. Hence, ossification is an epistemologically unsound practice of reductive inclusion with historical and structural underpinnings.
18. At least one of the authors of this paper would feel remiss for not pointing out that the very title of this special issue, "Gendered Oppression and Its Intersections," can easily be read as "white women and their periphery." Not because white women do not have a race, for example, but because that is such a white, academic feminist formulation. We, however, are not without sympathy for the difficulty of "titles" in this era of scholarship. But there is no such thing as gender and its intersections for us, as the kind of Black feminists we are. There is just multistable, complex existence across a range of historical and structural dependencies that serve to promote and/or compromise our living. Some of those dependencies have names. Others do not. But none of them is central. But we suppose that is a difficult orientation to title when one takes "gender" as central and everything else as its intersections. This is just one of the well-articulated sites of difference between many Black feminisms and much of academic feminism, which is a place where our inclusion can become toxic. One might wonder, then, why we would agree to place a piece in a special issue so problematically named. That is easily answered: out of the spirit of coalition. Like we said earlier, some coalitions are made at sites of difference. This particular effort toward coalition is being constructed at a site of difference. One author's rejection of the title (and possibly this project) does not also translate to a rejection of the people involved. If it makes sense to do, engagement is not somehow barred, even where there is no obligation to do so and/or where significant disagreement exists.
We consider this paper to be a gift to people attracted to the title of this special issue. It is a gift given in the spirit of coalition. We offer this gift not because we are obligated to write to audiences we are not part of but because, as structural Black feminists, we are well aware that there are significant structural dependencies shared in the lives of different populations in the United States. And though those dependencies do not make us the same or need the same things, well-functioning coalitional efforts can sometimes aid more than they hurt.
