Copyright © 2015
Avello Publishing Journal
ISSN: 2049 - 498X
Issue 1 Volume 5:
Marquise Émilie du Châtelet
Filling the Shell of the Black Woman With Nothing
Marquis Bey, Cornell University, USA.
“Other than melanin and subject matter, what, in fact, may make me a black writer? Other than my own
ethnicity—what is going on in my work that makes me believe it is demonstrably inseparable from a
cultural specificity that is Afro-American?”
—Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken
Birth of a Race Relation
Negro-ness. This concept, indeed, this claim initially uttered by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) in
his essay “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature’” was used to criticize the lack of authenticity—
black, Negro authenticity—in black literature. With this appellation, Baraka implies that
there is something endemic to all black individuals, something that characterizes all
individuals who belong to the black race and sets them apart from all people of the white
race. “Negro-ness” is indirectly illustrated as “authentic” blackness, as the kernel of
blackness that seeps into all that a black American produces. However, Baraka never defines
what this "Negro-ness" is; he never explicitly says what it looks like, writes like, thinks like,
or behaves like. Perhaps Baraka intended “Negro-ness” to be an ineffable, linguistically
inexpressible quality that one “knows when they see it;” perhaps it is a quality incapable of
being captured by the inadequacy of language. But if it is linguistically inexpressible and
known only when seen, how is one to develop, as Baraka implicitly does, a standard by
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which to gauge its amount in a work?
Or perhaps there is another reason for Baraka’s lack of definition—because one cannot
define things that do not exist. Asserting a “Negro-ness,” an innate black quality, denies
black individuals autonomy—autonomy in the sense that in designating innate, unalterable
characteristics in black individuals, they are deprived of the freedom to be things that
contradict or reject those predetermined characteristics. Put otherwise, to assert “Negroness” is to deny black individuals the capacity to fully resist. It is this very capacity that is of
central concern for philosopher Catherine Malabou. The capacity to resist connects to her
ontology of plasticity that reads being as change. “Negro-ness,” in short, denies the
malleability of identity and attempts to rigidify the fluidity of black identity.
“The” special experience of African Americans is often cited as the justification for
phrases like “Negro-ness” and other exclusively black concepts and theories is the special
experience of African Americans. It is said that black Americans have “a” historically unique
experience that permeates their lives and shapes their perception of the world. Because of
the historical institution of slavery and inimical fights for racial equality in the form of events
such as Emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement, black Americans share a common
past. This common past promotes a level of solidarity that unifies them because of the racial
commonality of the experiences. There seems to be some validity to the claim that a
commonality of experience translates into sweeping commonalities in writing, speech, art,
etc. of black individuals. Historical racial blights spawned by the onset of racist ideology
seem to conjure in the mind of black Americans certain specific talking points and views of
the world that seem to be in accordance with all individuals who identify as black; however,
what often mistakenly follows is a conflation of unique black experiences with a black
essence.
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I, however, wish to insist that a common experience is not a common essence. To
claim that the historical experience is synonymous with an innate black essence makes the
mistake of falsely internalizing external circumstances and passing them off as inherent or
natural. Furthermore, it jettisons the plurality and diversity within the experiences of black
Americans. Baraka, and others like him, contend that it is because of an a priori “blackness
of blackness” that one writes literature in a certain way or has a particular perspective. The
primary problem with this, however, is that it defines “blackness” as unchanging. The
problem is not necessarily that a specific thing is said to characterize black individuals, but
that this specific thing can never be anything else.
The same point can be made for women. All those who identify and are perceived as
belonging to the, what feminist philosopher Chrsitine Battersby calls, “female subjectposition” do not have a common essence underlying their identities. Battersby notes, in her
text, The Phenomenal Woman, that
Women’s predicaments are infinitely variable – and so are women’s experiences. The identities of
individual women are scored by a variety of forces and disciplinary structures. Not all of these
scorings relate to issues of sexual difference. Race, nation, religion, education, familybackground, neighbourhood, class, wealth – all contribute to configuring and patterning the
individualized self that persists through time. (6)
Women’s experiences vary across race, nation, religion, sexuality, etc. There is no monolithic
female experience that initiates the establishment of an immutable female essence.
Essentialism’s central dogma assumes that within a specific entity of a group, there
exists a set of attributes all of which are necessary to its identity and function, and unchanging
(Cartwright). Essentialists would believe that all black women possess some inherent trait
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endemic to them all that always has and always will identify them as black women. The
problem with essentializing is that it presupposes an innate, unalterable, fixed quality of an
individual of a group that is determined arbitrarily through outward manifestations. This
fixity clashes with Malabou’s ontology—that being is change. To essentialize black
individuals not only reduces them all to a level of sameness, but also deprives them of their
own capacity to resist.
To further this point, to say that all black women have a particular essence that has
always and always will exist in every black woman, is to falsely reduce their “essence” to one
that is immutable. It disregards the foundation of change and shrinks the broad spectrum of
possibilities for black women down to a core of arbitrary presuppositions. To assert this is to
answer Deborah E. McDowell’s question, “Is there a monolithic black female language? Do
black female high school dropouts, welfare mothers, college graduates, and Ph.D.s share a
common language?” with a hearty “Yes, always!”
Black Women Blotted Out
In the burgeoning epoch of second-wave feminism, the purported fight for full women’s
equality fell short of its claim because of its failure to include the trials of black women.
White feminists often evinced, what Adrienne Rich calls, a “white solipsistic” mentality when
fighting for the equality of women. White solipsism, as defined by Rich, is “to think,
imagine, and speak as if whiteness described the world. Not the consciously-held belief that
one race is inherently superior to all others, but a tunnel-vision which simply does not see
nonwhite experience or existence as precious or significant, unless in spasmodic, impotent
guilt-reflexes, which have little or no long term, continuing momentum or political
usefulness” (Spelman). This sequesters the different realities of black women to the realm of
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unimportance, which then adds another hindrance to black women and marginalizes them
even further. Black women suffer abject erasure when fighting for black or female equality,
forcing them to create their own fight for black and female subjectivity and equality, their
own militia of women that unsheathe weapons branded with words, theories, and actions
that make black women indelibly appear on the palimpsestic tablet of society. Black women
have unique gendered as well as racially oppressive forces bearing down on them. The
predominantly-white feminist movement’s embodiment of the white solipsistic mentality
treated the struggles of white women as universal, disregarding the unique struggles of their
black sisters. Black women were blotted out and fell victim to an erasure that made mythical
their difficulties while substituting white women’s difficulties for all women’s difficulties.
The remedy to this white solipsism is not simply an additive one; the struggles of black
women are not simply black struggles plus women struggles. It is “highly misleading to say,
without further explanation, that black women experience sexism and racism. For to say
merely that suggests that black women experience one form of oppression, as blacks—the
same thing black men experience—and that they experience another form of oppression as
women—the same thing white women experience” (Spelman; emphasis in original). A black
woman does not experience discrimination and oppression the same as a black man does,
nor does she experience sexism the same as a white woman. Her experience is quite different
than a black man’s because she is not just black (male being the hegemonic and thus invisible
characteristic); her experience is quite different from a white woman’s because she is not just
a woman. The sexism a black woman experiences influences and is influenced by the racism
she experiences (Spelman). To treat the oppression of black women as additive—simply
piling the stagnant weight of racism onto that of sexism, “treats the oppression of black
women in a sexist and racist society as if it were a further burden than her oppression in a
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sexist but non-racist society, when, in fact, it is a different burden” (Spelman). Black women’s
experience in a racist and sexist society does not give them a “double whammy” but a
different experience than anything black men or white women will ever endure.
White Black Feminist Womanist Thought
Womanist I. From womanish. (Opp. Of “girlish,” i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A
black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female
children, “You acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious,
courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered
“good” for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown-up. Being grown-up.
Interchangeable with another black folk expression: ‘You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In
charge. Serious. (Walker xi-xii)
The above quote tersely, yet poignantly captures the contrast between the demeanor and
attitude of black women and that of white women. The intersectionality in play within black
women and women of color changes their experiences so much that the purported
universality of the woes of white feminists failed to account for black women’s experiences
(“The Social Construction”). Because (white) feminism did not speak for the reality of black
women, a specialized perspective had to be created. Black Womanist Thought attempts to
correct the injustices of second-wave feminism and is a self-defined standpoint of black
women’s own oppression. Because black women’s social status externally affects them in a
common way and alters their views of the world, they experience a different world. These
experiences then bring forth a distinctive Black Womanist consciousness concerning that
material reality. This is the murmuring heartbeat of Black Womanist Thought: a subordinate
group’s different interpretation of a reality shaped by the dominant group (“Defining
Black”).
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The facticity of the dissimilar experience of black women brought upon by the pallid
hands of the hegemonic caste is reaffirmed due to black women’s realities being overlooked.
The creation of Black Womanist Thought was necessary because white feminists did not
recognize black women’s unique impedances, normalized whiteness, considered it universal,
saw white women’s reality as accounting for all women’s reality. For example, in the fight for
women’s suffrage during the second-wave of feminism, white feminists disregarded the
unique challenges black women were facing and would face. Because white women failed to
see black women’s issues as “real issues” and thus continued to lack a comprehensive vision
of the persisting troubles specific to black women, the struggles of black women were
subsumed under the thought-to-be universal white female experience, thus making invisible
the peculiar issues of black women. Since white feminists did not see the unique experiences
of black women, while consequently appropriating them into the Feminist movement (the
lack of specification implies a “white” qualifier), they did them the disservice of failing to
consider their womanness and their blackness.
Essential Points of Malabou
It has been made clear that blackness, or black essence, has fallen victim to essentialization,
that is, common racial pasts have been codified into a common modern racial essence. Black
women specifically have suffered under a unique, nuanced position of identity degradation in
that their marginalized race as well as their marginalized gender confer upon them inimitable
plights. Catherine Malabou, French philosopher combining traditional thinkers such as
Hegel and Heidegger with her own implementation of neuroscience, adds much to the
conceptualization of identity and essence. Malabou’s book Changing Difference attempts to
reconceptualize notions of gender difference in a post-feminist age by radically hollowing
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out the woman. Being a female philosopher, Malabou must combat the fact that “still today
the professional or personal achievements of a woman cannot be seen as anything other
than an act of emancipation” and “to be a woman still means to belong to a category that is
dominated sexually, symbolically, socially, economically, and culturally” (92). Women are
locked in a position that forces them to remain oppressed and makes any attempt at
liberation hearken back to her oppression, seen as only an emancipatory act. But Malabou
sets up her new articulation of the woman by stating that “there is a secret plasticity in both
woman and the feminine” (93). Malabou takes Battersby’s notion that “it is not necessary to
think in terns of fixed ‘essences’” (12), and that the Self “is not a ‘thing’ – a ‘substance’ that
remains permanent through change – it is more like an ‘event’ that is ‘born’ in the space and
time of interactive forces” (8) to its logical end. Woman, for Malabou, becomes constant
change, consistent with her notion of the ontological mutability of being. That which
underlies our existence is a constancy of change, of mutability. It follows, then, that what
constitutes the person is not a palpable static essence or a humanly-constructed imposed
essence but a changing one. Once we understand that everything is change, we can liberate
ourselves from the rigid dichotomy of essentialism or anti-essentialism, both of which are
inadequate for speaking of women’s and all people’s identity. Once we accept that
underlying our identities is eternal change, we no longer have to reject strict essentialism or
anti-essentialism, because change encompasses both of those options, as well as other
conceptualizations of identity. With change as fundamental, everything is possible, freeing us
all from confining categories.
In discussing the nature of our brain, our identity, and our essence, Malabou divulges
her idea of plasticity: the capacity to both receive form and give form, something modifiable,
formable, and formative at the same time; however, something that also has the capacity to
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annihilate, to explode (What Should We Do). An inherent reciprocity exists within the
functions of our world; we, and all that encompasses us, receive impressions from external
stimuli and experiences while simultaneously impressing ourselves upon our world, shaping
it and creating it while also being shaped and created. Also possible is deflagration: a
complete rupture of ourselves, annihilating all form. Our brains and our identities are
situated between two extremes: “on the one side the sensible image of taking form (sculpture
or plastic objects), and on the other side that of the annihilation of all form (explosion)”
(What Should We Do 5).
In light of her notion of plasticity, Malabou does not identify with either the essentialist
or anti-essentialist schools of thought. She repudiates the traditional essentialist
characterization because it reduces women to sameness, dilutes their differences and
compartmentalizes them into fixed, rigid, unalterable boxes that jettison uniqueness or
individuality. Malabou also says that anti-essentialism, characteristic of, for example, queer
theory, is an inadequate portrayal of the identities of women because, in trying to uplift
women from the depths of marginalization, it “defend[s] the specificity of this violence
simply a fall-back to a form of essentialism that confers a determinate identity on ‘woman’”
(Malabou, Changing Difference 94). Furthermore, anti-essentialism reduces all categories to
social constructions, disregarding the fact that the biological differences between the sexes
are significant. Social construction can only account for so much, and the physical, biological
differences between the sexes are undeniable. Both approaches are limited, and Malabou
specifically points out the shortcomings of both later in her book Changing Difference:
In gender studies, “essence” often refers to a combination of natural, biological, or anatomical
determinants (all three are treated as synonymous)—the woman’s “sex,” her “body”—and a
given social construction, feminine identity as it appears as a product of the heterosexual
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ideological matrix. Both natural determination and social construction refer to a supposedly
stable and unchanging essence. To speak of the “specificity” of the feminine would be
essentialist, since this discourse could only be a reclaiming of the “proper,” a preordained
anatomical and cultural reality. Few feminist theorists seem to question the crude amalgam that
such an understanding of essence conveys, one that reduces biology to nothing more than the
science of constituted identities and culture to a movement to re-appropriate these identities for
normalizing ends.
The anti-essentialism of “queer multitudes” emphasizes the infinite, unlimited, horizontal
stability and transformability of bodies, behavior, and gender, as if this constant displacement
were able to eradicate supposed stability of essence by itself. (96)
The problem with historical renditions of essence, according to Malabou, is that there has
been “a consensus regarding a definition of essence as stability, self-presence, and nature, in
both the ontological and biological meaning of the term” (98). Addressing the insufficient
and inadequate term “essence,” Malabou creates a new definition. She opens up a new
avenue for thinking about essence and asks us to “envisage the possibility that, in the name
woman, there is an empty but resistant essence, an essence that is resistant precisely because
it is emptied, a stamp of impossibility” (98-99; emphasis in original). Redefining essence in this
way can in turn redefine the fate of black women. To be sure, Malabou’s empty but resistant
essence can indeed be used to liberate all identities, not merely black women. However,
Malabou’s concept is particularly insightful and beneficial for black women of modernity
because of the onerous oppressive force black women face. The notion of an empty but
resistant essence can indeed liberate black men or white women, but because black women
face an exponentiated degree of racial and gendered oppression it can prove especially
liberatory. Malabou’s essence grants access into a more general yet specific idea of identity
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that is capable of addressing issues specific to black women but is bereft of the limiting
effect of prior notions of essence. It simultaneously liberates black women from confining
categories while opening up the possibility of anything being characteristic of black women.
It allows that which defines black women to prove insightful for all black women while
eliminating the mistake of ascribing that which defines a particular black woman to all black
women.
As stated, Malabou holds that both the essentialist and anti-essentialist arguments are
incomplete and insufficient in achieving the feminist goal of gender equality. She says that
“the fierce battle waged within various feminist movements between ‘essentialism’ and ‘antiessentialism’—the label ‘essentialist’ is attached to any discourse that tries to identify
anything like a specificity of the feminine—loses its meaning and ultimately turns against
feminist efforts” (95). The discourse surrounding feminism is unable to liberate and free
women from the shackles of marginalization. As Malabou notes, it often “oppose[s] the
feminine—understood
as
the
femininity
of
woman—to
masculine
domination,
simultaneously restricts the meaning of the feminine understood as openness and plurality.
Once again binaries dominate, along with their strict and often uncritical definitions” (27).
Feminism and the discursive fight for women’s equality limit women to predetermined
essences. It does not allow room for change, the primordial basis of one’s identity.
Malabou strongly criticizes queer theory’s and social constructivism’s fundamental
premise of stark anti-essentialism. Malabou implicitly states that anti-essentialists assert an
essential quality of the woman just as essentialists do. In pointing out the ambiguities of antiessentialism, she asks, “How do you establish an essential difference between women’s
studies and other fields of research, how do you define an essential identity for the political
attitude of women within the institution, how do you maintain an essential distinction
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between the male and female guardians of the Law if ‘woman’ or ‘women’ have no essence?”
(104). One cannot stand in the position of anti-essentialism and at the same time assert a
distinct, specific essence of the target of the oppression that one is trying to eradicate. Antiessentialism rebuffs any inherent essence of a particular group and claims that nothing in a
woman is endemic to or characteristic of all women solely by virtue of their womanness.
However, people committed to anti-essentialist thought assert the liberation of this specific
subject called women—a subject that they implicitly deem, since they specify a particular
target of oppression, to have something innate within them all that is the target of this
oppression.
She also criticizes anti-essentialists for severing ties with the natural sciences and, as
stated previously, their acceptance of the inherency of biological differences. Malabou
incorporates the facts of science into her philosophy via plasticity, which lies beneath her
ontology of change. For anti-essentialists to deny science and biology wholly denies a critical
component of the identity of people. There are real, material differences between women
and men that cannot be written off. Malabou retains the facts of science while still allowing
room for the very fundamental law of change.
What Malabou attempts to do is reconcile the two schools and find a way out of the
crammed spaces of essentialism and anti-essentialism. Malabou retains ties to the natural
sciences but still rejects a strict essentialist thought. She also understands the plasticity and
capriciousness of one’s identity but does not succumb to radical constructivism. Ultimately,
she attempts to answer the very poignant question “How can we defend the specificity,
however unstable, however relative, of a violence done to women if the very notion of
‘specificity’ is subject to the counter-violence of a constant de-appropriation?” The result of
this violence is
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that ‘woman’ is now emptied of her essence only serves the fact that she does not define herself
except through the violence done to her. Violence alone confers her being. The violence of the
deconstruction of this being, on the one hand, and, on the other, the domestic and social
violence constantly exerted on this very absence of being. Woman is nothing anymore, except
this violence through which her ‘being nothing’ continues to exist. She's nothing but an
ontological amputation, formed by that which negates her. (98)
Malabou wonders how this identity we label as “woman” can be liberated if the very
violence done to this specified identity is the subject to violence because of its specificity. By
specifying what is undergoing violence—that being “woman”—in order to liberate
“woman” we subject “woman” to counter-violence. How, then, are we to conceive of the
identities undergoing real, palpable oppression and violence? She subsequently provides her
answer, and through black women we can see it made manifest.
What, Then, Is the Black Woman, This New Thing?
Drawing on Malabou, I will show that the identity of black women is plastic: that there is no
static or universal entity that characterizes all black women. It shapes and is shaped, forms
and is formed, yet also has the potential to explode and become something wholly different.
We can no longer think of the identity, the essence, of black women as something a priori or
predetermined, nor can we assert that there is a commonality that pervades all black women
due to common experiences or a common racial history. The identity of particular black
women perennially shape the perception of who black women are and, in consequently,
perceptions of black women paint a picture of black female identity for others, a picture that
can be accepted or rejected. Also, the identity of black women can undergo radical,
impetuous change—what Malabou calls “explosion.” Black women’s essence is thus not
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something; this would presuppose an innate characteristic. Rather, the essence of black
women is emptiness.
To be sure, although Malabou only deals specifically with gender it is unclear whether
her remarks can apply to race as well. Malabou states that violence confers woman’s being;
that there is a balance to be struck between socially constructed and biological influences of
sex and gender, demonstrated by her partiality to social constructivism as well as science;
that female essence is under a constancy of change; and that female essences are empty but
resistant. She makes no mention of whether this all applies to black women, women who
undergo not only gender oppression but also racial oppression. Unlike what Malabou says of
sex, race has no biological or genetic foundation. It is a complete social construction having
no correlation to scientific axioms. One wonders, then, if Malabou’s empty but resistant
essence, which she employs for gender uses, can be used on race as well. I aver that it can
because the aim of Malabou’s reonception of essence is to, as the title of her book implies,
change difference. Like gender, race has palpable, violent consequences. As a materialist,
Malabou emphasizes the importance of material reality, therefore, the material consequences
of race, brought upon by perceived biological and ideological truths, are also subject to
Malabou’s new conception of essence.
Malabou’s claim about women’s essence is that “[i]n the name woman, there is an
empty but resistant essence, an essence that is resistant precisely because it is emptied, a
stamp of impossibility” (98-99; emphasis in original). What does this mean? How can woman
have an empty essence? How can an empty essence be resistant?
To answer these questions, we must look closely at Malabou’s alternative definition of
essence. She begins by saying that in the label “woman”—that group which is marginalized,
attacked, oppressed, “othered”—there is an empty essence. This word “empty” is most
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peculiar because it seems to directly oppose the very definition of essence; it seems
paradoxical, oxymoronic. How can there be emptiness and essence? This emptiness opposes
essentialism by asserting that instead of some innate “thing” within a particular group of
individuals, there is nothing—no-thing. Malabou asks us to first think of woman as empty
and undetermined, bereft of characteristics. Thinking of black women in this way clears
woman of any arbitrary characteristics that can be imposed upon her and leaves her purely
open, completely susceptible to plurality. An empty essence means that nearly all is possible,
but nothing is necessary.
Before moving further with Malabou’s claim, it is essential to engage Battersby’s
articulation of the “female subject-position.” Battersby’s boldly stated claim is that
In so far as there is ‘sameness’ between women, this is not a matter of shared experiences or lifehistories. It is, rather, a question of a shared positioning vis-à-vis the founding metaphysical
categories that inform our notions of individuality, self and ‘personhood’. Thus, whether or not a
woman is lesbian, infertile, post-menopausal or childless, in modern western cultures she will be
assigned a subject-position linked to a body that has perceived potentialities for birth. (16)
Her argument is a poignant one; however, it fails to acknowledge that even though lesbian,
infertile, and post-menopausal women will be perceived to be potential child-bearers, this
does not logically usher in the coda that, regardless of a particular woman’s accidental
characteristics, all women operate under the same subject-position. In the case of race, white
women do not hold fundamentally coequal positions with black women. In a white
supremacist society, black women’s experiences are fundamentally different from white
women’s experiences, thus showing that their subject positions are not the same. Therefore,
there must be something other than a congruent subject-position that unifies women across
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the multifarious spectrum of identities.
Malabou offers a remedy for thinking about the essence of women. Her claim of
essence reads: “an empty but resistant essence, an essence that is resistant precisely because it
is emptied.” To resist is to push back, to deflect, to oppose, to withstand, and to defy. The
empty essence of the woman is the necessary condition for this resistance, this deflection,
and it is because of that emptiness that her essence can withstand impositions of her
inherent identity. But what is being resisted? Perhaps the case of black women can help
illuminate the idea.
If a black woman’s identity is in fact empty and resistant because of that emptiness, she
resists everything that is not her. That which is not her is everything she resists. She only
becomes what she accepts, what she does not resist, meaning that her identity indicates
precisely what she has accepted as her and also what she has rejected as not her. What this
emptiness and resistance does is rebuke the claim that all black women are this or that and
opens up nearly any possibility for the black woman. She is not confined or limited but given
a multiplicity of possibilities to define her, possibilities that she chooses. In order to resist
unwanted characteristics we must address the question of who is doing the resisting. After all,
it would seem that is one’s essence is empty there would be no agent to resist. The resister is
precisely who has been inflicted and imposed upon; the resister is who was constantly
defined by others. While an empty essence enables resistance, more essential essences
diminish the potential for resistance. Her emptiness is required for her many possibilities and
ability to be anything. With that requisite met, we must then examine what that emptiness
signifies.
“A stamp of impossibility.” What about this empty but resistant essence makes it a
stamp of impossibility? A stamp marks an impression, a distinctive character or indication, a
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lasting imprint. Something about this empty but resistant essence gives the essence a
distinctive character—an identity. This identity is one of impossibility. But what is
impossible? The place of impossibility is “the structural impossibility [woman] experiences
of not being violated, in herself and outside, everywhere” (Changing Difference 140). The empty
but resistant essence is the name “woman” at the top of the guest list of a new club that puts
the old club of the a priori innately Other woman out of business. With old essential notions
of identity it was impossible for woman to define herself apart from the violence done to
her; in the name “woman” was only impositions from external sources other than herself.
What the empty but resistant essence does is rename woman as she who is self-defined,
stamping her with an empty but resistant essence, a state of affairs impossible with old
notion of essential identity.
This empty but resistant essence frees black women of marks of inherent sameness or
innate markers of inferiority. This new conception necessarily will change how black women
are viewed and thus change their fate. If one were to gaze upon the identity of black women
through the empty but resistant lens, it would be impossible to make the mistake of white
solipsism because there would be no inherent characteristic of all black individuals at which
to scoff. It would be impossible to assert a prejudiced agenda on individuals of a particular
group, be it racial, gendered, etc., because there would be no innate, unifying characteristic in
which to pinpoint a source of bigotry.
The liberation of black women, however, may also critique Malabou’s very claim of
changing essence. Malabou rebukes essentialist thought because it rejects biology completely.
Biological differences between the sexes are real and material—they are natural, so to speak.
However, what is natural for Malabou, what runs beneath the soil of our natural, material
world, is change—perennial, everlasting change. So, even biological differences between
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sexes succumb to the mandate of change. Male and female “essences” and innate physical
differences are natural, therefore capable of and unable to escape change. Women—black
women in this particular case—can be liberated with the knowledge of plasticity because
even their biology, that which differentiates them from the biological characteristics of men,
can and will change. However, what of their blackness? Race has come to be proven to have
no biological basis. It is a social construct that has permeated our society and resulted in real
impediments, material wounds, and inequities, and it has always been changing. Blackness
means something different now than it did ten, fifty, one hundred years ago. Blackness—
race—has demonstrated its susceptibility to change. However, while it has been susceptible
to change, it has also persisted in that it has always been anathema to liberation, reductionist,
and restrictive. Why hasn’t plasticity and change liberated blackness from the chains of
denigration in America? What, if anything, can the notion of an ontology of change and
plasticity do now for race if it hasn’t done anything so far, being that racism and ideas of
blackness have shown themselves to be ever-changing with ideas of blackness from chattel
slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, etc.? Why has plasticity not liberated
blackness from denigration yet? Can it?
Although it may be unclear how an ontology of change can address the persisting
challenges of the constantly changing concept of race, Malabou’s empty but resistant essence
redefines the essence of not only black women but all people. It removes predetermined,
arbitrarily imposed identity characteristics and presents an empty slate that each person can
choose to fill or leave as empty as they may. I do, however, wish to make clear that even
though there is no concrete black female essence, I do not, nor cannot, discredit the unique,
real, oppressive experiences black women have faced. Asserting the falsity of inherent group
essences does not assert the falsity of real group experiences because the ramifications of
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assumed identities are palpable events. What Malabou’s new essence does is make room for
change. Her conception of essence can enact concrete, material changes by destroying the
prime cause of group and individual denigration, discrimination, injustice, oppression, and
marginalization: purported innate, unfavorable characteristics of people who appear to share
a particular quality. Reimagining essence can lead to reimagining the possibilities of our lives;
it opens up a variety possibilities, liberating and freeing us from stagnation. It can promote
social justice and equity by devouring the underlying assumptions of group denigration. It
can define our world, allowing us all to define ourselves.
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