Research by Taylor, assistant professor of political science and policy studies, into the coalitional strategies of U.S. women of color feminism has been selected for a limited-term open access critical conversation about race and progressive social change in New Political Science.
Assistant Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies Liza Taylor will be featured in the journal New Political Science’s open-access critical conversation, “Black Lives Matter and New Political Science: Scholarship Committed to Progressive Social Change.” Anchored in the conviction that a commitment to social justice, a sustainable democratic society, and human rights is central to the study of politics, New Political Science is quickly becoming a leading journal of the global democratic left.
Taylor’s article, “Coalition from the Inside Out: Women of Color Feminism and Politico-Ethical Coalition Politics,” will be spotlighted alongside a handful of others, including work by prominent race scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in an effort to foreground scholarship relevant to current discussions around racial justice, systemic racism, and political activism for progressive social change.
Imploring political activists and theorists to take lessons from some of our most rigorous, though largely ignored, political theorists on collective intersectional group politics, Taylor’s research turns to 1980s U.S. women of color feminism to develop a notion of politico-ethical coalition politics as an alternative to contemporary articulations of activist coalition politics that obscure the high-stakes politics of coalescing across hostile race, class, gender, sex, and sexuality divides, and for the sake of intersectional social justice.
Absolutely crucial to concrete coalition politics, Taylor shows, is an appreciation of interlocking oppressions, which produce coalitional understandings of intersectional group politics, identity and consciousness. The ability to do this is captured in what Taylor calls politico-ethical coalition politics, a distinctive understanding of coalition located in Bernice Johnson Reagon’s 1981 coalition speech, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.” Rethinking political joining outside of notions of ontological spectacle and ethical community (typical of Judith Butler), Taylor argues that women of color feminists such as Reagon, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa encourage a uniquely political conception of coalition that resists appeals to political indeterminacy while still anticipating the power struggles and danger inherent to working in coalition. This understanding of coalition, Taylor attests, is nevertheless also an “ethical” one insofar as the political commitment to undermining interlocking oppressive forces grounding such efforts is overtly self-reflexive, thereby encouraging an ethical sensibility characterized by love and existential transformation.
The key concepts presented in Taylor’s research not only enrich discussions surrounding the impetus and longevity of effective progressive coalitional activism, they also present robust theoretical accounts of political subject formation, in the form of coalitional identity, and political consciousness, in the form of coalitional consciousness, that offer promising alternatives to popular feminist poststructuralist notions of the subject-in-process and epistemological undecidability.
Taylor’s article will be available on open access until December 31, 2020. This article also forms the basis of Taylor’s book manuscript, “Coalescing for Difference: Women of Color Feminism and Politico-Ethical Coalition Politics,” which is currently under review.