The philosophical question, “What is the good life?", has arrested the development of the realities and resources that Black women’s lives bring to bear. Womanism as a scholarly endeavor has had to portend so much with the blowback from canonical discourses or the justification or juxtapositioning of itself to assumed allies or movements, that the process of engaging interlocutors has done more for building the discourse rather than remaining in critical engagement and dialogue with the very women to whom it seeks to advance. This panel seeks to revisit the age-old philosophical question of what is the good life by forefronting the womanist imperative of whose life is it anyway. Taking its cues from the intergenerational inquiries of womanist thought and its tenets, this interdisciplinary and intergenerational panel of womanist scholars introduces the intersectional field called womanist phenomenology as a critical landscape that is accountable to black women’s realities.
This paper is an examination of womanist thought and phenomenological theory as it offers an unlikely but fortuitous interdisciplinary perspective through which we many examine American culture’s fixation on objectifying black women without taking into account Black women’s existence and lived experience. It is a study of Black women’s consciousness and the objectification of their experience. It is an exploration of how Black women’s bodies and their embodiment of success are seen as scandal/spectacle within the contemporary public sphere while Black female-ness is simultaneously appropriated and persistently commodified. Amid these levels of contestation, the construction of Black women’s identities has to resist any challenge as a dually misognynist racist discourse.
This paper presentation seeks to interrogate the ontological claims embedded in womanist thought. “Being” for Blackness remains a speculative point of contention within canonical philosophical assertions that overdetermine and authorize the possibility of subjecthood. This possibility of being a subject is determined through the category of “the human '', which is presupposed by those who have access to agency, subjectivity, and identity. When those categories are foreclosed to Blackness, the question of “being” for Blackness is foreclosed, thereby making our ontological attempts to determine ourselves outside of an antiblack paradigm limited in its scope. In placing a specific lens on womanist thought, race and gender does not serve as distinct but colluded identity formations within the discourse – which is to say Black women are always forced to interrogate their existence as raced and gendered subjects at the same time.
What must Black women do to be saved? Salvation is a central locus in Christian theology and a moral crisis for oppressed populations. As an anti-oppression paradigm that takes seriously the survival and liberation of Black women, while advocating for the wellbeing of all, womanist theology embodies Godtalk for the least of these. While survival represents the means, liberation—the freedom and flourishing of Black women—is the ultimate telos. The economic and political history of Black women from slavery to freedom begs the question of whether a liberating God has concern for Black women. Adapting Alice Walker’s theological suspicion in the 1980s, womanist scholars interrogating geopolitical realities as well as theological categories with Black women at the epistemological center soon developed a progressive interest in articulating what liberation means to and for Black women.