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Analysis Of The Article ' Notes On A Politics Of Location ' By Adrienne De Beauvoir

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In Adrienne Rich’s article “Notes towards a Politics of Location,” Rich argues that positionality is a way of understanding how power and privilege affect perspective. I am in agreement with Rich that recognizing one’s own politics of location is a useful starting point for feminist theory. Rich’s main arguments are that the US education system failed to provide an adequate retelling of world histories, that white feminism is ignorant of its privileges, and that through the awareness and inclusion of racial movements can feminist theory grow. I will also compare Rich’s article to Simone de Beauvoir’s first chapter, “Biological Data” from her book The Second Sex, and to Judith Butler’s article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Lastly, I will explain how Rich’s article is valuable to myself, to the WOMN 2000 Feminist Thought course, and in broader social contexts. Rich effectively argues that white feminism recreates the power structures feminism seeks to disassemble.
Rich maintains that white feminism begins with the faulty US education system, or for this paper’s purposes, the North American education system. Rich (1984) contends that “Any United States citizen alive today has been saturated with…the warning that any collective restructuring of society spells the end of personal freedom.…But we are not invited to consider the butcheries…of white supremacism” (p. 220). The lack of perspective for North Americans
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