Patricia Arquette Women Of Colour Analysis

Finding common ground

When Patricia Arquette went up the stairs to accept her Oscar a couple of weeks ago, she used the moment to call the attention of the Academy Awards watching world to the struggles of women in regard to equal pay and general recognition – and while her words fell on open ears with the female audience parts of the internet weren’t exactly happy about it. It’s not that equal pay isn’t an important issue anymore or that one shouldn´t use any opportunity to point out the still very much ongoing trouble women face in the work sphere. No, the thing that made people angry is not only what was said on stage, but the way it was clarified behind it: In Arquette’s opinion, it is time for gay people and all the Women of Colour to

We cannot understand the suffragette movements without seeing its context and we surely cannot understand the second wave feminism if we don’t know about the expectations and limitations women had to face all over the world. The liberation movement starting in the 1960s and lasting until the backlash in the early nineties, focused on rethinking the position of women in society, including the role of the mother and reproductive rights. – But it also brought forward ideas about a solidarity between women that would take into consideration the differences between them: Black women and Women of Colour would take a stand and try to make space in the mostly White feminist movements – that is to say movements that were mostly perceived White, as Gloria Steinem recently declared there were indeed a lot of Black women involved but they rarely attained as much visibility as White middle class women. It was mainly Black women in the 1980s advocating for a more inclusive view on feminism. bell hooks’ “Ain’t I a women”, Angela Davis’ “Women Race and Class” or again Audre Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class and Sex” all aim to shift the focus from a singular and homogenous examination of women’s lives to one that includes the variety and complexity of all women. A big goal for all of these writers was to show, as Lorde puts it: “[that] it’s not the differences between

Her goal was to establish the headstone for a transnational feminist movement that offered room for Women of Colour and women of the Global South. Therefore, she tried to shift the focus from the White feminism of the time to a more complex view that included the lives of non-Western women and their realities. To create solidarity between women from different places, different communities, different worlds there has to be a comprehension of their distinction to be able to recreate a sense of community and