Introduction: Defining Black Marxist Feminism

This chapter, as an introduction, attends to defining and providing the boundaries for hooks’ “black Marxist feminism,” and the extent that it provides an intersectional theory of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, by framing the distinctiveness of hooks’ Marxian analysis of the proletariat experiences of black womanhood. Given how hooks thinks Marxist thought, and what this ultimately means to her view of capitalism, this chapter considers how her account of the proletariat experiences of black womanhood, beginning in Ain’t I a Woman, directly challenges and theoretically complicates articulations of Marxist cultural studies in both the British and American contexts, black women’s studies and womanism, black feminism, notions of Marxist feminism. All of this will lead toward explicating what white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is for hooks, and how it informs hooks’ black Marxist feminism.