Authorizing the Mother: Sisterhoods in America

‘Sisterhood’, of course, has long been an important term for feminism, and from the beginning it was meant to be inclusive, reaching across racial, sexual, cultural, and national boundaries between women, despite feminism’s tendencies toward privileging white, middle class women.1 It has been criticized for being ‘an emotional appeal masking the opportunism of manipulative bourgeois white women. It was seen as a cover-up hiding the fact that many women exploit and oppress other women’ (hooks, 1984: 44). Contemporary postfeminist media culture has co-opted ‘sisterhood’ in ways that both evoke its originally intended meaning and undermine it. On the one hand, Hannah Sanders suggests that representations of sisterhood can ‘deny … the postfeminist ethic of individualized feminism’, and consequently, unlike other postfeminist images, ‘feminism is not discredited as an outmoded totalizing academic or activist discourse’ (92). On the other, however, since the always-heterosexual postfeminist subject is ‘white and middle-class by default’, postfeminist representations of sisterhood marginalize ‘women of colour [who] are either absent or are situated in a position of subordination’ (Tasker and Negra, 2007: 2; Winch, 2013: 3). In postfeminist media culture, sisterhood is a popular concept because of its gestures towards solidarity within femininity.