Feminist Epistemology Analysis

After reading the three essays and a poem in the “Bodies and Affects” section of the Feminist Theory Reader, I felt I just left an intense therapy section. I am thinking which essay to highlight, each author describes the affect of the body whether biological or psychological through a feminist lens. For example, Alison Jaggar’s “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology” questions, ‘What Are Emotions?’ and gives historical references of emotion associated with men as mental and emotion with women as irrational (511). I like the term Jaggar calls, ‘outlaw emotions,’ where she explains how subordinated individuals pay a higher price to maintain the status quo in social situations (520). Most of the time I find myself the only Black

Who was happy, it sure was not the slaves. It is interesting to observe the dynamics of race and happiness if the oppressed person does not smile or to show a sign of being happy they are seen as negative. So am I now the angry Black woman, the killjoy of the party because I am not making your life happy? I thought it was an interesting point Ahmed makes, “The black woman must let go of her anger for the white women to move on” (545). She quotes a film critic on the movie Bend it like Beckham, which made White Brits happy because they were tired of seeing images that made them feel guilty. As a Black woman, I feel everything I do is to make White people feel non-guilty. We have to change our appearance, how we dress, the style of our hair, our speech and mannerism all to make a White person feel happy that they freed us from slavery and civilize us from our animalistic ways. I would like to go to a movie and not see Black people portrayed as a prostitute, a murder, and thief or die first. I would be happy when I do not have to be reminded I am Black. I close with the first line in Bettina Judd’s (2017), poem, “I must have been found guilty of something” (p.