Over the past twenty years, the work of black feminist scholars has had a major im-
pact on the understanding of the category of difference in feminist scholarship. The
imperative to strive for a nonracist, nonoppressive feminist theory, research, and ac-
tivism has been heard both within and beyond the disciplines. Patricia Hill Collins' ar-
ticle "Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Fem-
inist Thought" describes a black woman's standpoint as the "outsider within" a
dominant white culture, a positionality shared with other nondominant groups and al-
lowing for the recovery of subjugated knowledges. Collins isolates three key themes,
however, that characterize the uniqueness of a black feminist epistemology: an em-
phasis on "self-definition and self-evaluation"; a recognition of "the interlocking na-
ture of oppression"; and the importance of "Afro-American women's culture." In ad-
dition to new and powerful analyses of self, family, and society, the standpoint of black
feminist or "womanist" thought provides insights and models that challenge the hege-
mony of traditional disciplines and the tendency of white middle-class feminists to
overgeneralize in their knowledge building without reference to the diversity of
women's experience. Although contextualized here within the specific field of socio-
logical research, Collins' theorizing of the "outsider within" standpoint has been widely
used by feminist critics challenging the biases operating in other academic disciplines,
and has provided a bridge between disciplines for those working in an interdiscipli-
nary context.

In the work of feminist scholars focusing on issues of race, class, and ethnicity,
gender difference has been shown to be inseparable from other categories of differ-
ence. These complex intersections of differences have been obscured by the promo-
tion of a white, Eurocentric, middle-class, heterosexual identity as normative, and by
the dependence of that norm on the construction of a simplified Other as their ex-
cluded opposite. In "Eating the Other," bell hooks examines the commodification of
the Other in "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy," particularly as seen in repre-
sentations of "blackness" in advertising, film, and popular music. An early version of
the erotic nature of this commodification is found in the imperialist desire to "possess"
the Other, and in early modernism's preoccupation with "primitivism" as a creative
force to be assimilated. Hooks sees the reduction of the potentially revolutionary con-
sciousness of the Other to mere stereotype and spectacle for the white gaze as an ef-
fect of what she calls " imperial nostalgia." Following the narratives of several popu-
lar films, hooks uncovers the fantasies behind stories of aging white males incorporating
the vitality of the black man, and of white women living on the margins of society ap-

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