I found Haraway's discussion of Chela Sandoval's theories of 'oppositional consciousness' and the woman of colour very interesting. Haraway talks about how 'women of color' is a name that "constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity" (155). In this article, Haraway discusses largely about how boundaries between categories are being blurred and transgressed in the postmodern society. Therefore, I understood his view of 'women of color' as one which has very blurry distinctions. This is exactly how he sees Sandoval's description, which is apparent when he points out how "Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of colour." Rather, the definition of this group has been determined by a "conscious appropriation of negation" (156).
This "conscious appropriation of negation" is the concept that confused me. Could someone clear up what he meant by this term?
I read Sandoval/Haraway here as addressing a problem with previous *marginal* discourses which attempt to create their own identity and insert it into an essentially Western ontology. Merely replacing 'man' with 'women' 'blacks', 'labor' silences non-white women, black women, female labor, any individual who fails to completely identify with this new subject - it has the same totalizing, imperializing effect of previous understandings of identity. 'Women of color,' however, is a group defined purely by its lack of identification with these other identities. Consequently, there is no paradigmatic 'woman of color' to serve as an ideal subject, to identify or fail to identify with, merely affinity with other 'women of color.'
Another way of saying it would be that previous 'isms' attempted to take a marginalized identity and make it central, but this only privileged a new identity and created new margins, whereas negative identification attempts to make the marginalization itself the basis for identification.
That was my reading of it, anyway. I don't know whether that clarified or complicated the concept.
-aha