Perhaps best known for award-winning Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Hill Collins outlined American Black feminism expressed in music, fiction, poetry, and oral history. Collins saw three themes: oppressions are interconnected; black women create alternative worldviews for self-definition and self-determination; and black women have often internalized imposed restricting definitions of who they are--especially racialized concepts of beauty, skin color, and physique. Collins points to areas that have been overlooked: racialized gender roles within family and work, politics, violence--in the home, on the job, and in the street--and homophobia.

Collins draws on black women's experiences and voices to explain concepts that have been obscured institutionally, philosophically, and ideologically. Collins's interdisciplinary methodology employs a "both/and" analytical approach to domination and subordination. Collins rejects oppositional thought because "either/or thinking categorizes people, things, and ideas in terms of their differences from one another" which...