“…hooks argued that “white women were not sincerely committed to bonding with black women and other groups of women to fight sexism,” for they remained unwilling to admit that “the women’s movement was consciously and deliberately structured to exclude black and other non-white women” (AI, pp. 142, 147). Harmful and hurtful as white exclusions have been, hooks universalized them as intentionally so.”

From what I’ve heard, bell hooks had a pretty good point. Second wave feminism seems to be right up there with Gay Lib and Punk in claiming radical credentials without actually dealing with its inherent middle class, white universals. There’s a copy of the article online at:

http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v24/gubar1.html

It’s been a while since I read it but it was an interesting, if not particularly successful, foray into the attempt to deal with identity based movements without resorting to essentialism. The other thing that’s interesting to look at is the homocore movement in the late eighties through to mid-nineties, in that it was a fairly direct attempt to build activist communities without relying on an essentialist core identity.