Patricia Hill Collins

Agora

Patricia Hill Collins

b. 1948

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Black women see society from a special position as outsiders within, and race, class and gender oppress people together as one system.

Placement

Sociology & Social Theory · North America · Society & History, Epistemology, Gender & Feminism

Sociologist: Black feminist thought is a standpoint of “outsiders within”, with its own criteria of knowledge – lived experience, dialogue, care; oppressions intersect in a “matrix of domination”.

Key ideas

Matrix of domination
Outsider within
Black feminist epistemology

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Influence

Influenced by 11

Anna Julia Cooper

influenced by
Collins counted Cooper among the founders of Black feminist thought, citing A Voice from the South (1892) on interlocking oppressions of race and gender (Black Feminist Thought, 1990). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990); A. J. Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892); SEP “Anna Julia Cooper”
Evidence: AI draft
Anna Julia Cooper › 1858–1964
Georg Simmel

influenced by
Collins modelled Black women’s ‘outsider within’ status partly on Simmel’s stranger, near and far at once, whose marginality brings objectivity (‘Learning from the Outsider Within’, 1986). P. H. Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within”, Social Problems 33 (1986); G. Simmel, “Exkurs über den Fremden”, in Soziologie (1908)
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Simmel › 1858–1918
Ida B. Wells

influenced by ✓
Collins presented Wells as a Black woman intellectual and activist whose campaign against lynching linked race, gender and sexual violence (Black Feminist Thought, 1990; Black Sexual Politics, 2004). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990); Black Sexual Politics (2004); I. B. Wells, Southern Horrors (1892)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Ida B. Wells › 1862–1931
Zora Neale Hurston

influenced by
Collins used Nanny’s image of Black women as ‘de mule uh de world’ from Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as a leitmotif (Black Feminist Thought, 1990). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990); Z. N. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Evidence: AI draft
Zora Neale Hurston › 1891–1960
Karl Mannheim

influenced by
In ‘Learning from the Outsider Within’ (1986) Collins drew on Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, with Simmel, to argue that marginal positions can yield distinctive insight into sociology. P. H. Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought”, Social Problems 33 (1986); K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1936)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Mannheim › 1893–1947
Angela Davis

influenced by ✓
Collins drew on Davis’s Women, Race & Class (1981) for the forced labour and sexual exploitation of enslaved Black women (Black Feminist Thought, 1990). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990); A. Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (1981); “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves”, The Black Scholar 3 (1971)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Angela Davis › b. 1944

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Dorothy E. Smith

influenced by
Collins related her Black feminist standpoint to Smith’s sociology from the standpoint of women, which begins from everyday experience rather than abstract categories (Black Feminist Thought, 1990). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990); D. E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987)
Evidence: AI draft
Dorothy E. Smith › 1926–2022
Audre Lorde

influenced by
Collins drew on Lorde’s essays in Sister Outsider (1984), on difference, on breaking silence and on the erotic as power, for Black women’s self-definition (Black Feminist Thought, 1990). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990); A. Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984)
Evidence: AI draft
Audre Lorde › 1934–1992
Sandra Harding

influenced by
In Black Feminist Thought (1990) Collins related her epistemology to the standpoint theories surveyed by Harding (The Science Question in Feminism, 1986), grounding it in Black women’s experience. P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990); S. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (1986); SEP “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science”
Evidence: AI draft
Sandra Harding › 1935–2025
bell hooks

influenced by
In Black Feminist Thought (1990) Collins drew on hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman (1981) and on the margin as a vantage for seeing the whole (1984). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990); b. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981); Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)
Evidence: AI draft
bell hooks › 1952–2021
Kimberlé Crenshaw

influenced by
Collins took up Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality (1989, 1991) and related it to her ‘matrix of domination’ (Black Feminist Thought, 2nd ed., 2000; Intersectionality, with Sirma Bilge, 2016). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 2nd ed. (2000); P. H. Collins and S. Bilge, Intersectionality (2016); K. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989); “Mapping the Margins” (1991)
Evidence: AI draft
Kimberlé Crenshaw › b. 1959

Influenced 1

Kristie Dotson

influenced
Dotson illustrated ‘testimonial quieting’ with Collins’s analysis of controlling images that deny Black women the standing of knowers (‘Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing’, 2011). K. Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing”, Hypatia 26 (2011); P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990)
Evidence: AI draft
Kristie Dotson › contemporary

Works

1990Black Feminist Thought
The knowledge of Black women as a standpoint: the matrix of domination and an epistemology of lived experience and dialogue.

Position

Collins argues that Black women in the United States have produced a body of thought – in blues lyrics, oral tradition, fiction and scholarship – which deserves to be taken as knowledge. Their position as “outsiders within”, working inside white institutions without belonging to them, gives them a distinctive standpoint. Black feminist epistemology, in her account, has its own criteria: lived experience as a criterion of meaning, dialogue in assessing claims, an ethic of caring and of personal accountability. Oppressions – race, class, gender, sexuality, nation – are not additive but form a “matrix of domination” in which a person may be oppressed in one dimension and privileged in another.

Life & context

Patricia Hill Collins (born 1948 in Philadelphia) studied sociology at Brandeis and Harvard, taught at the University of Cincinnati from 1982 and has been Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland since 2005. In 2009 she became the first African-American woman to serve as president of the American Sociological Association. “Black Feminist Thought” received the association’s Jessie Bernard and C. Wright Mills awards.