If Black feminism as it emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States was internationalist in the trajectories that many women followed, Black feminism as it developed in the UK was diverse in its very composition, owing to the history of the British Empire. Women from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, in all their diasporic richness, found common ground as they struggled against a neo-imperialist and racist state formation in Britain. In the 1960s and ’70s, Black feminists in the UK were at the forefront of resistance to racist violence, both at the hands of the Far Right (who were encouraged by politicians such as Enoch Powell), the private and public sectors (in relation to unemployment and racist working conditions) and state racism (in relation to education, health services and social welfare policy). Some of the most poignant industrial action that took place during those decades saw women workers striking, after struggling for union recognition, over unfair and discriminatory working conditions at the Grunwick photo-processing factory, the Chix bubblegum factory in Slough, the Imperial Typewriters in Leicester and elsewhere.
The militancy of trade unionism, particularly among large groups of immigrant workers of colour, was deeply affected by Margaret Thatcher’s brutal assault on the miners and on industrial relations more generally. The compound effect of highly restrictive labour laws governing industrial action, coupled with a long history of trade unions’ failure to adequately represent the interests of racialised workers, can be seen in the Gate Gourmet strike of 2005. In that case, a workforce comprised of largely South Asian women workers arrived at their airport catering jobs one day to find employment agency workers in the workplace, in the midst of a long process of restructuring the company. Over the course of two days, over 670 workers would be fired, giving rise to weeks of strike action.18
Two male shop stewards of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), Pat Breslin and Mark Fisher, were sacked for organising a wildcat solidarity strike that saw British Airways baggage handlers stop work for two days, costing the airline between 30 and 40 million pounds. The Gate Gourmet workers, originally employed by British Airways until they contracted out their catering services to Gate Gourmet in the 1990s, were part of a South Asian (and largely Punjabi) community in Southall who have long ties as employees with British Airways and Heathrow Airport, and these baggage handlers, who were also TGWU members, were very upset by the treatment of their colleagues. Under labour legislation such solidarity actions are illegal, and the two TGWU stewards were fired for organising them. They were, however, eventually awarded very large compensatory settlement payments by TGWU and the airline, under conditions of confidentiality. The former shop stewards were ‘allegedly following union orders’19 (presumably, as they had been following union orders to take illegal action), and if they had successfully proven that, the ripple effects of liability for the union would have been potentially disastrous.20
The outcomes of the strike action by the Gate Gourmet workers left many of the women workers feeling betrayed by their union.21 The TGWU negotiated a settlement that enabled the company to achieve many of its desired objectives – such as the reinstatement of some of the striking workers, but on worse terms (less sick leave, less pay for overtime and other changes). Some workers took voluntary redundancy. But fifty-six of the women refused to accept voluntary redundancy or compensation and continued their struggle for several years. By 2009, all but a handful of workers had had their unfair dismissal claims rejected by the Reading Employment Tribunal.22 The strike is both a testament to the ongoing militancy of women of colour workers and a reflection of the particularly punitive consequences they face due to outsourcing, privatisation, and restrictive labour legislation.
In other employment sectors and institutions populated by relatively more privileged workers, such as the civil service, universities, or museums and galleries, sociologist Nirmal Puwar argues ‘we are witnessing an unflagging multicultural hunger within the drive for diversity’. ‘Alongside this shift’, she notes, ‘long-standing traditions seem to be alive and well, as the spiritual, authentic, exotic, religious, ceremonial, innocent and barbaric continue to be the dominant ways in which diverse bodies are received.’23 She shows, with great nuance, the complex and ambivalent status of the racialised body in spaces that have hitherto been closed to the presence of these ‘space invaders’. Our experiences in the workplace continue to be shaped by hyper-surveillance, rigid and reified categories of legitimate speech, and the steadfast grip of ‘somatic norms’ which render racialised bodies out of place vis-à-vis a universal subject who remains white and male.
As with today’s austerity policies and the cuts to councils and local governments that followed the 2008 financial crash, a disproportionate number of women and people of colour were affected by Thatcherite labour policies as they held jobs in sectors affected by budgetary cuts.24 And thus it is crucial to recognise, as Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel argue, the 2008 crisis intensified, rather than produced anew, the effects of a racialised social and economic order that has always operated to the disadvantage of women of colour workers.25 And while it is also imperative to recognise the vast differences in the conditions of work for working-class women of colour and middle-class professionals, the pressures of austerity and cuts to funding, along with the increasing precarity of work across practically all public sectors of employment, have certainly impacted even relatively privileged women of colour workers.
The concrete issues around which Black and anti-racist feminists organised from the 1960s onwards included housing, health, social welfare and immigration. The work done by organisations such as OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, founded in 1978) and Southall Black Sisters (founded in 1979), among many others26 would lay the groundwork for feminist resistance to austerity and discriminatory immigration policies that continue today (see, for instance, the work of Focus E15, or Sisters Uncut UK).
Of course, there were omissions, exclusions and difficulties in Black feminist movements in the UK. Sexuality was largely absent in the political positions and concerns they articulated. In a collective conversation titled ‘Becoming Visible: Black Lesbian Discussions’ published in the 1984 OWAAD issue of Feminist Review, four lesbian women (one of whom, Gail Lewis, features in this volume) discuss the intense difficulties and challenges they contended with in the process of coming out, both within Black feminist organisations such as OWAAD and in relation to family and community. Deeply entrenched homophobia and heterosexism, compounded by racist notions that white, liberal social and familial spaces were somehow more enlightened in relation to sexuality than Asian and Black communities, made coming out a very fraught process for Black lesbians.27
It was therefore a groundbreaking development when Black lesbian and queer feminists in the 1970s and ’80s managed to put sexuality on the agenda at major women’s conferences, including the OWAAD conference in 1983. In spite of such victories, as Roderick Ferguson reminds us in One Dimensional Queer, dominant queer histories have not ceased to fall prey to the erasure of their multiracial and coalitional character. Our interview in this volume with Gary Kinsman traces some of the ambiguities and contradictions of activism from the 1970s onwards that sought to bring together anti-racist, queer and anti-capitalist critique with resistance to militarism and many other forms of state violence. This early political work, and all of the labour it entailed, set the scene for the development and reception of a queer of colour critique. A queer of colour critique, as defined by Ferguson, seeks to place the figure who has been routinely marginalised in radical Western epistemologies – the queer of colour, the sex worker, the vagrant – as the central subject in our theoretical frameworks and political concerns. Methodologically, it means engaging ‘nonheteronormative racial formations as sites of ruptures, critiques, and alternatives’.28
This is especially pertinent for thinking through the task of cultivating critical, creative and oppositional positions in relation to contemporary nationalisms and global capital. Moreover, Ferguson argues that in reformulating culture and agency, and opposing nationalism and the state form, women of colour feminisms ‘helped to designate the imagination as a social practice under contemporary globalisation. In a moment in which national liberation
