Another Letter Long Delayed

Abstract

This paper is an effort toward conceptual transparency around toxic inclusivity in academic feminism and the kinds of care it lacks toward, what amounts to, bad knowledge production practices. In this paper, we claim that some of the forms of reductive inclusion that ought to be avoided are epistemologically unsound practices that propagate disempowering, false, and/or distortive messages about targets of inclusion. We take reductive inclusion to be inclusion that treats the targets of inclusion as plot devices and/or as means to a narrative end. These practices should be avoided in order to work toward a range of coalitional possibilities between differently situated populations with social justice aims. Moreover, we are concerned with making clear that toxic inclusion is a type of bad scholarship. The reductive inclusions to avoid articulated in this paper are (1) interpolation and (2) ossification. Interpolation involves executing “inclusion” with formal, instead of substantive, overtures. Ossification, however, establishes parasitic relations of inclusion that present a skeleton of one’s targets for inclusion that reduces whole groups to serve the purpose of the narrator. Through a discussion of Audre Lorde’s “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” (1979), we explain Lorde’s brilliant and succinct critique of Daly as exemplifying interpolation and ossification. Ultimately, this paper adds to diverse Black feminist literatures on effective coalitions and gestures toward potential rules for engagement across difference in our story telling.