“Speaking the truth to power”, “speaking the truth to people”: power and resistance in the sociology of Patricia Hill Collins
Patricia Hill Collins; Power; Intersectionality; Matrix of Domination; Domains of Power Framework; Education; Racism
Patricia Hill Collins is a leading American sociologist whose work focuses on an analysis of power. The hypothesis of this work is that Collins conceives the idea of power as a way not only to identify injustices, but to resist them. We seek to understand, from a bibliographic review, three questions: the paths that the author takes to analyze power, her understanding of how power operates and how to resist differences in power. In the first chapter, we present the theoretical-methodological aspects that, in our view, provide the basis for Collins' analysis of power, namely, the collective point of view of black women; the tension between lived experience and traditional sociology; and intersectionality. In the second chapter, we analyze the theme of power more directly, showing how Collins articulates the idea of a matrix of domination to propose the heuristic of the domains of power: structural, disciplinary, cultural and interpersonal. We also understand the idea of dialectic between oppression and resistance proposed by the author. Finally, in the last chapter we present how Collins articulates the idea of resistance from the idea of community, as the space where people experience power relations, and critical pedagogy. To address these issues, we resort to the author's reading of racism as a system of power, specifically the ideology of colorblind racism. We conclude that Collins understands power from intersecting relationships between systems based on race, class, gender, nation and sexuality. These relations, which Collins analyzes both from the point of view of domination, but also from the point of view of resistance, are organized from the matrix of domination and the four domains of power. Understanding the forms of domination that promote injustice and social inequalities is a way to think more broadly about ways of breaking with domination systems.