OPPOSITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Oppositional Consciousness, a term coined by Chela Sandoval, is a response to the issues of race, gender, or class consciousness which were forced upon us by contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.1
Oppositional consciousness is organized around 5 principal categories, with the goal of effectively changing the dominant order of power; equal rights, revolutionary, supremacist, separatist, and differential ideology forms. All these different categories are brought into focus when the fifth category, differential consciousness, is used as a tool to retroactively clarify and ascribe a new meaning to the others. Differential consciousness represents the strategy of another oppositional ideology. It uses asymmetries and alienations as grounds for unification. "It permits functioning within yet beyond the demands of dominant ideology2."The political group Women of Color is founded on the vagueness of the term, exposing the difficulties in determining what stipulates a "woman of color". Oppositional Consciousness is Cyborg politics embodied.