Theory and Black Women as a Seriality
The first area of focus is postmodern theorizing on women in the global economy and their identities of discrepancy that resists categorization in a greater global experience.
There is a disjuncture between “Biological Foundationalism,” such theories are dualistic regarding differences, both allowing for differences, and also presuming commonalities.” Therefore, experience of globalization and capitalistic expansion cannot be summarized or deduced to the same experience for all women.  Elizabeth Spellman states that there is an additive type of analysis of sexism and racism, which points out that, while all women are oppressed by sexism, some women are further oppressed by racism. But such an analysis distorts Black woman’s experiences of oppression by failing to note important differences between the contexts in which Black women and white women experience sexism” (Nicholson and S. Seidman, 1995, p. 256).  “This additive analysis also suggests that a woman’s racial identity can be ‘subtracted’ from her combined sexual and racial identity.”  This comes short of an understanding of globalization because we must understand social variation and must fully comprehend the complexity of race and gender that clearly distinguishes differences, not subsuming them to equate the “cultural stereotype of personality and behavior”– not limiting them to a shared global experience.  We must also understand in the various cultures what it is to be a man or a woman as they themselves would interpret it.  Therefore, the “Biological Foundationalism” limits us in fully understanding the changes in globalization as they affect the variety of cultures because one’s own experience is limited and is created out of one’s own interpretation and cultural meaning that are placed on that entity, not on shared characteristics. 

According to (Nicholson and S. Seidman, 1995), this is historically based as a Western ideology as Westerners tend to believe that sex identity shares commonality cross culturally.  One could argue that there are some shared experiences as, say, for women their nurturing aspect, but that would still assume biological similarities that do not necessarily exist.  Iris Young stated that “the purpose of saying that ‘women’  names a series, and, thus, resolves the dilemma that has developed in feminist theory: that we must be able to describe women as a social collective, yet, apparently cannot do so without falling into a false essentialism.  It is argued by Young that we should be utilizing gender as “seriality” instead of a group because it avoids the pitfall of naming the groups with biological inheritedness as women, and instead allows women to be part of a series of women who display great variation as well as some shared concerns.  The women in Sierra Leone share AIDS, sex trafficking, illiteracy, and disproportionate numbers represented in the labor market and government among many other gendered issues, but they are on a much greater scale of suffering than do women at large, with a higher level of poverty,  more severe problems of a developing country, and often more difficult traditional cultural factors .  This implies understanding of women as a collective that is globally segregated, but which is, at the same time, the primary caretakers, and the educators of their children and families. But in Sierra Leone and comparable countries, there is also a seriality that usually places women outside the authoritative structures within this globalizing continent.  The serial collective of “women” names a set of structural constraints and relations to practical-inert objects that condition action and meaning. Barthes’ Elements of Semiology’ offers such “ideas of semiotics” even though he is more of a structuralist than a postmodern theorist, to assist in finding meaning in language in a global context, but that doesn’t mean that it is possible to understand the same meaning between the signifier and the signified throughout the globe, because such a meaning is culturally interpretive. This type of feminist theorizing may allow women to politicize their various struggles against, for example, normative heterosexuality and the sexual division of labor, and, thus, the ability to better understand the power struggle between men and woman globally.   In Sierra Leone, it helps to understand that women as a seriality may face many of the same global challenges but they cannot be expressed or understood only in the context of being a woman or a black women.  The various social, cultural and economic factors of a women’s location creates great differentiation that cannot be simply understood or defined.  It is complex and varied as well as interconnected and shared.