Vivian May
Syracuse University, Women's & Gender Studies/Humanities Center, Director, Humanities Center; Professor, Women's & Gender Studies
Address: 301 Tolley
Humanities Center
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244-1100
Humanities Center
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244-1100
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Endorsements:
Comprehensive and compelling, this book is poised to become the "go to" source on intersectionality. May is particularly effective at probing the ways that intersectionality has been resisted, misunderstood, and/or undermined in the name of intersectionality itself. Pursuing Intersectionality provides a rare, sustained examination of intersectionality that virtually no other scholarly work does.
-Shannon Sullivan, Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Vivian May's book is the first that analyzes intersectionality from a broad historical vantage point, taking readers back to 19th century Black feminist discourse. Complex, nuanced, thorough, and meticulous in her engagement with the debates that now swirl around this influential theoretical analytic tool, May engages its critics and advocates with passion and clarity. A must read for scholars and practitioners committed to social justice movements and anti-oppression ideologies.
- Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Founding Director of the Women's Research & Resource Center, Women's Studies, Spelman College, and author of Gender Talk (with Johnetta B. Cole).
At once fundamental and groundbreaking, instructive and provocative, Pursuing Intersectionality is a vital reader on a vital subject. May provides a clarifying analysis regarding the provenance, contestations, current use and disuse, and future of intersectional theory and practice in the academy and beyond.
-Paula J. Giddings, Afro-American Studies, Smith College
Some 25 years after being coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term intersectionality, if not always the idea, has traveled well beyond its origins. In this very readable book, Vivian May traces what has been lost along the way, including complexity, nuance, and perhaps most importantly, intersectionality’s foundational commitment to anti-subordination and justice. She then points the way forward with a set of concrete recommendations that will be welcomed by feminists working in fields from policy, to politics, to research.
-Elizabeth R. Cole, Professor, Women’s Studies, Psychology, and Afroamerican & African Studies, University of Michigan
"May persuasively argues that Cooper’s philosophical ideas are much more revolutionary—radical even—and subversive of dominant ideology than previously judged. This book will become central to the scholarship on 19th and early 20th century African American women writers." —Trudier Harris, UNC Chapel Hill, author of Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature
"May places Cooper in a rich political, philosophical and literary context in which her prescient work can at long last be fully appreciated. She enables readers to understand just how and why Cooper might have been misunderstood, and links such misunderstanding with some of the very political constraints under which Cooper labored. This promises to be the kind of book about which people will say, ‘Wow! How can we have missed out on all this?’" —Elizabeth V. Spelman, Smith College, author of Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering
"May has accomplished a major feat: she has given one of the greatest philosophical and political thinkers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century her intellectual due." -- African American Review"
Interpretive tools used to document and examine black women’s insurgency can stifle as much as they reveal. Harriet Tubman is deservedly remembered for her sustained resistance to multiple forms of oppression. Yet, she is often portrayed in ways that misrecognize, distort, or flatten. Tubman is often discussed as an exceptional but lone figure or in ways that animate stereotypes of black women’s unparalleled strength. Her life’s work is also often fragmented, meaning that her varied activism and different forms of coalition-building remain under-theorized and under-recognized. Furthermore, via lenses of the maternal or salvific, Tubman’s militancy is often softened, better to be embraced into the folds of the nation’s progress narrative (a triumphal tale that erases the ongoing nature of many forms of systemic oppression she sought to transform). In short, Tubman is often made visible as a historical
figure piecemeal, within narrow frames and in attenuated ways. Unfortunately, forms of “checking” Tubman’s contributions have gone relatively “unchecked” in feminist scholarship: I conclude by discussing Tubman’s relative absence in women’s studies, though her life’s work can readily be understood as pertinent to many of the field’s analytics and themes. Tubman’s contributions merit more than passing reference (if that) in feminist scholarship and curricula.
Endorsements:
Comprehensive and compelling, this book is poised to become the "go to" source on intersectionality. May is particularly effective at probing the ways that intersectionality has been resisted, misunderstood, and/or undermined in the name of intersectionality itself. Pursuing Intersectionality provides a rare, sustained examination of intersectionality that virtually no other scholarly work does.
-Shannon Sullivan, Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Vivian May's book is the first that analyzes intersectionality from a broad historical vantage point, taking readers back to 19th century Black feminist discourse. Complex, nuanced, thorough, and meticulous in her engagement with the debates that now swirl around this influential theoretical analytic tool, May engages its critics and advocates with passion and clarity. A must read for scholars and practitioners committed to social justice movements and anti-oppression ideologies.
- Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Founding Director of the Women's Research & Resource Center, Women's Studies, Spelman College, and author of Gender Talk (with Johnetta B. Cole).
At once fundamental and groundbreaking, instructive and provocative, Pursuing Intersectionality is a vital reader on a vital subject. May provides a clarifying analysis regarding the provenance, contestations, current use and disuse, and future of intersectional theory and practice in the academy and beyond.
-Paula J. Giddings, Afro-American Studies, Smith College
Some 25 years after being coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term intersectionality, if not always the idea, has traveled well beyond its origins. In this very readable book, Vivian May traces what has been lost along the way, including complexity, nuance, and perhaps most importantly, intersectionality’s foundational commitment to anti-subordination and justice. She then points the way forward with a set of concrete recommendations that will be welcomed by feminists working in fields from policy, to politics, to research.
-Elizabeth R. Cole, Professor, Women’s Studies, Psychology, and Afroamerican & African Studies, University of Michigan
"May persuasively argues that Cooper’s philosophical ideas are much more revolutionary—radical even—and subversive of dominant ideology than previously judged. This book will become central to the scholarship on 19th and early 20th century African American women writers." —Trudier Harris, UNC Chapel Hill, author of Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature
"May places Cooper in a rich political, philosophical and literary context in which her prescient work can at long last be fully appreciated. She enables readers to understand just how and why Cooper might have been misunderstood, and links such misunderstanding with some of the very political constraints under which Cooper labored. This promises to be the kind of book about which people will say, ‘Wow! How can we have missed out on all this?’" —Elizabeth V. Spelman, Smith College, author of Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering
"May has accomplished a major feat: she has given one of the greatest philosophical and political thinkers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century her intellectual due." -- African American Review"
Interpretive tools used to document and examine black women’s insurgency can stifle as much as they reveal. Harriet Tubman is deservedly remembered for her sustained resistance to multiple forms of oppression. Yet, she is often portrayed in ways that misrecognize, distort, or flatten. Tubman is often discussed as an exceptional but lone figure or in ways that animate stereotypes of black women’s unparalleled strength. Her life’s work is also often fragmented, meaning that her varied activism and different forms of coalition-building remain under-theorized and under-recognized. Furthermore, via lenses of the maternal or salvific, Tubman’s militancy is often softened, better to be embraced into the folds of the nation’s progress narrative (a triumphal tale that erases the ongoing nature of many forms of systemic oppression she sought to transform). In short, Tubman is often made visible as a historical
figure piecemeal, within narrow frames and in attenuated ways. Unfortunately, forms of “checking” Tubman’s contributions have gone relatively “unchecked” in feminist scholarship: I conclude by discussing Tubman’s relative absence in women’s studies, though her life’s work can readily be understood as pertinent to many of the field’s analytics and themes. Tubman’s contributions merit more than passing reference (if that) in feminist scholarship and curricula.