Black feminism

In this autoethnographic mapping of the educational experiences leading to my current role as a researcher and teacher educator in the United States, I argue that I enacted de/colonizing processes through my academic migrations. Using personal narratives rooted in de/colonial, Black feminist, and Mami-influenced onto-epistemological orientations, I outline key movements made during my undergraduate studies at (a) an Ivy League college and a teacher education program in South Florida, and my graduate studies at (b) a second Ivy League institution and a Hispanic Serving
Institution. I provide examples from a published book, web articles, and personal e-mail communications that reveal how peers, faculty, and administrators reacted to my departures and arrivals. I contend with the paradox of the US academy granting me access to theorists who name critical pedagogy and intersectionality, while simultaneously exacerbating constraints I mitigated as a Black woman with familial ties to the Global South. Centering the de/colonial sense-making women embodying multiple marginality offer, I identify the epistemic frictions that motivated my critical academic migrations. I conclude by offering points of considerations for institutions of higher education that are purportedly committed to equity, inclusion, and supporting diverse onto-epistemic orientations.

A Diasporada is a woman who transgresses national and political boundaries and is empowered by inserting Black and female voices into an transnational public sphere. This essay explores the work of Black women activists including Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, and ELizabeth Catlett. These women were visual artists who defied conventional forms of activism, and changed Black representation in the fine arts and in the social politics of racial uplift. I suggest that we recuperate Black women's activisms by inquiring into the ways in which Afro-U.S. women's thoughts in marble and oil set the stage, led, and inspired other forms of Black leadership. How, for example, did their work, both out front and "behind the scenes" add fuel to Black activism? In order to pursue these concerns, I illuminate the connections between Black women artists, their struggles to gain resources and support, their travels, and their social activism; and in th processs I hope to recuperate some of the expressive symbolism of Black women's art and its impact on transnational Black struggles.

The author takes her escrevivência as a Brazilian black trans woman and experiments with the poetics of Atlantic water to let the text itself be a transitioning space of poetics-autoethnography-cosmology-water-energy-memory tissue. Water is the riverine thread that runs through the sections of this text, be it as rain, as tears, as sea, as metaphor, as body, as energy. The author suggests that, for black trans people in the African diaspora, trans travel narratives evoke the metaphor of transitioning in the similar ways that M. Jacqui Alexander works with the metaphor of the crossing, which not only recalls the embodied memory of the disembodied in the " tidal current of the Middle Passage " but also " evokes/invokes crossroads, the space of convergence and endless possibility. "

Keywords Brazilian black trans women, black feminism, transfeminism, African diaspora, black queer studies

Future. Il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi, an anthology published in Italy in 2019, comprises writing by 11 self-identified black Italian women. As the book’s title suggests, their work, mostly personal accounts of being black women in Italy, is forward-looking while grounded in contemporary realities: a tomorrow narrated by the voices of today. The essays also are steeped in Italian history and particularly a past that only recently has begun to be acknowledged: that of Italian empire and its African colonies. The book—the first literary anthology by black Italian women— is a political intervention, an act of resistance to the racism and anti-immigrant attitudes that have become alarmingly widespread in Italian society and politics.

This senior honors thesis evaluates the theories for racial progress put forth in A Voice from the South (1892) and The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Using secondary sources by David Levering Lewis, Joy James, and more, I critique Du Bois’s gendered oversights and argue that Cooper at times offers superior paradigms for understanding oppression. This project positions Cooper as an early black feminist thinker.

What does the development of a truly robust contemporary theory of domination require? Ashley J. Bohrer argues that it is only by considering all of the dimensions of race, gender, sexuality, and ability within the structures of capitalism and imperialism that we can understand power relations as we find them nowadays. Bohrer explains how many of the purported incompatibilities between Marxism and intersectionality arise more from miscommunication rather than a fundamental conceptual antagonism. As the first monograph entirely devoted to this issue, "Marxism and Intersectionality" serves as a tool to activists and academics working against multiple systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada.

While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates.

Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities.

A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.

This dissertation analyzes the postfeminist tendencies and biopolitics in contemporary media practices by considering the pop culture exemplar, the Kardashian-Jenner family.

This dissertation received First Class Honors from Trinity College Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

Las historias de estas mujeres nos interpelan a partir de su derecho y su capacidad de autorepresentarse, no como adalides de las luchas de las mujeres negras colombianas en general, sino como subjetividades y trayectorias encarnadas de tensiones, ambigüedades, contradicciones y zonas grises presentes en las reconstrucciones de sus biografías. Con este libro comprendemos que autorepresentarnos como mujeres negras es oponernos a la imposición de un relato nacional que ignora o estereotipa nuestras actuaciones y producciones culturales. Autorepresentarnos es crear y recrear −desde nuestras propias identificaciones y con nuestros propios recursos estéticos e intelectuales− la historia y la cultura negras colombianas en toda su polifonía; es hacer uso de nuestra agencia subjetiva para adquirir existencia política y cultural como mujeres negras, en toda nuestra diversidad, dentro de la sociedad colombiana.

With the “controlling images” of the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the Sapphire constantly reiterated in movies, television shows, and popular culture, serving the interests of what bell hooks has identified as white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, a consumer has to wonder if there is any way for Black women performers to thrive and empower other Black women while working within these constricting institutions. Although pop culture is the predominant cultural space where these controlling images and stereotypes have been reproduced there are many Black female entertainers who attempt to challenge and undermine such representations.
Scholars such as hooks and Patricia Hill Collins introduce us to the diverse forms of black feminists and black feminism by showing how black women from all walks of life produce and engage black feminist practice. In common cultural discourse, however artists such as Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae, Meshell Ndeogeocello are upheld as leading black feminist entertainers of our contemporary period while artists Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé are denounced as disempowering to black women and merely reproducing dominant racist, sexist, and hetero-normative stereotypes of black women.
Much Black Feminist scholarship has focused on Black women’s resistance to the patriarchal, racist structures that continue to police and attempt to restrain Black women’s bodies and freedom within material social and political realms, but less scholarship focuses on the ways in which Black female entertainers produce Black feminist knowledge and empowerment within the realms of pop culture.
The purpose of this study is not to show how Badu and Monae are the best examples of “true” Black feminism in the entertainment industry and how artists like Minaj and Knowles are tools of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy. The purpose is to take the expansions of Black feminism that Collins, Davis, hooks, and several other Black feminist intellectuals, have articulated in order to reflect the broad ways in which Black feminism plays out in the popular music industry and to argue against the grain of critiques of popular culture to demonstrate how, despite its limitations, this realm of cultural representation and performance can be emancipatory for black women.

Genesis 16 gives us a different meeting between women, waters and the sacred. Taking  as a fist step the own meaning of text, we will find Hagar in several moments of her life: arriving on Abraham’s house, her pregnancy, the escape to the desert, the experience with Yahweh’s me sager on the route to Sur, this was determinant to difficult moments that she pass on the following years. Hagar is the first woman on the Bible, after Eve that heard Yahweh’s voice bringing her promise of life and posterity.

REFERENCIA:
MARIANNO, Lília Dias. Que alegria! – A palavra de Yahweh também veio à mulher! - Uma análise eco-feminista de Gênesis 16. In: Revista de Interpretação Bíblica Latino-Americana - RIBLA  (Leituras bíblicas latino-americanas e caribenhas). Petrópolis, n. 50, p. 70-75, 2005.

Through a study of Lauren Ekué’s Icône Urbaine (2006), touted as France’s first Hip-hop feminist novel, I argue that Hip-hop aesthetics can be used to find a language, re-negotiate the deviance and pathologies associated with black femininity as either diva-hood or deviance. Using the Hip-hop feminist theory and the critical cultural analysis of black visuality in Nicole Fleetwood’s On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public (2015), I frame Ekué’s portrayal of Flora D’Almeida, the novel’s heroine, as a negotiation of public images of black femininity in popular culture. I firstly read Flora’s pathological narcissism through Nicole Fleetwood’s association of racial iconicity – diva-hood – with hyperbolic consumption. I then use Hip-hop feminist theory to unpack the consumption practices of Hip-hop culture through the notion of “bling” and the “deviant” image of the video-girl. My final section then examines how denigration and veneration inform Flora’s negotiation of her sexual desire. Throughout the analysis I pay close attention to the novel’s hyperbolic narrative style, sampling of musical and literary references, as well as the re-mixing of linguistic codes to simultaneously represent the particularities of black France in relation to a globally mediated (African American influenced) public image of blackness

Black women activists between the First and Second World Wars fought on the "front lines" for racial equality in Louisiana, attests Lee Sartain, the author of Invisible Activists. Sartain's elegantly laid-out topic has enormous potential. We know very little about black women activists in the South in this time period (most historical scholarship focuses on women during Reconstruction or the Civil Rights era), and as the work of historians Elsa Barkley Brown, Annette Gordon-Reed and Deborah Gray White shows, when we learn more about African American women's historical activities, we often reframe the dominant narratives of major periods of American history. Thus Sartain's focus on women in the Louisiana National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a welcome addition to the fields of African American historiography, women's history, and the history of social movements. Published in Women and Social Movements online journal, Sept. 2008.

This paper considers perspectives on marriage in the Queer and feminist community reviewing key contemporary thinkers on the subject and using direct interviews and material from radical Queer activists and academics in the field.  It examines problems inherent in the fight for gay marriage and examines the ways gay marriage intersects with issues of race and class. I conducted dozens of interviews over the course of the research involved in this project.  Many of them  were broadcast in a documentary entitled, “Beyond Gay Marriage, broadcast on KPFA in 2010 and podcast by Race, Poverty & the Environment http://reimaginerpe.org/rpe/radio/dettmer. Quotations from these interviews are interwoven in the text without specific footnote. Unattributed direct quotations are excerpted from the transcript of Lisa Dettmer, Beyond Gay Marriage audio documentary, KPFA/ RP&E (2010).

#AnneMoody

This is an overview of the Anne Moody History Project (AMHP) and its plans to promote and help preserve the legacy of Anne Moody (1940 - 2015). Ms. Moody was a civil rights pioneer and the famous author of Coming of Age in Mississippi. She grew up in Centreville, Miss., where she overcame poverty, racism, persecution, and the threats of death. She became a respected leader in the Civil Rights Movement.

Drawing on the author's background in marketing and journalism, this document presents a list of practical ideas adapted by AMHP for promoting Ms. Moody's history. The ideas include promotional work through schools, churches, the local community, government agencies, social media, and the news media. In addition to honoring her with a street and highway bearing her name, AMHP plans call for having a proclamation issued for “Anne Moody Day.” The author, who serves as AMHP chairman, has said the promotional campaign is about “history, education and tourism.” Current and future generations need to know her story, according to the author.

Note: Readers are encouraged to follow updates on Ms. Moody’s history by following @AnneMoodyHP on Twitter. #AnneMoody

“Is hashtag activism real activism?” I am often asked this question. It is an odd question that I have found leads to unwieldy debates. This essay, however, does not engage the question of whether or not hashtag or Twitter activism is “real activism.” Instead, this article presents a meditation on what hashtags can tell us about ourselves, our communities, and about the political movements of which we are a part. As digital artifacts, hashtags locate cultures across time and space. No matter the context—that is, grassroots, institutional, or corporate—hashtags compel us to act. They are political actors, and most importantly, hashtags represent evidence of women and people of color resisting authority, opting out of conforming to the status quo, and seeking liberation, all by way of documentation in digital spaces. To wit, hashtags represent a new semiotics of emancipation (Chela Sandoval 2000).

Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning is a resource for teachers and learners seeking to participate in the creation of radical and liberating spaces in the academy and beyond. This edited volume is inspired by, and applies, decolonial and feminist thought – two fields with powerful traditions of critical pedagogy, which have shared productive exchange.

The structure of this collection reflects the synergies between decolonial and feminist thought in its four parts, which offer reflections on the politics of knowledge; the challenging pathways of finding your voice; the constraints and possibilities of institutional contexts; and the relation between decolonial and feminist thought and established academic disciplines. To root this book in the political struggles that inspire it, and to maintain the close connection between political action and reflection in praxis, chapters are interspersed with manifestos formulated by activists from across the world, as further resources for learning and teaching.

These essays definitively argue that the decolonization of universities, through the re-examination of how knowledge is produced and taught, is only strengthened when connected to feminist and critical queer and gender perspectives. Concurrently, they make the compelling case that gender and feminist teaching can be enhanced and developed when open to its own decolonization.

Sycorax shapes a powerful figure and narrative thread through colonial and postcolonial thinking. This essay, written in the 1990s, lays out some of the influential ways in which the figure of Sycorax influenced postcolonial feminist methodologies.

(fr.) Fondé sur ce que l’autrice nomme l’« approche féministe de la décolonisation des savoirs », cet article aborde la place du féminisme noir dans la philosophie politique. L’autrice montre que la pensée féministe noire est une philosophie de la justice sociale. À partir de la notion de « modestie épistémique » proposée par Eva Feder Kittay, l’autrice examine comment l’ignorance du système de valeurs et des expériences des femmes noires dans les théories libérales constitue une injustice herméneutique pour les intellectuelles qui édifient le Black feminism comme théorie de la justice raciale et de genre.

(eng.) Based on a « feminist approach to the decolonization of knowledge », as designated by the author, this article focuses on the place of Black Feminism in political philosophy and shows why Black Feminism thought is a philosophy of social justice. Through Eva Feder Kittay’s notion of epistemic modesty, the author examines how ignorance of the value system and experiences of Black Women constitutes a hermeneutic and epistemic injustice toward this theory of racial and gender justice.

Incongruities explores the suicide of black journalist, Leanita McClain, who was head of the Chicago Tribune's Editorial page; she was the first Black and second woman ever to sit on the Tribune's Editorial Board in 185 years of it's history.  The chapter was a published Master's paper that offers a critique of feminist theory and its failure to account for the lives of Black women.  It is the beginning of my movement towards a theory of Black feminism

Through a content analysis of the maternal relationships in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, the author evaluates how southern black women writers construct black motherhood. This study is based on the premise that Eurocentric paradigms of motherhood confine black mothers to controlling images that continue to criminalize, distort, and devalue black motherhood. The researcher finds that the institution of black motherhood exists independently of Eurocentric paradigms. The conclusions drawn from these findings suggest that black women writers construct motherhood in terms of Womanist leadership. In the aforementioned memoirs, Womanist leadership is learned and defined in the black church. In summation, this thesis finds that southern black women writers use spiritual reconciliation as a form of Womanist leadership.

This book is composed of essays written primarily between 1990 and 2003, including many reviews and discussions of books, films, stage productions, some music. There are sections devoted to Queer Theory, Popular Culture, Multiculturalism and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  Published in 2004, it also features a lengthy introduction with a photo album insert containing photographs of myself, family and friends.  This is my favorite book of my own thus far.

Includes 50 essays, many of which are provided in list form below. Please see this book if you wish to see those essays. It's in a kindle edition now.

cated to ‘Further Reading,’ readers are referred to Anderson’s Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities, which is ‘noteworthy insofar as it offers a critique of Connell’s now almost hegemonic concept of hegemonic masculinity’ (50). This is the totality of treatment we see for Inclusive Masculinity Theory, save a very brief discussion in the chapter on sexuality. Whether one agrees or disagrees with IMT is not quite the point, rather, the point is that IMT has had a significant role in the critical study of men and masculinities – even if writing in opposition to it. This underdevelopment or absence becomes all the more obvious in the chapter on sexuality, where Edley draws on a ‘much cited paper’ by C. J. Pascoe, which shows the ‘dislocation of masculinity and sexuality, not least because it would appear to be a relatively new phenomenon’ (129), but Pascoe is not alone in exploring the phenomenon. Admittedly, there is a brief mention of Anderson’s work, but it feels unfinished, tentative, uncertain. Moreover, what can be said of the recent interest in queer theory and men’s studies on ‘sex on the down low,’ or straight men having sex with men? While the chapter on sexuality devotes a few pages to ‘gay masculinities,’ it overlooks other forms of sexuality or sexual practices. Another example of references or allusion might be taken from the chapter on the body. Towards the end of the chapter Edley writes,

Cet article examine la place des domestiques noires aux États-Unis entre le milieu des années 1930 et le milieu des années 1950 ainsi que les questions liées à la lutte pour l’amélioration de leurs conditions de travail et pour leur reconnaissance sociale, une lutte qui a lieu sur les lieux de travail via le développement du syndicalisme mais aussi dans la sphère socioculturelle où les logiques de ségrégation raciale et de suprématie blanche prédominent. En particulier, les femmes noires membres ou sympathisantes du Parti communiste américain constituent un courant militant désigné sous le nom de Black Left Feminism (féminisme noir de gauche) qui permet de sortir les domestiques de l’ombre et du silence et de porter un sujet jusqu’ici marginal au centre des débats des organisations du mouvement ouvrier et en faveur des droits civiques auxquelles elles appartiennent. Dans ce cadre, la contribution politique et artistique de la dramaturge Alice Childress mérite une attention toute particulière. Conversation From Life, sa série fictionnelle rédigée chaque mois de 1951 à 1955 pour le journal de la gauche noire Freedom, est la première tentative de représentation d’une domestique qui défend en même temps fierté noire, dignité ouvrière et pouvoir d’agir féminin dans un contexte de guerre froide où toute démarche de contestation est férocement réprimée. Mildred, le personnage principal, est le symbole du passage possible des femmes noires de la marge à l’avant-garde des luttes qui caractérisent cette période, en faveur des droits des noir.e.s, des salarié.e.s, des femmes et de la paix.

This paper examines the position of black women domestic workers in the United States from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s and their struggles for improved working conditions and social recognition, which primarily took place in the workplace through the development of trade unionism, as well as in the sociocultural sphere where the logics of racial segregation and white supremacy were predominant. Specifically, black women who were members or sympathizers of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) constituted a militant movement known as Black Left Feminism that placed black domestics at the heart of their analysis and artistic expression. This movement brought what was a hitherto marginal subject out of the shadows into the center of debate within the labor and civil rights organizations to which they belonged. In this context, playwright Alice Childress’s political and artistic contributions deserve special attention. From 1951 to 1955, Childress wrote a monthly fiction column titled Conversation From Life for the black left newspaper Freedom. Conversation From Life was the first attempt to depict a domestic worker who simultaneously defends black pride, workers' dignity and women's power to act, in spite of the repressive Cold War context that dominated U.S. society at the time. Mildred, the main character, symbolizes the possible transition of black women from the margins to the vanguard of the struggles for black people’s, workers’, and women’s rights, and for peace.

This screening and roundtable discussion focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to the aesthetics of "triple consciousness" in the work of acclaimed Ghanaian-American filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu. Owusu's visual elaborations of triple consciousness reflects the collision of identities and worlds experienced by African immigrants in the United States. Her work explores themes of the asymmetrical geographies of feminism, queer desires, displacement, and historical archives. The event will feature three short films introduced by Owusu and followed by reflections from Lauren McLeod Cramer (Cinema Studies), Jordache Ellapen (WGS), and Julie MacArthur (History).

This paper complicates notions of Black girlhood by examining the dual experiences of gendered racism that result in both strength and sadness in Black girls’ educational experiences. I highlight the need for a curriculum of liberation to combat historical and current social conditions negatively impacting school-aged Black girls, such as harsh disciplinary practices, low academic expectations, and sexual objectification. The Super-Girl phenomenon serves as a metaphor illustrating the balance and imbalance of multiple social constructs. Utilising constructivist grounded theory [Charmaz, K. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory. London: Sage], the key concepts in the research derived directly from the voices of 18 school-aged girls (8–13) as well as my observations, interpretations, and related experiences. Data collection utilising observation notes, interviews, written responses, and activity products provided from monthly sessions over the course of two years, offer critical insight into some of the complexities of Black girlhood. The most striking common themes abstracted from their voices were concepts related to ‘strength’ and ‘sadness’ in their lives. Thematic narratives were found to be most relevant to (1) negative teacher–student relationships, as well as, (2) policed bodies and sexual objectification. This work offers specific recommendations for future girl empowerment programming, curriculum, and evidence-based intervention development that can aide in liberating Black girls.

Studies indicate that African American men report more personal experiences with discrimination than do African American women. According to the subordinate male target hypothesis, this gender difference reflects an underlying reality in which African American men are the primary targets of anti-Black discrimination. From the perspective of intersectionality theory, African American women and men experience racial discrimination differently; and therefore greater reports of discrimination among African American men might be a result of measurement bias that favors the experiences of African American men vis-à-vis African American women. To assess these perspectives, the authors analyze data from the 1995 Detroit Area Study and the 2001–2003 National Survey of American Life. The authors use multiplegroup confirmatory factor analytic models with latent means and categorical outcomes to observe the degree to which gender bias in measurement accounts for disparities in perceived discrimination among African American women and men. The results show that gender bias in the measures most often used to assess unfair treatment in social surveys is responsible for the gender gap in certain kinds of perceived discrimination among African Americans. Measures of everyday discrimination are mostly gender balanced, but measurement bias is responsible for a large portion of the gap in perceptions of major life discrimination and the entire gap when major life discrimination is attributed to race. The results highlight the importance of intersectionality theory for assessing discrimination, and the authors argue that revisions in the measurement of perceived discrimination are required to better reflect the experiences of African American women.