Women of Color Feminism

South Asia is a region with unity in diversity, having at least twenty different dominant languages and over two hundred basic dialects. And yet, most of South Asia continues to remain economically poor and "developing" with gender disparity remaining a real concern at the heart of South Asian unity. The 2019 Global Hunger Index ranks all the major South Asian countries in the "serious" category with Sri Lanka coming in 66th, Nepal 73rd, Bangladesh 88th, Pakistan 94th, and India 102nd out of 117 countries. Women suffer the most, as they have to bear the direct burden of gender inequality and, as a consequence, children experience malnutrition. The 2018 Global Nutrition Report states that on average 49 percent of reproductive-age women in South Asia have anemia, and the prevalence of stunting in the population of children under-five is 32.7 percent, which is significantly greater than the global average of 21.9 percent. There is no data available for those who identify as nonbinary, and there is a long way to go before the data gap can be filled despite the official recognition of "third" gender people in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. Ironically, in spite of the official recognition of a nonheteronormative gender identity, homosexuality has yet to be decriminalized in most of South Asia with the exception of Nepal and India, having decriminalized homosexuality in 2007 and 2018, respectively. To read more: https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/genderedlives/chapter/chapter-3-introducing-the-region/

The editors and contributors to Color of Violence ask: What would it take to end violence against women of color? Presenting the fierce and vital writing of organizers, lawyers, scholars, poets, and policy makers, Color of Violence radically repositions the anti-violence movement by putting women of color at its center. The contributors shift the focus from domestic violence and sexual assault and map innovative strategies of movement building and resistance used by women of color around the world. The volume's thirty pieces—which include poems, short essays, position papers, letters, and personal reflections—cover violence against women of color in its myriad forms, manifestations, and settings, while identifying the links between gender, militarism, reproductive and economic violence, prisons and policing, colonialism, and war. At a time of heightened state surveillance and repression of people of color, Color of Violence is an essential intervention.

Contributors. Dena Al-Adeeb, Patricia Allard, Lina Baroudi, Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), Critical Resistance, Sarah Deer, Eman Desouky, Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, Dana Erekat, Nirmala Erevelles, Sylvanna Falcón, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Emi Koyama, Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez, maina minahal, Nadine Naber, Stormy Ogden, Julia Chinyere Oparah, Beth Richie, Andrea J. Ritchie, Dorothy Roberts, Loretta J. Ross, s.r., Puneet Kaur Chawla Sahota, Renee Saucedo, Sista II Sista, Aishah Simmons, Andrea Smith, Neferti Tadiar, TransJustice, Haunani-Kay Trask, Traci C. West, Janelle White


https://www.dukeupress.edu/color-of-violence

This essay is a critical examination of Russian prodigy Dostoyevsky's famous work "Crime and Punishment". In this essay, I attempt to deconstruct the ideas of duality, identity crisis, moral resurrection, and religion by illuminating the theme of prostitution and crime. My area of concern is Sonya and her multi-layered character used as a window to gauge the above-mentioned ideas. 
Keywords: Prostitution, Christianity, Sin, soul, identity, Crime

Seeking to meet Freire's (Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage , Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 1987) call to enact a critical pedagogy of love, this article explores how one urban teacher/researcher engages in pedagogy that supports students to heal from internalized oppression towards what bell hooks (Talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black, South End Press, Boston, 1989, Sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, Routledge, New York, 2015) calls self-recovery. Set in an elective class for young women in a Los Angeles middle school, I examine my process as teacher/researcher to understand the experiences of a student named Chelsea, and develop curriculum to serve her arising needs. I integrate critical pedagogy with embodied pedagogies and women of color feminist epistemology to critique dominant ways of knowing and teaching in urban schools. Then, I use auto-ethnography and portraiture to craft three blended portraits: exploring how Chelsea's sense of self is influenced by her life experiences; how interventions like meditation, dialogue and vulnerability, or what I call pedagogies of bodymindspirit, helped Chelsea to unpack her distrust of others and a longing for wholeness; and how a final project supported Chelsea's path towards self-recovery. I conclude with ways to cultivate love in the face of material and epistemological violence in schools, and offer implications and tensions for teachers seeking to utilize a bodymindspirit praxis to serve all marginalized students.

“Becoming Tender” invites readers to rethink intergenerational refugee relations. Rather than solely focusing on refugee parents and their failings, as commonly expressed in scholarly works, becoming tender necessitates children recognizing the perspectives and biases they bring into conversations with parents that impede empathetic connection and value for refugee knowledge. This two-way softening serves as a praxis to rewrite how refugee families have been represented by dominant discourse while also encouraging readers to answer the call to tend to their familial ties. Critical examination of intergenerational engagement between refugees and their children may illuminate unexpected enactments of refugee knowing and healing.

This chapter intends to discuss the similarities between and political connotations of two Cuban novels, Erick Mota’s "Habana Underguater" ("Havana Underwater", 2010) and "Espejuelos para ver por dentro" ("Glasses to see the inside", 2019), by Maielis González. Both authors speculate about Cuba’s future from different perspectives in terms of style and subject.

Abstract:  The objective of this ethnographic research is to offer an introductory summary of a Subculture Within A Subculture... This research will endeavor to offer powerful social and historical content for the subject’s social emergence, seek to demystify Fetish/Kink/BDSM (Bondage, Dominance, Sadism, Masochism (BDSM)), to challenge the DSM-5 Paraphilic  Disorder, reframe the A & B diagnostic criterion classifications, to explore the subject’s underground lifestyle from a psychosocial point of view, to offer sixteen (N=16) personal interview findings from sexually variant women of color in the fetish/BDSM lifestyle, and to advocate for inclusive sex-positive awareness acceptance.

In her 1990 text “homeplace (a site of resistance),” bell hooks argues that for black women throughout history, the making of home cannot be extricated from the struggle against racism and forging of community. This paper explores how artists who occupy tenuous subject positions as immigrants, people of color, and female engage with home-making. Instead of examining home as an object, I engage with home-making as an action that is shifting and provisional. Using philosophical, sociological, and anthropological constructs of “home” as points of departure, I turn toward the domestic projects of visual artists Amanda Williams, Mona Hatoum, and Doris Salcedo. In Color(ed) Theory (2015), Amanda Williams repaints and reconstructs vacant urban homes in such a way that demonstrates the persistent presence of the human even beyond its bodily inhabitation of home’s hallowed halls. Mona Hatoum’s installations Homebound (2001) and Mobile Home (2005) fold the alien and violent into domestic objects that defy being fixed to domestic architectures. Doris Salcedo’s La Casa Viuda (1995) and other untitled sculptures transform doors, dressers, and wardrobes with concrete, dust and bone in response to the flights of Colombian women from their homes and vacillate between tracing memories of the past and
being haunted by premonitions of violence, evacuation, and ruination with the ongoing passage of time. In the works of these three artists, the binary between homely and unhomely comes apart, and homemaking becomes the act of inhabiting or embodying something that shifts, accommodating for a wider range of experiences in how one constitutes self in relation to one's environments.

This dissertation investigates the inclusion of women in capoeira: an Afro-Brazilian martial art, dance, and musical tradition. Believed to have originated among communities of African slaves in colonial Brazil, capoeira represents a unique practice because men and women perform together, interact, and compete simultaneously. The last 40 years have seen a revolution in the number of female students and teachers practising capoeira both in Brazil and abroad. Capoeira offers its students an inclusive and validating space for bodily self-expression and physical empowerment; however, this is not always guaranteed due to hierarchical power structures within some groups. The growing influence of female leaders is challenging historical male-centred narratives in capoeira. My research fulfils the need to document, compare and analyse the emerging oral and embodied narratives of women who train in capoeira groups in Brazil and in Europe. This multi sited, cross-cultural study represents an innovative and timely contribution to discussions of creolization, decolonialization, performance, race, and gender theory, and shows how gendered identities are being questioned and redefined by a diasporic practice from the 'Global South'. My findings will be of interest to both practitioners and researchers of capoeira and Afro-Brazilian music, culture, politics and history, and of performative art forms as a site of investigation for gender and cultural studies.

Roma, Travelers, and Gypsies have been persecuted for millennia for their nomadic tribal traditional lifestyle.  Many like this author’s maternal grandmother were forced to settle.  Many were killed throughout several waves of attempted genocides.  Despite the persecution, a mystery and lore developed around the Gypsies.  The women were fetishized.  Most genre paintings depicting gypsies are of a few similar stereotypical themes:  fortune telling, dancing seductively, evil in religious motifs, or poor beggars and thieves.  Do female Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters of the turn of the 20th century take a considerably different approach or are their portrayals just veiled in more subtle innuendos? Does class, gender, culture, or something altogether different have the most impact on the social experience inspiring artistic expression?

Characterized by ambiguous sexual energy and resistance to male domination and objectification, the visual idiom of punk rock communicated feminist prospects through the performance of fashion. This essay interprets the creative agency of Alice Bag, Marina “Del Rey” Muhlfriedel, Trudie “Plunger” Arguelles-Barret, and Helen “Hellin Killer” Roessler as Latina and Hispanic sono-spatial artists in the early days of L.A.’s punk subculture. Situating the performance practices of Hispana (Iberian) women alongside the Latina (hemispheric Latin American) artists, L.A. punk is situated within a Spanish-American borderlands matrix of meaning, where non–Western European roots of women in punk gain coherence as a specifically bordered set of historical circumstances. By embodying musical performativity as creators of a relational theatre of musical experience, the study asserts that women punk fans redefined how alternative music was generated, circulated, and consumed.

Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color is coming out from Nightboat Books on May 1, 2018, though I originally began editing this project about four years ago with Lambda Literary, as an online journal. The anthology covers 100 years of queer of color history, since the Harlem Renaissance. To celebrate the launch of this historic project, VIDA has provided the space for several of the queer women of color in the anthology to write odes for the other queer women of color who also appear in the anthology but are deceased. Below is an intergenerational literary dialogue, from one generation to the next, from the living poets to those who have passed. I hope you enjoy these conversations, these love letters, letters of appreciation, across time and space. — Christopher Soto

This article excavates a democratic feminist thesis from Susan Okin's provocative essay, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" by revealing, beneath a conspicuous and troubling "othering" language, an imperative to treat "culture" as a political-as opposed to private-matter and to privilege the voices of women within minority cultures. It thereby locates in Okin's controversial essay a position against treating liberal principles as trumps over the voices of the most vulnerable, exposing her democratic-as opposed to liberal-leanings and urging contemporary political theorists in a direction that contrasts sharply with Linda Zerilli's recent calls to outsider liberal judgment. Ultimately, this project invites contemporary political theorists to reconsider the extent to which certain brands of liberalism may be bad for women, and to align instead with 1980s women of color feminism in its emphasis on insider democratic dialogue as a necessary prerequisite to all forms of political judgment.

Drawing on queer and women of color theoretical frameworks including Cherrie Moraga's "theory in the flesh," M. Jacqui Alexander's "fire" metaphor,  and Grace Chang's "Where's the Violence?: The Promise and Perils of Teaching Women of Color Studies," I discuss what I call "pedagogies in the flesh," which urge educators to challenge white entitlement and empower women and queer students of color, disrupting psychic racial violence in the college classroom.

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and--at times--white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. I want to challenge this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogeneous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. I take this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing, as I see it, thus has something to offer those of us today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

רקע: בקיץ 2015 יצאו מאות מבני הקהילה האתיופית לרחובות למחות נגד האלימות המשטרתית, הגזענות והאפליה כלפיהם; וכן נגד יחס מפלה מצד הממסד ומצד האזרחים, הדרה מהמרחב הציבורי וסטיגמות שליליות. קליטתם של יוצאי אתיופיה בישראל מציבה שאלות, אתגרים, ואף צורך בחשבון נפש לחברה הישראלית.
מטרת המאמר: להעלות את הקולות השונים של בני ובנות הקהילה וללמוד על תחושותיהם ביחס למעמדם בחברה.
שיטת המחקר: רואיינו 32 בני ובנות 20-45 מהקהילה האתיופית. הראיונות נותחו באמצעות יישום מתודולוגיה איכותנית של ניתוח נרטיבי, המכונה "מדריך ההקשבה" (Listening Guide), שפיתחה פרופ' קרול גיליגן. שיטה זו מאפשרת האזנה לקולות מושתקים של קהילות מודרות במצבי קונפליקט.
הממצאים העיקריים: מניתוח רב-רבדי של נרטיבים בקונפליקט של קהילת יוצאי אתיופיה עלו רגשות תסכול, כעס ואכזבה מהחברה, ועימם רצון לנקוט פעולה אקטיבית נגד המצב הקיים.
מסקנות והשלכות לפרקטיקה ולמדיניות: הממצאים מאתגרים את ההנחות הקושרות את בני הקהילה האתיופית בישראל ל"קורבנות מוחלשים", מאפשרים להקשיב לקולותיהם המפוכחים ומאירים תהליכים משמעותיים במעבר מקהילה מוחלשת לקהילה נאבקת. מחקרים רבים על קליטת יוצאי אתיופיה מציעים פרקטיקות שמהותן 'טיפול' כזה או אחר בקהילה. לעומתם, המחקר הנוכחי מציע עמדה המבקרת את התפיסות המובנות של החברה הישראלית הקולטת כלפי הקהילה וקורא להעלאת המודעות לאפליה.

Ramasubramanian, S. (2019). Feminism and inclusive leadership: Bridging tradition and modernity from an Indic perspective. (In S. Bodhananda, T. Agerwala, & S. Menon (Eds.). Inclusive Leadership: Perspectives from Tradition and Modernity. (pp. 213-243; Chapter 9). Routledge: London, U.K.

This chapter examines ideas of Rajarshi leadership, derived from Indic traditions, through a feminist critical sociological lens. Traditional Western norms about leadership are associated with masculine values such as power, dominance, violence, and authority that reinforce hierarchies and patriarchal structures. Feminist perspectives provide substantive alternatives to how we theorise and practice leadership in the new millennium. Beyond redefining the Rajarshi leadership ideal through a feminist lens, this chapter draws on other related Indo-Dharmic concepts such as the feminine divine principle of Shakti and the Bhakti movement that sought to break caste and gender hierarchies by emphasising on the vernacular and the unconventional. Thus, this chapter de-centres leadership discourses from patriarchal notions of entrepreneurial charismatic masculine leadership. It also simultaneously disrupts the idea that feminist leadership is a Western, modern, and colonial concept.

For nearly three decades, racial formations theory has influenced ideas, discourses and political projects surrounding race and racism in the United States. The theory holds that although race is a permanent feature in the US, the formation, order, and set of meanings inscribed onto racialized subjects are contingent upon historical and political contexts. This framework conceals anti-black racism as an enduring social order that affects policies, policy outcomes and organizes the relationship between non-black and black bodies. One exemplary social institution through which this can be seen is the public education system and its culture of discipline and punishment in the US. Current interrogations of school disciplinary landscapes have focused in on disparities in discipline policies as they affect working-class/working-poor boys of color. While it is useful to examine the uneven rates of suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, focusing on these disciplinary discrepancies misses everyday occurrences of punishment that young black girls experience. This qualitative paper examines school discipline policies and informal punitive practices including the implications that these mechanisms have on the physical and emotional worlds of black girls. The study finds that black girls are rendered structurally vulnerable to discipline and punishment at the hands of adults and peers in ways that exceed or contend with the logics espoused through racial formations theory. Placing black girls at the center of analysis compels us to examine the anti-black logic of discipline and punishment in schools and at large.

Should women see a relationship between patriarchal oppression and the destruction of Nature in the name of profit and progress? How can they counter the violence inherent in these processes? Should they look to a link between the women's movement and other social movements?

The authors offer an analysis of such issues from a unique North-South perspective. They critique prevailing economic theories, conventional concepts of women's emancipation, the myth of 'catching up' development, the philosophical foundations of modern science and technology, and the omission of ethics when discussing so many questions including advances in reproductive technology.

In constructing their own ecofeminist epistemology and methodology, they look at movements advocating consumer liberation, subsistence production and sustainability , and argue for an acceptance of limits and reciprocity and the endless commoditification of needs. A book as relevant today as when it was first published.

Vandana Shiva is an Indian environmental activist and anti-globalization author. She has received honors around the world for her work.

Maria Mies is a Professor of Sociology in Cologne, Germany, and author of several feminist books.

Series: Critique. Influence. Change.
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Zed Books; Second Edition,New Edition,New edition (April 1, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1780325630
ISBN-13: 978-1780325637

This groundbreaking work remains as relevant today as when it was when first published. Two of Zed's best-known authors argue that ecological destruction and industrial catastrophes constitute a direct threat to everyday life, the maintenance of which has been made the particular responsibility of women. In both industrialized societies and the developing countries, the new wars the world is experiencing, violent ethnic chauvinisms and the malfunctioning of the economy also pose urgent questions for ecofeminists. Is there a relationship between patriarchal oppression and the destruction of nature in the name of profit and progress? How can women counter the violence inherent in these processes? Should they look to a link between the women's movement and other social movements? Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva offer a thought-provoking analysis of these and many other issues from a unique North-South perspective. They critique prevailing economic theories, conventional concepts of women's emancipation, the myth of 'catching up' development, the philosophical foundations of modern science and technology, and the omission of ethics when discussing so many questions, including advances in reproductive technology and biotechnology. In constructing their own ecofeminist epistemology and methodology, these two internationally respected feminist environmental activists look to the potential of movements advocating consumer liberation and subsistence production, sustainability and regeneration, and they argue for an acceptance of limits and reciprocity and a rejection of exploitation, the endless commoditization of needs, and violence.

In this article I discuss Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019) as a transmodern narrative that gives voice to a marginalised group of black women living in Britain. Written in a hybrid style that combines prose and poetry and eschewing punctuation and long sentences, the novel interweaves sundry stories from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century set in countries ranging from Africa, the Caribbean, and America to Britain. This networked structure exposes transtemporal and transnational patterns of diversity, connectedness and relationality, as well as the distinctive genealogy of black British women and their maternal empowerment. I argue that the resilience of the characters in the face of social, racial and gender marginalisation springs from their empathic relatedness and solidarity. This emphasis on the importance of care for the other highlights the need for improving not only women’s rights and socioeconomic opportunities but of benefiting humanity on a broader scale.

This paper offers a critical reading of María Lugones’s engagement with intersectionality theory, as primarily developed by Black feminists. I argue that her "linguistic critique" of intersectionality risks jeopardizing the possibility of coalitional politics emphasized by decolonial feminisms, especially between Black women and Latinas. We should instead attend to her "coloniality critique" that shows what undergirds the categorial logics intersectionality names, interrogating their source as a colonial imposition. By furthering the insights of intersectionality, I argue that decolonial feminism helps us to reorient our practices of resistance to categorial logics and the possibility of forging decolonizing coalitions among women of color.