Abolition Feminist Storytelling as Methodology: Lessons Within the Stories We (Re)Tell About Punishment and Violence

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) use positivist/biomedical frameworks of ethics to construct a fear-based logic through discourses of risk/harm. This critical queer autoethnography explores how the fear-based logic of IRBs is experienced on an embodied and affective level by a graduate student navigating sexually precarious ethical situations in the field. Using Black feminist thought and queer of color critique, I reflect on bell hooks’s “love ethic” as a queer strategy to subvert this fear-based logic and transgress the academy by leaning into the messiness of ethnography. Doing so, I introduce “academic dissimulation” as a performative resistance tactic for navigating institutional constraints of IRBs.

As the administrative state continues to retreat from its core goals, communities are looking for new ways to build safety and protection. A community built on the universal values of good and evil with equitable protections requires intentionality and focus. We offer a reminder of the ways that Black Feminism has invited us to build communities and lives rooted in love and imagination, while holding space for the messiness that could occur in community. With the changes brought on by the 47th president and his administration, cruelty in the name of cost saving and efficiency is the point; however, a just state should never look to kill or harm communities. This paper engages Black Feminism as a guide to sustain better futures during and after this retrenching government. Through the love ethic, Black Feminism evokes a care for humanity that supports the co-creation of a community rooted in values. Moreover, Black Feminism enables a vision into the future that cultivates dreaming and imagining for the individual and the tribe. We offer Black Feminism as a community-based solution rooted in humanity that can hold the messiness of the ever-evolving present moment and future. These offerings are a call to action in building communities.

Academics have a hard time talking about the place of “love” in social research, and the lack of a working definition for its meaning only partly explains our difficulty. The more substantial barrier is our tendency to think about “research” not as a careful exploration of specific social, intellectual, or methodological problems that bear on the everyday circumstances of real people, but as the product of observable and replicable processes, of science. Love, many would argue, has got nothing to do with this. In this article, I offer a radical counter narrative of the possibilities that a broadened view might enable. Using my own research experiences, I sketch the beginnings of an “intimate” approach to qualitative inquiry that is grounded in feminist theory, governed by an “ethic of love,” and expressed in data as “love acts” for the individuals whose lives our work aims to shape.

Black feminisms offer lenses through which Black women can resist and re-exist under new emancipatory conditions. Part of that work is uncovering roots and routes through which Black women's lives can come to the fore as articulated centers. Such a mandate, I argue, must center love. This article's work, therefore, is to articulate the function of love, as an ethic and a discourse of love as a dialectic space, in the creation of emancipatory spaces for Black women. In particular, this article aims to articulate how alove ethic, as a princple,can be used to support a citational politics for Black women toward a Black feminist reclamatory past, liberatory present, and emancipated future.

“The Erotic Black Diaspora: From Your Hands to Mine” is a theoretical exploration of how the erotic informs Black feminist politics, kinship, love, and spirituality throughout the African diaspora. Through an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, history, African and African diaspora studies, women’s and gender studies, and Black queer studies, as well as archival research, a close reading of letters sent to Black feminist, writer, and poet Audre Lorde reveals how the erotic functions within Black feminist spaces, particularly in the late 1970s–mid 1980s. In using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, as she defines it in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” this paper argues that the Erotic Black Diaspora is a way of reading Black feminist love, language, and action. Recognizing the diversity within Afro-diasporic experiences, the Erotic Black Diaspora privileges the erotic (platonic and/or romantic) feelings and expressions across continents cultivated between same-sex-loving and queer individuals throughout the African diaspora. Positioning Black feminist archives, in particular correspondence sent between Black feminist foremothers, as a counter-archive to institutions of oppression informs one’s understanding of the ethics of Black feminist politics, love, spirituality, and community building.

In this paper, Joan M Anderson explores post-colonial feminist scholarship, generated through the convergence of black feminist and post-colonial scholarship, and examines its use as a theory and methodology for nursing scholarship.

Editorial Introduction Patti Duncan I began drafting this introduction while sheltering in place in Oregon early in the COVID-19 pandemic, writing in small moments of time between zoom meetings, remote teaching, and helping my child adjust to distance learning. I returned to it following the racist police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, and others, amidst mass protests across the nation and around the world, and feelings of deep, collective grief. I finally finish it during a transnational uprising against racist state violence and white supremacy, while we continue to live with deep uncertainty, precarity, and trauma. Writing this brief introduction has taken me much longer than usual because it's difficult to focus. I don't know what the future holds for my community, my family, my students, or my university. I write as someone with an auto-immune syndrome that places me in a high-risk category in a moment when campuses are announcing that they will reopen in the fall. I write as a non-Black woman of color committed to the Black Lives Matter movement. I write from my home in the Clackamas area of Oregon, on the land of the Clackamas people who traditionally lived along the Clackamas River until being forcibly removed. I don't know how we will all weather this storm, and what our collective losses will ultimately be. I write this while still grieving my mother's passing, a few months before we all became aware of COVID-19, from a rare form of cancer that was diagnosed just months before her death. Like many of you, during these months I've been learning new things about grief, getting familiar with loss, and pausing to try to gather my stories and my loved ones close. But still, there is so much work to do. The authors in this issue of Feminist Formations highlight this point, offering questions, frameworks, and theories that provide meaning during these difficult times. Through their critiques of settler colonial and carceral logics, arguments about racism, white supremacy, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, and discussions of the connections among gender, sexuality, race, and disability, these writers move us forward in important new directions. Their articles are timely and urgent. They offer theoretical frameworks and analyses that help us make sense of the world right now. In this moment when we are learning that nothing in our world will ever be the same, I share them with the hopes that they offer you some meaning, comfort, and hope. [End Page vii] We begin this issue with "Black Feminist Thought and the Gender, Women's, and Feminist Studies PhD: A Roundtable Discussion," by Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, Moya Bailey, Karen Flynn, Bettina Judd, Ayana K. Weekley, Jennifer Musial, and Melissa Autumn White. This piece is based on a roundtable discussion that took place at the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Conference in 2017. In the discussion, participants reflect on their work as Black feminist scholars in Gender, Women's, and Feminist Studies (GWFS) programs and departments, their experiences earning the PhD in this discipline, and their hopes for the future of GWFS. Their collaboration "serves as part wake-up call, part warning, and part 'truth telling' about the realities of being a Black woman intellectual navigating GWFS PhD training and post-PhD faculty life." Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, Bailey, Flynn, Judd, and Weekley describe both interpersonal and structural forms of violence that they have encountered in the academy. They theorize how the logics of slavery continue to shape institutional spaces, contexts, and structures. And in describing and analyzing painful experiences of anti-Black racism, microaggressions, exclusionary practices, and feelings of "push out," the authors also offer their collaboration as a call to action, pointing to "the importance of making Black Feminist Thought more explicitly central to the very possibility of the field of GWFS." Building on the work of other Black feminist intellectuals, they ask, "How do/can Black women survive the GWFS PhD?" In "Amplifying Our Voices: Feminist Scholars Writing for the Public," Carrie N. Baker, Aviva Dove-Viebahn, Michele Tracy Berger, Carmen Rios, and Karon Jolna describe their work writing for Ms. Magazine, and argue...

98 SHOFAR COURSE DESCRIPTION AND SYLLABUS: RELIGION 104, "INTRODUCTION TO JUDAISM" EMORY UNIVERSITY, 1989-90 Laura Levitt Laura Levitt is a Ph.D. candidate in Constructive Jewish Theology at Emory University, where she will also receive a certificate in Women's Studies. Her dissertation, "Identity/ies: Rethinking Jewish Feminist Theory and Practice," uses the tools of Feminist and Critical Theory to address the diversity of Jewish Feminist experience. She has an M.A. degree from Hebrew Union College-JIR in Modern Jewish Thought and an A.B. in Religious Studies from Brown University. In January 1992, Ms. Levitt will become an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religion at Temple University, where she will teach courses in Jewish Studies and Feminist Theory. I. Rationale Traditionally in the Jewish community learning has been a communal activity. When I put together my course "Introduction to ~udaism," I wanted it to reflect this value. I also wanted to do this in a critical way which would take into account the fact that Jewish women were excluded from this process. Given this history, I ask my students to enter into worlds which on the one hand seem to offer much hope and much promise for contemporary practice. On the other hand, I ask them to do so with their eyes wide open to the asymmetrical power relationship which often hold up these very systems. Maintaining these contradictory positions is uncomfortable, but it is also honest. By doing both, I ask my students to engage in a kind of critical practice. Mine is a feminist critical practice which is informed by what Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza calls an "ethic of accountability." I want to teach my students to be accountable for their positions vis-a-vis the tradition. I want them to be responsible for the political, social, and moral implications of course readings. This is especially important given the power of "Torah," both Oral and Written, in shaping Jewish communal values and practices. Students are asked to take seriously the implications of their own interpretations. This is the challenge of the course. I hope to teach students to see not only what a text says on its surface but to think, as Schussler Volume 9. No.4 Summer 1991 99 Fiorenza suggests, about the rhetorical situation in which these statements were and are still being made. For example, as· feminist scholars like Bernadette Brooten and others have suggested, just because a text like the Mishnah may not mention women in the public sphere does not necessarily mean that women did not hold positions of communal authority at the time this text was written. Thus, the Mishnah needs to be read with a "hermeneutic of suspicion," for it may not be reflecting social practices as much as it may be prescribing them. This critical practice is reinforced in the requirements for the course. Students are expected to work together in small groups, whether outlining questions to be turned in as part of an exam or working on group projects. In addition to this, students are required to use gender-neutral language except when referring to gender-specific issues or materials. Finally in terms of accountability, students are each required to attend and critique two Jewish services. In these papers students must be clear and up-front about their experiences, whether they are non-Jews going to a Jewish service for the first time or Reform Jews going to an Orthodox service. In so doing, students are asked to take responsibility for their positions and not hide behind a cloak of objectivity. In this course there is no such thing. II. Syllabus for the Course Religion 104: Introduction to Judaism MWF 11-12:00 Spring 1990, Emory University Instructor: Laura Levitt Office Hours: by appointment This course will be an introduction to Jewish'history and the diverse faces of Judaism. Students will be exposed to a wide range of Jewish experience from the biblical period to the present. Given the diversity of these experiences, students will be encouraged to develop and articulate their own answer to the question: What is Judaism in various historical, cultural, political, and economic contexts? Method: In this course, students...

The postsecular turn within feminist theory refers to a renewed attention to religion within feminist scholarship. However, rather than conceptualizing the postsecular as a new moment within feminist theorizing that breaks with a previous trend of secular feminism, this article stresses that it is important to recognize the long history of coexistence and contestations between religious and secular feminist approaches. In this article, the different reception histories of the story of Sojourner Truth are examined to elucidate and reflect on the complicated (historical) relationship of the religious and the secular within feminist scholarship. Three different types of feminist theoretical engagement with the story of Sojourner Truth are examined and contrasted: the implicitly secular use of the story of Sojourner Truth in black feminist scholarship and theorizing of intersectionality, the explicitly religious interpretations found in the work of feminist and womanist theologians, and the deconstructive reading by Donna Haraway. In discussing and comparing these different engagements with the story of Sojourner Truth, it is stressed that the boundaries between the religious and the secular are perhaps less clear-cut than initially imagined, and that a dialogue between secular and religious feminist approaches is very fruitful. The article closes by examining how the complex intersections of gender, religion and race in the story of Sojourner Truth can be connected to the contemporary theorizing on the racialization of religion within critical race scholarship.

“What’s in your backpack?” This is a question media theorist Shanté Paradigm Smalls asks on the podcast Fantastic Blackness (2020). Smalls draws this theme from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) to encourage her students to think creatively about how they are preparing for the world they are finding themselves in. Butler’s parable is about the enactment of radical change through community and self-care, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable ecological and ethical catastrophe. This chapter begins with an audacious conceit: that the music theory classroom can be a space for nurturing connections, for tending caring relationships, and indeed for enacting radical change. To do so, it deploys themes and (post-)methods from Black feminist theory and pedagogy, decolonial feminist theory, and anarchafeminism to productively consider how music theory can be a space for valorizing difference, making connections through co-creation, practicing storytelling as an analytic method, reinventing histories, and enabling futures. It can do this by attending to its traditional projects—critical music analysis and its claims of preparing musicians for professional careers—through what I would call, following Gloria Josephs (1988) and Patricia Hill Collins (1991), four tenets of Black feminist epistemological praxis: dialogue as knowledge production, personal expressiveness, an ethics of accountability, and attention to lived experience. All of these taken together can transform music theory into a theory “in the making” (Combahee River Collective 1979).

When the Walls Came Down

Whose Body Is This?On the Cultural Possibilities of a Radical Black Sexual Praxis Marlon M. Bailey (bio) "Whose body is this?" draws from a legacy of Black feminist and queer scholars posing this rhetorical question; I am thinking of bell hook's 1996 essay (on Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It), "'Whose Pussy Is This? A Feminist Comment."1 In 2007 Herukhuti wrote "Whose Booty Is This? Barebacking, Advocacy, and the Right to Fuck,"2 an essay in response to the targeted policing of bodies and the sex of Black gay men as we confront the HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States. These rhetorical questions have for a long time been, and continue to be, critical questions confronting the Black studies intellectual and political project and the communities we study. These questions bring into focus the ways in which the US anti-Black state has always been invested in, as the feminist scholar Andrea Smith argues, the perpetual "slaveability" of Black people,3 and how gender and sexual oppression within our communities is not separate from but constitutive of anti-Black racism / white supremacy. For, as Alice Walker argues, one who is not free to express same-gender love in public is a slave, and anyone who requires that one should not express same-gender love has a slaveholder's mentality.4 This slaveholder's mentality exists both within Black communities and outside them. I take seriously the centrality of these rhetorical questions about Black sexuality raised by Black feminist and queer scholars. Therefore, this essay contemplates the role that respectability politics (intracultural policing of gender and sexuality) has played in Black studies. And, although there has been an influx of scholars producing cutting-edge scholarship in Black gender and sexuality studies, the field has yet to forge a cogent, intersectional analysis of the relationship between Black sexuality and HIV. Furthermore, Black studies needs to study and highlight the quotidian practices and knowledges of Black gender and sexually marginalized people and how these efforts contribute to fortifying a Black sexual praxis. [End Page 161] I make this argument in three points. First, I briefly review some of the challenges and debates around gender and sexuality within Black studies. I query how the politics of respectability limits and refracts the analytic relevance/potency and the socio/political currency of Black studies. Second, I move to the status of the struggle over gender and sexual knowledge in Black studies today. I highlight what some might call a watershed moment in 2012 at a Black studies conference at Northwestern University during which the training in gender and sexuality studies in Black studies, or the lack there of, was brought into focus and vociferously debated. This moment helped birth a very important article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by Stacy Patton, titled "Whose Afraid of Black Sexuality?"5 Finally, I discuss where Black studies is/needs to go from here with regard to gender and sexuality studies, particularly as it relates to the HIV epidemic in the US. With this point, I am in conversation with several scholars who are producing scholarship that advances a Black radical gender and sexual praxis, one that fearlessly confronts respectability. I enter this conversation by sharing some of my current work on Black gay sex and sexual subjectivity. My notion of a radical Black sexual praxis is indebted to the transformative scholarship of the Black lesbian feminist Cathy Cohen and her concept of deviance as resistance and M. Jacqui Alexander's erotic autonomy,6 which I reframe as sexual autonomy. I suggest that the critical sites of critique and resistance for Black studies in the academy and African American public discourse are the Black feminist and queer scholarship and on-the-ground practices that inform our work. I first entered Black studies through Black theatre studies at West Virginia University (WVU) in 1991. Throughout the 1990s, I was a board member of the National Council for Black Studies (those were my angry Black Nationalist days). Before I entered the PhD program in African Diaspora studies at UC Berkeley in 1999, I taught in Africana studies at the University of Michigan–Flint. I...

Intimate partner violence is a scourge that cripples’ families and society at large. The consequences of IPV are observed on emotional, physical, sexual, spiritual, social, and financial levels. Unfortunately, victimized women who are Church going may be forced to believe that their abuse is God's will. This arises in certain Christian homes where the Ephesians letter of Paul is utilized to force females to submit to their husbands as if they were submissive to the Lord. Here, only husbands’ views and practices relating to spiritual, financial, social, and sexual aspects are considered genuine and inspired by God. This paper aimed to explore a feminist approach to the theology of sin and forgiveness in intimate partner violence within marriage in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. To achieve this purpose this paper looked at how a feminist approach can offer a new perspective to the Anglican Church of Southern Africa’s understanding of the theology of sin and forgiveness in intimate partner violence. This paper concludes that the understanding of sin and forgiveness in Christian Churches as well as in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa leaves no option for those who find themselves as victims of intimate partner violence within marriage. Whilst forgiving is noble and is what all Christians should conform to, victims should be given a chance to combine forgiveness with ethical accountability. This paper utilized secondary data and feminist analysis as a methodology. This paper has four proposals for the Anglican Church of Southern Africa which will see intimate partner violence being mitigated among the Church’s members.

Reviewed by: The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea by Hannah Appel Gisa Weszkalnys Hannah Appel. The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 332 pp. There is a telling moment about two-thirds of the way through Appel’s monograph (200). In a reversal of roles, fostered by the intimacy of long-term fieldwork, the ethnographer becomes the (reluctant) informant. “[I]s this normal?” Appel’s friends demand to know at the end of an informal get-together during which they shared experiences of exploitation and racialized discrimination in Equatorial Guinea’s oil industry. “Does this happen in other places?” Appel’s discomfort is palpable as she scrambles for a truthful response. Are low salaries, the lack of job security, insurance, and other benefits unique to this country? How about neighboring oil producers such as Nigeria or Angola? Or is Equatorial Guinea’s story typical of an analytical “anywhere,” a story of exclusion and dispossession that applies to late liberal capitalism, generally, across the uneven geographies of the postcolonial world? The Licit Life of Capitalism sheds light on the operations of the international oil industry in Equatorial Guinea, in particular, prominent US corporations whose aim it is to extract oil for the largest profit possible while leaving an impression of benevolence, legality, and non-interference in sovereign matters. The result is deplorable. Poverty remains entrenched in the small state whose GDP per capita is among Africa’s highest. According to local activists and opposition members, since the discovery of hydrocarbons in the mid-1990s, oil companies have helped prop up a sinking authoritarian regime led by President Obiang Nguema without however assuming sociopolitical membership in the country (147). (The intriguing counterfactual of what would have happened in the absence of [End Page 551] oil is unfortunately not pursued here.) This is not simply an expression of a common resource curse, as Appel is careful to point out. Rather, concepts such as the curse have become part of a local repertoire readily deployed by Appel’s corporate interlocutors who keenly point to corrupt behavior among the Equatoguinean rank and file but seemingly have no qualms doing business with them. How is this possible? How can a country like Equatorial Guinea at once appear so exceptional, with its failings openly denounced, and be “just another oil exporting place” (21)? This is the conundrum that The Licit Life of Capitalism aims to solve. Doing so, it builds on feminist approaches and a black radical tradition in political economy to reveal the epistemological grounding and far-reaching implications of key technical infrastructures and forms of economic expertise, which together give Equatorial Guinea’s economy an acceptable and comparable shape. Each of the book’s six chapters explores one of these building blocks of liberal capitalism, from the Offshore to the Enclave, the Contract, the Subcontract, the Economy, and the Political. Together, they generate a kind of dream space in which, as Tim Mitchell has argued, widespread forms of “leakage, network, energy, control, violence, and irrationality” (2002:300) are ignored. In this view, departing from post-Callonian economic sociology, economics does not so much enact its worlds than allow capitalism to press on under a “licit” veneer. This is a story, not about how capitalism fails, but about how it works regardless of its failures. Though focused on the hydrocarbon industry, this book is about much more than oil. Its incisive contribution is to show that the circumstances observed in Equatorial Guinea reveal something about the project of capitalism at large. Appel rejects both a reductive understanding that sees oil primarily in terms of petro-dollars flooding local economies and resource-deterministic approaches that hinge on the material properties of specific substances. Instead, she highlights the extensive web of institutional and infrastructural relations centered on transnational oil firms busy managing their uncomfortable entanglement in resource-rich locales. Rather than kinship diagrams of elite families or crony networks, Appel deploys complex organigrams and graphics to render visible the “corporate archipelago” with its stupefying capacity to sidestep financial and ethical accountability. Here the financial and the industrial offshore merge in a spatialized abdication of responsibility...

This dissertation is a qualitative portraiture study that explores Black female educational leaders’ lived experiences and the way those experiences cultivate knowledge formation. This study uses Black feminist thought as a theoretical framework. Black feminist thought grounds this research study in advancing intellectual traditions, equal educational opportunities, and the ethic of personal accountability. Black feminist thought serves as an ideal theoretical framework to ground this research study because its utility in clarifying the unique way Black female educational leaders translate theory into action (Loder, 2005; Lomotey, 1993; Tillman, 2008; Renix, 2016). The findings of this research study position Black female educational leaders at the nucleus of the knowledge validation process regarding declarations of expertise on implementing relevant pedagogical practices and policies that elevate Black and marginalized students’ lived experiences. Through the creation of portraits, the actors in this research study produce a counternarrative that reflects the journey along the rivers of their lives.