Anti-racist Feminist Research Articles

Envisioning the Future of Intersectional Anti-Racist Feminism in Psychology

Although there has been a focus on intersectionality theory in feminist studies broadly and within the field of psychology specifically, there have been increased calls for an explicitly anti-racist focus within intersectional feminist psychology. The purpose of this article is to articulate what an intersectional anti-racist feminism in psychology looks like in terms of research, clinical practice, and advocacy. First, we provide some context for our focus on articulating an intersectional anti-racist feminism and our hope for this special issue, particularly in the current sociopolitical moment. Next, we share our positionalities as feminist leaders during the impetus of this special issue and share a brief herstory of intersectionality and the Society for the Psychology of Women (SPW). Then, we envision the future of intersectional anti-racist feminism with a focus on coalition-building and use the Combahee River Collective as a foundational example for the way forward in both theory and praxis. We end by briefly highlighting the series of articles that encompass this special issue which showcase scholarship, clinical practice, and advocacy.

Críticas ao lugar de fala mantém interdição às narrativas de mulheres negras

In this article, I resume the concept of ‘standpoint,’ a notion mainly defended by black feminisms in Brazil, against the persistent denial by the hegemonic media of rejecting structural racism in their news productions. In this context, the criticisms, mostly limited to identity arguments or reverse silencing, disregard the historical absence of racial content in the narratives published in mainstream media, thus nullifying a racial ‘standpoint.’ As an example, I note the low number of black columnists that exercise their standpoint in print and digital media and thus interfere in public opinion. I offer a critical analysis of how the discourses of black and anti-racist feminisms are ‘cancelled’ creating a negotiation threshold that does not exceed the greater presence of black journalists, mainly on Brazilian TV, which is a novelty despite barriers.

Feminist Theories and Activist Practices in Organization Studies

This piece reflects on the untapped potential of feminist theories and activist practices to address vital organizational issues and societal challenges such as inequality, sustainability and care for the environment. While we recognize and briefly review the progress on gender issues in organization studies achieved over the last decades, our focus is on identifying the critical and underutilized strands of feminist thinking offering fresh responses to these problems, including decolonial feminism, feminist ethics of care, posthuman feminism and ecofeminism. By way of illustrating our theoretical arguments, we discuss how five different papers recently published in Organization Studies address some of these issues, including the uncovering of hidden entanglements of power and performativity in a global bank and in the beauty industry by paying attention to body and affect, the underrepresented struggles of women in the Global South as they disrupt gendered practices through consciousness raising, contesting gender regimes at organizational social events and, finally, how the social media operate at the intersection of gender and occupation. We conclude by outlining future directions for research as we discuss the contributions of anti-racist feminist theory and decolonial feminist practice to completing the unfinished project of social change while making our scholarship more reflexive and inclusive.

Stories of Antiracist Gay/Lesbian Gender Alliance: Articulating Intersectional Solidarity in the 1980s

This article shows how in the early 1980s, Black and White Men Together (BWMT), an interracial group of antiracist gay men, constructed relations of connection with antiracist feminist lesbians of color. My analysis details how BWMT engaged in storytelling through newsletters, reporting their creation of relations of connection with Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbians and constructing these relations as a multidimensional gender alliance involving important processes of creating networks of reciprocal solidarity, forging political alignment, and creating intentional spaces of camaraderie to sustain intersectional solidarity. This research substantively expands our understanding of U.S. LGBTQ+ intersectional movement(s) activism with the concept of multidimensional gender alliance and analytically expands our understandings of intersectional solidarity.

“Doing inequality, doing intersectionality”: intersectionality as threshold concept for studying inequalities in entrepreneurial activity

PurposeThis paper intervenes in existing literature on entrepreneurship and inequalities by proposing a novel reframing of intersectionality as a threshold concept, an important idea that enables us to deepen and progress the understanding of complex subjectivities.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from education studies, intersectionality is explored through the five key features of threshold concepts: (1) transformative, (2) irreversible, (3) integrative, (4) bounded and (5) troublesome. We offer a set of reflection questions for what we call “doing intersectionality.”FindingsWe develop a metacritique of the way in which the concept of intersectionality has thus far been treated in feminist theory and applied in entrepreneurship studies – namely, as the culmination of thinking about difference and inequality, decoupled from its roots in collectivist analysis and Black and anti-racist feminism. The paper invites scholars of entrepreneurial inequalities to both engage and look beyond an intersectional lens to better elucidate the range of historically emergent social hierarchies and systems of power that shape their phenomena of interest.Originality/valueThrough reframing intersectionality as a threshold concept, this paper challenges entrepreneurship researchers to view intersectionality as a foundational starting point for the conceptualisation of complex interactions of social structures, and the structural inequality and power relationships present within their research, rather than a destination.

Crossing the Borders and Challenging the Boundaries of White Feminism in Italy: Situated Rearticulations of Difference and the Impact of Antiracist Feminisms

Crossing the Borders and Challenging the Boundaries of White Feminism in Italy: Situated Rearticulations of Difference and the Impact of Antiracist Feminisms

Anti-Racist Pedagogy as Activism: Cultivating Radical Healing and Liberation among Asian American Counseling and Psychology Students

The links between experiences of discrimination and mental health consequences have been well established among Asian Americans. Since the pandemic, anti-Asian racism and xenophobia surged, and the negative outcomes can be severe and long-lasting. Asian American mental health professionals can play an important role in addressing the mental health needs in the Asian American community. Feminist psychologists have long criticized the oppressive nature of traditional Western mental health practices. Strategies to promote liberation and radical healing among Asian American students are especially needed, given the challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that their needs are often overlooked due to the model-minority stereotype. This article offers critical consciousness–informed pedagogy as a form of anti-racist feminist practice to cultivate radical healing and liberation for Asian American students. Anti-racist teaching strategies include: modeling by counseling and psychology educators, challenging internalized oppression and teaching accurate history, building community and collectivism, cultivating solidarity with other communities, and supporting student activism.

Conclusion to Anti-Racist Feminist Practice, Advocacy, and Activism Special Issue

In this special issue, we sought to expand and extend the work of feminist and womanist therapists, educators, and activists beyond the Association for Women in Psychology 2021 conference—uplifting ongoing work toward anti-racism and liberation within a dual pandemic context. Contributors to this special issue detailed their work and recommendations in these domains across levels of intervention from the interpersonal to the structural. In this concluding article, we synthesize the throughlines of healing and action in contributor narratives and offer our final thoughts to advance anti-racist work taking place across a number of settings.

Towards Antiracist Feminist Ethics of Care: Interrogating White Apathy in Women-Led Organizations

Towards Antiracist Feminist Ethics of Care: Interrogating White Apathy in Women-Led Organizations

“White feminism ruins the party again”: a case study of the rise and fall of the My Favorite Murder Facebook fan group

ABSTRACT This paper employs digital ethnographic methods to explore the Facebook fan group for the popular podcast My Favorite Murder. We argue that the My Favorite Murder podcast and Facebook group, while providing a potentially unique feminist online space for its members in its early days, quickly devolved into a toxic space rife with conflict and ultimately destroyed by white-centred feminism and white supremacy. We explore failed gatekeeping practices in relation to other Facebook podcast fan groups that have met a similar demise. Finally, we question whether truly inclusive anti-racist feminist spaces can exist in capitalistic models of media production and consumption.

Introduction to Anti-Racist Feminist Practice, Advocacy, and Activism Special Issue

This special issue draws together Black feminist, womanist, mujerista, and anti-racist approaches to theory and praxis. Authors provide recommendations and guidance toward liberatory approaches to psychology, therapy, activism, and healing. The collection builds upon presentations and conversations that took place at the Association for Women in Psychology 2021 virtual conference about how to best work toward a more just, anti-racist, and liberatory world as feminist and womanist therapists in increasingly difficult social contexts. The articles provide important herstories, testimonies, analyses, and promising actions. Together, these works invite readers to join together in imagining and enacting radically inclusive paths to healing and collective liberation.

Decolonial approaches to laïcité as a mode to re-think contemporary Islamophobia

ABSTRACT Over the last decade, we have witnessed the reinforcement of laïcité as a mode of governance, which increasingly focuses on France’s Muslim citizens. However, rather than argue that the reinforcement of laïcité is a response to a series of Islamist terror attacks since 2015 this article will consider the historical formations of political secularism in modern France and argue that we should take more seriously the historical and conceptual relationship between laïcité and coloniality. The first part of the article will problematize three ideal-type conceptualizations of laïcité from a decolonial perspective. The second part of the article will consider the historical contexts, which have influenced contemporary understandings of laïcité by examining broader processes of colonization and secularization during the 19th century. This approach recognizes that the history of laïcité as a socio-political process predates its juridical expression in the law of 1905 which separated the state and the churches. Finally, in part three, I will outline some ways in which a decolonized conceptualization of laïcité can be an illuminating analytical tool in relation to Islamophobia and political conflicts surrounding the emergence of Muslim and anti-racist feminism via a discussion of the association Lallab.

Résistance numérique à la haine des Asiatiques-Américains pendant la Covid-19 : Étude de la photographie et de l'art sur Instagram

In this research, I study the digital resistance to Asian-American hate, isolation, alienation, and ‘othering’ visibilized during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21 in the Global North. Specifically, I draw attention to the role of personal and artistic representations of Asian female bodies that perform both a resistance to hate, in the context of the pandemic, and an affirmation of ethnic and racial heritage and belonging of the self in North America. Through the engagement with #stopasianhate and #haterisavirus hashtags on Instagram, I uncover the rejection of historic and contemporary racial and gendered violence, harassment, xenophobia, and othering that emerges through visual activism and personal and artistic performativity online. I focus on the interplay between body politics and anti-racist feminist digital activism in order to understand how performativity of the self through photography and art can empower Asian-American female bodies.

O Poder de Nomear Intelectuais Antirracistas Feministas Brasileiras em Plataformas Digitais

Abstract This article examines the practice of naming anti-racist women intellectuals as a form of feminist digital activism in Brazil, in tweets referencing Carolina Maria de Jesus and Lélia González. The analysis combines the tools of feminist decolonial digital humanities, intellectual history and what has been called “distant reading”, in order to study the act of naming as a set of techno-discursive practices. It addresses the transnational circulation of tweets, hashtag emergence and relevance, users most frequently mentioned and the topics with greater traction in social networks. The main conclusion is that digital practices of naming Brazilian anti-racist feminist intellectuals on Twitter are powerful tools for creating and mobilising social meanings that: (1) subvert global and intellectual canons and hierarchies; 2) take advantage of the technical possibilities of digital platforms, but instead of privileging advertising and self-promotion, they go against platform determinism and stress an egalitarian logic; and (3) form and maintain collective identities and solidify counterpublics.

Realizing the social mandate of work-integration social enterprises through an anti-racist feminist praxis and spatiality?

Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) have emerged as an important labour market intermediary in the contemporary period, helping those who face multiple intersecting barriers to find work. Interpreter Services Toronto is one WISE that provides training for immigrant women living in Toronto, Canada. In this paper, we draw upon detailed open-ended interviews to explore the joint economic-social mandate of the organization, and its incorporation of an anti-racist feminist praxis. Interpreter Services Toronto develops skills and secures employment. It also creates a safe space for immigrant women, advancing an ethics of care that supports the social reproduction of immigrant women. While the organization is constrained by neoliberal imperatives, our objective in this paper is to explore the everyday experiences of people involved in this organization. We examine the tensions and contradictions the organization confronts, but also the subjectivities and coalitions they form, and the possibilities opened up by an alternative ethics and praxis.

Gender, Race, and the French Imperial Republic

Gender, Race, and the French Imperial Republic Amelia H. Lyons (bio) Nimisha Barton, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 306 pp. ISBN 9781501749636 (cl); 9781501749681 (ebook). Françoise Vergès, The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism. Translated by Kaiama L. Glover. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 184 pp. ISBN 9781478008521 (cl); 9781478009412 (pb); 9781478008866 (ebook). Sarah J. Zimmerman, Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2020. 318 pp. ISBN 9780821424223 (cl); 9780821424476 (pb); 9780821440674 (pdf). When French people of color raised their voices as part of the global Black Lives Matter movement and brought increased attention to endemic institutional racism in France, President Emmanuel Macron responded by blaming foreign influences, especially "Anglo-Saxon traditions based on a different history, which is not ours," for fomenting separatism that led to the spread of "Islamo-leftism" and the corruption of French society. He worried that "children of the Republic," who had never experienced colonialism and whose parents and grandparents had lived in France, were being tempted to revisit "post-colonial or anti-colonial discourse."1 In short, the French government argued that scholars like those whose works are being reviewed here are to blame for putting "radical" and "activist" ideas that intend "to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the enemy" into the minds of French people of color.2 This view that racism is not a French problem has roots in French history and in a range of contemporary issues that infantilize, minimize, and deny the agency of French people of color. Moreover, it assumes that the traumas of colonialism, decolonization, neocolonialism, and systemic, institutional racism are somehow not French. It pretends that the French are unaware, until told by anglophone scholars, that their own family histories have a fraught relationship with the French imperial republic. The French do not need to read these works to understand their own experiences; nevertheless, academic work plays an important role in analyzing the connections between the past and the present. Recent publications by Françoise Vergès, Sarah Zimmerman, and Nimisha Barton are excellent examples of the kind of academic work that President Marcon and others malign. All three provide careful, scholarly research that underscores the connections between racism and the management of women's bodies. Together these works help [End Page 156] us to understand that the tenets of French republicanism, with its claims to secularism and universality, are not separate from, but part of an interconnected history of France that includes systemic racial and gender discrimination and violence. We need this scholarship, as Kaiama Glover states in her thoughtful translator's introduction to Vergès's book, because for most of white France "the concept of race is perceived as incommensurable with progressive discourse. Race per se does not exist in France" (xiv). These books are part of a growing body of scholarship intended to force France to grapple with its difficult history and to demand that the French accept race as a constituent element of French history, society, and national identity. In her recently translated book, The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism, Françoise Vergès, a French, antiracist feminist and public intellectual, intentionally disrupts the contention that a critical examination of the intersections of systemic racial and gender discrimination is both foreign to and intends to corrupt the French people. Vergès's goal is to expose, through the politics and history of reproduction, how French colonial power continues to function. To do so, she examines the largely forgotten case of French doctors' regulation and violation of women's bodies in the department of Réunion for over a decade, mainly in the 1960s. As she puts it, by studying the "management of women's wombs," her book serves as "an act of historical reparation for the raced, despised, and exploited women of France's overseas departments" (3). Vergès begins with a history of the violent conquest of Réunion, followed by the story of Doctor Moreau and others who used French fears about overpopulation to justify aborting and sterilizing thousands of pregnant Réunionese women without...

Citizenship as spiritual practice: the role of spiritualty in youth activism

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to explore citizenship practices among racialized youth in a ‘priority’ neighborhood in Toronto. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research, this paper examines an under-researched element of youth citizenship and belonging; the role of spirituality. Informed by the works of anti-racist feminists and Indigenous scholars, this paper examines how youth draw on spirituality in their daily lives to cope with everyday oppressions. For these youth, spirituality intersects with their art and informs their sense of activism or what they refer to as ‘artivism’. This paper argues that spirituality can inform a type of citizenship that questions systemic injustices while simultaneously acknowledging the importance of self-care. It produces a form of inclusionary politics steeped in spiritual practices.

The Personal is Political and so is Discomfort: Intersectional, Anti-Racist Praxis in Feminist Criminology

The phrase “the personal is political” is commonly associated with 1970s feminists, for whom it denoted the relationship between personal experiences and broad systems of inequality. However, considering bell hooks’ argument that feminists have lost the power analysis fundamental to the relationship between the personal and the political, we assess the relevance of the notion the ‘personal is political,’ to our work as feminist criminologists. Building on hooks’ insight, we argue there is a need to take up an intersectional and anti-racist feminist praxis that centers multiple forms of oppression in scholarship and seeks greater accountability for sexism, racism, and transphobia both within and beyond academic spaces. We elaborate our ideas by, first, outlining the intellectual history and evolution of feminist criminology. Second, we examine how the relationship between the personal and political figures in the work of minoritized scholars. Third, we discuss the necessary discomforts associated with working towards an intersectional and antiracist feminist criminology.

Reflections on Antiracist Feminist Pedagogy and Organizing: This Bridge Called My Back, Forty Years Later

Reflections on Antiracist Feminist Pedagogy and Organizing: This Bridge Called My Back, Forty Years Later

Naming Performativity on Twitter

This article examines naming as a discursive performance deployed by antiracist feminists in Brazil. I analyze tweets referencing the names of three Black Brazilian women intellectuals: Marielle Franco, Lélia González and Djamila Ribeiro, seeking to unearth the way in which their names help to build counterpublic spaces of resistance involving notions of citizenship, belonging and democracy. Using platform studies and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis as a theoretical frame, I perform different operations of computational textual analysis to map most frequent users referenced and hashtags used, as well as most relevant topics. I conclude that naming grants a powerful role in building counterpublics’ identities, helping to constitute alternative intellectual traditions in Brazil. Linking a social media post with a name to a collective mobilization serves to establish and maintain cultural identity, combining ephemerality with a continuing legacy.