Black Feminist Analysis Research Articles

“We have a lot weighing on us:” a Black Feminist analysis of U.S. newspaper quotes of Black women in year 1 of the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT This study examined Black women’s quotes in seven major U.S. newspapers during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lexis Uni and a university news database were used to locate articles from March 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021. The study sought to determine what topics Black women’s quotes most focused on and what their quotes revealed about their pandemic experiences. In total, 300 quotes from Black women about the pandemic in 119 articles were identified. Media Framing theory and Black Feminist theory were used to analyze the quotes. The first round of analysis using Media Framing revealed that health and justice topics were the most prevalent in the women’s quotes. Additionally, the frames of morality, attribution, and Strong Black Woman were most frequently used. Expert women were the most common sources. The secondary analysis using Black Feminist Theory revealed that, in the pandemic’s first year, Black women’s experiences included: identifying interlocking systems of oppression, resisting interlocking systems of oppression through self-definition, self-valuation, and activism, and struggling with Black womanhood and motherhood. This analysis reveals that while the media is a gatekeeper, Black women can use the media to increase awareness of their experiences and advocate against disparities.

Can You See Her? The Absent Presence of Black Female Subjectivity in Get Out (2017)

ABSTRACT This article investigates racial-sexual violence, and conceptualizations of Black female subjectivity as they are situated in the cinematic Black political imagination. Through a Black feminist analysis of Get Out (2017), the author argues that the film and its articulation of race in the post-Obama US fails to account for gender and sexuality by tangentially engaging Black women in its dissection of race and racism. The author contends that Black women are the absent presence in the film and utilizes theories of temporal, spatial, and material racial-sexual violence and the coupled subject invisibilities to dissect the (in)visible Black women in film.

“Maintaining hope for a better future”: An interview with Dr. Crystal Felima

AbstractWhile anthropologists have played roles speaking out for marginalized groups, formalized to combat Antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia, they have also aided in the marginalization and oppression of communities, justified colonialism, and put the communities they have studied at risk. In recent decades, anthropologists have rethought the way research is conducted, presented, and justified to reduce harm to communities. Despite these shifts, anthropological training has been slow to include activist work by women of color and other marginalized people, leaving anthropologists‐in‐training with limited concrete guidance on how to apply their anthropological lens to social justice. Addressing this gap, this article centering a Black feminist analysis offers an interview conducted between anthropology students and a professor of anthropology, giving insights into how anthropological thought can be applied to activism and advocacy. Centering Black feminism is not only important to redress historical marginalization within the discipline. By centering the lives of marginalized people within an intersectional lens, Black feminist analysis provides a mandate to rethink theoretical models, such as political ecology, the dominant frame anthropologists have used to address disasters and climate change. Also importantly, centering Black women's bodies and embodied experience uncovers the urgent necessity for self‐care during fieldwork. Prof. Felima embodies both these challenges, and offers candid advice to students, inspiring a two‐way dialogue.

Black Women’s Mothering Practices in the Canadian Racial State: Reflections on Maternal Sufferation in the Afterlife of Slavery

This article foregrounds a Black feminist analysis of a bereaved Caribbean-Canadian mother, Cecile Case Holder, whose 24-year-old son, Andre Burnett, was murdered in Toronto on 10 September 2005. The article reframes her grief through the lens of maternal sufferation to explore a distinctly Jamaican reality in a transnational context. Burnett was one of 52 people who died by gun violence in what became known as “The Year of the Gun.” In an extensive interview with Holder about the life and death of her youngest child, Toronto Star reporter Jim Rankin addresses the forms of structural violence that contributed to the conditions that led to Burnett’s demise. Reading her narrative from a Black feminist perspective, the author explores the politics of Holder’s mothering practices to keep her children safe. Her narrative is located in the scholarship on Black motherhood in the African diaspora, focused on the exigencies of the afterlife of slavery. Cecile Holder’s reality is particular to her circumstances. Yet, her experience as a Black Jamaican mother in the Canadian racial state provides a snapshot of the quotidian navigations that frame women’s parenting practices at the nexus of structural violence and the demands of the global economy unique to African-Caribbean women.

A Black Feminist Analysis of Patient Provider Concordance in Sexual Health Care

Racial disparities in gynecological health have persisted over time. Interestingly, there is a dearth of research that centers Black women’s experiences with gynecologists and even less research that uses Black feminist theory and methods. We use semi-structured interviews ( N = 39) to understand the sexual health care related experiences of Black women at a Predominately White Institution (PWI) and a Historically Black College or University (HBCU). We found that the following themes captured Black women’s experiences: (1) Feeling Ignored, (2) Having Their Intelligence Insulted, (3) Receiving Proper Help and Education, (4) Benefits of Concordance across Race and Sex Categories, (5) Discomfort Due to Sexual Taboos, (6) Perceived Medical Racism, (7) Impact of other Intersectional Identities, and (8) No Impact. Implications for enhancing experiences with sexual health care appointments and improving patient provider relationships are discussed.

Is Trust Enough? Anti-Black Racism and the Perception of Black Vaccine "Hesitancy".

In this article, I offer a preliminary exploration of the heavy lifting that the word "trust" is doing in questions about Black distrust of medicine and what, if anything, comes from it. I also offer an account of why questions like, "Why don't Black people trust vaccines?" are not only the wrong questions to ask but also insulting, and I go on to provide a Black feminist analysis of racial injustice in medicine-an analysis that does not center a notion of trust. I begin by arguing that implicit in these questions is a pathologizing of Black people-the idea that there is something wrong with Black people rather than something wrong with the conditions within which Black people exist. The sense that there is something wrong with Black people both further disadvantages them and ignores the role that health care institutions have played and continue to play in fostering a climate of distrust. I show that even attempts to explain distrust fail to adequately capture the harms committed against Black people, even if such efforts gesture at institutional responsibility. I sketch out what is important about trust but also briefly discuss why trust may not be the answer to the problems that Black people face in health care encounters.

Spitting Back at Law and Order: Donnetta Hill’s Rage in an Era of Vengeance

In this essay, I analyze the rise of vengeful populism in relation to sex workers in late twentieth-century Philadelphia as part of the popular response to the transformation in the city’s political economy. I juxtapose vengeful populism with the rage of Donnetta Hill, a Black sex worker tried and convicted for the murder of two men the state alleged were her clients. In order to appreciate the contours of rage as a fiery cascade of affect, emotion, and action in the hands of a Black woman who faced violence, economic depravation, and social ostracization, I draw on Black feminist thought, especially as located in Audre Lorde’s writing, about the generative nature of Black women’s and Black feminist rage. Rage, in the context of Black feminist analysis and in Hill’s actions preceding and after her conviction—which I classify as a spitting rage—signifies a form of power connected to self-preservation and the fierce desire to maintain one’s chosen bonds of family, kin, and community. Rage is thereafter a positive program of self-definition, resistance, and world making. I highlight the contours of Hill’s rage as a generative, if confined and constrained, force over and against the novel enclosures related to the transformation in urban geography, political economy, and politics in the decade and a half between 1980 and 1995. Though Hill’s politics remain largely illegible because of the bloody and vocal expression of her disquiet, I want to appreciate these as abolitionist resources, however constrained and impinged on by the violent context in which Hill attempted to survive and live in the wake of social and economic abandonment.

Post-Trump Intersections and “Post-Racial” Reflections: A Black Feminist Analysis of Black Women and Navigating Structured Inequality in the U.S., 2012-2017

Barely a decade ago, the 2008 and 2012 elections of President Barack Obama to the U.S. Executive Office propelled questions about whether the U.S. had overcome its racially oppressive history, through the presidency of a political centrist of African descent. The premature celebrations of racial transcendence in were countered shortly thereafter by the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency in 2016. The latter was accomplished partly by using “dog-whistle politics” to covertly (and overtly) bolster a tide of racialized political backlash to the prior administration. Ultimately, just after post-racialism dominated discussions on U.S. racial attitudes, an openly white supremacist, misogynistic national affect presently coincides with anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-Black legislation. Further, under an inflammatory and oppressive administration, everyday incarnations of inequity expand as concerns for marginalized groups. This is particularly true for those subject to multiple and simultaneous forms of structured inequality – of interest to this project are Black women. In this project, I employ twenty-one semi-structured interviews with Black American women aged 22-50 drawn between 2011/2012 and in 2017. Building on earlier Black feminist theory, this article captures Black women’s lived experiences navigating racism, classism, and sexism during the aforementioned political transition. Like many other Black feminist theorists, I argue that Black women are subject to, and still contend with these intersecting structures. Further, in line with other Black feminist approaches, the project elucidates ways shared lived experiences provide windows into everyday manifestations of structured inequality.

‘That’s Jean Lowe’: On Being a Black Canadian Female Track Athlete in 1940s Toronto

From the late 1930s through to the 1940s, Lowe remained a constant in the city’s sports pages. Yet, in 1946, she moved to the Southern United States to complete her education and did not reside in Canada again. Using Toronto’s White press media reports on Lowe, the present Black feminist analysis nuances a racialized woman’s tortuous journey to success, demonstrating that no amount of public acclaim could obfuscate raciality. Indeed, praise existed alongside othering discourse. Most prominent in this narrative is the notion that, no matter how valued an individual may have been as an integral member of a squad, they were and remained a ‘Black athlete’. This had sociocultural implications and tinted even the acclaims of her most enthusiastic supporters. Lowe also allows a juxtaposition of Canadian and American Black/White relational contexts. Her departure from her hometown is framed by conflicting, yet defining, characteristics of a Canadian society which nurtured an image of tolerance and openness, while firmly endorsing the colour line. Lowe’s athletic biography underscores that locating marginalized peoples within Western sport history is necessary to appreciate how individuals with multilayered subordinate identities fit into, reorganize, and disrupt White/Euro centric grand historical narratives of sport, nation, and settlement.

Trans Studies and Resistance in an Academy Based on Masculinity Contest Culture

AbstractTrans studies is a burgeoning and global interdisciplinary field of scholarship. Although trans people in general continue to remain on the margins of the academy in Canada and the United States, some of the trans scholars who contribute to the field of trans studies are in continuing faculty (tenure-track and tenured) positions. Trans women in general and trans women and trans feminine people of color, in particular, however, are particularly underrepresented in this labor pool. The author brings together a theoretical pastiche consisting of a Black feminist analysis of patriarchy as a layered phenomenon, trans necropolitics, and a masculinity contest culture paradigm to trouble this limit to representation within trans studies in Canada and the United States.

Locating black feminist resistance through diaspora and post-diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short stories

ABSTRACTMigrating to the US is transformative in the short stories in Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! and Chimamanda Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck. The currents of Blackness, gender and class alter their characters' experiences of the world, shaped by the global flows of migration taking place under neoliberal capitalism. This essay explores the nuanced and conflicting ways diaspora and post-diaspora spaces can facilitate Black feminist resistance in Danticat's ‘Caroline's Wedding' and Adichie's ‘Imitation'. I offer a Black feminist analysis, paying attention to the literary body as the site where tensions are dramatised. My reading of Danticat's and Adichie’s short stories leads to a progressive reconsideration of diaspora.

A gathering of the three r’s: Resistance, refusal, and refuge

A gathering of the three r’s: Resistance, refusal, and refuge Leigh Patel1 I recall several times when my parents were headed out to have dinner or join a catered dinner party at one of father’s colleagues’ homes. I was most mesmerized and confused by my mother’s actions of ‘getting ready.’ She often wore a still-elegant silk ivory pant-suit with black polka dots. She would be ‘ready’ early and would paint her nails, always cut short because that would only get in the way of her sizeable labor in our home. She would blow on her freshly painted nails softly because there were just a few moments in which she was preparing to step across a door path, not just our home’s, but more significantly, across the threshold into of the all-white middle and upper middle class hosts and their guests. She would not speak to them of the work she might have done earlier in the day, including cooking for a family of five and keeping the household running to financially stable and navigating the bureaucracy to sponsor many relatives for resident visas in the United States. On the few occasions in which I had seen my mother at “company picnics,” I saw her veer towards the quiet side. The popular culture references abounded, but only a few made sense to her in such a way that she might recognize the tone. Those just-painted nails did the job just fine as she sat, for the most part, with her hands folded, and speaking almost exclusively at the welcome and thanking the hosts for the dinner party. Her painted nails were enough action for her to take; she did not seek to be part of the dinner party banter. I first encountered fugitivity, as so many others have, in my own home, in my own community. There was a dominant culture and language to be performed and articulated so that allegedly, our brown skin would through the myth of meritocracy upend the project of coloniality (Wynter, 2003). Who held these hopes and who would not be so attached to those hopes became the small moments in life where I witnessed, quite clearly, the subtle yet distinct ways of being with and at once agentively outside a dominant code and culture. The mythology of meritocracy conjoins with individualism to communicate that validation cannot be attempted without rendering other as lesser, good-trying, well-kept, but not of that culture. While so many migrants traverse this terrain in anything but a straight line, it remains territory to be traveling. Accent, phenotype, clothing some desiring a whiteness that will not include them and others desiring just enough whiteness so that they still know themselves and their children in their home codes of love and values. In the collection of articles in this volume of The High School Journal, we are offered three different yet connected articles of not just what it means but also how it feels to engage in learning and teaching that is engaged in fugitivity, in refusal, and in relation out of necessity. [End Page 137] In one of the articles, Player, Coles and Gonzalez Ybarra, connect to the long-standing practices of literacy as fugitive practice. In the United States, Black and Indigenous peoples’ languages were systematically destroyed, while migrants joined these populations in being told that how they pronounced words was an indication of lack of intelligence. As Player, Cole, and Gonzalez Ybarra point out, the Black feminist analysis in Combahee River Collective’s statement addressing intersectionality is named appropriately out of reverence for Harriet Tubman. In 1719, Tubman led a two-pronged attack via the Combahee River not to shed blood but to provide passage from bondage for over 800 enslaved Black peoples. Tubman, who had suffered traumatic brain injury as a young person, made a way, through sound and rhythm to convince justifiably reluctant enslaved people to board ships with Union soldiers. She would, throughout her life, share with people that her wound from an anvil being thrown at her head provided both difficulties and trances in which she saw herself come into being as a militant freedom...

Developing a Black Feminist Analysis for Mental Health Practice: From Theory to Praxis

The use of a Black feminist therapeutic perspective represents an intellectual and practical effort to use racial consciousness to place the authentic reality of Black women at the center of the therapeutic process. From this space, participants formulate the therapeutic assessment, treatment plan, and goals. The ethos of therapy is shaped toward one that is more self-reflective about the limitations of one’s knowledge and ultimately more acknowledging of diversity. This article outlines a blueprint for the use of Black feminism in therapy by providing culturally congruent recommendations for therapists to develop their skills in practice with Black women.

The Black feminist spatial imagination and an intersectional environmental justice

ABSTRACTStarting with seminal work from Katherine McKittrick and Katherine McKittrick and the late Clyde Woods, this paper compares and contrasts articulations of justice as espoused by Black feminism, ecofeminism, and the movement for environmental justice. The utilization of an intersectional genealogical approach allows for examination of the ways in which these movements might serve as the ideological bases for a Black feminist spatial imagination and an intersectional environmental justice. A Black feminist spatial imagination is an orientation that accounts for the merger of frames around race, gender, and ecology; it serves as a unique departure from conventional Black feminist analysis by its particular attention to the construct of space in Black feminist epistemology. Analysis reveals that manifestos engage similar strategies around boundedness, an identification among a collective identity and the subject of reproductive justice and liberation as wresting control and self-determination of physical bodies. The final task is an outline of essential tenets for a singular notion of justice of a Black feminist spatial imagination which incorporates the spirit of all of three manifestos and expands current environmental justice discourse to include those ‘who know no one knows’ while highlighting Black women’s agency in environmentally degraded environments.

Damn, I Love the Strippers! A Black Feminist Analysis of Rihanna’s “Pour It Up”

This article argues that Rihanna’s music video for “Pour It Up” disrupts the grotesque/hypersexual dichotomy regarding Black women’s bodies in the popular/mainstream music industry by constructing exotic dancers as multi-dimensional artists and athletes, not always already objects lacking autonomy and self-determination or silenced bodies reduced to their appearance. Additionally, the article argues that the video subverts the idea that exotic dancing is only significant as a consumer commodity, as well as the idea that constructions of Black exotic dancers must always perpetuate discourses that denigrate Black women.

Repositioning childhood lived experiences within adult contexts: A Black feminist analysis of childhood/s regulation in early childhood care and education

Children have been governed within early childhood care and education in ways that would be heavily scrutinized if the same situations occurred within adult contexts. As such, in this article, we utilize Black feminist perspectives to interrogate and (re)examine childhood regulatory spaces. We provide readers with storied narratives that demonstrate how younger human beings are violated, controlled, and disciplined. To emphasize these points, we describe these same childhood experiences as if they were happening to adults. Examples of situations interrogated include everyday childhood routines, the use of assessment to determine ability grouping, and implementation of classroom management systems. Theorizing the narratives with a Black feminist lens inspires the rethinking of everyday (sometimes unrealized) regulation of younger human beings in early childhood care and education.

Selected Bibliography

Selected Bibliography Skyler D. Gordon Primary Sources Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Clash of Colour: Indians and American Negroes.” 1936. In W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line, edited by Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson, 69–73. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind.” AME Church Review 17, no. 2 (1900): 95–110. Hunton, Addie W. and Kathryn M. Johnson. Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Eagle Press, 1920. Tate, Merze. “Decadence of the Hawaiian Nation and Proposals to Import a Negro Labor Force.” The Journal of Negro History 47, no. 4 (October 1962): 248–63. ———. Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1968. ———. “Review: A Personal Report on an American Negro in India.” The Journal of Negro Education 24, no. 2 (Spring 1955): 130–32. ———. “Review: A Report on India.” The Journal of Negro Education 25, no. 4 (Autumn 1956): 412–13. ———. “Review: Imperialism in Disguise.” The Journal of Negro Education 23, no. 4 (Autumn 1954): 447–49. ———. “Review: Life with the Nehrus.” The Journal of Negro Education 23, no. 4 (Autumn 1954): 443–44. ———. “Review: Somaliland Under Italy’s Heel.” The Journal of Negro Education 21, no. 4 (Autumn 1952): 497–99. ———. “Review: The White Man’s Pan African Idea.” The Journal of Negro Education 13, no. 1 (Winter 1944): 76–79. ———. “Review: Who Are South Africans?” The Journal of Negro Education 23, no. 4 (Autumn 1954): 444–47. [End Page 208] ———. “Slavery and Racism as Deterrent to the Annexation of Hawaii, 1854–1855.” The Journal of Negro History 47, no. 1 (January 1962): 1–18. ———. “The War Aims of World War I and World War II and Their Relation to the Darker Peoples of the World.” The Journal of Negro Education 12, no. 3 (Summer 1943): 521–32. Tate, Merze and Fidele Fay. “Slavery and Racism in South Pacific Annexations.” The Journal of Negro History 50, no. 1 (January 1965): 1–21. Tobias, Channing H. “World Implications of Race.” Presentation at the Jubilee Meeting of the Conference of Foreign Mission Boards in Canada and in the United States, Chicago, January 3–7, 1944. In Report of the Jubilee Meeting of the Conference of Foreign Mission Boards in Canada and in the United States, 187–91. New York: Foreign Missions Conference of North America, 1944. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1926. Newspapers and Periodicals The Afro-American Sentinel [Omaha, Nebraska]. 1896. The Cleveland Gazette. 1896–1914. The Colored American Magazine. 1905–1909. The Crisis. 1914–1919. The New York Age. 1909. The New York Times. 1896. The Times [London, England]. 1895–1896. The Voice of the Negro. 1905. The Washington Bee [Washington, D. C.]. 1895. Articles Adair, Zakiya. “Respectable Vamp: A Black Feminist Analysis of Florence Mills’ Career in Early Vaudville Theater.” Journal of Africa American Studies 17, no. 1 (March 2013): 7–21. Allen, Ernest, Jr. “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943.” Gateway Heritage (Fall 1995): 38–55. Allen, Ernest, Jr. “When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Darker Races’: Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism.” The Black Scholar 24 (Winter 1994): 23–46. Angelo, Ann-Marie. “The Black Panthers in London, 1967–1972: A Diasporic Struggle Navigates the Black Atlantic.” Radical History Review 103 (Winter 2009): 17–35. Bair, Barbara. “Pan-Africanism as Process: Adelaide Casely Hayford, Garveyism, and the Cultural Roots of Nationalism.” In Imagining Home: [End Page 209] Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, edited by Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley. London: Verso, 1994. ———. “True Women, Real Men: Garvey, Ideology, and Social Roles in the Garvey Movement.” In Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, edited by Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, 154–66. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bayly, C. A., Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyer, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed. “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History.” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1441...

Complicating the triangle of race, class and state: the insights of black feminists

This article complicates Wacquant's three-sided schema of race, class and state by adding a focus on gender, the experiences of black women, and a black feminist intersectional analysis. Welfare retrenchment in the USA relied on stereotypes of black women, especially the ‘Welfare Queen’, that were at once sexist and racist and implemented policies targeted specifically at them as the vilified beneficiaries of state largess. Attributing social inequality to black women's childbearing furthers race, gender and class oppression in the context of neo-liberalism by legitimizing intensified deprivation and surveillance. A focus on the regulation of black mothers brings to the fore the child welfare system as a critical institution of social supervision, on a par with workfare and prisonfare. A black feminist analysis of the intersection of welfare, prison and foster care in the systemic punishment of black mothers and of strategies for resistance illuminates how racism and neo-liberalism operate together in the USA.

Black/Female/Body Hypervisibility and Invisibility

Through an interdisciplinary lens, this paper proposes two concepts for Black feminist analysis (visibility and hypervisibility) to augment feminist leisure scholarship. We examine questions of invisibility in relation to the systematic oppression that besets Black women in society, and in the academy, through their absence as research participants and researchers. This raises a new sense of invisible marginality that may exist in scholarship, and otherwise. With hypervisibility in body politics, Black women are represented in stereotyped and commodified ways throughout leisure spaces and scholarship. The critique of historical and contemporary representations of hyper-visibility is conducted through representations of Black women's bodies. We conclude with specific implications as Black feminism provides a culturally congruent epistemology to advance the field and augment third wave feminism.

Who speaks for Precious? A black feminist analysis

The intraracial debate about the gender, class, and sexuality politics in the movie “Precious” has received little critical attention beyond popular media outlets. This essay focuses on the black patriarchal perspectives within this debate through a black feminist critical lens and considers why such perspectives continue to have political capital in black spaces. Under scrutiny also are the ways in which some black feminist-identified women scholars reproduce similar patriarchal perspectives even as they repudiate the white male hegemonic institutions that stigmatize and scapegoat black women in poverty. My contention is that “Precious” has a black feminist agenda that, although flawed in many ways, exposes the social erasure of poor black women's humanity and plight. As this phenomenon of erasure relies, in part, upon black men's intraracial gender blindness, I call upon black feminist-identified men to take the lead in supporting the film and opening up discussions about black men's roles in perpetuating black women's suffering.