Black Feminist Approach Research Articles

Learning from Within: Life-Affirming Practices and Third Spaces Created by and for Incarcerated Youth

Grounded in a Black feminist approach (Collins, 2022; Evans-Winters, 2019), in this article, I weave together the personal and professional to share what I have learned as a Black Latina educator, researcher, and abolitionist who for the past twelve years has worked in carceral spaces alongside numerous men, women, youth, and gender expansive people. I bridge what I have learned from theories of the flesh (Madison, 1993; Moraga & Anzaldúa 2021) to what I have learned as a researcher who works with incarcerated youth and use it as a lens to better understand and study youth confinement. Drawing on data from a three-year critical ethnographic study focused on teaching, learning, and identity development in a juvenile detention center, this article explores young people’s experiences living and learning while confined. Using three distinct vignettes, this article touches on the lives of Black and Mexican heritage youth who at the time were detained in a juvenile detention center and the life-affirming practices and spaces they created in response to their dehumanization. Although youth were in a state of unfreedom (Gilmore, 2008), many refused their dehumanization and developed life-affirming strategies and third spaces for themselves and others.

Can’t Just Send Our Children Out: Intensive Motherwork and Experiences of Black Motherhood

AbstractRace and racism play an integral role in shaping mothering practices. Specifically, motherwork examines how Black mothers use strategies and practices to shield children from, as well as help them navigate through, experiences of racism. The necessity of these mothering practices may be fundamental in how motherhood is experienced for Black women. This study used qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews with 35 predominantly middle-class Black mothers of children in adolescence and young/emerging adulthood. A grounded theoretical and Black feminist approach was taken to analyze data. Black mothers take on numerous laborious and exhaustive strategies to shield their children from racism through what I theorize as the concept of intensive motherwork. I define intensive motherwork as the exhaustive efforts and effects of Black mothers protecting and empowering their children and themselves in the face of anti-Black racism. Intensive motherwork can be seen in three broad themes: (1) protective mothering, (2) resistance mothering, and (3) encumbered mothering. This work expands current discourse on Black families by highlighting the overlap between the intensive nature of Black women’s mothering, the laborious practices that are deployed, and the role of race and racism on Black women’s mothering experience.

Resistance and Gendered Racism: Middle-Class Black Women's Experiences Navigating Reproductive Health Care Systems

A core issue in reproductive justice concerns how racism impacts reproductive health outcomes for Black women. However, the intersectional experiences of middle-class Black women navigating racism in reproductive health systems have not been fully captured in psychological literature. By utilizing a Black feminist approach to qualitative inquiry, this study situates the psychological dynamics behind middle-class Black women's interpretations of and reactions to gendered racism in reproductive settings within the historical context of slavery and its aftermath. The data analysis of 12 interviews captures how middle-class Black women reflect on their interactions with gynecologists, narrate their anticipation of gendered racism, and interpret and respond to experiencing gendered racism. Findings from this study suggest that gendered racism is a haunting of embodied gynecological trauma that maps onto the historical legacy of slavery. This study offers psychology an empirical and analytical framework for moving forward with its conceptualizations of how race, gender, and class intersect in service of reproductive justice. Results from this study can be used by clinicians to guide their clients towards healing gendered-racist-related stress, as well as medical schools to educate obstetricians and gynecologists on how to provide anti-racist care to their Black patients. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/03616843231168113 .

Antiracism Approaches Through an Outsider-Within Positionality: Making Black Women’s Lives Matter in Art Education

This study investigated the narratives and racial experiences of Black women K–12 art educators navigating the White field of art education. Drawing from a Black feminist outsider-within positionality framework, their shared stories reveal how Black women art educators are unprivileged insiders within their schools and outsiders to a social system that privileges White people as the dominant group in art education. Outsider-within positionality is foundational in providing a platform for revealing the exclusion of Black women’s identities in White spaces. A Black feminist approach to narrative inquiry is a crucial methodology in identifying why Black women matter in art education. Their interviews expose the experiences of racist obstacles that hinder their progress as art educators. As a result, approaches to implementing gender equity with antiracist strategies are presented for an inclusive and safe environment for Black women art educators and create a critical dialogue in art education at large.

Serving in Black spaces of the institution: A decolonial Black feminist autoethnography

abstract Black women serving in Black Culture Centres (BCCs) are often tasked with cultivating a safe space for Black students (Young 1986), yet may experience their own gendered racism from the same institution which they are supporting students through (Jenkins et al. 2021). As such, a decolonial Black feminist authoethnographic approach allowed me to be self-reflexive in examining day-to-day challenges as a leader; including the desire to incorporate feminist ethics of care such as othermothering into developing the safe space for Black students, while navigating the pervasiveness of racism and sexism experienced in the institution. Situating my experience as a tension, I seek to contribute to the research by examining how Black women BCC directors can embrace othermothering while also resisting capitalistic expectations of labour through a decolonial Black feminist approach to leadership. Findings from this study contribute to the emerging scholarship exploring the experiences of Black women in BCCs and provide an authentic understanding of the day-to-day work. Finally, strategies are provided for Black women directors who seek to incorporate a decolonial Black feminist praxis into their leadership as BCC directors.

Chaucer's Wenches

Abstract: This essay analyzes the eighteen occurrences of the word wenche in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and argues that the idea of the "wenche" persists today, most notably as implicit justification for the rescinding of the constitutional right to an abortion in the US Supreme Court's monumental decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (June 2022). It takes a Black feminist approach by situating Chaucer's wenches in the context of Black women's history and tracing how the word's resonances continued their pernicious work of making meaning and shaping material realities long after the Middle Ages. It first gives a careful history of wench 's origins and accretion of meaning from the early to the late Middle Ages, paying particular attention to its relationship with the Latin ancilla . It uses the Wycliffite Bible as a lens to explore the term's rapidly accruing connotations of youth, servitude, femininity, and transgressive sexuality, and discusses the connections between "wenche" and reproduction in An Alphabet of Tales and Geoffrey the Grammarian's Promptorium parvulorum before tracing its symbolic freight across the Canterbury Tales and pointing to its underlying role in struggles for reproductive justice in our own time.

Slave Trade and Dehumanization of Afro-American Women in Gyasi’s Homegoing: A Black Feminist Study

In this article, bell books' ground-breaking black feminist approach is adopted to examine the lingering impact of slave trade of Afro-American women in contemporary America. Slavery in the past stigmatized the present lives of Afro-American women. Even though slavery was abolished, the terrible effects of the slave trade continue to demean, degrade, and caricature black women in the western world of today. hooks' radical black feminist ideas reveal how racial discrimination and sexual orientation towards black women rob them of their social identity and place in white supremacist society. This research critiques all the forms of dehumanization black women experience in the white world starting with historical enslavement and ending in the present dehumanization. In the white media, theatre, music, literature, and other disciplines, black women are presented as sexy, bold, aggressive, hypersexual, angry, impatient, violent, macho, insensitive, incompetent, and lazy. The contemporary lives of Afro-American women are being plagued by the effects of the slave trade in the white world.

A Black feminist approach to antiracist qualitative research methods: Commemorating the legacy of bell hooks

This article commemorates the legacy of bell hooks by bringing core themes in her oeuvre to bear on several debates on the conceptualization and use of qualitative research methods in sociology. Despite the uptake of qualitative research methods in sociology as a launching point for critical inquiry with analytical and political overtones, they have been fragmented threefold by debates about their politics (whether to humanize research subjects), practice (whether to intervene in field research), and epistemology (procedural, craft, and bricolage orientations). Reflecting on the legacy of bell hooks, this article articulates a Black feminist approach by unearthing methodological and epistemological themes underwritten in hooks’ work (inclusive pedagogy, creative dialogue, and reflexive accountability) to offer new perspectives on the three debates and, in so doing, to identify ways to better qualitative research methods as tools for emancipating the marginalized – by invigorating cross-professional and transdisciplinary dialogue, collaboration, and love.

A decolonizing, intersectional, Black feminist approach to young Black Caribbean-Canadian mothers’ resilience

ABSTRACT Growing research documents how systemic anti-Black racism leads to negative physical and mental health outcomes for Black populations, including Black mothers. There is also increasing attention to the concept of resilience as a way of theorizing how Black persons draw on strategies and resources to avoid, overcome or recover from these experiences. This paper, guided by a decolonial framework, intersectional theories and Black feminist epistemologies, reports on key findings from a qualitative, community-based study of young Black motherhood, which included in-depth interviews and focus groups with 13 Black Caribbean-Canadian mothers in the Greater Toronto Area. We demonstrate how barriers caused by anti-Black racism, gender inequalities, xenophobia, and classism operate in the lives of young Black mothers, and we reconfigure resilience from a Eurocentric, individualized concept towards a feminist intersectional one. Findings challenge the conceptualization of ‘normal’, universal, and time-bound development privileged in resilience research; demonstrate that the adversities young Black Caribbean-Canadian mothers encounter in trying to care and provide for their families are rooted in the cumulative intersectional impacts of racialized, gendered, xenophobic, and classed experiences, contexts, and policies across the life course; and highlight the critical importance of working with decolonizing research processes, intersectionality theories, and Black feminist epistemologies.

Citing Black Women: From Citational Refusal to Recognition

This essay addresses the tension between Northern Hemispheric intellectual assumptions and anthropology’s ostensibly critical stance within that intellectual tradition, one. Two, extending beyond the contradictions of the discipline’s origins in colonial encounter to address the place of Black women anthropologists caught between “the Here and the Elsewhere” (Trouillot 1995), “Citing Black Women” argues for working through the problem of canonical disciplinary knowledge formation by prioritizing a Black feminist approach to a new decolonial anthropology.

Black Feminist Bioethics: Centering Community to Ask Better Questions.

This commentary builds off the article "Is Trust Enough? Anti-Black Racism and the Perception of Black Vaccine 'Hesitancy,'" by Yolonda Wilson, and her assertion that the question, "Why don't Black people trust … ?" is insufficient. The commentary describes ways in which a Black feminist approach to knowledge production can facilitate centering community and can lead researchers, health care providers, and bioethicists to ask better questions. Instead of demanding that Black patients change to fit within biomedicine, people in these fields must radically reimagine biomedicine to better meet the needs of Black patients. For this to become a reality, bioethicists must work toward eliminating racism, and the field of bioethics should embrace Black feminist bioethics to work toward this goal.

Part Typewriter, Part Divination: A Black Feminist Approach to Black Digital Archives and Preserving the Papers of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home

Black Digital Humanities in the hands of Black Feminist and Black Women’s Studies scholars enables historiography and open access pedagogy about Black liberation thinkers in the tradition of the Black Studies Movement.1 Furthermore it is a subversive model of archiving which produces a counter-narrative to traditional and canonical ways of thinking, producing, and storing work that is coming out of Black liberatory movements, praxis, creative social visions, and knowledge production. For our purposes we describe this as the myriad valences of Blackness experienced, encompassed, and reproduced. This paper theorizes the ways in which Black Digital Humanities can be used to preserve historical documents that would otherwise be repressed and erased in the evolving world of online databases, open access and for-profit library packages. It examines these questions by discussing the creation of the Activist Studio West (ASW) and its efforts to preserve the history of The Campaign to Bring Mumia home. We deploy Black Feminist praxis through collaborative interventions into historiography as a key feature of political consciousness raising. The stakes of this article (and archive) call into question the fundamentals of digital humanities and what it means to develop a digital repository to document Black Radical Political movements as Black Feminists. Research team members, historian Jessica Millward, political scientist Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Black cultural studies scholar LaShonda Carter, visual culture scholar Ella Turenne, and ethnic studies archivist Krystal Tribbett prioritized introducing students to the major scholarship on creating community based archives, the ethical concerns around this particular type of Black Radical archive, and the political ethos involved in initiating an archive around a figure that has been consistently threatened by state sanctioned historical record. As a research methods driven paper we have focused on concept and theory-building toward curriculum development.

Becoming with Toxicity: Chemical Epigenetics as “Racializing and Sexualizing Assemblage”

AbstractIn this article I think through Black feminism and queer theory to critically analyze toxicology. I focus on toxicology's conception of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), a class of toxicants that can cause epigenetic changes leading to inheritable health issues. I suggest that Black feminist interventions are particularly necessary for the study of toxicants because multiply marginalized populations are disproportionately more exposed to EDCs. The structural preconditions that generate this uneven, racialized, and sexualized toxic body-burden threaten to turn cultural constructions of race and sex (epistemologies) into biological realities (ontologies). My discursive analysis of key scientific texts on toxicology, EDCs, and epigenetics underscores how Eurocentric biases and eugenic logics permeate and co-constitute biochemical matter. I further argue that these texts’ un/articulated norms regarding the human, sexual behavior, and evolutionary fitness undermine the usefulness of toxicological assessments for environmental justice. I close by urging scientist scholar-activists to reconceive the study of toxicants. A Black feminist approach to toxicity, I suggest, would not only situate chemical exposures in their sociopolitical contexts, but also radically revision what it means to be human.

"Black Nurses in the Home is Working": Advocacy, Naming, and Processing Racism to Improve Black Maternal and Infant Health.

1) To explore how racism-related stress impacts Black women's health, pregnancy, and parenting. 2) To explore how a culturally-specific program affects the relationship between racism-related stress and Black women's health, pregnancy, and parenting. This qualitative study uses a Black Feminist approach to center the lived experiences and perspectives of Black women. Focus groups were conducted with clients and staff of a culturally-specific program that provides perinatal care for Black families. A thematic analysis was conducted using a Reproductive Justice framework as a guide. Participants consisted of 23 program clients and staff who all identified as Black women. Four themes emerged from the analysis: 1) The pervasive reach of structural racism, 2) Shared identities facilitate trust and healing, 3) Racism directly impacts mental health, and 4) Advocacy on macro and micro levels is a vital service. Results show the chronicity and toxicity of structural racism on Black women's physical and mental health. The presence of overt and subtle forms of racism occur in multiple systems and require interventions on macro- and micro-levels. Culturally-specific perinatal care programs that prioritize racial concordance between providers and clients/patients are well-received and effective models of care. Black perinatal care should include culturally-specific approaches, advocacy on behalf of and alongside Black people, mental health support with attention to racism-related stress, and interrogation of implicit bias. Multipronged interventions guided by Reproductive Justice principles provide a holistic framework to address interpersonal and systemic racial oppression.

On the Uses of Black Feminism: Notes on Black Feminism as Sexuality Study

This essay reflects on the theoretical and pedagogical utility of centering a Black feminist approach in the queer/sexuality studies classroom, an antiracist praxis the author conceptualizes as Black feminism as sexuality study.

A Black feminist approach for caseworkers intervening with Black female caregivers

ABSTRACT The disproportionate representation of Black children in the child welfare system, and its implications for Black female caregivers, must be understood through a critical perspective that considers their historical, social and cultural context. It has been posited that Black feminist philosophy and ideology may be a useful perspective for understanding risk factors that contribute to the disproportionate numbers of Black women who are involved in the child welfare system. Additionally, this perspective offers a practice framework that assists child welfare caseworkers to effectively engage, assess, and intervene with Black women and their families. In this article, we provide a brief overview of Black women’s disproportionate involvement in the child welfare system through a historical-trauma lens, review existing child welfare casework practice models, and discuss the need for an engagement in child welfare public consciousness for Black female caregivers. Further, we propose a culturally relevant casework practice model grounded in Black feminist principles. A case vignette is provided.

“It’s Awfully Important to Listen”: Ella Jenkins and Musical Multiculturalism

The 1995 release of Multicultural Children’s Songs (Smithsonian-Folkways) solidified the reputation of Ella Jenkins (b. 1924) as the most prolific and influential U.S. children’s musician of the late 20th century. Yet while the album brought Jenkins’s music to new audiences, the compilation of her work under the “multicultural” moniker threatened to obscure the radicalism of her repertoire and pedagogical method. Focusing on her 1957 Folkways debut, Call-and-Response Rhythmic Group Singing, I argue that Jenkins models a black feminist approach to early childhood musical education that assails cultural hierarchies, imagines “difference” outside of essentializing representation, and recognizes song as a vehicle of cultural memory and subjugated knowledge, even for very young audiences.

I Need You to Tell My Story: Qualitative Inquiry for/With Transnational Black Women

Drawing on a yearlong qualitative research project with seven Black transnational women, this article employs a transnational Black feminist approach. It is guided by the following questions: What does it look like to conduct qualitative research rooted in a transnational Black feminist framework? What implications related to storytelling, reciprocity, and the relationships with participants emerge from this work? In exploring these questions, I consider some of the ways transnational Black feminist theory can be operationalized to counter re-inscriptions of dominant ideologies onto the research process with marginalized communities, particularly under consideration of contemporary national and transnational processes and discourses.

‘Larger than life’: celebrity journalism, gender and black politics in Fay M. Jackson’s Hollywood adventures, 1933–1935

ABSTRACTThis historical article analyses the work of an under-recognised black female journalist, Fay M. Jackson, who wrote as the Associated Negro Press Hollywood correspondent during the 1930s. Drawing from the literature on celebrity studies, the black press and black feminist thought, this study reveals how Hollywood’s first black female correspondent brought visibility and personhood to black celebrities while employing conventional journalistic strategies. The analysis highlights two primary themes that emerged in Jackson’s celebrity news coverage: Jackson’s employment of gossip news and biographical profiles to bring personhood to black female celebrities; and Jackson’s coverage of the ‘browning’ of Hollywood to highlight the importance of racial representation within the entertainment industry. This study addresses how a black feminist approach to analysing race and gender politics in black media and Hollywood extends previous understandings about the history of celebrity studies.

Black Feminism and Critical Media Literacy: Moving from the Margin to the Center

Abstract The topic grounded in this essay was inspired by the interactions had and stories shared by an intergenerational group of Black women (including the three coauthors) who termed their regular meetings “the Black Women’s Gathering Place.” During meetings, discussions ranged from popular culture and political events to everyday experiences with racism, sexism, and other burning topics that need sisterly advice. Eventually the group became a place where members not only supported and leaned on each other’s shoulders for comfort, but also engaged in practices of everyday activism as described by Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and heeded bell hooks’s (1997) call to critically examine media (re)presentations of Black women. The lesson plan that follows the essay represents an expansion of the learning space created by the BlackWomen’s Gathering Place. It provides an educational opportunity for students to develop critical media literacy skills grounded in a Black feminist approach.