Black Feminist Scholars Research Articles

‘I Am a Broken Policy’: A Critical Reflection on Whiteness and Gender Anti-Black Racism in Institutions of Higher Education and Social Services

This personal narrative is a critical reflection and affirmation letter to Black women. Throughout this commentary, at the end of each section, I have included what I call “gems”. I hope they serve as a manifesto for our collective healing from working in institutions that center on the ideologies and practices of dominance. This piece particularly focuses on the dominant ideology and practice of “whiteness” within institutions as a surveillance tool through policy that directly impacts Black women’s wellbeing through gender anti-black racism. Through storytelling and drawing on Black feminist scholarship, this narrative exposes the challenges I faced with institutional policies and practices as I pursued my career in both academia and social service work. Throughout this narrative, I highlight how the undercurrent of whiteness is embedded in the foundation of institutional policy and practices. This narrative serves as a demand for institutional accountability and reckoning with the coloniality of epistemology and ontology. There is a great emotional toll for Black women who are confronting and resisting gendered anti-black racism with deep internal struggles and triumphs. The violent institutional practices seek to eclipse Black women’s ability to dream, imagine and create. Whiteness is centered in institutional infrastructure, serves as a distraction, and impedes our ability to conceptualize the world we desire. We deserve to have imagination in our work. This narrative is a reflection of the harm of whiteness, a guide for Black women academics, a manifesto for change, and a testament to our humanity.

Black Crip Superpowers

This article contains some language that readers may find offensive. Black people have never been human. White heteropatriarchal paradigms in the United States depend upon the abjection of blackness, excluding us from the realm of human identities. It is this exclusion that generates the problem of unintelligibility; this lack of grammar in turn renders black bodies invisible and more vulnerable to violence. The article attends to the black disabled body as a source of new grammars , short-circuiting the separation of blackness from other modes of difference. These new grammars, or what the article articulates as crip superpowers , theorize new ways of thinking, knowing, and being beyond abjection. By building on the labor of black feminist, crip/queer, and disability scholars, this intervention into disability studies analyzes how marginalized bodies engage with issues of erasure and disability within the black community. The article offers a transtemporal reading of Essex Hemphill’s Ceremonies (1992) and Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead (2017) to examine how black disabled subjects have developed these new grammars across time and space. Through this affective connection between the past and our contemporary moment, we can, as it were, go home ; we can imagine, that is, alternative worlds, where we can be whole and free.

Intersectionality as a tool for clinical ethics consultation in mental healthcare

Bioethics increasingly recognizes the impact of discriminatory practices based on social categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation or ability on clinical practice. Accordingly, major bioethics associations have stressed that identifying and countering structural discrimination in clinical ethics consultations is a professional obligation of clinical ethics consultants. Yet, it is still unclear how clinical ethics consultants can fulfill this obligation. More specifically, clinical ethics needs both theoretical tools to analyze and practical strategies to address structural discrimination within clinical ethics consultations. Intersectionality, a concept developed in Black feminist scholarship, is increasingly considered in bioethical theory. It stresses how social structures and practices determine social positions of privilege and disadvantage in multiple, mutually co-constitutive systems of oppression. This article aims to investigate how intersectionality can contribute to addressing structural discrimination in clinical ethics consultations with a particular focus on mental healthcare. To this end, we critically review existing approaches for clinical ethics consultants to address structural racism in clinical ethics consultations and extend them by intersectional considerations. We argue that intersectionality is a suitable tool to address structural discrimination within clinical ethics consultations and show that it can be practically implemented in two complementary ways: 1) as an analytic approach and 2) as a critical practice.

Intersectional Mentorship in Academic Medicine: A Conceptual Review.

Academic medical institutions seek to recruit and retain a diverse workforce to foster equitable, supportive environments in which early-stage investigators, especially those who are underrepresented in medicine, can thrive. Intersectionality is a critical theoretical framework rooted in Black feminist activism and scholarship that elucidates how power and privilege are differentially structured for groups at different intersectional sociodemographic positions. As a dynamic method of analyzing multiple axes of power and inequality, intersectionality has the potential to offer a critical lens through which to view the mentor-mentee relationship. In this article, we seek to elaborate upon and extend the concept of intersectional mentoring, elucidate its essential components, and explore its application in the context of mentoring early-stage investigators in academic medicine. We propose that intersectional mentorship requires an orientation toward deep cultural humility, lifetime learning about the impact of systemic oppressions on present-day opportunities and experiences of mentees, and changing systems that perpetuate inequities by centering praxis-the application of principles of intersectionality through action to transform power dynamics in academic culture and institutions. Intersectional mentorship can help build a more equitable and representative workforce to advance intersectionally relevant and innovative approaches to achieving health equity.

Gendered Anti-Blackness: Policing Black Women and the Making of the Modern City

The Streets Belong to Us makes a significant contribution to multiple fields, most principally the history of race, gender, sexuality, incarceration, and state violence in the United States. It is a definitive history of the changing nature of police power, and the ways that it defined, defended, and enforced the logics that undergirded racial segregation. Illuminating the significant degree to which urban policymaking and planning depended on state violence, Anne Fischer compels us to better appreciate the relation between the making and the remaking of the modern city and the consolidation of police power. To do so, we must see that this connection was made possible through the surveillance, harassment, and sexual criminalization of Black women. Women’s bodies, particularly Black women’s bodies, acted as the constitutive material that made up the very fabric of state power and racial segregation. Along with presenting an analysis of the racial and gendered dimensions of morals law enforcement, The Streets Belong to Us moves Black women out of the shadows of urban history by grounding the analysis within the intellectual production by Black feminist organizers and scholars. Their concept of gendered anti-Blackness proved indispensable to feminist antiviolence struggles of the late twentieth century.

Femmenoir pedagogies: rescripting the reproduction of Black women’s marginalization in education

ABSTRACT Many Black educators have left the profession, a trend often linked to Black fatigue . This study presents findings from qualitative data seeking to understand how Black women STEM educators who stay, respond to the inherently antiblack nature of schooling . Participants of this study illuminate unique and creative approaches to effectively navigate racism and sexism while teaching within the constraints of the educational apparatus. Based on the results of this study, we introduce the term Femmenoir Pedagogies which hones in on three elements that serve to counter the antiblack conditions of schooling. It emphasizes the need to center Black women as experts using their socio-political location to harness their strengths and radically imagine ways to disrupt the oppressive reproduction of schooling. Drawing on the work of Black feminist scholars, we analyze data from personal narratives, in-depth interviews, and focus groups with six self-identified Black women educators.

The Nose at the Crossroads: An Intersectional Reading of the Pseudo-Vergilian Moretum

summary: This article provides a new interpretation of the anonymous poem Moretum as erotic satire. Mindful of Shelley Haley's invitation to read it through a Black feminist lens, this article turns to recent Black feminist scholarship on pornography to argue that the presence of sex does not automatically negate the agency of Scybale, the African woman described in the poem as Simulus's custos . Further, I review the evidence for Simulus's own identity. Through a combination of Audre Lorde's Black queer lens and Paul Preciado's trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining Simulus as Black, queer, and/or trans, the power imbalance between Simulus and Scybale is greatly reduced. Lastly, I heed Haley's invitation to read Black protagonists of Latin poetry through Yoruba mythology, and turn to Henry Louis Gates Jr. to argue that Simulus's Blackness brings them closest to Esu, the genderqueer trickster god, which in turn helps us identify him with the author themselves.

A Chola Sex Party: Anal And Concha Art

This piece explores the visual art and performance of Wynnie Mynerva (1992–), interpreting their aesthetic use of violence and sadism. My reading of Wynnie’s work articulates cholanness in relation to Blackness, unearthing the colonial etymology of “cholo.” I argue that the body of chola women is at very center of the “abigarrado cholo sex,” a sexual/reproductive system of extraction of labor and pleasure. Wynnie’s visual experimentation toys with castration and revenge, and with the non-generative pleasures of anal sex and anti-natalism. To think through the contemporary uses of chola, I use the work of Black feminist scholars in the US and the Caribbean, establishing hemispheric connections with Latin American feminist scholars and activists.

The black feminist: Don't exclude the voice that nurtures you

AbstractIn this article, we survey quotes, narratives, and theories of Black feminist scholars to provide some historical context of the Black feminist voice that challenged notions of achievable equity and elucidated the uniqueness of challenges relative to intersecting identities such as race and gender. The article delves into three Black feminist theories in adult educational studies to explore how core tenets of these particular theories could inform the development of an adult learning model. Next, we describe our proposed adult learning model based on a restorative justice structure centered in core concepts of the evolutionary voice of Black feminism.

Honoring the enslaved African American foremothers of modern women's health: Meditations on 40 years of Black feminist praxis.

This article analyzes 40 years of Black feminist scholarship, art, and grassroots activism dedicated to the lives and legacies of the "foremothers of American gynecology." Infamously, in Montgomery, Alabama, between 1845 and 1849, up to 16 enslaved women were exploited at a backyard hospital, some subjected to surgical experimentation by Dr James Marion Sims. He was a famous and world-renowned surgeon who died in 1883, with a reputation as "the father of modern gynecology." Sims achieved the medical knowledge that catapulted him into American and European fame, using skills gained from the exploitation of the enslaved women in his early career. Famously, three of these women are referenced by their first names: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey. This research asks: how have these important figures been remembered in 20th and 21st-century Black feminist scholarship, art, and grassroots community activism? Further, what are the broader impacts of this pathbreaking truth, reckoning, and reconciliation work?

Resisting the binary: reconciling victimhood and agency in discourses of sexual violence

Queer, post-colonial and Black feminist scholars and activists have long cautioned against the dangerous exclusions and complicities entailed in even the best-intentioned efforts to counter sexual violence. The rhetoric of protecting women from sexual violence is frequently and effectively invoked in order to rehabilitate old colonial projects and justify new ones that persecute sexual dissidents, police gender, sexual and caste transgressions and re-inscribe neoliberal and neo-conservative rationalities across the globe. This article argues that many of the exclusionary, violent and coercive consequences of efforts to protect women from sexual violence are rooted in mischaracterisations or mis-descriptions of the subject of sexual violence, and enabled by particular (mis)orientations towards this subject. Specifically, I suggest that the imagination and representation of the subject of sexual violence is subtended by a politically dangerous and conceptually untenable victim/agent binary. Mediated by rationalities of caste, race, class and religion, women are imagined either as vulnerable victims in need of protection, or as capable (even culpable) agents, but never simultaneously both. The failure to reconcile victimhood and agency within discourses of sexual violence is precisely the condition of possibility for a range of violent, exclusionary and regulatory outcomes. This article tracks the effects of the victim/agent binary in dominant responses to sexual violence, before assembling the foundations from which to rethink victimhood and agency away from their binary orthodoxy, drawing centrally on the radical subjectivity of pain.

‘Somewhere. Some time. Somehow. Something has to change’: Prima Facie and the cruel optimism of feminist legal advocacy

In her play Prima Facie, playwright and lawyer Suzie Miller uses theatre to critique legal responses to sexual violence. This article thus offers an analysis of the play as both feminist theatre and feminist advocacy. We examine the rhetorical and performative strategies it deploys, arguing that they are effective because they mobilise long-standing feminist tropes which use a representative figure of the traumatised victim and the repetition of statistics to position the audience as potential victims of violence. Such strategies, however, fail to account for the complexity of sexual violence, intersectional understandings of it, or its relationship to other structural forms of harm that flow from turning to the state, as articulated by Black feminist scholars. These limitations also function in the play’s loop between an indictment of law’s failings and recuperating the law as a privileged site for responding to sexual violence. We read this tension as exemplifying the play’s enactment of a cruelly optimistic relationship to law, which is, we argue, a recurring feature in feminist cultural advocacy around sexual violence. However, we also suggest that reading the play through the words of its protagonist can open visions of justice beyond what Carol Smart has described as the ‘siren call of law’.

In] Searching Our Mothers’ Archives

Black feminist scholarship provokes us to reimagine archives in creative and speculative ways and echoes everyday Black communities’ deep investment in memory that rejects the idea of African people as a people without history. I enter this discourse through Umi’s Archive is an interdisciplinary and multimedia research project that draws on my family archive to engage everyday Black women’s thought to investigate key questions of archives and power. In this article, I describe my experience curating, preserving, and presenting the archive and how that became a process of de-disciplining myself, turning to intimacy and mourning to learn from Black women by searching in my Umi’s archive.

Black Women Been Knew: Understanding Intersectionality to Advance Justice

Although the term intersectionality was coined by Kimberl. Crenshaw in the late 1980s, Black feminist scholars have long interrogated how having multiple marginalized identities reproduce inequity in their daily lives. Black women have been at the forefront of justice efforts way before it was popular and thus, continue to offer insight into ways to advance justice and equity for not only themselves, but for people and communities experiencing systemic oppression. This article examines Black Feminist Traditions to contextualize how Black women have remained resilient despite systemic racism and injustice. Additionally, this article offers strategies to thoroughly integrate Black Feminist Theory into public administration.

“An Elegy of Place”: Affective Mapping in June Jordan’s Civil Wars

Most people know June Jordan the poet, the activist, the political essayist, and perhaps even the fiction writer. Fewer perhaps know her as an architect, urban planner, Black ecofeminist, and spatial theorist. This essay uses Jordan’s theories of place as a framework for her autobiographical writing, turning primarily to Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (1981), a compilation of essays, letters, lectures, scenarios, diary entries, and reportage. An interdisciplinary approach that incorporates Black feminist autobiography scholarship, trauma and affect theory, and queer theory uncovers Civil Wars as both an autobiography of feeling and an archive of intellectual development. Jordan’s theory of place in Civil Wars functions as an architectural aesthetic that facilitates affective mapping—the movement of feeling between the self and the collective. Affective mapping allows Jordan to narrate a relational self by drawing on Black feelings that emerge within the intimacy of place and in the frequencies of Black sound.

Contributions of Black psychology scholars to models of racism and health: Applying intersectionality to center Black women.

Although theoretical and empirical research on the impact of racism on the mental and physical health of African Americans is well established in the literature, there is still a dearth of research that focuses on the role of the intersection of racism and sexism, or gendered racism, on the health of Black women. The purpose of this article is threefold: (a) to review the foundational contributions of Black psychologists to the study of racism and health, (b) to highlight the intellectual contributions of Black feminist scholars to the study of intersectionality in psychology, and (c) to apply an intersectionality framework to research on racism and health by introducing a conceptual Biopsychosocial Model of Gendered Racism to better understand the impact of gendered racism on Black women's health and well-being. This article ends with recommendations for future research, clinical practice, and social justice advocacy centered on Black women's health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Abandoning inauthentic intersectionality

AbstractIn the time since the term “intersectionality” was first introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term has gained a measure of widespread, even viral popularity. Increasingly, psycholinguists are citing this concept to promote work which more fully engages with the consequences of human diversity for language processing. This piece discusses the ways in which “intersectionality” has thus far been engaged by the field of psycholinguistics. I argue that the common usage of the term “intersectionality” is notably out of step with the tradition of Black feminist scholarship from which it derives. Originally defined as an analytical framework for examining the effect of interlocking oppressions in erasing the distinctive experiences of multiply marginalized people, intersectionality should not be invoked without any serious and specific discussion of oppressive systems or erasure. To achieve a more just and equitable applied psycholinguistics and authentically promote intersectional approaches to understanding language behavior, intersectionality must be taken as a framework primarily engaging with effects of structural violence. The article concludes with some guidelines for readers to assist in distinguishing “intersectional” claims which perform erasure from those which reflect the original and intended anti-misogynoir applications of the theory.

Andaiye and Audre Lorde’s Black Transnational Sisterhood; or, “I Want You in This World”

So many Black revolutionaries lived with and died from cancer. How did they make sense of their vulnerability when confronted with this illness? How did they balance fighting for the world and for themselves? When modern medicine could neither ameliorate their pain nor eliminate the disease, to whom did they turn for support? This essay centers letters from 1989 to 1990 that Andaiye sent to Audre Lorde shortly after they met at the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action conference in 1988. Drawing on these letters, a tribute titled “Sister Survivor” that Andaiye wrote for Lorde following her death, a copy of A Burst of Light that Lorde sent to Andaiye, and Black feminist scholarship on how listening constitutes care work, the author explores what Andaiye and Lorde taught each other about the possibilities for living with cancer and listening across differences.

Secondary Agency: Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and the Making of Those Bones Are Not My Child

This article examines the writing and publication of Toni Cade Bambara’s posthumously published novel Those Bones Are Not My Child using the philosophical concept of secondary agency to attend to the careful and compassionate process by which Black women set out to tell the stories of trauma and survival on behalf of others who cannot—or will not—speak. It reads the fictional character Zala Spencer and her attempts to locate and tell the story of her son, who was kidnapped during the Atlanta Child Murders, alongside Bambara’s own attempts to tell the story of those murders and in the context of Toni Morrison’s role in posthumously publishing this novel. In particular, it traces the efforts of these three women who aim to tell a story without appropriating it and who are mindful of both the peril and power of silence. Drawing on Black feminist scholarship and the archival and material evidence of Bambara’s work, it suggests that a reading of the novel’s narrative, the various drafts of its prologue, and its materiality offer a portrait of the complicated intimacy at the heart of secondary agency.