Black Women's Studies Research Articles

Preface

Preface Judith Gardiner and Matt Richardson this year, 2022, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Feminist Studies. In the spirit of retrospection and celebration, our first issue of the year commemorates the fortieth birthdays of two anthologies that heralded major innovations in feminist theory: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Persephone Press, 1981; Kitchen Table Press, 1983) and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (The Feminist Press, 1982). The writing in this issue reflects the deeply personal impact that these books have had on scholars' intellectual, political, and emotional development since the time of their publication. Several of these essays articulate and historicize concepts from these anthologies that have since become influential in gender studies, later termed "intersectionality," "women of color, and "queer theory." Other essays contribute new approaches to feminist theory developed in the last forty years. In addition to scholarly articles, this special issue includes two art features as well as a cluster of creative prose and poetry reflecting on This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave curated by our creative writing editor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. As a whole, this issue of Feminist Studies explores and expands the categories developed in those original two anthologies. The categories "women of color" and "queer" may seem disparate. However, it is precisely women of color feminisms that centered the voices of lesbian activists, writers, and scholars who insisted on acknowledging [End Page 7] the various parts of their identities, thereby paving the way for anti-essentialist understandings of gender, race, and sexuality. The category "women of color" realigned thinking about gender, ethnic heritage, and "race." It was preceded by the category of "people of color," which aimed to unite all persons who had been targeted by white supremacy through a common and liberatory political alignment. The category of "queer theory" reoriented thinking about both sexuality and gender. These categories, which are anti-essentialist, question supposed boundaries between nature and nurture, between the biological and the cultural. These categories were understood in differing, sometimes overlapping dimensions. Both "women of color" and "queer" assumed and realigned older majoritarian categories that once seemed self-evident although they were not. That is, new categories regarding race and ethnicity assumed a stable background of "white" dominance, at least in the United States, although the boundaries of whiteness, as well as of other racialized categories, continue to be contested. New categories defining gender identity and sexual orientation, which were also apparently self-evident though still under scrutiny, were shown to be unstable and continually contested so that categories like "woman" and "women" no longer seemed self-evident. The essays in this issue illuminate how the concepts "women of color" and "queer" opened up new approaches to theory at the same time that they introduced new exclusions and new opportunities for action and coalition. Samantha Pinto and Jennifer C. Nash envision the potential of This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave as a corrective to the limited scripts that have emerged in feminist theorizing. In their article, "Then and Now: Women of Color Originalism and the Anthological Impulse in Women's and Gender Studies," they show how these two pioneering anthologies continue to circulate alongside "women of color," a term that these texts helped produce as "legible and coherent," yet one that still remains undertheorized. Treating the anthologies as performances of "bridging," Pinto and Nash describe their visions of struggle for an autonomous institutional space for Black women's studies. They claim that "intersectionality has become the institutional cure for women's studies and the intellectual property of Black feminism." They argue that these anthologies self-consciously call attention "to how the field has created, crafted, and performed difference in the women's studies classroom" in order to situate the category "women of color" within this interdiscipline. [End Page 8] In a complementary essay that describes "Revisiting This Bridge Called My Back" decades after its original appearance, Paulina Jones-Torregrosa describes the impact the book had upon her as an undergraduate, leading her to insist that we must not settle...

Meditations from a Black Woman Chair: Social Justice Values and a New Normal in Academic Administration

Meditations from a Black Woman Chair: Social Justice Values and a New Normal in Academic Administration

The State and Future of Black Women's Studies: The Black Women's Studies Association and the National Women's Studies Association in Conversation

230 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nneka D. Dennie The State and Future of Black Women’s Studies: The Black Women’s Studies Association and the National Women’s Studies Association in Conversation On February 25, 2021, the Black Women’s Studies Association (BWSA) and National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) partnered for one of NWSA’s Kitchen Table Talks—a new initiative spearheaded by NWSA President Kaye Wise Whitehead to foster dialogue between NWSA and other organizations. The event, titled “Space Making: State/Future of Black Women’s Studies,” featured three panelists and was moderated by Whitehead. The featured speakers were Stephanie Andrea Allen (BWSA conference chair), Jacinta R. Saffold (BWSA co-founder and treasurer), and Erica L. Williams (member of the NWSA Governing Council). Allen is a Black lesbian writer and publisher whose scholarship examines how lesbian literature and film responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that invisibilize Black lesbians; she is a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana University. Saffold is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Orleans who researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, hip hop studies, and digital humanities. Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at Spelman College, whose work has examined sex tourism and Black feminist activism in Brazil. Together, Whitehead, Allen, Saffold, and Williams explored their hopes for Black Women’s Studies and illuminated the challenges and joys of advancing the field. News and Views 231 The collaboration between BWSA and NWSA is a testament to how far Black Women’s Studies has come over the past fifty years and a promise of where it may continue to go in the future. NWSA was founded in 1977 and has since served as a hub for researchers, educators, and practitioners who interrogate questions of women and gender in their work. For decades, NWSA has been central to the nationwide US institutionalization of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. By contrast, BWSA is a young organization that is continuing to grow. In 2018, Saffold and I co-founded BWSA in order to provide a community for scholars working in the field of Black Women’s Studies. BWSA is the only professional association specifically designed to bring scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation about research that centers Black women. We launched BWSA with the goal of ensuring that future generations of scholars can readily access networks and mentorship from researchers who encounter a common question: when your work is simultaneously “too Black” and “too woman” for your field, department, or institution, what do you do? Drawing inspiration from well-established organizations in which we frequently participated, such as NWSA, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), and the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), Saffold and I sought to build a space that cultivated a Black feminist ethic of care for both the research and the researchers. In that spirit, BWSA provides resources to help scholars do their best work, including a mentorship program, a virtual writing community, a calls-for-papers list for publications, and article as well as graduate student paper prizes. It was an honor to join an organization as trusted and respected as NWSA for a dialogue about our shared visions for Black Women’s Studies. Three key themes emerged from the panelists’ conversation with each other. They repeatedly returned to the importance of making financial commitments to Black Women’s Studies, creating conditions to support Black women’s intellectual labor, and practicing self-care. Speakers explored the interplay between the responsibilities that institutions, communities, and individuals have to Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist scholars. They observed that in order for departments and universities to foster interdisciplinary work on Black women, they need to move beyond paying lip service to the idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion matter; there needs to be permanent funding for work on race, 232 News and Views gender, class, and sexuality. Panelists also emphasized that Black women being in community with each other and supporting one another have always been central to...

The State and Future of Black Women's Studies: The Black Women's Studies Association and the National Women's Studies Association in Conversation

230 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nneka D. Dennie The State and Future of Black Women’s Studies: The Black Women’s Studies Association and the National Women’s Studies Association in Conversation On February 25, 2021, the Black Women’s Studies Association (BWSA) and National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) partnered for one of NWSA’s Kitchen Table Talks—a new initiative spearheaded by NWSA President Kaye Wise Whitehead to foster dialogue between NWSA and other organizations. The event, titled “Space Making: State/Future of Black Women’s Studies,” featured three panelists and was moderated by Whitehead. The featured speakers were Stephanie Andrea Allen (BWSA conference chair), Jacinta R. Saffold (BWSA co-founder and treasurer), and Erica L. Williams (member of the NWSA Governing Council). Allen is a Black lesbian writer and publisher whose scholarship examines how lesbian literature and film responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that invisibilize Black lesbians; she is a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana University. Saffold is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Orleans who researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, hip hop studies, and digital humanities. Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at Spelman College, whose work has examined sex tourism and Black feminist activism in Brazil. Together, Whitehead, Allen, Saffold, and Williams explored their hopes for Black Women’s Studies and illuminated the challenges and joys of advancing the field. News and Views 231 The collaboration between BWSA and NWSA is a testament to how far Black Women’s Studies has come over the past fifty years and a promise of where it may continue to go in the future. NWSA was founded in 1977 and has since served as a hub for researchers, educators, and practitioners who interrogate questions of women and gender in their work. For decades, NWSA has been central to the nationwide US institutionalization of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. By contrast, BWSA is a young organization that is continuing to grow. In 2018, Saffold and I co-founded BWSA in order to provide a community for scholars working in the field of Black Women’s Studies. BWSA is the only professional association specifically designed to bring scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation about research that centers Black women. We launched BWSA with the goal of ensuring that future generations of scholars can readily access networks and mentorship from researchers who encounter a common question: when your work is simultaneously “too Black” and “too woman” for your field, department, or institution, what do you do? Drawing inspiration from well-established organizations in which we frequently participated, such as NWSA, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), and the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), Saffold and I sought to build a space that cultivated a Black feminist ethic of care for both the research and the researchers. In that spirit, BWSA provides resources to help scholars do their best work, including a mentorship program, a virtual writing community, a calls-for-papers list for publications, and article as well as graduate student paper prizes. It was an honor to join an organization as trusted and respected as NWSA for a dialogue about our shared visions for Black Women’s Studies. Three key themes emerged from the panelists’ conversation with each other. They repeatedly returned to the importance of making financial commitments to Black Women’s Studies, creating conditions to support Black women’s intellectual labor, and practicing self-care. Speakers explored the interplay between the responsibilities that institutions, communities, and individuals have to Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist scholars. They observed that in order for departments and universities to foster interdisciplinary work on Black women, they need to move beyond paying lip service to the idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion matter; there needs to be permanent funding for work on race, 232 News and Views gender, class, and sexuality. Panelists also emphasized that Black women being in community with each other and supporting one another have always been central to...

Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper

Reviewed by: Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper Kirsten T. Edwards Williams Brittney C. Cooper. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 2017. 208 pp. Cloth: $95.00; Paperback: $19.95; ebook: $14.95. ISBN: 978-0-252-08248-1 When Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith published their groundbreaking text in 1982, it represented a century-long formulation of Black women's intellectual labor into one organized body of work. It aimed to not only solidify Black women's thought into a unified compendium, but to also put forth Black women's philosophical and political position as a rigorous unit worthy of substantive academic analysis. While All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave stands as a cornerstone text in Black women's studies, its legacy is of the continuing and not culminating variety. The edited collection marked not a conclusion to a long-fought battle, but one beginning to an ongoing war: the war of ideas fought on the battlefield of identity and power. For Hull and her colleagues, the fundamental problem hindering the progression of Black women's studies was/is the fallacious attempt by academics to map Black women's epistemic and ontological relationship to the world onto white1 male frames. These attempts support the "destructive" process of, categorizing all who are not like [white men] as their intellectual and moral inferiors. The [End Page E-8] fact that the works in which such oppressive images appear are nevertheless considered American "masterpieces" indicates the cultural-political value system in which Afro-American women have been forced to operate and which, when possible, they have actively opposed. (Hull, Scott, & Smith, 1982, p. xviii) The above assertion was not new to Black women, but needed to be formally articulated in text to speak to an oppressive academic context that theorized in ways that obscured and erased their influence. The authors' statement spoke not only to white masculinist dismissal of marginalized voices, but also to the foundational distinctions in Black women's ways of knowing and being in the world. These distinctions, if taken seriously, put into serious question the absolution of traditional logic. But Some of Us Are Brave, like the arguments made by Black women before them, additionally recognized the ways white feminist and Black male race theorists often utilized white patriarchal political and philosophical strategies to forward their liberation movements. Strategies that ignored the ways the body is "read as text" (Baszile, 2008, p. 252), therefore participating in (and often encouraging) the silencing of Black women. Since their earliest efforts to enter the public sphere of ideas, Black women have vigorously demanded intellectual analyses that took the body seriously. From Phillis Wheatley to Mary Church Terrell, bell hooks to Melissa Harris-Perry, embodied experience has been the lynchpin of political theorizing. Centering the body is a sharp departure from the predominant philosophical position predicated on the mind/body divide (Ani, 1994; Collins, 1990; Descartes, 1978); a departure that has longed placed Black women's theorizing squarely in the frame of the illogical, if not the un-reasonable. On one level these philosophical barriers have blocked Black women from accessing full humanity under the present terms of the social contract (Mills, 1997; Pateman, 1988). These blockades place Black women in perpetual vulnerability within the body politic fueling a literature base about Black women that has been primarily concerned with physical, mental, emotional, and economic survival. However, at a deeper level, white masculinist frames of logic have made "unvisible" (McKittrick, 2006) Black women's labor as intellectuals and their accompanying theoretical contributions (Baszile, Edwards, & Guillory, 2016). It is here, at the level of ideas that Brittney C. Cooper's formidable Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women enters the enduring conversation. As she alerts the reader on page one, the book is about "Black women as thinkers and intellectuals." Throughout the text, Cooper remains laser-focused on the distinctive avenues to and through social theory provided by Black women. Not abandoning an analysis of bodily vulnerability, like her predecessors, Cooper situates Black...

But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men—Black Women's Studies

<i>But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men—Black Women's Studies</i>

Deaf HERstory: Making Strides

EmergenceTo maintain dominance over a minority group, the dominant social group deprives its victims of their history. Frantz Fanon, a leader of the Algerian resistance to French rule in the 1950s, wrote that colonialism is not satisfied with merely holding a people in its grip ... but by a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of an oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.1 Prevented from appreciating the historical experiences and the achievements of their own people, the colonized are kept powerless. Because African Americans have long understood this deprivation, a civil-rights movement occurred in the mid-twentieth century.This evoked a sense of social consciousness leading to the formation of Black studies.2 A domino effect ensued, and women's studies, disability studies, Chicano/a studies, and other disciplines began to evolve. According to historian Gerda Lerner, being denied equal opportunities brought forth the field of women's studies, which also was engendered by the need to improve women's lives.-3Like the impetus for black studies and women's studies, the field of Deaf studies emerged from the now-famous discovery of the linguistic nature of American Sign Language (ASL) in the mid-1960s.4 The first formal Deaf studies program was created in 1980 at Boston University and was followed by similar initiatives at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), in 1983. Initially a department at Gallaudet University in 1994, Deaf studies became a program when it merged with the ASL program in 2002.Studies of Deaf women began in 1993, when Vicki Hurwitz offered the first Deaf women's studies course at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) as part of her master's degree program in social work.6 The course, which was a historical review of Deaf women's professional and personal lives, included a field trip to the Women's National Hall of Fame Museum in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1996, the next Deaf women's studies course emerged at CSUN with Genie Gertz, who saw a serious gap in the field of Deaf studies.7 Her course consisted of a multidisciplinary analysis of Deaf women in both the Deaf community and American society. Studies of historical, social, political, educational, and economic factors that affected the status of Deaf women were incorporated into Gertz's class.The course included discussions about Deaf women's struggles and successes and examined historical accounts of Deaf women in the context of the Deaf community.Inspired by both Hurwitz and Gertz, I began the first Deaf women's studies course at Gallaudet in 1997. An additional impetus was a general lack of reading materials on the experiences of Deaf females in my women's studies classes at the University of Maryland. In that first Deaf women's studies course at Gallaudet, I quickly learned that the students had no prior knowledge of general herstory,8 forcing a shuffle in the course syllabus. Since then, the course has begun with a brief exploration of hearing herstory, covering suffrage, first with Susan B. Anthony and her cohorts in the late nineteenth century, and later with Alice Paul in the early twentieth century, and finally with activist Betty Friedan in the mid-twentieth century.This course invariably includes a visit to the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument, in which Alice Paul and colleagues lived and worked diligently to cinch the 1920 suffrage victory After this introduction the students shift into an exploration of social, educational, and gendered issues among Deaf women. Finding this approach to be useful in introducing women's studies to the students, I continue to use this strategy two decades later, starting the semester with a quick exploration of hearing herstory and ending with a look into the experiences of Deaf females, especially those of Gallaudet alumnae.ResourcesIn addition to realizing that students had no prior knowledge of general herstory, a dearth of published materials, specifically books about, for, and by Deaf women was another challenge in teaching Deaf women's studies classes. …

Women's Studies and Sexuality Studies at HBCUs: The Audre Lorde Project at Spelman College

Women'sStudies and Sexuality Studies at HBCUs: The Audre Lorde Projectat Spelman College Erica Lorraine Williams A NATIONAL DISCUSSION ON INSTITUTIONAL CHANGES in Women's studies and sexuality studies would be remiss if it did not consider the specificities of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States. Here, I highlight the efforts that the Women's Research and Resource Center and its Audre Lorde Project at Spelman College have made to foster critical discussions about LGBTQ schol arship, activism, and history at HBCUs. In particular, I reflect on the Audre Lorde Project's finding that in order for critical conversations around sexuality and queer studies to happen on HBCU campuses, there must first be an institutional and curricular commitment to black feminisms and black women's studies. Over the last seven years, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, M. jacqui Alexan der, and their team have spearheaded the Audre Lorde Project, whose objective was to "increase public awareness and understanding about African American LGBTQ. experiences; to explore the marginaliza tion of racial issues in the LGBTQ movement and in gay and lesbian studies; and to create climates that acknowledge, value, and respect difference, especially within HBCUs, where profound silences con tinue to exist around gender and sexuality."1 Named after the firstout lesbian woman to speak at Spelman College, the Audre Lorde Project involved visits to eleven HBCU campuses to investigate the social climates for LGBTQ students, faculty, and staff. Their visits helped FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Erica Lorraine Williams 520 Forum:W/G/SStudies 521 document homophobia on campuses: LGBTQ students experienced discrimination in the classroom, lived in fear of being ostracized, struggled with coming out on campus, and sometimes dropped out or transferred to other institutions. Simultaneously, Guy-Sheftall and Alexander made a fascinating, although perhaps unsurprising discov ery: the HBCUs that had women's studies programs were more open and receptive than other institutions to having candid discussions about sexuality. They noticed that students who had enrolled in women's studies courses ... were more likely to be conscious of the politics and history of their campuses in relation to matters of gender and sexuality and as a result were more likely to view these matters not as private, individual concerns but as public, culturally constructed, and ultimately amenable to intervention.2 In other words, women's studies paved, and continues to pave, the way for sexuality studies. And given the reality that women's studies has not been widely institutionalized at HBCUs, LGBTQ studies as a result appears virtually non-existent.3 In the Audre Lorde Summit Resource Guide, Roderick Ferguson, Howard University alumnus and American studies scholar, argues that "a curricular interest in black feminism" must be institutionalized in order to transform HBCUs into spaces with an intellectual climate that could engage members of the black LGBTQ community. Black women's studies, Ferguson maintains, "was the first to incorporate examinations of queer sexuality into Black Studies," and "black femi nism has had the longest engagement with the issue of black sexuality." If HBCUs are to embark on a project of institutional transformation to become more open and inclusive spaces for LGBTQ students, faculty, and staff,they must firstcommit to "the insights of black feminism."4 Understanding the historical context of HBCUs can shed light on the resistance that many of these institutions have to both wom en's studies and LGBTQ studies. HBCUs have long been invested in producing ideal black intellectuals and educated women and men who could engage in what was commonly termed "racial uplift." For black women, this too readily meant adopting a politics of silence and respectability in order to counter wider prevailing racist discourses about black women's "excessive" sexuality. As Marybeth Gasman 522 Forum: W¡G¡S Studies points out, "during the early years of black colleges, black temale stu dents were sheltered by the administration; their lives were shaped by institutional policies designed to control their behavior."5 This polic ing of black women's sexuality had significant implications for black queer people. As Matt Richardson argues, the tradition of representing Black people as decent and moral histor ical agents has meant the erasure of the broad array...

Frances Smith Foster: A Select Bibliography

In this final tribute, we offer a sampling of Frances Smith Foster's published work. Because the SSAWW Lifetime Achievement Medal recognizes the recipient's support of and impact upon the work of others as well as her own scholarly contributions, we have also included a short selection of volumes published by former students of Foster whose work she advised or supervised. BOOKS AUTHORED 'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. Teaching with The Norton Anthology of African American Literature: A Guide for Instructors. New York: Norton, 1997. With Helen R. Houston. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives. Westport: Greenwood, 1979; znd ed. Madison: U of Wisconsin P. 1994. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. BOOKS EDITED Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women's Studies. New York: Feminist, 2010. Ed. with Stanlie M. James and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Love and Marriage in African America: An Anthology. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2007. La Familia en Africa y la Diaspora Africana: Estudio Multidisciplinar/Family in Africa and the African Diaspora: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Salamanca: Almar-Anglistica, 2004. Ed. with Olga Barrios. Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley. Chicago: R. R. Donnelley, 1998; Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. The Concise Oxford Companion to African American New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Ed. with William L. Andrews and Trudier Harris. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2001. Ed. with Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American New York: Norton, 1997. Ed. with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Nellie Y. McKay, et al; 2nd ed., 2004; 3rd ed. in press. The Oxford Companion to African American New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Ed. with William L. Andrews and Trudier Harris. Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W Harper. Boston: Beacon, 1994; 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon, 1995. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. New York: Feminist, 1990. ESSAYS Unraveling the Strands. Part of Hidden in Plain Sight: Colloquy with Annette Gordon-Reed on The Hemingses of Monticello. American Literature 47.2 (2012): 449-51. Anyway, We Certainly Don't Want to Be Lumped in with Black Studies!' True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School. Ed. Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 2011. 219-34. Genealogies of Our Concerns, (African) American Print Culture, and Transcending Tough Times. American Literary History 22.2 (2010): 368-80. Looking Back Is Tricky Business ...) Narrative 18.1 (2010): 19-28. Mammy's Daughters; Or, the DNA of a Feminist Sexual Ethics. Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies. Ed. Bernadette J. Brooten. New York: Palgrave, 2010. 267-86. Ports of Call, Pulpits of Consultation: Rethinking the Origins of African American Literature. A Companion to African American Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 45-58. With Kim D. Green. Race and Literary Politics. A Companion to American Literature and Culture. Ed. Paul Lauter. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 316-27. With Cassandra Jackson. Early African American Women's Literature. The Cambridge Guide to African American Women's Ed. Angclyn Mitchell and Danille K. Taylor. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009, 15-31. With LaRose Davis. Afterwords; Or, Whistling 'Dixie' on the Front Porch of My Southern Home. Southern Quarterly 45. …

A Radical Reconstruction of Resistance Strategies: Black Girls and Black Women Reclaiming Our Power Using Transdisciplinary Applied Social Justice©, Ma’at, and Rites of Passage

Heeding the call for Black Women's Studies to move from theory to praxis, the Transdisciplinary Applied Social Justice model provides a theoretical and methodological approach for social justice change, with an emphasis on praxis. In this article, the model is used to examine the lived reality and effects of intersectional race, class, and gender oppression on African American girls and women. Their high unemployment rates, incarceration rates, disenfranchisement rates, and health care disparity rates demonstrate that a very real "Black female crisis" exists. This article encourages a radical reconstruction of resistance strategies by African American girls and women. It suggests that they can reclaim their power by embracing ancient African thought, traditions, and practices, as symbolized by Ma'at and rites of passage programs.

Black Women's Studies: From Theory to Transformative Practice

The current period of global capitalist crisis presents daunting challenges for struggles against transnational capital, white supremacy, and global heteropatriarchy.1 A complex theoretical and pra...

Body of Knowledge: Black Queer Feminist Pedagogy, Praxis, and Embodied Text

This article examines the “body as text” in the Black women's studies classroom. I transparently name this method of teaching “Black queer feminist pedagogy,” an ordered and practical teaching method that relies on both the teaching of realities and teaching through interdisciplinary practices, while recognizing the body as a site of learning and knowledge. Illustrated by autoethnographic narratives drawn from classroom experiences, I discuss how the body inspires teachable moments, and consider how embodiment and subjectivity function as “equipment” for teaching and learning.

We Are All on Native Land: Transforming Faculty Searches with Indigenous Methods

We Are All on Native Land: Transforming Faculty Searches with Indigenous Methods Becky Thompson Since its inception in the late 1960s, women's studies has brought substan tial change to curricular, pedagogical, and epistemological practices in the academy. The initial "add and stir" approach to including women in the curriculum has largely been replaced by a sophisticated analysis of gender, race, and class; a transnational focus; and a complex understanding of women's embodiment. Feminist attention to pedagogy has succeeded in illuminating multiple forms of learning as well as the multiple ways that power manifests itself in the classroom. Women's studies-inspired theoret ical formulations—including standpoint theory, mestiza consciousness, and intersectional frameworks—also reverberate across the academy.1 Although facilitating these changes has been, for many of us, the center of our life's work, acknowledging what remains to be done is a humbling experience. One area that we have yet to examine systematically is how institutions go about recruiting and hiring diverse new faculty. The percentage of full-time people of color faculty in women's studies (30.4 percent) substantially exceeds the percentage of people of color in other disciplines (19 percent), but we have yet to offer sustained discussion of the methods and ethics we use (and hope to use) to continue to diversify the faculty.2 In addition, the actual embodied experience for many women of color in women's studies still makes relevant the pioneering title, All the FeministStudies37, no. 3 (Fall 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 534 BeckyThompson 535 Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies.3 These realities are especially ironic given that the building and sustaining of women's studies and other disciplines in the twenty-first century abso lutely depend upon a process of diversified regeneration. I became particularly aware of the limited analysis in hiring and retention practices when, as a newly hired director of the recently combined Women's and Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (uccs), my first charge was to lead a search for a tenure track scholar specializing in Native American studies. As I began to docu ment the process we used for the search, I looked for articles about other search processes intent upon achieving a diverse pool of applicants. Along the way I uncovered various handbooks about the strategies adminis trators and faculty have created through the years for recruiting diverse faculty. The University of Michigan Handbook for Faculty Searches and Hiring: Academic Year 2009-2010—one of the most substantial and comprehensive online hand books currently available—offered crucial points for conducting searches, including broadening pools, using active recruitment processes, and focusing on the scholarship and commitments of candidates of color (not solely their demographic characteristics).4 The most helpful quantitative research on affirmative action includes a study based on data from seven hundred searches conducted at three large elite public research universities. These data convincingly show that in order to hire people of color successfully, it is essential to change how regu lar searches and hiring processes are conducted. The authors conclude their study with a plea for detailed case studies that will "shed more light on the particular circumstances under which faculty of color hires are made."5 The value of case studies, in part, is the potential for nuance, specificity, and attention to complex power dynamics. Such specificity can, among other contributions, help counter the common tendency to lump Africans, African Americans, South Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans into one category—people of color—a conflation that misses the numerous ways that strategies for recruitment need to be culturally and racially specific.6 Although handbooks and quantitative work offer valuable guidelines, I found myself continuing to search for "thick description," for qualita tive analysis of searches that successfully resulted in hiring faculty of color. 536 BeckyThompson The dearth of case studies—on practicing affirmative action in general and in relation to Native American scholars in particular—is of special concern because few faculty members have been granted the training we need to conduct race-, gender-, and language-conscious searches. This reality...

Still Walking, Still Brave: Mapping Gender, Race, and Power in U.S. Western History

This essay highlights several interdisciplinary works about gender, race, and power in U.S. western history that utilize analytic tools generated by women's studies and women's history and considers how these recent works are charting new pathways for future research about U.S. western women's history. The theory of intersectionality, articulated by black women's studies, has been particularly useful in addressing the complexity of how gender, race, and power have informed women's lives in the U.S. West. However, several of the scholars producing this exciting work do not identify or locate their work as U.S. western women's history. One reason may be the existence of an "American western history imaginary," an ideological construct that currently dominates the field and scholarship. The essay addresses what is at stake in challenging this imaginary for U.S. western women's history.

Still brave: the evolution of black women's studies

Still brave: the evolution of black women's studies

Black Feminist Studies: The Case of Anna Julia Cooper

Julia Cooper--feminist, human tights advocate, educational reformer ... teacher, lecturer, scholar, the author of essays, vignettes, and poems.--Louise Daniel Hutchinson, 1981 feminist studies, which emerged in the 1970s as a corrective to black studies and women's studies, probes the silences, erasures, distortions, and complexities surrounding the experiences of peoples of African descent wherever they live. early scholarship was comparable to the painstaking excavation projects of an archaeologist digging for hidden treasures. A small group of mainly black feminist scholars have been responsible for reconstructing the androcentric African American literary tradition by establishing the importance of black women's literature going back to the nineteenth century. In this regard, the early work of Mary Helen Washington and Barbara Christian comes to mind--as well as that of Alice Walker who is responsible for rescuing Zora Neale Hurston from the shadows and possibly from oblivion. (1) When Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and I published Sturdy Bridges: Visions of Women in Literature, it was the first anthology of black women's literature, and would signal the importance of reclamation projects in the development of a case for a robust black women's intellectual tradition. When Words of Fire An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought was published, the maturity of black feminist studies, as well as recognition of the significance of founding texts in the evolving field, could be claimed. In this historic symposium on Julia Cooper (1858-1964), it is appropriate to begin with an assessment of the scholarly criticism about her life and legacy. Beginning with the reception she received from her peers, to the rediscovery of her seminal 1892 text A Voice from the South: By a Woman of the South by contemporary black feminist scholars, this essay chronicles significant junctures in Cooper criticism. (2) It also calls attention to the silences and gaps in the scholarship on Cooper while simultaneously bearing witness to her significance in the development of black feminist discourse and its theory-building around intersectionality. publication of Gerda Lerner's documentary history Women in White America (1972), a foundational text in the development of black women's history, situates Cooper, for the first time, among a small group of nineteenth-century black feminist leaders that included Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Mary Church Terrell. In her final section, Black Women Speak of Womanhood, Lerner includes a very brief excerpt from Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South in which there is the now-famous quote about the peculiar and special burdens of black women: The Colored Woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both (Cooper qtd. in Lerner 572-73). Six years later, the first collection of scholarly essays on the neglected history of African American women would make an important contribution to our understanding of the importance of black women's history as a corrective to American, African American, and women's movement historiography. Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978), edited by two pioneering black women historians, Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, includes the first assessment of Cooper's importance in an essay entitled Anna J. Cooper: A Voice for Women. Here Harley chronicles the important details of her life as a women's rights and human rights crusader and educator, her role in the black women's club movement, her struggles with racism and sexism, as well as her personal crises within Washington, D. …

From the Margins to the Center: Callie House and the Ex-Slave Pension MovementMary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True

Mary Frances Berry's My Face Is Black Is True is best situated within two historiographical, autobiographical, and biographical traditions within African American intellectual history. The first tradition is what John Ernest has labeled Historiography; second is Black Women's Studies. In this comment on Berry's fascinating and illuminating study of Callie House and ex-slave reparation movement, I focus first on how her work continues and enriches Historiography. In second section, I examine Callie House's life, providing an attenuated chronology of her emergence as a leader of movement, her thoughts and deeds, and finally political forces that crushed her. I conclude by locating Berry's work in dynamic explosion of scholarship in Black Women's Studies, with specific attention to historians who have shattered silence and brought into greater visibility lives of heretofore overlooked, obscured, or ignored black women of late 19th and 20th centuries. PART I We owe Dr. Mary Frances Berry an enormous debt for reclaiming life and struggles of Callie House and for giving us this long memory of formative leader of modern black reparations movement. My Face Is Black Is True is a major achievement and an invaluable gift. Mary Frances Berry's historical scholarship continues a tradition established by black historians and writers during 19th century such as William C. Nell, George Washington Williams, and Williams Wells Brown. In Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and Challenge of History, 1794-1861, John Ernest, Professor of English at University of New Hampshire, argues that these early African American writers understood that conceptions of historical scholarship and methodology were deeply implicated in system of white supremacy that defined every other aspect of American life. (1) In 20th century practitioners of liberation history included Carter G. Woodson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rayford Logan, John Hope Franklin, Earl E. Thorpe, Benjamin Quarles, Vincent Harding, Lerone Bennett, and others. Working in long and admirable tradition of liberation historiography has allowed Mary Frances Berry to make truly unique and powerful contributions to African American, and U.S. political and constitutional history, and especially to Black Women's Studies, none more impressive than pathbreaking My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations. Berry has written a book that is a work of historical recovery, but also an historical intervention. It is a work that is metahistorical. In it Berry provides a brilliant argument for justice of reparations and restores to historical memory long-forgotten Callie House. Berry's history/biography provides current reparations movement its historical record and informs us of importance of indigenous black leadership in struggles for social justice. And in keeping with her style of historical practice, Berry details ugly resolve of white political figures to use terror and incarceration to silence ex-slaves' demands for justice, and to break Callie House. In 1841 William C. Nell turned to history in an effort to understand and expose the structures of sin, and to thereby compel this guilty nation to acknowledge debt she owes her oppressed sons and daughters. (2) Over a century later, Mary Frances Berry continues that work. For her, as for Nell, George Washington Williams, and William Wells Brown, narration of history is never politically neutral. Berry's ethical commitment to reparations, her determination to give voice to those silenced, and her accessible and captivating writing style make author and her subject, Callie House, inspiring models of personal and professional integrity. Berry organized her indispensable work into nine chapters that trace evolution of washerwoman and widowed mother of five children as she emerged into a leader and came to embody heart, soul, and spirit of National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association in 1890s and 20th century. …

Roundtable Discussion: Must i be Womanist?: Response

Womanist scholars of religion have helped to create a place at the table for black women scholars and black women's studies within the Eurocentric disciplinary traditions of a male-dominated religious academy. Any conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of womanist religious studies must acknowledge a debt of gratitude to womanist pioneers. There now exists a substantive body of religious scholarship about black women's lives and religious faith, in part because of how these groundbreaking efforts have helped to carve out this intellectual legacy. It must also be remembered that the broader academic context of any conversation about womanist religious studies is shaped by historically rooted challenges of white supremacy. The mere fact that there is a need for a discussion of whether religious studies of black women and by black women scholars in religious fields can be located within varying schools of thought is a consequence of constraining white supremacist assumptions. Can you imagine a discussion about the appropriateness of assigning one analytical category to identify the work of all white religious scholars? There is something absurd and sad about the necessity to fight for the space in scholarly discourse and the academic job and publishing markets for a black woman scholar to be permitted to have more than one analytical label for her work. Yet it is indeed reflective of current realities. Monica Coleman's courageous article helps us to avoid the racist trap of obedience to black communal taboos on critical discussions of blacks "in front of whites." Critical discussions of womanist thought are healthy for the development of womanist religious studies. They signal freedom from bondage to the need to assert a singular, uniform voice of "the black community" in order to pierce the forms of racist disregard that blacks encounter in a white-dominated academy. I find myself in agreement with much of Coleman's insightful critique [End Page 128] of womanist religious studies, especially of its heteronormativity. Also, I resonate with Coleman's inquiries because I claim womanist religious scholarship as an essential resource and conversation partner but tend to identify myself as a black feminist. As I have written elsewhere, my feminist consciousness was awakened as a young adult by direct exposure to black feminist pioneers such as Michele Wallace, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Angela Davis, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith.1 The radical black lesbian feminism exhibited in the writings and activism of several of these women is precisely what most excited me. It provided language for many of my political, intellectual, and emotional yearnings. This burgeoning black feminism of my young adulthood was also developed through my exposure to white lesbian feminist and Latina lesbian feminist scholars. I have not found a compelling reason to abandon this pivotal black feminist foundation, no matter how many people in the religious academy have decided that all black women are now to be identified as womanists. (I suppose I should also confess my personality flaw of a stubborn, knee-jerk reaction of resistance whenever there is pressure to do something simply because "everybody" says it is the thing to do.) The distinction between black feminism and womanism has been blurred in several ways that militate against becoming too preoccupied with trying to capture it. As Coleman notes, the very first point in Alice Walker's defi nition of womanism describes a womanist as a black feminist.2 If Walker's 1983 defi nition is still the primary arbiter of the meaning of the term womanist for religious scholars, the effort to create a sharply differentiated dichotomy between the defi nition of black feminism and womanism is somewhat bogus. In fact, womanist Christian ethics and theology have often incorporated black feminist terminology and scholarship. Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (1995) includes Katie Cannon's essay "The Emergence of Black Feminist Consciousness" as one of the building blocks of Cannon's womanist method in Christian ethics that she lays out in that volume.3 One of the...

Black feminist theory: Charting a course for black women's studies in political science

Black feminist theory: Charting a course for black women's studies in political science

Charting Ourselves: Leadership Development with Black Professional Women

and groups in a healthy and catalytic fashion has everything to do with how they themselves are first willing to create and gain access to support vehicles that seed self-revelation and promote their own knowledge of self in relation to others. An ongoing commitment to developing the self is paramount to the establishment of an identity that is centered and grounded. The use of same raced, gendered, dyadic relationships, sister circles, therapeutic interventions, and mentoring relationships is a first step. This process is the precursor to obtaining analogs to optimize self-definition and relational positioning. Attending to such personal housekeeping allows for the dissolution of toxic interactions derived from stereotypes, negative interjections, destructive projections, character assaults, delimitations of opportunity, an absence of reciprocity, silencing, or relegation to a dominant-culture-defined placement. In short, it is the processing of raced-gendered and class-related interactions that serves as the nexus to both personal liberation and the capacity to teach others the process of uplift. Over the last fifteen years we have hosted fifteen bonding retreats for African American professional women. Our collaborative blend is rooted in being African American women. Toni C. King is an African American associate professor of Black Women's Studies at Denison University who holds a joint appointment in Black Studies and Women's Studies. S. Alease Ferguson is an African American therapist and consultant who has extensive experience in organizational and community development. Each of us has attained licensure for clinical practice. In addition, we both hold Ph.D.s in organizational behavior and we began collaborating as professionals more than a decade ago while attending the same doctoral program. The field of organizational behavior is an interdisciplinary one, drawing from psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and management science. While our counseling backgrounds have provided us with paradigms to understand individual development across the life span,