Combahee River Collective Research Articles

The Combahee River Collective Statement and Black Feminist Universalism

ABSTRACT Black feminist philosophers deserve to be included in philosophical discussions about universalism. In contrast to other approaches to universalism that seek to diminish the importance of identities such as race and gender, black feminist philosophers focus on them. This article argues that black feminist philosophers offer a universalist viewpoint, that is, a “black feminist universalism,” which asserts that a more inclusive world starts with a theory and praxis focused on those who are the most oppressed. The article shows that the Combahee River Collective writers in their manifesto, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1995) demonstrate black feminist universalism. It argues that the Combahee River Collective writers’ emphasis on their own identity as black women is the foundation for their theory and praxis, which aims to include others.

Envisioning the Future of Intersectional Anti-Racist Feminism in Psychology

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

That is What Most of Us Fail to Remember: Politics as a Neutralizing Game World Designed by Elites

Concepts such as political framing and elite capture have never been thought of as part of the humanitarian foundation of politics. This is, however, not true of identity politics. Christened in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, identity politics was originally meant to enable a group, composed mainly of black feminist women, to build their own political agenda. Striving to see the full complexity of their values and priorities leveled with those of other political movements, identity politics was looking to reveal limitations from inside groups and widen the scale and scope of problems tackled. Unity was meant to guide society towards a better world. Nevertheless, presently, identity politics often represents a normalized separation between societies whose identities are defined by past history. No longer meant to strengthen the voices of the unheard, it has become a political tool for those exercising significant impact on the political discourse of the present. Similarly, the integrities of both values and religion have, over time, subsided to power as well. With the basic foundations of the world's politics hijacked, a race against time has begun as society's justifications for climbing over people and exploiting the planet's limited resources have driven it to the verge of a disbalance so grave it might prove impossible to reverse. Thereupon, this text aims to analyze the scope of this twisted use of politics, explore activism as a countereffect, and examine the development of society under what can be defined as a never-ending match between "dark" and "light."

Discussion: “Unconsciousness-Raising”

ABSTRACT In discussing Nick Malherbe’s important exploration of liberation psychology and psychoanalysis, I attempt to sharpen analysis of the oppressive impact of traditional psychology/psychoanalysis (especially so in the U.S.). I consider oppressive hierarchies of privilege within the capitalist order in which all institutions, movements and individuals are implicated. I draw particularly from the intersectional theories of the Black feminists of the Combahee River Collective and their successors, and I consider struggles around privilege within other activist movements like ACT UP. This exploration leads me to raise questions about Malherbe’s sharp distinction between “consciousness- raising” and “unconsciousness-raising.” I explore, and raise some questions about, Malherbe’s vivid case illustration.

Lest We Forget Black Patriarchy; or, Why I'm Over Calling Out White Women

This article contends that present-day focus of Black feminist anger at white women obscures the old and ongoing Black feminist struggle to name and diagnose Black patriarchy. In effort to redirect attention to the sexual/gendered intramural struggles within Black social life, this article reads selected texts by the Combahee River Collective, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks from the 1970s–1980s. Doing so illustrates the long tradition of Black feminist writing filled with rage –not at white women—but at Black men and with the expressed objective to eradicate patriarchy. Remembering these Black feminist analytic and activist efforts to challenge black women's sexual oppression reframes Black feminism as a singular project that calls out white women's racism to a broader liberatory one requiring confrontation with male power writ large and, in particular, Black male violence against Black women.

Review of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò (Haymarket Books / Pluto Press)

The discourse surrounding identity politics has become fraught with misunderstanding and co-optation by forces across the political spectrum. What was once a radical discourse initiated by the queer, Black, and Indigenous feminists of the Combahee River Collective has become a movement defined by incapacity, stigmatization, and misinterpretation. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò sets out to clarify the nature of the identity politics movement and its relationship to the powerful institutions and individuals which have misappropriated the original radicalism of this idea to serve their own political gains. Through a materialist and narrative approach to identity politics and social critique, Táíwò argues that the problem is not with identity politics as such, but a specific power called "elite capture," which stifles the potential latent in identity politics and genuine leftist social organizing. He concludes that, rather than deferring responsibility and accepting symbolic gestures of empty representation, we must begin to construct a new politics and a new house altogether.

Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973–2001

Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973–2001

Becoming Allies: Introducing a Framework for Intersectional Allyship to Muslim Survivors of Gender-Based Violence

Multiple social movements (e.g., Black Lives Matter, The Combahee River Collective, Musawah, and #MeToo) have highlighted the systems of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and classism) in this country and globally that have targeted different marginalized groups. The traumatic experiences of gender-based violence (GBV) are compounded by the trauma of a long history of structural violence and the unique experiences of different social identities, including race, religion, and gender. One example in the Muslim American context is how Oyewuwo (2019) analyzes the unique experiences of Black Muslim women seeking help for GBV. Her work illustrates the ways in which these women, growing up in a system of oppression and injustice, shaped their response to GBV by creating patterns in which they endure violence and pain. As a South-Asian-American and an Arab-American researching GBV and working within the field, we ask: how do we, members of the Muslim community, become allies for Muslims experiencing GBV within the context of systematic oppression (in ways that prevent privileged groups from reproducing and maintaining patterns of inequality)?
 In this paper, we aim to envision possibilities for our role as allies by looking into the intersection of Islamophobia, racism, sexism, and domestic violence within Muslim communities. We present a theoretical background to some of the existing literature on intersectionality and allyship and provide a framework to combine them. The resulting framework will build off existing social movements and apply these learnings to the context of GBV within the Muslim context. Finally, this framework gives community allies, including faith leaders, activists, and community members, a guideline on the role they play in this critical social issue.

More Than and Beyond Racism: Theoretical and Political Meditations on Antiblackness

This article keys in on antiblackness and distinguishes it from racism, laying bare the false universality of the Social and the Human: Racism takes place in the Social among the Human, while antiblackness continually casts Black people and Blackness out of those foundational modern categories whose definitions derive from the violent expulsion. To delineate, the article analyzes two paradigmatic texts that strive to deal uncompromisingly with antiblackness but through the language of racism: George Yancey’s Who Is White? and “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” The article concludes by suggesting the need for a Fanonian leap of invention and an all-encompassing abolition.

The Uses of Mourning

The Uses of Mourning

Being and Becoming: Rethinking Identity Politics: Combahee River Collective Statement; How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor; The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Stuart Hall

Being and Becoming: Rethinking Identity Politics: Combahee River Collective Statement; How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor; The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Stuart Hall

Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality by Jennifer Nash

Reviewed by: Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality by Jennifer Nash Brenna M. Casey Jennifer Nash.Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham: Duke UP, 2019. 184 pp. $23.95. When Jennifer Nash returns to the state at the conclusion of her potent Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, it feels, as she notes: “risky” (117). “Against the grain of the moment,” writes Nash, hailing the state’s diurnal renewal of anti-Black violence, “I suggest that the juridical might be precisely where black feminists need to root our loving practice” (115). Beyond mere redress, Nash advocates an orientation to radical politics that dispenses with a presumptive antistate imperative. “What if the disavowed deathly archive of law is reimagined as a home for black feminism’s loving practice?” (113). Nash’s project throughout the book is to excavate the “largely forgotten connections” of law to the ubiquitous sign of intersectionality—a Black feminist theoretic that has come to frame shorthand considerations of the interlocking structures of domination (114). The term’s most frequently cited source is legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s exacta box of articles, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991), in which a metaphorical traffic intersection is deployed as an analogue for US antidiscrimination law that submits Black women to converging biases. From these coordinates, Nash produces an intellectual history of the term’s evolution and attendant applications. Citing figures like Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Beale, and the Combahee River Collective, Nash reveals the durational warp and weft of Black feminist intellectual labor. Rather than positioning intersectionality as a singular emergence, Nash reveals it as part of a “cohort of terms” that multivocal Black feminists have long cultivated for a sophisticated analysis of oppression’s interconnected mechanizations (6). While Nash acknowledges its mainstream migrations—untethered from the analytic’s history—it is with intersectionality’s atonic institutional life that Black Feminism Reimagined is most concerned. Nash identifies intersectionality as the primary program-building initiative of women’s studies, which has rendered it as a disciplinary corrective to a racist and wholly gender-focused field, but often as an implicit equivalency with Black feminism, Black feminists, and “the body that haunts the analytic,” Black women (2). This positions Black feminists as salvific “disciplinarians who quite literally whip the field into shape” on the one hand, and heavies who usher in the demise of a fictitiously coherent field on the other (13). Nash reflects on intersectionality’s co-optation by the neoliberal university’s “diversity and inclusion complex,” where equity initiatives shift inclusion from remedial affirmative action ideals to the logic of students of color offering pedagogical value-added for an increasingly global white work force (22). She analyzes the freighted deployments of “intersectional scholar” ads in the ever-diminishing [End Page 95] academic job market and pulses the term’s nefarious liaisons with “interdisciplinary” labor. Highly mobile, adaptable, “filled with promise and emptied of specific meaning” (2), intersectionality has been claimed by various and vying factions of the academy. The book traces the frustration, territoriality, and exhaustion that adhere to these migrations of a term constituted by Black feminism—a tradition whose ideas and actors have long been abused, disavowed, and erased by the academy. Nash diagnoses these imbricated feelings as “a posture of defensiveness.” One compelling illustration is of a conference panelist who quotes Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf while ruminating on intersectionality’s institutional promiscuity: “Somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff.” Nash’s recognizes this sense of possession and loss as the Black feminist affect that appends to intersectionality’s circulations. “What does it mean,” Nash queries, “when an anticaptivity project like black feminist theory claims ownership as a primary model for conducting black feminist inquiry?” (26). As critic and acolyte, Nash plumbs “the felt life of black feminism” (28). She charts “the intersectionality wars”—the discursive, political, and theoretical battles that seem to be waged over intersectionality’s vexed origin stories, appropriations, and criticisms. These persuasive narratives suggest that intersectionality requires a robust defense from usurpers and critics, and demands scholars to position themselves as either for or against the...

Portraits on the Wall

Portraits on the Wall Tiana Reid (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Barbara and Beverly. Roxbury, Massachusetts. 1978 © JEB (Joan E. Biren) from Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians published by Anthology Editions (2021). In 1978, photographer and self-described propagandist Joan E. Biren, better known as JEB, took a photo of Barbara and Beverly Smith, two of the founders of the Boston-based Combahee River Collective (CRC). Barbara gazes softly at her twin Beverly, while Beverly looks up, maybe mid-thought, with some papers in her lap. Her hand curls around her ankle, a double-sided pencil braided through her fingers. Her socks are loose and worn at the heel. She's ready to write, not run. Since 1974 these twins, along with a host of their non-biological sisters in the CRC, had theorized about the material specificities of black women's conditions. Their statement, which shook up feminism forever the year before this photograph was taken, coined the phrase "identity politics" and argued that racism, sexism, capitalism, homophobia, and imperialism could not be understood as separate issues. This black-and-white photograph captures the accessories of a life of activism and study: books, stacks of documents, a rotary telephone, a reading lamp, file cabinets. Further into the horizon, pinned onto the wall, two portraits reflect an endless cascade of black women's intellectual labor and political action. Up top is the journalist Ida B. Wells, and just below her is Harriet Tubman, who led the 1863 raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina that freed 750 enslaved people, and after which the CRC is named. It is easy to imagine the walls of present and future activists adorned with this very photo of the Smiths. [End Page 136] Tiana Reid Tiana Reid is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of English at Brown University and a former editor of the New Inquiry and Pinko. Copyright © 2022 Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc. (FSISI).

Blue Pill, Red Pill: The Incommensurable Worlds of Racism and Antiblackness

Examining two foundational texts of Black liberation, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power (1967) and the Black feminist socialist manifesto “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977), through an allegory borrowed from the 1999 film The Matrix, this article argues that both engage two distinct worlds: the “red pill” world of antiblackness, defined by Black people’s specific, exceptional, and incommensurable ontological and social conditions, including Black strategies of survival and political transfiguration; and the “blue pill” world of racism, that affects nonblacks and Blacks in distinct but related manners. To explore the fundamental difference between racism and antiblackness, the article analyzes the ways in which each world (1) manifests its foundational racial divisions; (2) engenders modalities of progressive political struggle and alliances focused on eliminating, or ameliorating, exclusion based on race and its interlocking forms of oppression; and (3) gestures toward, or demands, horizons of social transformation. It concludes by raising questions, against the backdrop of antiblackness, about the socialist horizons both paradigmatic texts embrace.

There and Back Again: A Commentary on Social Welfare Policy in the Wake of 2020

There and Back Again: A Commentary on Social Welfare Policy in the Wake of 2020

Censoring Anglogynophobia: Reconsidering the Disappearance of the National Alliance of Black Feminists

Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 201 Ileana Nachescu Censoring Anglogynophobia: Reconsidering the Disappearance of the National Alliance of Black Feminists Black women’s activism in the 1970s has often been located in the fissures between the civil rights movement, women’s liberation movement , and Black nationalism—a form of “interstitial feminism,” in the words of Kimberly Springer.1 Providing crucial interventions to disrupt male supremacy and sexism within Black organizations as well as racism and homophobia within feminist organizations, Black feminist politics modeled a “vanguard center” whose liberation signaled the liberation of all.2 The Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement” (1977), which has become a classic in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies curricula, encapsulates the power of this transformative image. The Combahee River Collective was not the only Black feminist group active in the second half of the 1970s, of course. The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), founded in 1969, had a vibrant presence on both the East Coast and the West Coast throughout this decade. The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), active between 1973 and 1975, mobilized Black women around the country and gave the impetus for the formation of several local chapters. After NBFO ended, the 1. Kimberly Springer, “The Interstitial Politics of Black Feminist Organizations ,” Meridians 1, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 156. 2. Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 91. 202 Ileana Nachescu National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) became perhaps the bestknown Black women’s organization at the time due to appearances on national television, articles and essays published in multiple Black and feminist venues, and its attempt to build a national organization. In October 1977, NABF’s national conference, “A Meeting of the Minds,” attracted more than two hundred African American women to Chicago for two days in order to discuss their experiences, listen to speakers, and develop an agenda to address the most pressing issues of the day. To this day, the long list of resolutions passed at this conference constitutes the most comprehensive set of political, economic, and cultural demands collectively devised by African American women. Yet, more than four decades later, NABF has disappeared from public consciousness, remembered only by a small group of feminist historians. The erasure of NABF from women’s history and Black history is a puzzle—in part because the organization excelled at the kinds of activities that leave visible traces. In an interview with Kimberly Springer, Combahee River Collective founder Barbara Smith noted that “People who write get far more visibility than those who don’t.”3 But NABF Executive Director Brenda Eichelberger published many essays in regional and national periodicals documenting diverse initiatives by Black feminists in the 1970s. Furthermore, unlike many feminist organizations that did not record their operations or whose records have been lost, NABF intentionally gathered and preserved rich archival materials.4 Using materials from the National Alliance of Black Feminists archives, I suggest that NABF defies many received views about Black feminist activism, and this defiance makes attention to NABF all the more vital to the history of US feminism. By examining NABF’s original theorization of “Anglogynophobia,” Black women’s distrust of and animosity toward white women, I advance a much darker explanation for the 3. Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 75. 4. For this article, I have conducted research at the following archival sites: Brenda Eichelberger / National Alliance of Black Feminists Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library; Brenda Eichelberger / National Alliance of Black Feminists Papers, 1974–1997, Chicago History Museum Research Center; and National Black Feminist Organization collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. Ileana Nachescu 203 disappearance of NABF from feminist histories—one linked to the politics of erasure. There is clear evidence that NABF’s efforts to reveal Black women’s perceptions of persistent racism and white supremacy within the feminist movement was censored, as the series of articles titled “Anglogynophobia!” was canceled prior to completion by...

Censoring Anglogynophobia: Reconsidering the Disappearance of the National Alliance of Black Feminists

Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 201 Ileana Nachescu Censoring Anglogynophobia: Reconsidering the Disappearance of the National Alliance of Black Feminists Black women’s activism in the 1970s has often been located in the fissures between the civil rights movement, women’s liberation movement , and Black nationalism—a form of “interstitial feminism,” in the words of Kimberly Springer.1 Providing crucial interventions to disrupt male supremacy and sexism within Black organizations as well as racism and homophobia within feminist organizations, Black feminist politics modeled a “vanguard center” whose liberation signaled the liberation of all.2 The Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement” (1977), which has become a classic in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies curricula, encapsulates the power of this transformative image. The Combahee River Collective was not the only Black feminist group active in the second half of the 1970s, of course. The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), founded in 1969, had a vibrant presence on both the East Coast and the West Coast throughout this decade. The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), active between 1973 and 1975, mobilized Black women around the country and gave the impetus for the formation of several local chapters. After NBFO ended, the 1. Kimberly Springer, “The Interstitial Politics of Black Feminist Organizations ,” Meridians 1, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 156. 2. Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 91. 202 Ileana Nachescu National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) became perhaps the bestknown Black women’s organization at the time due to appearances on national television, articles and essays published in multiple Black and feminist venues, and its attempt to build a national organization. In October 1977, NABF’s national conference, “A Meeting of the Minds,” attracted more than two hundred African American women to Chicago for two days in order to discuss their experiences, listen to speakers, and develop an agenda to address the most pressing issues of the day. To this day, the long list of resolutions passed at this conference constitutes the most comprehensive set of political, economic, and cultural demands collectively devised by African American women. Yet, more than four decades later, NABF has disappeared from public consciousness, remembered only by a small group of feminist historians. The erasure of NABF from women’s history and Black history is a puzzle—in part because the organization excelled at the kinds of activities that leave visible traces. In an interview with Kimberly Springer, Combahee River Collective founder Barbara Smith noted that “People who write get far more visibility than those who don’t.”3 But NABF Executive Director Brenda Eichelberger published many essays in regional and national periodicals documenting diverse initiatives by Black feminists in the 1970s. Furthermore, unlike many feminist organizations that did not record their operations or whose records have been lost, NABF intentionally gathered and preserved rich archival materials.4 Using materials from the National Alliance of Black Feminists archives, I suggest that NABF defies many received views about Black feminist activism, and this defiance makes attention to NABF all the more vital to the history of US feminism. By examining NABF’s original theorization of “Anglogynophobia,” Black women’s distrust of and animosity toward white women, I advance a much darker explanation for the 3. Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 75. 4. For this article, I have conducted research at the following archival sites: Brenda Eichelberger / National Alliance of Black Feminists Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library; Brenda Eichelberger / National Alliance of Black Feminists Papers, 1974–1997, Chicago History Museum Research Center; and National Black Feminist Organization collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. Ileana Nachescu 203 disappearance of NABF from feminist histories—one linked to the politics of erasure. There is clear evidence that NABF’s efforts to reveal Black women’s perceptions of persistent racism and white supremacy within the feminist movement was censored, as the series of articles titled “Anglogynophobia!” was canceled prior to completion by...

Troublesome Knowledge: Autotheory in the Queer Classroom

Troublesome Knowledge:Autotheory in the Queer Classroom Shannon Brennan (bio) "On the eve of finishing this essay my attention is focused not on how to rework the conclusion (as it should be) but instead on news stories of alleged racism at Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC)."1 So begins CATHY COHEN'S influential essay, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" COHEN'S opening salvo attunes the reader to the urgency of her project and draws into the political present the act of writing: the "rework[ing] [of] the conclusion." Present on the surface of the text are COHEN'S "attention," her "mixed emotions," and the recursive process of revision. Such moves constitute what readers of this special issue might recognize as an "autotheoretical" gesture. In a turn that's also typical of the genre, what Cohen performatively frames as a "distraction" from her work is not a diversion at all but instead exemplifies her argument's necessity. The story she tells shows a failure of LGBTQ+ organizations to conceive of politics intersectionally, while it also "highlights the limits of a lesbian and gay political agenda based on a civil rights strategy, where assimilation into, and replication of, dominant institutions [End Page 707] are the goals."2 Cohen advocates for a reconceptualization of the meaning of "queer"—not as a static identity marker but as the basis for a politics built on shared relationships to power. Two decades on, Cohen is still "rework[ing] the conclusion." While optimistic about the intersectional work of the Movement for Black Lives, Cohen notes how LGBTQ+ politics has refused "Punks's" intervention.3 Instead, the loudest mainstream LGBTQ+ voices continue to invest in presumptively stable identity categories, the security of which is expressed in well-meaning bromides such as the claim to having been "born this way" or tautologies like "love is love." They invest, that is, not in the radical "identity politics" articulated by the Combahee River Collective, which emphasized the "synthesis of [interlocking] oppressions" on axes of race, gender, sexuality.4 Instead, much contemporary LGBTQ+ discourse emphasizes a putative "identity politics" that is single-axis (rather than intersectional), consumerist (rather than radically politicized), individual (rather than collective), liberal (rather than radical), and organized around securing the identitarian platform from which a self can seek representation and redress rather than investigating the wily question of power's operation in our connected biopolitical, necropolitical existence. These two impulses—toward single-axis identitarian commitments and toward more dynamic conceptions of the subject—are both potentiated in autotheory, a genre in which the self, in its body and in all its particularity, is staged on the page as an object of, vessel for, or method of doing philosophy. Whether autotheory ultimately reifies the neoliberal self as expressed through identitarian taxonomies isn't really the point; the question of the self's reification is always there—implicitly or explicitly. My aim is not so much to offer a political analysis of the works of autotheory that exist but to examine the works of autotheory that might be—the works of autotheory that undergraduate students produce (to personalize: the works that my undergraduate students produce) as they work through what, in the language of constructivist pedagogy, we might call queer theory's "troublesome" knowledge practices.5 What are the uses of autotheory as a pedagogical tool? Given the genre's feminist, queer, queer of color, and trans genealogy, I wish to consider its use as a tool for learning and, more, for "doing" queer theory—for [End Page 708] doing queer theory as Cohen and other QPOC scholars define it, I mean: recognizing and theorizing one's positionality in relation to power and in relation to potential coalitions of care, activism, and resistance.6 To what degree does the production of this genre of writing enable students to cross the threshold—as educational theorists Jan Meyer and Ray Land would put it—into the transformative ways of thinking that queer theory (and its cognate fields: women's and gender studies, trans studies, ethnic studies) looks to enable?7 It's a gnarly question, for contemporary autotheory, like contemporary queer theory, is positioned at...

Preface: “Be a Mystery”: (The Infinity of) Black Feminist Thought

preface Sometimes, even those of us who have organized our entire lives around the transformative possibilities of Black feminist thought can sit back in wonder at the expansiveness of this intergenerational transnational practice.Thisspecialissuetakesamomenttoimbibewhere we have been, where we are, and where we have yet to journey . The contributors to this special issue on, or more precisely, of Black feminist thought find Black feminist thinking in a wide range of times, places, and forms. Each of the contributors invites us to bear witness in a distinct way to the pushes and pulls of critical engagement with Black feminist thought. Biomythic origin point “mitochondrial eve” brainstorms the archive and admonishes those of us looking back to “be a forest of your own / dreams.” Gladys Bentley sends unrequited texts to . . . Gladys Bentley . Everything is possible here, even what should never have happened. In If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, Farah Jasmine Griffin, one of the most dedicated and prolific stewards of Black feminist thought as a liberatory practice, cites Rita Dove’s poem “Canary” to evoke the protective strategies Black women employ to hold something (ourselves, each other) sacred in an unfree world.1 The lineage we participate in through our Black 1. Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 155–56. “Be a Mystery”: (The Infinity of) Black Feminist Thought 8Preface feminist intellectual labor is sacred to us. For generations, even before the name “Black Feminist,” it has existed as a form of love, communion , protest, and prophecy, often far from the spotlight. Nurtured by the warmth of imagination, practices became praxis. Griffin and others have ensured a tradition wherein, to invoke Griffin’s paraphrase of Toni Morrison in her tribute to Nellie McKay, “the mothers may soar and the daughters may know their names.”2 We are some of the daughters. But we are living in times that neither we nor our mothers would hardly recognize. Abolitionist queer Black feminists are topping the New York Times bestseller lists. Our scholars and experts speak on the nightly news. Some of what were once our most marginalized proposals have become policies, funding keywords, and even memes. The Movement for Black Lives, one of the largest and most visible social movements of our time, or any time, explicitly connects its vision to the foundational Combahee River Collective statement. We do this work now in the light of recognition. Masses of people think they know what Black feminism is, and yet, this is not the world that we dreamed. We, the current generation of practicing Black feminist thinkers, are faced with the consequences of Black feminist practice feeling like less of a mystery. We celebrate the legacy our foremothers have made possible, and we must also think creatively, lovingly, and sometimes even cryptically about what this moment can and must mother—or bring into being. It has to bring into being something we cannot describe from here, something we have not yet known. It is exhilaratingly beautiful to look upon what’s been made possible , but we know there is so much more than recognition. Undaunted by a world still hellbent on not caring for or loving us, even as it consumes our insights, theories, and modes of organizing, we create worlds filled with an abundance of joy, affirmation, and ingenuity. It is from this robust, ancestral practice of world-making that this special issue emerges. The pieces found here provide insight into one of the most dynamic aspects of Black feminist thought: its generative power. The range of topics included in this special issue encapsulates the breadth of this interdisciplinary, transnational, multimodal, and 2. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “That the Mothers May Soar and the Daughters May Know Their Names: A Retrospective of Black Feminist Literary Criticism,” Signs 32, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 483–507. Preface 9 intergenerational practice. Given the seemingly infinite nodes and entry points of Black feminist thought, it is befitting that this issue coheres because of an unboundedness and porousness among the pieces. The art essays, articles, field reviews, and conversations converse, dance, and harmonize with...

“We care about feminist notions of genuine security” A Conversation with Margo Okazawa-Rey. By Katrin Meyer

Margo Okazawa-Rey is Professor Emerita at San Francisco State University. Her research develops an understanding of security from an intersectional, transnational, and activist perspective. She examines the connections between militarism, economic globalization and the impacts on local and migrant women in East Asia, as well as the role of feminist research in activism, women’s empowerment and policy change. She was a founding member of the Combahee River Collective, which articulated a theory of intersectionality in the 1970s. The following interview with Margo Okazawa-Rey took place on September 24, 2019 by video call.