White Liberals Research Articles

Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer

Reviewed by: Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer Cait McKinney (bio) Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer. Duke University Press, a Camera Obscura Book. 2022. 304 pages. $107.95 hardcover; $28.95 paperback; also available in e-book. Feminist theory and queer cultures often locate lesbian feminism a bit out of time, a formation that is over(ish) but drags on, affecting present movements. In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer enters this fray with a metaphor about being tongue-tied. Lesbian is a hard word to say, they suggest, both technically—as the transition from the slow, smooth les- to the hard, quick -bian requires a sudden shift in embouchure—and also conceptually, in that some associate the term lesbian with transphobia and white feminism. For Samer, speaking the word lesbian "always feels like molasses," because there is urgency in uttering the word but its lineages are a mouthful. This image is bound up with the author's emphasis on the gendered body, located in time, as what we always think and theorize from.1 The slow, careful being with 1970s lesbian media that unfolds in this book is geared toward a different kind of historiographic opening, which Samer names lesbian potentiality. With this concept, Samer puts forward a new theory of lesbian media history as offering alternative visions of sexual and gendered life, visions that emerge from concrete experiences of lesbian conviviality, including the film screening, video workshop, and fan newsletter. Lesbian documentary and science fiction, they assert, enact worlds without patriarchy, prisons, or binaries that wound. These visions are "potentialities" because they present former [End Page 209] futures that were never realized, that are indeed unrealizable, but that generate ideas scholars and activists committed to liberation "may want to imagine within the ongoing project of forging freer futures."2 Samer emphasizes that potentiality has implications for historiographies of media and of social movements, which are freed from the burden of making something progressive and linear out of the past to revel in historical contingencies as they either resonate onward or don't. "What happened and what did not happen" is as important in Samer's method as "what could have not been but was and what could have been but was not."3 As Samer puts it, sounding a bit weary of trends in media history, "there are historiographical alternatives to simply converting past potentialities into a resource in the service of our imagined future."4 Freed from the burden of being a precedent for feminists and queer people "today," lesbian media in this book are allowed to be expansive, messy. In this process, Samer paints lesbian as a structure of feeling more than an identity category and a capacious concept for which people who might call themselves trans today have always had affinity. Samer builds on the work of Giorgio Agamben to carefully contextualize lesbian potentialities as existing and concrete rather than generic. Unlike related theories such as José Esteban Muñoz's aesthetic focus on queer futurity, potentialities are not abstract or utopian.5 Rather, they emerge from grounded conditions of lesbian feminist collaboration across media, politics, and affective life. Samer finds these lesbian potentialities in counterpublics formed around documentary film and video and science fiction fandoms, each of which take up one-half of the book. In the first two chapters on documentary, Samer begins with a study of film distribution, an under-theorized aspect of 1970s lesbian feminism's cultural infrastructure. Investigating the origins of Women Make Movies and some of their lesser-known contemporaries, Samer frames the traveling film screening as an eventful space where audiences labored to generate, negotiate, and revise meanings between their local contexts and the feminist politics of the films they watched together. Feminist distribution is a culmination of activist-artist labor, technologies and systems, and routines through which audiences are invited to encounter media. Returning to the concreteness of lesbian potentiality, Samer shows how film distribution as a system combines with dialogic consciousness-raising as a practice. This conjuncture happens in and through a political vision of what an end to compulsory heterosexuality...

How Do We Grow Grassroots Critiques of the State? A Close Reading of Triple Jeopardy from East Baltimore

How Do We Grow Grassroots Critiques of the State?A Close Reading of Triple Jeopardy from East Baltimore Lenora R. Knowles (bio) When I sit with the images, concepts, and community voices of the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) in their Triple Jeopardy newspaper, I am struck by how this movement publication served as a key mechanism for the New York City chapter of the TWWA to grow leadership and critical consciousness of the racial capitalist U.S. state among their base of Third World women and Third World people more generally. In this first issue, the TWWA elucidates how members were teaching and circulating Third World political analysis and movement strategy, along with the meanings and values of Third World movement leadership. As a revised organic intellectual, organizer, and nepantlera,1 I find joy and possibility in the complex process of growing grassroots movement leaders struggling for broadscale social transformation. From its first issue through its last, Triple Jeopardy offers important considerations for doing the relational and processual work of political education and leadership development today. Below, I explore how writers of Triple Jeopardy utilized the rhetorical device of the question as a method for critical inquiry and political education. Moreover, I trace how they mobilized radical critiques of the state at multiple scales, ranging from global regimes of violence to everyday trauma, in order to build political unity. I suggest that these approaches provide invaluable tools for the grassroots base-building and leadership development that I attempt to practice while organizing in East Baltimore. To better understand some of what this first issue teaches us about leadership development, I provide a bit of context for the TWWA (see Springer 2005; Farmer 2017), the stakes of their organizing and theorizing within a Cold War context, and how they conceptualized the role of their [End Page 191] grassroots publication. The TWWA was a radical women of color organizing collective that first took shape in New York through the leadership of Black women organizers Frances Beal and Gwendolyn Patton. The organizational life of the New York–based TWWA spanned roughly from 1969 to 1977; during this time, they created an organizing program and collectivist organizational structure that centered a Third World woman of color politics that was anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-sexist. The collective's effort to develop a united front of Third World women necessitated multimodal work that was deeply personal, epistemic, collective, analytical, and embodied in nature. Their writings and organizing articulated a Third World women's consciousness among working-class women of color. They mobilized members around key local and international campaigns that promoted reproductive justice, opposed the Vietnam War, and resisted police and carceral violence. Their growing numbers demonstrated the resonance of the organization's intersectional analysis and its strategies for organizing among Third World women. In addition, their thriving base spoke to their increased organizational capacity. Thus, we might think about the TWWA's increased grassroots power in terms of its potential threat to the U.S. nation-state's stability and working-class women's allegiance to a U.S. status quo. By 1971 the organization expanded into the West Coast with the formation of the Bay Area and Seattle chapters. The national membership has been estimated to be somewhere around two hundred members. While the NYC chapter mostly organized among Black diasporic and Puerto Rican women, the West Coast chapter expanded the membership of Chicana and Asian American and Pacific Islander women alongside African American women. The NYC chapter mobilized women for the annual International Women's Day and supported local workers' picket lines, as well as protests spearheaded by groups like the Black Panther Party, La Union Latina, and the Campaign to Free Angela Davis. One of their first actions as a collective was participating in the 1970 New York women's strike, during which members publicly delivered a critique of the hegemonic white feminist organizations of the time (TWWA [1974?], 2). The organization challenged state and corporate violence domestically and abroad, most notably in their work to end the country's imperial intervention in Vietnam, state discipline of Black activists, and attacks on Third World Women's reproductive capacity...

There Are No Good Deaths in War: Rebecca Harding Davis's "John Lamar" and the White Feminist Foundations of U.S. Antiwar Literature

Studies of (anti)war literature continue to devalue Rebecca Harding Davis's contributions to the genre. This essay reaffirms Davis's status as a foundational writer of U.S. antiwar literature whose exposure to emergent guerilla conflict in the borderlands of western Virginia made her critical of northern and southern attempts to reconcile the Civil War's carnage with martial codes of conduct and domestic narratives of mourning. Reibsome argues that Davis's 1862 short story "John Lamar" employs a multivalent Good Death/Bad Death rhetoric to convey the horror of unconventional warfare and to force readers to contemplate the irreconcilable differences between Confederate and emancipatory war aims. Combining contemporary criticism and new historical research, Reibsome problematizes the story's reconciliationist conclusion, suggesting that Davis's familial participation in slavery distorted her perception of race, as evidenced by her penchant for incorporating racist tropes and caricatures in her writing.

Re/playing slavery: The play within the play in Suzan-Lori Parks’s White Noise and Jeremy O. Harris’s

This article considers the use of the play within the play in recent African American dramas. Following Caroline Levine’s discussion of forms, it asks about the dramaturgical and political affordances of this device when used together with the reenactment of the Master-Slave script. Comparing Suzan-Lori Parks’s White Noise (2019) and Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play (2018), the article discusses what the metatheatrical re/play of slavery in the two plays affords, in terms of possibilities and limits, for probing the continuing psychic and affective hold of slavery on contemporary subjects. While the play within the play’s traditional Western self-reflective function can afford insight for some of the characters into their role in the social field, this insight does not necessarily translate into progressive action. Notably, both plays’ endings visually tie the vocal emancipation of the Black protagonists from the scripts of slavery to the straight, white, male, liberal antagonist crumbling under the awareness of the weight of the historical role he agreed to reenact. Hence, the plays seem to suggest that for white liberals an affective encounter with their structural implication in the enduring legacies of slavery might be a prerequisite for imagining systemic change. In doing so, these plays challenge both the characters who engage with the play within the play onstage as well as their off-stage audience to consider their positionality and performance in an entrenched racial scenario.

‘Stockhausenesque’: South African Musical Vanguardism during the ‘Durban Moment’

AbstractThis article weaves a story around the scant evidence that survives of the first university-based electroacoustic studio in Africa and the musical experimentalism that developed alongside it at the fledgling music department of what was then the University of Natal. The time is the early 1970s, the setting the eastern seaboard city of Durban, the local political context the ‘Durban moment’ of growing political unrest infused by Steve Biko's Black Consciousness movement and the radical politics of Richard (Rick) Turner, the red herring an ARP-2500 modular synthesizer, and the key figures the German-born experimental composer Ulrich Süsse and South Africa's foremost musicologist at the time Christopher Ballantine. By tracing the genealogy of Ballantine's ideas in post-1968 British counterculture and in musical collaborations with the physics department at the University of Natal – and by juxtaposing and contrasting the Durban New Music Group's activities with Turner's contemporaneous and often seething critique of white liberalism – the article offers perspectives on the globalization of the avant-garde, the expression of musical vanguardism in the problematic and contradictory spaces of twentieth-century white liberal South Africa, and the dialectics between the ‘experimental’ and the ‘avant-garde’ that informed alternative institution-building at what was to become the first department in South Africa to include African music, jazz, and popular music in their curricula in the early 1980s.

Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World by William A. Link

Reviewed by: Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World by William A. Link Tracy Campbell Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World. By William A. Link. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 343. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6493-4.) North Carolinian Frank Porter Graham occupies a lofty perch in twentieth-century southern history, compared by some of his admirers to Gandhi and Christ. In William A. Link’s well-researched biography, Graham emerges as more complex and human, and his career exposes the limitations of white liberalism in the post–World War II South. After graduating from the University of North Carolina (UNC) in 1909, Graham earned an M.A. in 1916 at Columbia University under William A. Dunning and then attended the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. Although known affectionately as “Dr. Frank,” Graham never finished his Ph.D., but that did not keep him from returning to UNC to teach history. In 1930, Graham was president of the university, and during the height of the Great Depression, he battled legislative budget cuts and countered attacks on academic freedom. His outspoken support of labor causes made him many powerful enemies throughout the state. In 1938, at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Graham proclaimed racial justice was “the primary test of American democracy and Christianity” (p. 106). Throughout his life, Graham sought to bridge divides through education and religion, while avoiding federal directives or legislation. A frustrated John Hope Franklin, like so many others who witnessed Graham’s focus on evolutionary change, was unimpressed. “Graham’s reasonableness, sweet as it was, was on one side. On his side,” Franklin recalled (p. 111). During World War II, Graham served on the National War Labor Board, where, in a crucial 1943 case, he supported equal pay for equal work. He used the occasion to proclaim that the nation should celebrate “‘the vigor and variety of its differences’” and “refuse to become a ‘stronghold of bigots,’” but he retreated when the opportunity arose to further loosen the grip of segregation (p. 147). After the war, President Harry S. Truman appointed Graham to the President’s Commission on Civil Rights. Graham dissented from the committee’s landmark 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, because he opposed federal efforts to ensure voting rights and to pass an antilynching bill. Instead, he encouraged a tepid philosophy of “nondiscrimination, not nonsegregation” (p. 166). In the end, Graham’s attempt to reconcile gradualism and goodwill with the reality of white supremacy satisfied no one. When U.S. senator J. Melville Broughton died in 1949, Governor W. Kerr Scott appointed Graham to fill the seat. Link describes Graham’s 1950 campaign to remain in the Senate as “weak and overconfident” and the candidate himself as “disinterested” (p. 205). Graham relied on his reputation for personal integrity to overcome charges of communist subversion. He won more votes than his opponent, Willis Smith, in the Democratic primary but fell short of the required majority. In the runoff election, Smith’s supporters, in a pattern that became all too common, warned that Graham favored Blacks working and living alongside “your wives and daughters.” They urged white people to “Wake Up!” if they wished to avoid a “mingling of the races” (p. 211). [End Page 182] Graham lost the race by 19,000 votes and never ran for elective office again. Afterward, during his appointment as a United Nations mediator, Graham failed to resolve a dispute in Kashmir between Pakistan and India. When he died in 1972, one friend eulogized that the martyred Graham may have “lived too long” (p. 250). Link’s well-crafted and thoughtful account can be paired with his excellent biography of North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York, 2008). The differing tactics and political trajectories of Graham and Helms tell us much about the contours of southern history and American politics since the 1950s and provide a timely context for understanding our current dilemmas. Tracy Campbell University of Kentucky Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

The power of story: Understanding gendered dimensions of mobility among Tucson refugees

AbstractThe paper focuses on the power of a single story to bring the human contexts and circumstances that shape refugees' post‐resettlement lives to the forefront. Through an ethnographic example, the article brings attention to the lived experience of refugees and dismantles gendered tropes that are rooted in Western and white feminist theoretical frameworks. We do so through the prism of mobility‐related challenges that refugees experience after resettlement. By focusing on the narrow topic of mobility, we hope to illuminate the uniqueness of each individual's journey in navigating one's post‐resettlement life in the United States.

Gadji Feminism(s) in Serbia: Racial Privilege and “Intersectional” Solidarity in an Eastern European Semiperiphery

Abstract: In this paper, we follow Jelena Savić, the only Romani critical race theoretician, poet, and decolonial activist in Serbia in her call for unpacking the colonial legacy and whiteness behind the feminist politics. Accordingly, we trace the historical trajectory through which whiteness has been introduced into and became paradigmatic of specific post-Yugoslav Serbian feminist activism and theories. In line with Savić’s critique of the feminist politics in Serbia, we identify two types of gadji (non-Roma European) feminism(s): gadji saviorism and gadji performative solidarity . In the first section we outline the notion of gadji saviorism as an optics perceiving Roma women as victims of the purportedly backward Romani way of life and the supposed inherent poverty from which Roma women need to be “saved” or “uplifted” by the enlightened Eurocentric culture(s). We point both to similarities and differences between colonial-state antiziganist subjugation of Roma women and children in the Austro-Hungarian empire/kingdom and the contemporary Serbian feminist “savior politics” aligned with transnational European and national Serbian policies. In the second section, we look at the (post)socialist genealogies behind the concept which Savić identified as white feminist “performative solidarity” and its race-blind approach to both feminism and solidarity based on its (self)conflation with the ideology of “sisterhood and unity”. Our research shows how these ideas nested in the Serbian feminist scene following the fall of socialism and the end of Cold War.

The Postcolonial and the Post-Traumatic: Specters and Syndromes of White Feminist Canon

Abstract: Following Namita Goswami’s call for a “non-antagonistic understanding of difference” in Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (2019), I want to challenge the canon of white feminism that still lingers in the emerging discourses on trauma care and trauma recovery, specifically utilizing concepts from Critical Disability Theory and, to some degree, Critical Trauma Studies. As Joy DeGruy asks in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome [PTSS]: “debilitating beliefs and assumptions are . . . part of the legacy of trauma. . . . How are such effects of trauma transmitted through generations?” and in the spirit of Spivak’s aesthetic education as Goswami cites her, I make an effort here to “bring to crisis” the meaning of trauma, beyond its psychotherapeutic connotations, especially as it may be rooted in the collective, as well as to demonstrate the connections between the inherited trauma of anti-black oppression to the legacy of slavery. This challenge begs the following questions: whose trauma matters? And to what end?

Perspectives for a Liberation Psychology in the 21st Century: Learning Alongside Survivors in Guatemala and Rwanda

As is increasingly recognized globally, Ignacio Martín-Baró sought to liberate psychology from its roots in a dominant, dualist, positivist paradigm evident in Euro-American/Western psychological theory, research and praxis in the 20 th century. He called for a new horizon for psychology of relevance defined by its contribution towards breaking cycles and dynamics of personal and social oppression. He has been credited with developing an onto-epistemology “of the people” – ways of being, knowing, and doing that evolve in situ – within and beyond the context of systemic violence in the 1981-1990 armed conflict in El Salvador in which he was one among approximately 75,000 people assassinated. Against the backdrop of his contributions, we note the presence of a “trauma industry” whereby mental health professionals regularly enter war zones and post-conflict settings with diagnostics and treatment models imported from the global North, thereby de-politicizing and de- contextualizing historically rooted violence and locating social suffering in individual symptoms of PTSD. We authors – feminist community and clinical psychologists, researchers and consultants with a long-term relationship of accompanying survivors in Guatemala and Rwanda – explore selected ethical and conceptual shortcomings of the international trauma boom that influences our work, while consciously engaging and confronting contradictions of being part of the very power structures that they seek to overcome through a praxis of mutual accompaniment. Martín-Baró’s liberation psychology orients our research and trauma work in multiple dilemmas we encounter in contexts wherein we also draw on critical reflexivity vis- à-vis our positionalities as “outsiders”, Euro-American/Western educated White feminists who have developed dialogic relationships with women and child survivors of gross violations of human rights. We seek to decolonize psychology while the latter continues to privilege us and marginalize those we accompany. Through a lens of an open dialogue between two different regional contexts we identify and discuss “lessons learned” through similar praxis developed “from the perspective of survivors”, while identifying ruptures and limitations as well as pending questions encountered in the field as we seek to contribute to a liberation of psychology in our professional roles through the praxis of mutual accompaniment.

Audre Lorde, Labor Theorist: Rethinking Integrity within Late Capitalism

Abstract: Audre Lorde’s work is most often read for her insights in the fields of gender, sexuality, and critical race theory, and while her work certainly merits close attention for its groundbreaking contributions to these fields, I will suggest here that her work can also be productively read as a significant contribution to literary labor theory. Reading Lorde as a labor theorist enables a holistic understanding of the complete nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and class as the materialist manifestation of the underlying capitalistic abstraction of the self of the worker. I will argue that for Lorde, ultimately, woman is one who works, and this underlies her overarching conceptualization of integrity, a radical notion of wholeness that is based in the fullness of women’s labor (often social justice labor). This materialist idea functions as a radical alternative to capitalist alienation, and specifically combats the privilege of white feminism, and other bourgeois power inequalities. Lorde’s conceptualization of the working woman of color is truly world-making. It is sensuous and holistic (in a way that the abstraction of capitalism is demonstratively not), and it is a specifically non-white, lesbian labor that effects this. Lorde’s “integrity” is a way of reuniting the subject and object (à la Marx’s “species being”) within the figure of the woman who works. What that looks like, in our political reality, is active social justice work, done—and lived—with integrity.

Gender and Race in John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women

Focusing on Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), this paper adopts the perspective of the feminist and decolonial history of philosophy. It defends the idea that this book may be read as making a contribution to the construction of a Euro-centered white feminism, which developed in the nineteenth century. In this book, Mill dissociates race from gender issues and characterizes feminism and its subject as being indifferent to racial problems. Indeed, the comparisons that the book makes between sexism and racism, between women and slaves, are not used as a way of drawing a connection between feminist and antiracist causes. On the contrary, they are usually used to dissociate the different fights and to separate the defense of English women’s rights from the defense of the rights of non-white men and women. In the first part of the paper, I show that Mill defines anti-Black racism as a non-European problem, unrelated to the domination of women. Next, I argue that he disconnects the subjection of women from slavery by affirming their non-contemporaneity and the exceptionality of the subjection of women in the modern world. Finally, I demonstrate how Mill appropriates and modifies the meaning of “slavery,” applying it primarily to English married women, and establishes a hierarchy that ranks Black enslaved women lower than white women on a scale of subjection. Thus, this paper uncovers and interprets these blind spots in order to allow contemporary feminists to make a cautious and mindful use of Mill’s The Subjection of Women.

“Diversity Within”: The Problems with “Intersectional” White Feminism in Practice

Abstract In intersectionality studies, debates about the additive versus constitutive nature of intersectionality are long-established. This article attempts to intervene in these conversations by examining how additive, “diversity within” intersectionality works in practice. Across feminist academia, advocacy, and policymaking, there is a widely held perception that among the nongovernmental organizations constituted around identity-based inequalities (feminist, racial justice, migrants, disability, and LGBTQI+ rights), it is the feminist sector that best advocates for and attempts to practice intersectionality. This is related to the appropriation of Black feminist theories of intersectionality which emerged from grassroots activism and Critical Race scholarship as “feminist” theory, wherein feminist is always-already constructed as white. Drawing on empirical research with equality organizations working with disabled women and trans women in England and Scotland, this article suggests that the opposite is true: the additive intersectionality practiced by the white-led feminist sector serves to uphold white supremacy and other structural inequalities.

Decolonization of Feminism in the Malayan Nationalist Movement: A Case Study of Ibu Zain and Shamsiah Fakeh

The misrepresentation of Southeast Asians throughout history was often the results of the White Man’s burden doctrine practiced by Western colonialists, which clouded their perceptions of Southeast Asians, resulting in claims that Southeast Asians were inferior. This Eurocentric idea has distorted the representation of colonized nations in general. However, the worst Eurocentric fallacy is regarding Muslim women in Southeast Asia. They were not only misrepresented but also intimidated by the patriarchal nature of orientalism. Muslim women were, and indeed often still are, viewed as vulnerable victims that need to be saved from their men, making them quarry of double oppression. The most unfortunate part is even many modern white feminists still subscribe to these Eurocentric ideas. Thus, this paper aims to decolonize this narrative by illustrating the history of women’s involvement in politics from the time of the Malay Sultanate until post-World War II Malaya. This research also explores women’s participation in the far-right and far-left political movements in Malaya, with special references to Ibu Zain and Shamsiah Fakeh. We demonstrate the independence of Malayan women and affirm that they were well-presented in Malayan politics over this period of time.

Is It Gender or Is It Race? To Kill a Mockingbird and Its Film Adaptation

This article begins by exploring the national climate in which Lee’s novel appeared, at the height of the civil rights movement in the South, which had a crucial impact on its composition and reception. The major film studios were not initially interested in the novel, but independent filmmakers Alan Pakula (producer) and Robert Mulligan (director), influenced by existentialism, felt attracted to stories with strong dramatization over the spectacular. The film is famously characterized by the voice-over narration of the adult Scout, which embodies a paradoxical duality of perspective: the events are seen from the perspective of the young Scout but described in the language of a mature and articulate adult Scout. In the novel, the destabilization of gender norms is the central theme, and the protagonist is clearly Scout going through the pains of growing up female in a South with very strict definitions of gender roles. This dimension is not prominent in the film version, which gave in to the demands of the Hollywood star system and made the girl’s father, played by Gregory Peck, the main character, and made racism the main issue. The article concludes with a necessary reconsideration of Atticus Finch, subjected in recent years to the complaint that both the novel and the film convey the historically inaccurate message that heroic whites, instead of blacks, were the leaders of the anti-racist movements of the twentieth century. Atticus Finch no doubt remains tied to the accommodating values of his class and he never openly questions the structural racism of which he himself is part, but moral horizons of previous eras are often narrow in comparison with our own, and we should avoid the excesses of presentism and maintain the historical perspective that allows us to celebrate the courage and success of fictional white liberals like Atticus and real ones like Harper Lee herself, who could only speak as whites, not as black victims. Despite all its limitations, Mockingbird did contribute to making hearts and minds reconsider race in America, and it remains a socially and historically important film. Thus, we should at least acknowledge its merit in taking a stand during a period when many films avoided controversial racial matters.

Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump by Anthony J. Badger

Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump by Anthony J. Badger

White Feminism and Carceral Industries: Strange Bedfellows or Partners in Crime and Criminology?

In this article, we examine the existing policy and academic literature on punitive responses to gender-based and family violence, focusing, in particular, on women’s police stations. Specialist women’s police stations have been a feature of policing in Argentina, Brazil, and other South American as well as Central American countries since the late 1980s. They are considered to be a phenomenon of ‘the global South’, having also been set up in some African and Asian countries including Sierra Leone and India. In this article, we critique research on women’s police stations as well as the public discourse within which women’s police stations are being proposed as a solution to domestic violence – looking at questions of research design, methodology, empiricism, ethics, and criminological claims to knowledge or ‘truth’. We reflect on the significant dangers posed by the potential transfer of women’s police stations to the Australian context, especially for sovereign Indigenous women and girls. Finally, we critique what we see as deep-seated contradictions and anomalies inherent in ‘southern theory’ and white feminist carceralism.

Mary Magdalene and the Dangers of White Feminism

Abstract The film Mary Magdalene (2018) has been praised for its focus on one of Jesus’ most overlooked followers. But the film includes subtly negative depictions of Jewishness as well as problematic depictions of Black characters. Despite the film’s stated attempts to reflect first-century contexts, cinematic decisions reinforce harmful stereotypes about Judaism and about Black men. Viewing the film in light of historical Christian-feminist anti-Judaism on the one hand, and on the other, the figure of the ‘Karen’, a white woman who polices the presence and behaviour of Black people, this article investigates the ways in which Mary Magdalene is characterized in line with white feminism, and as such, the ways in which this white Mary is weaponized against Jews and Black people.

“Better never means better for everyone”: White feminist necropolitics and Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale

ABSTRACT This article builds on those who have critiqued Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale along racial lines and calls into question the esteemed status the show holds as a rhetorical resource for contemporary feminist activism. By drawing attention to the parasitical relationship that the archetype of the vulnerable (but resilient) white woman has to Black pain and death, I argue that the series further calcifies the dominance of white feminism, enacting what I term “white feminist necropolitics.” To illuminate this theory, the essay presents a close analysis of The Handmaid's Tale. Specifically, I demonstrate how the show deploys post-racial logics to center a white feminist heroine whose story of saviorism relies on the cooptation of Black pain and the exploitation of Black death. Ultimately, this critical reading of the series points to the ways in which white feminism and necropolitics are intricately entangled.

A White Liberal College President in the Jim Crow South: Guy Herbert Wells and the YWCA at Georgia State College for Women, 1934–1953 by Sandra E. Godwin

Reviewed by: A White Liberal College President in the Jim Crow South: Guy Herbert Wells and the YWCA at Georgia State College for Women, 1934–1953 by Sandra E. Godwin Leah LaGrone A White Liberal College President in the Jim Crow South: Guy Herbert Wells and the YWCA at Georgia State College for Women, 1934–1953. By Sandra E. Godwin with Helen Matthews Lewis. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 238. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-790-1.) What began as a project to explore the history of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) at Georgia State College for Women (GSCW) was transformed into a story about college leadership in the Deep South during the 1930s and 1940s. Author Sandra E. Godwin, a professor of sociology at Georgia College and State University, examines the racial politics of conservative Georgia and the liberal leanings of a white college president. She shows that GSCW president Guy Herbert Wells was determined to balance student demands for racial tolerance, which matched his own politics, with pressures from the racist Georgia politicians who held his job in their hands. [End Page 797] Godwin begins with a focus on the progressive politics of several YWCA chapter leaders at GSCW in the 1930s and 1940s. For example, she shows how Marguerite Jernigan, YWCA president in 1938–1939, wrote an article for the student newspaper, The Colonnade, calling attention to white supremacy. Jernigan observed that Georgia's poll tax "arose not immediately following the Civil War as many people think, but rather . . . was a result of white supremacy conventions that came in the late 1890s and early 1900s" (p. 31). Several other YWCA leaders on the GSCW campus similarly pushed "beyond the boundaries of the status quo" regarding racist politics in the South, examining connections between racism, capitalism, and poverty (p. 31). YWCA members also visited Black institutions and attended interracial conferences, sometimes staying overnight in the same venues as Black students. Their actions blatantly subverted the norms of southern segregation. That is, until President Wells demanded that the organization proceed with caution so that he would not have to contend with the wrath of racist politicians. The book intersperses the history of the college's radically progressive chapter of the YWCA with analysis of Wells's responses to its activism. Godwin argues that focusing on his balancing act gives us a clearer picture of complex southern politics. She examines how a white liberal in the Deep South allowed YWCA leaders to challenge the demands of Georgia politicians with the power to fire him. Godwin describes a comment made after Wells supported the YWCA chapter's attendance at an integrated conference in the 1940s. Georgia House Speaker Roy Harris, who had been appointed to the University System of Georgia Board of Regents by the vocal segregationist and staunchly anti–civil rights governor Herman E. Talmadge, reportedly said, "If ever there was a traitor to the white people of Georgia, it is Guy Wells" (p. 159). Wells, however, did sometimes succumb to the political pressure and forced the YWCA to curb its participation in interracial politics. Godwin shows that whatever Wells's personal politics, he strained to play the middle so that he could remain in his position at the university. The histories of white liberalism and white radical progressivism in a deeply segregated state revealed here are fascinating. Godwin argues that the book is primarily about college leadership. Nevertheless, it is the story of a racially progressive YWCA that called to task systemic racism in the 1930s and 1940s that really stands out. The book provides rich historical context for interracial politics by showing how groups like the YWCA spoke out against white supremacy. Although a white man is on the cover of the book, A White Liberal College President in the Jim Crow South: Guy Herbert Wells and the YWCA at Georgia State College for Women, 1934–1953 reveals a new history in the actions of white women subverting a racist and patriarchal system. Godwin's book is an excellent starting point for a needed history on the politics of the YWCA in the South. Historians can also build on stories of interracial...