Humanity Of Women Research Articles

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Karen Powell Sears and Stacey L. Brown Recent public health, political, cultural, economic, and environmental changes have refocused public attention on women's intimacy, sexuality, family, and relationship experiences. While academic research in these areas increased in recent years, our understanding of Black women's experiences remains limited. Research and public discourse have often framed Black women's lives through a "problem and pathology" prism. In popular culture, a functional classroom to the masses, essentialist tropes of Black womanhood persist offering contemporary spins on historical notions of our sub-humanity reflected in exaggerations of our power, understatements of our vulnerability and denied evidence of our joy and pain. The storied history of academic research about Black women reflects patterns seen in the public sphere. Across disciplines Black women have been understudied and frequently misrepresented. The dearth of research about our organic needs and desires reflect the priorities of the gatekeeping power structures that define and govern the parameters of knowledge deemed scientific and worthy. We recognize that the opportunity to focus on Black women's experience- in the academy and in general social discourse- in ways that is celebratory and uninhibited is a rarely granted privilege. All too often definitions about what is worthy and valid knowledge reflects the same unequal power structures that question Black women's value outside of the academy. It has often been the case that "worthy science" reflects "outsider" imaginations at the exclusion of Black women's insider knowledge. Black and African Diasporic women continue to experience dramatic and rapid shifts in family/intimacy patterns worldwide. With global changes in Black and African Diasporic women's family and relationship formation patterns, discourse in sociology, psychology, Black Studies and Women Studies suggest a need for additional theoretical and methodological perspectives. [End Page 1] The need to engage these issues is of particular concern as crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate instability, and persistent anti–Black racism pose obvious threats to Black women's lives health and sense of wellbeing in the global context. This special issue attempts to respond to this need by exploring the nuanced experiences of Black women's sexuality, intimacy, and leadership from Black scholars from a range of fields including psychology, sociology, Black studies and women's studies. We are grateful for the courage and determination of academic pioneers, past and present, who have broken through erected institutional boundaries to share the insider stories of Black women's experiences. This volume is a collection of such pioneers, who offer new and renewed perspectives, illuminate social patterns that have been obscured and celebrate a range of Black women's humanity. The authors in this collection explore diverse meanings and constructions of intimacy, sexuality, relationships and satisfaction and contemplate Black women's vulnerability in ways that resist narratives of pathology and make visible offer powerful re-conceptualizations of Black women's humanity. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2023 James C. Wadley

Response to Leah Schwebel and Jennifer Alberghini

Response to Leah Schwebel and Jennifer Alberghini Lynn Shutters Leah Schwebel and Jennifer Alberghini demonstrate how consent remains important, even to those who secure it coercively and retroactively. Women want it—or at least the tellers of these stories want women to have wanted it. However offensive, this narrative imperative disrupts present-day perceptions that female consent was utterly foreign to medieval cultures. Yet both authors demonstrate that consent alone does not ensure female empowerment. Their work aligns with Kate Manne's argument distinguishing misogyny from sexism. Sexism, Manne argues, "discriminate[s] between men and women, typically by alleging sexual differences."1 Misogyny, on the other hand, posits men and women's common humanity and potential for virtue, even if that virtue is expressed in gender-specific terms. While sexism assumes women's blanket inferiority, misogyny "differentiate[s] between good women and bad ones, and punishes the latter."2 Consequently misogyny coopts, rather than denies, female interiority: misogyny demands that women yield men "not only their bodies but also their minds, in their capacity for choice, volition, and agency."3 In The Reeve's Tale, Schwebel explains, Aleyn reduces Malyne to a tool for exacting revenge. In Manne's terms, this treatment of Malyne is sexist, a denial of women's humanity, rather than misogynist. Why, then, the need for Malyne's retroactive consent? This vengeance on women is two-pronged: first, the Reeve discounts Malyne's personhood. Second, and contradictorily, the Reeve reinstates Malyne's autonomy through retroactive consent. Schwebel convincingly argues that Malyne's affectionate leave-taking of [End Page 359] Aleyn allows her to reclaim agency and insert herself into a narrative of romance. Additionally, in imagining Malyne as consenting, the Reeve makes her conform to the model of attentive femininity that misogyny demands. Based on his prologue, the Reeve is a man who does not get what he wants from women: we might read The Reeve's Tale as an incel revenge fantasy. The feminist pay-off might be to reframe our questions about consent by considering how an agential act might, paradoxically, be imposed. Alberghini reminds us that narrative impositions of retroactive consent can also come from well-meaning women, such as Eglantine's nurse. The nurse dismisses a non-consensual kiss as "a thynge of nought" and blames Eglantine for rejecting a "gentyl man." Yet she also assures Eglantine that nobody saw the kiss but herself, and she'll never tell. If the kiss of a gentleman can—and should—be accepted, then why is secrecy required? Alberghini suggests that we need not reduce the nurse to an ideological mouthpiece. We might instead see how she articulates the complex negotiations of agency, coercion, and consent that medieval and modern women regularly face. These essays remind us that we cannot historicize consent as a march forward from premodern women who were the dehumanized victims of ideological forces, to modern women who are empowered individuals. As Linda Martín Alcoff argues, our present-day notion of consent "ignores the constrained options within which choices are too often actually made."4 In changing the narrative, we must complicate our understanding of consent and consider additional terms in which sexual violation might be assessed. [End Page 360] Lynn Shutters Colorado State University Footnotes 1. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 79. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 108. 4. Linda Martín Alcoff, Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 127. Copyright © 2022 The New Chaucer Society, University of Miami

The most human bot: Female gendering increases humanness perceptions of bots and acceptance of AI

AbstractCompanies have repeatedly launched Artificial Intelligence (AI) products such as intelligent chatbots and robots with female names, voices, and bodies. Previous research posits that people intuitively favor female over male bots, mainly because female bots are judged as warmer and more likely to experience emotions. We present five online studies, including four preregistered, with a total sample of over 3,000 participants that go beyond this longstanding perception of femininity. Because warmth and experience (but not competence) are seen as fundamental qualities to be a full human but are lacking in machines, we argue that people prefer female bots because they are perceived as more human than male bots. Using implicit, subtle, and blatant scales of humanness, our results consistently show that women (Studies 1A and 1B), female bots (Studies 2 and 3), and female chatbots (Study 4) are perceived as more human than their male counterparts when compared with non‐human entities (animals and machines). Study 4 investigates explicitly the acceptance of gendered algorithms operated by AI chatbots in a health context. We found that the female chatbot is preferred over the male chatbot because it is perceived as more human and more likely to consider our unique needs. These results highlight the ethical quandary faced by AI designers and policymakers: Women are said to be transformed into objects in AI, but injecting women's humanity into AI objects makes these objects seem more human and acceptable.

Style Politics and Self-Fashioning in Mamie Garvin Fields's Lemon Swamp and Other Places

This article explores Southern black women's engagement with beauty culture, fashion, and style politics at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on Mamie Garvin Fields's personal history, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir , the article interrogates the ways that middle-class and aspiring black women designed, deployed, and enjoyed fashionable clothes and stylish creations. It argues that in addition to serving as part of a larger project of black middle-class self-fashioning, these efforts were powerful assertions of black women's humanity, individuality, and determination to thrive as black women in the context of Jim Crow.

Who speaks for Precious? A black feminist analysis

The intraracial debate about the gender, class, and sexuality politics in the movie “Precious” has received little critical attention beyond popular media outlets. This essay focuses on the black patriarchal perspectives within this debate through a black feminist critical lens and considers why such perspectives continue to have political capital in black spaces. Under scrutiny also are the ways in which some black feminist-identified women scholars reproduce similar patriarchal perspectives even as they repudiate the white male hegemonic institutions that stigmatize and scapegoat black women in poverty. My contention is that “Precious” has a black feminist agenda that, although flawed in many ways, exposes the social erasure of poor black women's humanity and plight. As this phenomenon of erasure relies, in part, upon black men's intraracial gender blindness, I call upon black feminist-identified men to take the lead in supporting the film and opening up discussions about black men's roles in perpetuating black women's suffering.

Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s

Erin D. Chapman's Prove It on Me illuminates the complexities of the New Negro era by refusing to simplify the forces shaping black life in the United States. There is no easy conclusion about how liberating or confining modern discourses were, so Chapman resists one-dimensional arguments. She uses a distinctly black feminist approach, but while concerned with how rarely black women's ideas and experiences have been fully understood, she does not examine them in isolation. The result is a nuanced account of how strategies for asserting African American citizenship often empowered black men at the expense of black women and of how mainstream media limited recognition of black women's humanity. In the process, readers come to appreciate that different strategies might have yielded broader freedom for both men and women. Indeed, though many understand the black power movement to have diverged from the tactics of the New Negro era, Chapman's analysis illuminates a masculinist orientation in 1920s ideology that was largely unaltered in later decades.

Two steps forward, one step backward: addressing Violence against Women in Suriname

Introduction Violence against Women has long been ignored as a societal problem in Suriname. Domestic Violence in particular was seen as a private matter, and therefore not something for the State to interfere in. According to 1993 statistics 69 % of Surinamese women had experienced violence in their conjugal relationships. Legally married women seemed to be at less risk of domestic violence than those in common-law marriages, but otherwise the incidence of domestic violence was consistent regardless of ethnicity, geography (urban/ rural) and employment status1 . Entering the decade of the 1990s, Suriname had just one nongovernmental organization (NGO) assisting victims of domestic violence, based in the capital Paramaribo2. Women activists sheltered women who could not return to a dangerous home environment, and provided counseling as best as they could from their own life experience. impact of NGO efforts to battle gender-based violence remained marginal because of the small scale and incidental nature of the projects and the lack of a consistent policy framework at a macro level.3 Intimate partner violence occurs in all countries, irrespective of social, economic, religious or cultural group. Suriname is no exception to the rule. Although women can be violent in relationships with men, and violence is also sometimes found in same-sex relationships, the overwhelming burden of partner violence is borne by women at the hands of men. Through the efforts of women's organizations, violence against women has become an issue of international concern, recognized as both a human rights and a public health problem4. nineties brought a wave of new ideas and renewed activism, which put domestic violence on the agenda of policy makers and donors. What was special about this wave was that is was both local to global, and global to local: women's activists from around the world lobbied hard in order to have domestic violence acknowledged as a violation of human rights. This article explores how the women's movement in Suriname borrowed and adapted existing strategies and invented new ones that influenced the entire Caribbean region. Human rights approach: Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal patriarchal view of the relationship between men and women was clearly expressed by Xenophon in the fourth century BC: The Gods have created women for the domestic functions and men for all other functions. Women's confinement to only one social space, the home, has meant that through the centuries men have played the role of intermediary between women and all the other spheres of social life. To mediate such a relationship is a formidable exercise of power, even for those men who do not have access to wealth and social prestige. In spite of the inequalities of class, race and culture, the one pattern that seems to cut across centuries and different civilizations, is that a woman is always less entitled to rights than a man.5 issue that women's rights are human rights is therefore at once both simple and complex. On the one hand, it makes common sense to declare that as human beings, women and girls have human rights. On the other hand, it is a radical reclamation of women's humanity and right to equality. language of human rights cuts to the core of women's and girls' inequality and helps to identify violations and the violators who should be held accountable for them. Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 outlines the world's consensus on the human rights that all people have in relation to security of person, slavery, torture, freedom of movement and speech, as well as social security, work, health, education and citizenship. In Article 2, it clearly stipulates that these human rights apply to all equally, without distinction of any kind such as race, color, sex, language or other status. …