Black feminism encompasses both Black feminist thought and practice. My research looks at the Black feminist practices of contemporary social movements. For example, I analyzed the intersectional social media activism of SayHerName proponents on Twitter.
However, Patricia Hill Collins writes in the landmark text on the subject that the work of Black women intellectuals constitutes just one feature of Black feminist thought in the United States. Furthermore, not only Black women intellectuals engage in Black feminist thought. Everyday Black women contribute to Black feminist thought. For example, Cashawn Thompson , an early childhood development expert living in D. In this blog, I describe the six features of U. Collins writes that Black women engage in activism as a response to how the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation shape their lives.
The unique experience of living as a Black woman in America reveals the contradictions of marginalization within a democratic society. This experience shapes the consciousness of Black women. Collins uses the term standpoint to refer to group knowledge. Read more on standpoint theory in this introduction by feminist philosopher Sandra Harding. Nevertheless, the ways individual Black women respond to these themes may differ because common challenges do not mean universal experiences.
Black women differ depending on the historical era they share, their class position, their sexuality, ethnic heritage, etc. Through their standpoint, Black women rearticulate and reaffirm their own identities to a create a different perspective on themselves and the world. This standpoint stimulates resistance, activism, and oppositional knowledges or practices aimed at self-definition and autonomy among Black women. The work of Black women intellectuals emerges out of theories about the everyday life of Black women.
The use their knowledge as experts or specialists in accordance with the unique lens they possess as Black women in the pursuit of the self-definition and empowerment of Black womanhood. Collins argues that Black women intellectuals, both within and beyond academia, play an important role in Black feminism. They use their positionality to build coalitions that cut across the lines of various social identities. Black women, like members of other marginalized groups, do not control how dominant society imposes controlling images of race and gender onto them to subordinate them.
Korryn died at the height of a political moment fueled by discontent with the state of policing and the assumed increased hyper-frequency of police brutality. However, there was a gaping silence around the death of Korryn. Rather than asserting why Korryn should be seen as exemplary to the concerns of the political dissent wagered against law enforcement practices, I argue it is more critical to hone into what theoretical and political maneuvers force state violence against Black women into discursive boxes that insist on employing the logic of subjectivity to account for the object status of their suf- fering.
This shift illustrates how Black death animates the dis- course of gender violence while rendering the relationship between gender and antiblackness void through its assumptive underpinnings. This is an intentional maneuver to work with and through the wake work18 of other activist, scholars, and employ Blackness as theorem that is not excessive to the concern of gender but essential to its oper- ative modalities. Black death, which symbolizes much more than absence, is polit- icized here through a genealogy of Black feminism.
It functions as an operative mode of analysis to engage what is both specific and general about the formulations of anti-black gender violence. It takes serious Black feminism as both a corrective to the assumptive logic of non- black gender concerns and a theory of violence that expands and chal- lenges the manner in which gendered violence is assumed to appear in the world. It is both in the death and the lack of dis- cursive capacity to bring redress to this death that gender as a genre of Man is fortified.
This framing also refuses the demand for conclusiveness and rests with the tensions of violences that cannot be named. Lastly, Black death demands critical perspectives that disallow identity to codify what it means to inhabit the world of Black gender. By focusing gender through the scope of death, the point is to refuse binaries and dichotomies, and widen the scope of engagement to think about gender within the broader politi- cal concerns of Blackness as a political ontological category.
Not all Women are Women The emergence of a crisis takes on multiple expressions. To many the crisis began with the politics of the presidential election, culminating in with the formal election of the 45th President of the United States. So many jolted by the shock and awe of the election of a president whose beliefs about race and gender read like a nineteenth century legal ruling on the sta- tus of slaves.
To the self-proclaimed, nasty women,21 who began protesting the results of the election and gathering in support of wom- en and gender rights. After the march, many boasted of no arrests or conten- tious encounters with the police.
Though crisis to some is politics as usual to others. It points to the manner theories of gender and gendering situates the context of Black violence outside of or in tension with its concerns. As with the Presidential Election and the dominant affect expressed thereafter a critical engagement with the state of Black lives was violently supplanted with a perceived susceptibility to gratuitous death for those not figured by Blackness. For Blackness, this political moment encapsulated centuries of mourning.
We honor these women and so many more. Johnson, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and Harriet Tubman, are amongst the list of many names that follow this statement. The framing of the vision statement, the calling upon these women, and the visuality of the march all sit in tension. Stating the names of Black women who have struggled against struc- tural violence alone cannot reconcile the suffering of Black women. The names of living and dead Black trans and cis-gendered wom- en are meant to represent women who contributed to a Black feminist politics that has arrived at the point of celebrating coalition through difference.
I contend that these names are called upon in bad faith. It alludes to an articulation of political association that assumes finitude with the political figures, activists and scholars that galvanized many Black feminist concerns. More to this point, Black feminism is posited as maintaining an invested in a division of Black genders. Thus, the march cannot through theory or performance, grapple with how the sexualization of Black gender binds a suffering community.
As such, the privileging of coalition as a unifying point overshadows and ignores the specifici- ties of Black gender. Those bones are not my feminism. Police violence and its relationship to gender violence are not explanatory without a concentrated exegesis. Especially given the fact that the subjection of Black and Native cis-gender and trans women to gendered violence at the hands of the state is statistically higher than all other women.
S antagonisms. Both settler colonialism and slavery underwrite the imagery of this violence. This transfer does more than produce increased vulnerability. It conditions the political ontology of being, that triangulates the discursive capacities for Humans to locate their suffering within redressable terms, while Black and Native peoples wallow in the irreconcilable antagonisms and conflicts of the libidinal economies of violence that situate them in this world.
Yet the names of the Black women whose deaths catalyzed the tensions so viscerally felt in politics are painfully absent in the above framework. It generalizes a very real and specific set of urgencies. Rather than seeking visibility by adding these women to a list, I argue an analysis of a structural paradigm that pervades this gratuity, making it invisible to the central analysis of gender violence, is essential.
Why not march for women who died at the hand of the state? Where is the march for Korryn? Ritchie outlines how the mainstream narrative of the experiences of gender violence as equal for all women betrayed reality. Ritchie stages her intervention through the work of Black feminists and activists whose pivotal work in the antiviolence movement became overshadowed by the demands of white feminism. Furthermore, this narrative hinged upon the falsely held belief that there was unity amongst women across racial and class lines.
Ritchie outlines a dual erasure produced from the insistence on reading all women through the same narrative of violence. The counters of race are positioned as excessive to the constitution of the arrangements of gender.
This framing was predicated on a refusal to privilege the intimate relationship between state violence and women of color, specifically Black women, as constitutive of gender violence.
The conceptual framework of women of color, I argue, similarly performs an erasure of the antagonistic relationship Black genders hold with the structuring paradigm of gender. At the level of experience women of color, as a broad association, are subjected to violence at the intersections of at least their race and gender. However, the structural positioning of Blackness blurs the lines of difference demonstrating an intimate proximity to violence that troubles the water of gender as an explanatory category.
Ritchie explains how the assumption of gender transgression places women of color at an increased risk of experiencing police brutality. The significance of this gesture by Ritchie is that is hones into the peculiar relationship between Blackness and gender. Gender here is not accounted for by how Black women identify or perform. Nor can it be taken as misrecognition of real gender by the police. What is revealed is that Black gender functions as a demarcation of difference at the level of existence.
Ritchie goes on to offer a critical analysis of beliefs held by police officers that rely on racialized and gendered preconceptions of women of color to justify the use of force. Latina and Asian women are por- trayed as hypersexualized and deviant variants of womanhood, while Black women are not seen as women at all.
Black women are posi- tioned outside of the scope of humanness. Though, I would caution to suggest that the hum-animal distinction does not mark the essence of Black feminine gender. Instead the description of Black women given above situates Black identity into a void.
The Black, can be everything and nothing simultaneous- ly. Blackness is gendered through violence that structures it outside of humanity and defines the perimeters of what it means to be for the Human and its discontents. Its assumptive log- ic, whether explicit in its presentation or not, maintains that all women have the same gender. This orientation of thought does more than ren- der Black gender invisible or silent. It makes it conceptually impossible to think of gender violence as orienting more than the realm of gender.
Rather than engaging a politic fixated on what binds women together in life, I want to draw focus to what separates Black women in death. What creates the conditions of im possibility for Black women to die like Korryn Gaines?
How might we augment the lens to theorize the issue of Black gender as much larger than it appears? Blackness brings into focus a paradigm of existence that rests on a gratuitous structure of violence that unhinges Black people from a possessive relation to cat- egories of identity. Anti-black violence bleeds across demarcations of difference. When examining the contexts of Black gender, what emerg- es through theory is Blackness obscures the intensity and scope of vio- lence such that Black suffering becomes indiscernible from violence experienced by others.
Thus, the intimate relationship between Black gender and violence becomes a crisis for non-blacks, as this structural proximity is assumed as applicable to all. So, what does the lens of Blackness offer introspections into gen- der?
In the same respect as the proclamation by Beth E. Ritchie that is it dangerous to produce theory for all women, can the same be said for Blackness? The short answer to latter is, no. While there is no place in history where all women have stood subjected equally to violence, there is such a place for the black, the hold of the slave ship. I would like to privilege an analysis of the hold and the world produced from it as predicated on Black social and political death.
The hold is marked by the putridness of unattended matter. A critical theory of Blackness rooted in the urgency and immanence of that death must attend to the specter of Black gender unhinged by a dispossessed status. When gender and Blackness converge, Black people are found wavering in an ocean of violence. The core of Black feminist concerns is how to account for the gravity of gender violences that lack a proper name. Is Gender for the Captive? Is it theoretical silent on this point, when in all other iterations it is theoret- ically quite loud?
Afro-pessimism,40 as a theory, arose in conversation between Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III as they worked to carve out a space for Black theorizing, which Hartman terms the position of the unthought. In fact, there are many scholars and activist engaging Afro-pessimism worldwide that carry out the possibilities of its explanatory potentials.
Afro- pessimism is visibly indebted to the work of Spillers as represented through its conceptual maneuvers, language, and citational practices. Spillers argues, Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a terri- tory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific. But this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence biological, sexual, social, cultural, lin- guistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join.
However, I would suggest there is a conceptual misstep that buttresses concerns about Afro-pessimism and gender. Afro-pessimism theorizes at the level of structure. It is concerned with how bodies are positioned in the world. Afro-pessimism also is centrally concerned with theorizing anti-black violence as that which lacks the discursive capacity to be named. Such cannot be said. I would like to bring attention to the words italicized by Spillers in the breakout quote above.
Together it reads, Gender in the outcome. However, let us rephrase this into question. What is gender in the out- come of theory? Answers evade a direct response to this question. If we parse out gender, outcome, and theory each term has the poten- tial for multiple inferences. Gender, for the gendered and ungendered inflect upon the separation of worlds.
Outcome, in this respect lacks finality, demonstrat- ing the repetition of an antagonistic interplay of worlds. Theory then has the potential to provide a lens to think through and across the division of degraded existence and the status of complete dispossession.
Just as it is within reason to ask Afro-pessimism to locate gender, the reverse, I argue, demands greater theoretical concern.
Do the concerns of gender, ade- quately account for the structural concerns of Afro-pessimism? Does Afro-pessimism deracinate gender or is Black gender obliterated prior to theory by the violence Afro-pessimism takes on as the orbit of its concerns? In order to approach these questions, we must contend with the death of Korryn.
Empathy could not find her. She made videos and wrote statements that spoke against the power of the police. She told her five-year-old son the cops were trying to kill him. Where was her concern for his innocence? She illegally covered her license plate.
She drove around town looking for an altercation with the police. She talked back. She filmed her body being violated. She fought back. She did not appear in court.