Black Women’s Positive Embodiment in the Face of Race × Gender Oppression

2019 ◽  
pp. 191-200
Author(s):  
NiCole T. Buchanan ◽  
Isis H. Settles ◽  
Krystle C. Woods
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Positive Perception ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Intersectionality Theory ◽  
Gender Oppression ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
Intersecting Identities ◽  
The Face ◽  
Racialized Sexual Harassment

For many Black women, their relationship with their physique is complicated and nuanced by narratives of race, gender, and their intersection. Given this reality, positive embodiment is a hard-won battle for those Black women who achieve it, and their efforts are repeatedly challenged by mainstream cultural narratives that view their bodies as deviant and lacking value. The chapter examines Black women’s experience of embodiment through the lens of intersectionality theory. Given the nature of experiences such as racialized sexual harassment, examining intersecting identities such as Black women’s identities as simultaneously Black and female and their positive perception of this intersecting identity may specifically buffer against negative embodiment.

scholarly journals Birthing a New World

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Marquita R. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Male ◽  
New World ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Social Death ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
The Face

This essay analyzes how James Baldwin’s late novel If Beale Street Could Talk represents Black women’s care work in the face of social death as an example of how Black women act as surrogates for Black liberation giving birth to a new world and possibilities of freedom for Black (male) people. Within the politics of Black nationalism, Black women were affective workers playing a vital role in the (re)creation of heteronormative family structures that formed the basis of Black liberation cohered by a belief in the power of patriarchy to make way for communal freedom. This essay demonstrates how Beale Street’s imagining of freedom centers not on what Black women do to support themselves or each other, but on the needs of the community at large, with embodied sacrifice as a presumed condition of such liberation.

Racial Exclusion and Queer Identity

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-264
Author(s):  
Shaeleya Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Community Group ◽  
Identity Verification ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Intersectionality Theory ◽  
Racial Exclusion ◽  
Intersecting Identities ◽  
And Gender

In lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social movement communities, members with varied sexual and gender identities work to pursue shared goals. While gender and sexual marginalization serve as common rallying points for members, intersectionality theory recognizes that each person has multiple, intersecting identities, which influence their experiences of oppression and empowerment (Crenshaw 1989). As a result, it is important to understand how LGBTQ activists navigate multiple identities and investments, while still maintaining group solidarity. Using 53 interviews with non-heterosexuals, I examine how multiple sexual, gender, and racial identities were subsumed within a broader "queer community" group engaged in identity-verification among their peers. Based on the findings, I suggest that inclusive ideologies, when deployed in diverse social movement communities, can reproduce inequalities from within. Furthermore, I argue that these inequalities are made visible through the processes by which members of social groups engage in struggles to verify group membership.

Situated Voices: ‘Black Women's Experience’ and Social Work

1996 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
Women Social Workers

The article uses a discourse analytic approach to explore some of the ways in which black women social workers invoke the category ‘experience’ as a means by which to mediate their structural and discursive location in social services departments. The article draws on current feminist theoretical debates about ‘experience’ and the ‘multivocality’ of black women as they construct dialogic spaces with diverse interlocutors. In so doing an argument is made for an understanding of ‘black women's experience’ as constituted rather than descriptive.

After the march, what? Rethinking how we teach the feminist movement

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 402-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Elizabeth Vickery
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Intersecting Identities ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Feminist Movements

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the history of Black women as critical civic agents fighting for the recognition of their intersecting identities in multiple iterations of the feminist movement. Design/methodology/approach Utilizing Black feminism and intersectionality I explore the many ways in which Black women have fought against multiple forms of oppression in the first, second and fourth wave feminist movement and organizations in order to fight for their rights as Black women citizens. Findings Black women in the past and present have exhibited agency by working within such multiple civil rights movements to change the conditions and carve out inclusive spaces by working across differences and forging multiracial coalitions. Originality/value This paper serves as a call to action for social studies classroom teachers and teacher educators to rethink how we remember and teach feminist movements. I also explore how we can use this past to understand and advance the conversation in this present iteration of the women’s movement to work across differences in solidarity toward equal justice for all.

scholarly journals Religion across Axes of Inequality in the United States: Belonging, Behaving, and Believing at the Intersections of Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 296
Author(s):  
Landon Schnabel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Sexual Minorities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
College Degree ◽  
Sexual Minority Women ◽  
Intersecting Identities ◽  
Race Ethnicity

Much research considers group differences in religious belonging, behaving, and/or believing by gender, race, ethnicity, class, or sexuality. This study, however, considers all these factors at once, providing the first comprehensive snapshot of religious belonging, behaving, and believing across and within these axes of inequality in the United States. Leveraging unique data with an exceptionally large sample, I explore religion across 40 unique configurations of intersecting identities (e.g., one is non-Latina Black heterosexual college-educated women). Across all measures considered, Black women are at the top—however, depending on the measure, there are different subsets of Black women at the top. And whereas most sexual minorities are among the least religious Americans, Black sexual minorities—and especially those with a college degree—exhibit high levels of religious belonging, behaving, and believing. In fact, Black sexual minority women with a college degree meditate more frequently than any other group considered. Overall, whereas we see clear divides in how religious people are by factors like gender, education, and sexual orientation among most racial groups, race appears to overpower other factors for Black Americans who are consistently religious regardless of their other characteristics. By presenting levels of religious belonging, behaving, and believing across configurations of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality in the contemporary United States, this study provides a more complex and complete picture of American religion and spirituality.

scholarly journals Policy as Punishment and Distraction: The Double Helix of Racialized Sexual Harassment of Black Girls

2020 ◽  
pp. 089590482098446
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Wilmot ◽  
Valentina Migliarini ◽  
Subini Ancy Annamma
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Education Policy ◽  
Double Helix ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
School Policy ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Racialized Sexual Harassment

Black girls’ experiences with sexual harassment in schools remain critically understudied. To mediate this void, this study explored the role of educators and school policy as disrupting or perpetuating racialized sexual harassment toward them. Using a disability critical race theory (DisCrit) framework, we argue educator response and education policy create a nexus of subjugation that makes Black girls increasingly vulnerable to experience racialized sexual harassment at the hands of adults and peers, while largely failing to provide protection from or recourse for such harassment.

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