Blunted Cutaneous Thermal Reactivity in Black Women and the Relationship with Endothelin‐1 and L‐arginine

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?

Download Full-text

Black feminist intersectionality is vital to group analysis: Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in?

Group Analysis ◽

10.1177/0533316421997767 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 053331642199776

Author(s):

Suryia Nayak

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Black People ◽

Black Feminism ◽

Group Analysis ◽

Black Feminist ◽

Online Platform ◽

Large Group ◽

Diversity And Inclusion ◽

Analytical Structure ◽

The Relationship

This is the transcript of a speech I gave at an Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) event on the 28th November 2020 about intersectionality and groups analysis. This was momentous for group analysis because it was the first IGA event to focus on black feminist intersectionality. Noteworthy, because it is so rare, the large group was convened by two black women, qualified members of the IGA—a deliberate intervention in keeping with my questioning of the relationship between group analysis and power, privilege, and position. This event took place during the Covid-19 pandemic via an online platform called ‘Zoom’. Whilst holding the event online had implications for the embodied visceral experience of the audience, it enabled an international attendance, including members of Group Analysis India. Invitation to the event: ‘Why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis’ Using black feminist intersectionality, this workshop explores two interconnected issues: • Group analysis is about integration of parts, but how do we do this across difference in power, privilege, and position? • Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in? This question goes to the heart of who/ what we include in group analytic practice—what about black feminism? If there ‘cannot possibly be one single version of the truth so we need to hear as many different versions of it as we can’ (Blackwell, 2003: 462), we need to include as many different situated standpoints as possible. Here is where and why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis. On equality, diversity and inclusion, intersectionality says that the ‘problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including black [people] within an already established analytical structure’ (Crenshaw, 1989: 140). Can group analysis allow the outsider idea of intersectionality in?

Download Full-text

Hidden in the limelight: A feminist engagement with innovation studies

Organization ◽

10.1177/13505084211015380 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 135050842110153

Author(s):

Lara Pecis ◽

Karin Berglund

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Bell Hooks ◽

Innovation Studies ◽

Subject Positions ◽

Space Race ◽

The Subject ◽

Political Dimensions ◽

The Relationship ◽

Positively Charged ◽

Blind Spots

Innovation is filled with aspirations for solutions to problems, and for laying the groundwork for new technological and social breakthroughs. When a concept is so positively charged, the hopes expressed may create blindness to potential shortcomings and deadlocks. To disclose innovation blind spots, we approach innovation from a feminist viewpoint. We see innovation as a context that changes historically, and as revolution, offering alternative imaginaries of the relationship between race, gender and innovation. Our theoretical framework combines bell hooks (capitalist patriarchy and intersectionality), Mazzucato (the entrepreneurial state and the changing context of innovation) and Fraser (redistributive justice) and contributes with an understanding of innovation from the margin by unveiling its political dimensions. Hidden Figures, the 2016 biographical drama that follows three Black women working at NASA during the space race, provides the empirical setting of the paper. Our analysis contributes to emerging intersectionality research in management and organisation studies (MOS) by revealing the subject positions and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion in innovation discourses, and by proposing a radical – and more inclusive – rethinking of innovation. With this article, we aim to push the margins to the centre and invite others to discover the terrain of the margin(alised). We suggest that our feminist framework is appropriate to study other organisational phenomena, over time and across contexts, to bring forward the plurality of women’s experiences at work and in organisations.

Download Full-text

No Bodily Rights Worth Protecting

Black Sexual Economies ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252042645.003.0006 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 89-107

Author(s):

Erica Lorraine Williams

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Working Class ◽

Public Sphere ◽

Object A ◽

Black Popular Culture ◽

Music Making ◽

Black Public Sphere ◽

Normative Practices ◽

Sexual Labor ◽

The Relationship

The sexual labor of music making began, in earnest, with the classic Blues women of the 1920s who epitomized the turn to a national Black popular culture. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey was one of the most prolific of her cohort and made a career describing, in intimate detail, the interior lives of Black women and working class communities. Her popularity was a testament to her talents as a singer and performer but also to the skill of those around her, including the “Father of the Gospel Blues,” composer Thomas Dorsey and his wife, seamstress Nettie Dorsey. The materiality of the relationship shared between Mrs. Dorsey and Rainey is found in the dresses painstakingly sewn by Dorsey and glamorously displayed on stage by Rainey. While pleasant for the eye, these dresses also carry sounds—the music of its making as well as its performative display, making this object a text. In this examination, Redmond exposes the close proximities that exist within the costumes sewn by Mrs. Dorsey and worn by Rainey—namely the relationship between pious respectability and working-class nonheternomativity, laboring femininity and sonorous vocalities. Mrs. Dorsey’s work documents dressmaking as a sonic production capable of facilitating the growth of new industries and challenging the normative practices within the early twentieth century Black public sphere. Microreadings of these items, laborers, and artists expose some of the detail of Black political cultures in this moment and highlight the intertextual and multimedia enterprise of Black women’s sexual economies.

Download Full-text

Confronting Removal

Embattled Freedom ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643625.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 83-100

Author(s):

Amy Murrell Taylor

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Black Men ◽

Mississippi River ◽

White Men ◽

People Of Color ◽

Men And Women ◽

Racial Ideologies ◽

The People ◽

Competing Ideas ◽

The Relationship

This chapter focuses on the relationship between race and space—between competing ideas for how people of different races should reside spatially—by looking at the Union army’s various attempts to remove refugees en masse. These removals attempted to resettle the people in places far removed from active combat, including northern states, islands in the Mississippi River, and even Haiti. Some of these efforts bore a great deal of resemblance to antebellum colonization plans, and, as in those cases, black men and women in the Civil War largely resisted being sent away. Most of the removals were justified by white officials in environmental terms, driven by racial ideologies that linked particular climates and landscapes to people of color. The chapter also argues that removals were sometimes triggered by concerns about gender and sex too—by beliefs that the physical proximity of black women and white men in military encampments had made rape inevitable.

Download Full-text

Education

Madam C. J. Walker's Gospel of Giving ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252043451.003.0004 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 83-104

Author(s):

Tyrone McKinley Freeman

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Vocational Education ◽

Urban Communities ◽

Black Education ◽

Black Schools ◽

Industrial Education ◽

National Network ◽

Gainful Employment ◽

The North ◽

The Relationship

Chapter 3 focuses on Walker’s gift of education through her national network of beauty schools as a model of urban industrial vocational education at the same time that Booker T. Washington’s southern rural model of industrial education was prominent. Washington’s Tuskegee model has been critiqued as not successful in addressing black educational needs despite its proliferation because it appeased the white South and focused on the fading agricultural economy. Walker’s beauty schools, in contrast, offered an urban alternative for migrating black women to earn credentials, enabling their gainful employment in the emerging industrial economies of the North, Midwest, and South. The chapter analyzes the curriculum of the Walker beauty schools and its blending of theory, technique, and business management principles to support graduates’ success. This gift of education aligned Walker with other educator-philanthropists of her era, such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Lucy Laney, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown—whose schools she also funded. Walker’s partnership with southern black schools is also examined through which she made donations in exchange for commitments to offer her curriculum. Although only a few colleges took up the offer, participating schools split profits of beauty culture sales made by students with the Walker Company. The program was Walker’s effort to grow her market, extend opportunity to students, and financially support the schools. The chapter reinterprets the relationship between industrial philanthropy and black education, and the value of industrial vocational education to northern black urban communities.

Download Full-text

Winning as American Women

10.5622/illinois/9780252043482.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 115-138

Author(s):

Cat M. Ariail

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Soviet Union ◽

Women Athletes ◽

Track And Field ◽

Tennessee State University ◽

State University ◽

Gender Expectations ◽

The Relationship ◽

Perfect Adherence

This chapter explores how black women athletes began to emerge as accepted exemplars of American identity after their performance at the inaugural US–Soviet Union dual track and field meet in Moscow in 1958. An almost perfect adherence to normative, white-defined gender expectations allowed black American track women to assume this symbolic status. These young women athletes, especially the sprinters and jumpers of Tennessee State University, now protected, rather than contested, the relationship between race, gender, and Americanness. The celebrated emergence of Wilma Rudolph ahead of and during the 1960 Olympic Games highlights the central role of heteronormativity in determining the boundaries of belonging in modern America.

Download Full-text