Anna Julia Cooper's Black Feminist Love‐Politics

Hypatia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-53
Author(s):  
Vivian M. May
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Collaborative Action ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper ◽  
Love Marriage

To flesh out love's potential for transformative imaginaries and politics, it is important to explore earlier examples of Black feminist theorizing on love. In this spirit, I examine Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), an early Black feminist educator, intellectual, and activist whose work is generally overlooked in feminist and anti‐racist thinking on love, affect, and social change. Contesting narrow readings of Cooper, I first explore how critics might engage in more “loving” approaches to reading her work. I then delineate some of her contributions to a Black feminist love‐politics. In unmasking dominance enacted in love's name, Cooper analyzes romantic love, marriage, and gendered care‐work in the domestic sphere. Using an intersectional lens, she contests gendered‐raced hierarchies and links normative masculinity and femininity with white supremacy, xenophobia, and imperial rule. Cooper also extolls the possibilities of love rooted in nonhierarchical, intersubjective cooperation: such loving has the potential to transform interpersonal relations and foster broad collaborative action to eradicate inequality, locally and globally. Structural subjection, internalized oppression, and colonized imaginations have no part in Cooper's reciprocal, political love‐force. Unfortunately, her ideas about transforming gender relations, contesting racism, challenging imperialism, seeking decolonized selves, and pursuing solidarity as a loving political orientation remain relatively unknown.

scholarly journals In Conversation with Fikile Nxumalo: Refiguring Onto-Epistemic Attunements for Im/possible Science Pedagogies

2021 ◽  
pp. 321-330
Author(s):  
Fikile Nxumalo ◽  
Maria F. G. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Science Education ◽  
Early Childhood Education ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Indigenous Knowledges ◽  
Educational Spaces

AbstractThis chapter elucidates critical concepts of place in relation to Black-feminist and more-than-human geographies in the context of early childhood education. This conversation helps get at pressing political contexts for science education that are often excluded in white educational spaces. Our conversation with Dr. Nxumalo offers practical starting points for researchers interested in playing with the messy intersections of materiality, settler-colonialism, white supremacy, Indigenous knowledges, and more-than-human kin.

Afrofuturist Entanglements of Gender, Eugenics, and Queer Possibility

Old Futures ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 99-128
Author(s):  
Alexis Lothian
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Central Term

Part 2 (A Now that Can Breed Futures: Queerness and Pleasure in Black Science Fiction) turns to black diasporic speculative imagining as it has been used to create futures for those rendered futureless by global white supremacy. Chapter 3 focuses on how speculative fiction, racialized reproduction, and queer possibility converge to articulate processes that breed futures, and how these connections underlie the emergence in the 2000s of a canon of literary black science fiction. It introduces pleasure as a central term, tracing figurations of a radical future for black female sexuality that emerge from narrative foreclosures in W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 “The Comet” and following their trail into the queer speculations of two black feminist vampire novels: Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005). Du Bois’s text highlights the persistence of reproductive Afrofuturisms that have sometimes overlapped with eugenic discourses. Gomez and Butler pick up this thread to demand we think reproductive futures outside the logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy, using the figure of the vampire to envision a decolonial lesbian future and a speculative reconsideration of eugenic science respectively.

scholarly journals Organizing a Rainbow Coalition of Revolutionary Solidarity

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeb Aram Middlebrook
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Young Lords ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Rainbow Coalition ◽  
Black Panther

AbstractThis article considers the possibilities and limitations of multiracial alliances and antiracist organizing in and beyond the USA by analyzing the Rainbow Coalition of Revolutionary Solidarity in Chicago from 1969 to 1972. The article argues this coalition—involving the Black Panther Party, Young Lords, and Young Patriots, among other diverse organizations—demonstrated a powerful model of organizing across race for revolutionary social change, which structured self-determination in communities-of-color alongside white communities’ responsibility for ending white supremacy.

“Can You Hear Me Now?” Race, Motherhood, and the Politics of Being Heard

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Killen
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Black Mothers ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
National Convention ◽  
Equal Citizenship

AbstractMotherhood as a political identity grants women political legitimacy, enabling them to make rights-based claims. However, the efficacy and possibility of motherhood as a political identity is entangled in the sexist and racist narratives that are inextricable from white supremacy. In this article, I analyze the language used by the Mothers of the Movement (MothM) at the 2016 Democratic National Convention to demonstrate how the identities and experiences of Black women, specifically Black mothers, are co-opted and reproduced as deficient, criminal, and irrelevant, thereby limiting their ability to make claims as mothers and citizens. How, then, can marginalized mothers confront the tools of white supremacy, which portray them as “bad” mothers and “bad” citizens, to be heard within the dominant order without conforming to it? I contend that in appropriating the very discourses and spaces that seek to exclude and subjugate them, the MothM demonstrate the hypocrisy of the system of “good motherhood”—all the while reaffirming their status as equal citizens deserving of political recognition. Drawing from Black feminist thinkers, I demonstrate how motherhood and the rights that the MothM claim as mothers can be conceptualized as assertions of freedom and equal citizenship.

The Social World of Self-Actualizing People: Reflections by Maslow’s Biographer

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 908-933 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Humanistic Psychology ◽  
Intellectual Style ◽  
Counseling Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Love Marriage ◽  
Future Theory

Maslow’s concept of self-actualization has been a bulwark of humanistic psychology for more than 50 years, and has increasingly gained international appeal beyond its original nexus within the United States. His description of the high achieving characteristics of self-actualizing men and women has influenced theorists and practitioners in such fields as counseling, education, health care, management, and organizational psychology. Through these same decades, Maslow’s formulation has also been criticized as promoting a hyperindividualistic, even narcissistic, orientation to personality growth. Because Maslow by temperament and intellectual style expressed himself in an ever-evolving set of speeches and writings that were seldom explicit about interpersonal relations, his actual outlook on the social world of self-actualizers has remained elusive. The focus of this article, therefore, is how Maslow depicted self-actualizing people with regard to five major interpersonal dimensions of life: friendship, romantic love, marriage and lasting intimacy, parenthood, and communal service. By pulling together Maslow’s comments primarily in his published works, and secondarily in his unpublished works-in-progress, it is possible to explicate his tacit viewpoint. Doing so will not only help dispel the misconception that Maslow depicted self-actualizers as loners or even hermits but also guide future theory and research on personality growth.

#yeeyeenation

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Rumya S. Putcha
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Media Analysis ◽  
Social Media Analysis ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
White Masculinity ◽  
The Face ◽  
Alter Ego

Abstract Using methods from country music studies, performance studies, hashtag ethnography, and Black Feminist Thought (BFT), this article employs sonic, discursive, and social media analysis to examine performances of White masculinity known as “country boys.” In the opening sections, I describe examples of country boys that emerge from Texas A&M University (College Station), bringing together confederate statues and the men who identify with and defend such statues. I then turn my focus to critical analysis of one country boy in particular: county music singer, brand progenitor, and Texas icon, Granger Smith a.k.a. Earl Dibbles Jr. Highlighting the importance of country boys to the cultural identity of Texas A&M University, I argue that White publics aggregate and accrue racialized and gendered meaning in social media spaces through signs associated with Smith like the hashtag #yeeyeenation. Such signs are predicated on and normalize a rhetoric—in this case, that something or someone “is not racist”—even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Extending the insights of scholarship on the former Confederacy to contemporary country music cultures and to the present political moment, this article interrogates how White identities and related genealogies in the U.S. context are not simply established to sanitize and excuse expressions of racist, gendered, and exclusionary thought, but are sustained by aestheticized deceptions. I refer to these deceptions as mythopoetics. In this article I demonstrate how Smith’s success, particularly since he is best known for his “redneck” alter-ego, Earl Dibbles Jr., is a testament to the power and reach of mythopoetics in a hegemonic White and heteropatriarchal society. I argue that mythopoetics are not only essential to majoritarian cultural formations today, but also normalize White supremacy to such a point that its violence can circulate without consequence and in plain sight.

Motherhood, Anti-Apartheid, and Pan-African Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grant
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Black Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Family ◽  
The United States ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
A Site ◽  
Black Motherhood

This chapter examines how the gendered language of motherhood informed black international connections between South Africa and the United States. It argues that global black motherhood – defined as a form of transnational maternalist politics based around the shared experiences of black women in white supremacist societies – shaped racial politics on both sides of the Atlantic. It demonstrates how black women in the United States and South Africa transformed the domestic sphere into a site where citizenship claims could be made. By privileging their position within the home, as primary caregivers for the black family, they worked to stress the political significance of black motherhood in the global fight against white supremacy.

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