Customer Service Representatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-571
Author(s):  
Julian Kevon Glover

This article investigates sex work among Black transgender women in Chicago’s ballroom scene, drawing on ethnographic data to argue that Black transwomen engage in sex work as a practice of self-investment undergirded by an epistemological shift regarding the centrality of affective labor to their work. In so doing, interlocutors reap the benefits of deploying embodied knowledge—the harnessing and transformation of insight derived from lived experiences of racial, gender, and sexual subjection into useful strategies, tactics, and tools—to secure material and human resources necessary for survival. A focus on how Black transwomen live, despite continued physical, spiritual, socioeconomic, political, and cultural annihilation, remains critically important given the myriad indicators (low average life expectancy, low annual income, disproportionally high murder rate, etc.) that expose the world’s indifference to the plight of this community and Black bodies writ large. Further, the author places interlocutors in conversation with Black feminist historians’ and theorists’ discussions of sex work among Black women to expose points of convergence between Black cis- and transgender women. The author also complicates narratives that link sex work to “survival” and subsequently obfuscate explorations of limited and situated agency among Black women that have significant historical precedent.

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslee G. Arididon ◽  
Yzabel Louise S. Bueser ◽  
Danielle Denise D. Pau ◽  
Raiza Elaine P. Ramirez ◽  
Krizia Jane V. Soriano ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
pp. 155708512110194
Author(s):  
Allison E. Monterrosa

This study of working class, heterosexual, criminal-legal system-impacted Black women described the women’s romantic histories and current romantic relationship statuses in terms of commitment, exclusivity, and perceived quality. Using intersectional research methods, qualitative interviews were conducted with 31 Black women between the ages of 18 and 65 years who were working class, resided in Southern California, and were impacted by the criminal-legal system. Data were analyzed using an intersectional Black feminist criminological framework and findings revealed six types of relationship statuses. These relationship statuses did not live up to the women’s aspirations and yielded disparate levels of emotional and psychological strain across relationship statuses.


2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642199776
Author(s):  
Suryia Nayak

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?


Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Stravens

This piece discusses the online and offline discourses on the lives and bodies of Black femme and nonbinary individuals and the harm that is so casually inflicted upon us. Through popular stories of harm performed around famous Black women, such as with rapper Megan Thee Stallion, I connect the history of Black women in popular culture to current online spaces that continue to minimize and trivialize our trauma. I seek to highlight that these stories are not an anomaly, but rather sentiments rooted in the misogynoir that is so entrenched in western culture and have been expanded and weaponized within the online sphere. In addition, the piece challenges the universality of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in its implementation, criticizing its propensity to forget its feminine victims. It is important to emphasize where it has failed and where it needs to be intentional about the people it has overlooked, as this is a movement that began online, where this harm is currently taking place, and at the hands and energies of Black femmes, the very people getting hurt. This piece has manifested from many conversations already occurring in online Black feminist spaces about our treatment and our needs. It invites others into the fold and seeks to encourage individuals to critically reflect on how Black femme and non-binary individuals are presented on their timeline in-between the numerous BLM posts that claim to protect them.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-27
Author(s):  
Shardé M. Davis ◽  
Frances Ashun ◽  
Alleyha Dannett ◽  
Kayla Edwards ◽  
Victoria Nwaohuocha

Academia can be a hostile environment for Black women. Our research team leveraged Black feminist research praxis to produce new knowledge countering conceptions of Black women students and faculty as people who are unintelligent, produce superfluous work, and worthy of being ignored. In order to locate spaces for healing, mentorship, and validation, we engaged in a collaborative autoethnography to co-narrate our experiences while conducting a study for, by, and about Black women. Re-purposing tools from Black feminist thought, critical autoethnography, and collaborative autoethnography enabled us to write ourselves into existence, countering damaging narratives and subverting the harm inflicted by the institution.


2022 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-113
Author(s):  
Nakia M. Gray-Nicolas ◽  
Marsha E. Modeste ◽  
Angel Miles Nash ◽  
Lolita A. Tabron

This inquiry offers insight into how Black women assistant professors traverse the challenging journey toward tenure while acknowledging their connection to their students and communities, research, teaching, and service. By employing a phenomenological approach and utilizing Black feminist thought and community cultural wealth as conceptual and theoretical frameworks, this research advances scholarship identifying commonalities across Black women’s experiences. Further, we offer implications for how the academy can support Black women and other professionals from marginalized populations. Findings include how Black women assistant professors develop and create dynamic support systems amongst themselves to combat the multiple marginalizations of their positionality in the academy––a place where they are historically “outsiders.”


Author(s):  
Terrion L. Williamson

For commentators concerned with black cultural production in the contemporary era, there are few images more controversial than the angry black woman, particularly as it is reproduced within the confines of reality television. This chapter traces the lineage of the angry black woman back to key black feminist texts of the 1970s, arguing that the trope emerges out of a distinct sociopolitical history that was codified within both public policy and popular culture throughout the decade. Blaxploitation films became the site where black women’s anger was most visibly commodified, even as black women involved in an emergent black feminist movement worked to combat withering social commentaries that included Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s matriarchy thesis and sexist takedowns of black women writers like Ntozake Shange and Michele Wallace.


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