scholarly journals Rebellious and Strong Black Women in Paradise

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 122-132
Author(s):  
Zadmehr Torabi ◽  
Parvin Ghasemi
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
Unique Identity ◽  
Strong Black Women ◽  
And Gender

The main aim of this paper is to apply black feminist tenets especially those of Bell Hooks and Alice Walker to demonstrate that unlike the passive black female characters of The Bluest Eye, and the resisting but finally victimized black women of Beloved, the wise and strong black women of Paradise who live in the Convent, are strong enough to recreate themselves as subjects, and to cultivate their own unique identity in a hegemonic environment which is replete with racial and gender discrimination. Black feminist actions and womanistic rituals help them accomplish this improvement. Consolata, and Mavis are two of such strong women of the Convent who not only succeed in healing themselves, but also in healing other black women as well. Black feminists claim in order to place black women at the center of stories about the American past, they must be depicted as subjects, that is, as creative change-agents, rather than as objects, or victims of hegemonic agency. In Paradise black women are depicted thus, have their own voices, and completely reject the patriarchal ideology.

The Kinkiness of Turquoise

Groove Theory ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 182-223
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Vocal Technique ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Bessie Smith ◽  
Critical Methods

This chapter showcases Betty Davis’s transposition of women’s blues into rock-inflected version of funk. Bolden advances two key arguments. First, Davis reprised the sexual politics and rebellious spirit exemplified by singers Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, for instance, and reinterpreted those principles in modern America. Second, Davis’s eroticism and sui generis style of funk, which she expressed in her recordings and onstage, reflected a sexual politics that served as a counterpart to those of black feminists writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and many others who were publishing coextensively. But whereas black feminist writers often wrote about black women in previous generations, Davis not only addressed contradictions that black women encountered in contemporary street culture; she also represented such X-rated sexual desires as sadomasochism in her songwriting. In addition, the chapter provides biographical information that contextualizes Davis’s route to the music industry, and Bolden uses critical methods from scholarship on African American poetry to illuminate Davis’s vocal technique. 

Reversal of Stereotypes in Alice Walker's The Color Purple: God, Gender, Narrative and Sexuality

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-21
Author(s):  
Morshedul Arifin ◽  
◽  
Shah Ahmed ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Color Purple ◽  
American Authors

Unlike most African-American authors, who constantly mirror the repressive effects of racism, classicism and gender discrimination, Alice Walker (1944–) in her The Color Purple (1982) compulsively deals with sexism that was still pervasive within African American communities during the early twentieth century. She argues that just as black groups are relegated to an underclass due to the colour of their skin in a wider milieu of white society, in the same way the black women are reduced to a more inferior class due to their sex in their own community. For women’s self-emancipation from such an inhibitory patriarchy, the novel gives an overarching emphasis on the formation of language, execution of voice, review of sexual preference and redefinition of identity of her female characters, the protagonist Celie in particular. This paper examines how, by a fusion of the bildungsroman and epistolary conventions, the novelist melds a unique way for her women creating a God for their own and carving out a niche in social and economic concerns. It assesses the strategic reversal of gender stereotype as well as sexual orientation in order to establish the independence and equality of women on a par with men. The paper ends up with the claim that the novel is predicated upon the theoretical prism of womanism, previously premised by Walker herself, which puts extensive emphasis on a deeper, empathetic relationship and camaraderie of women.

The Daughters Debt: How Black Spirituality and Politics are Transforming the Televisual Landscape

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josslyn Luckett
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
Women's Spirituality ◽  
Spiritual Practices ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
Black Spirituality

The spectrum of black women's spirituality in television has become nearly as diverse as the portraits of Afro-Atlantic spiritual practices that became central to key literary works of black feminist authors of the 1980s, such as Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. While many are the spiritual and televisual daughters of the authors mentioned above, this essay argues that the appearance of this wider range of black women's spirituality and activism in episodic television owes its greatest debt to two films from the 1990s, Julie Dash's, Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Kasi Lemmons’ Eve's Bayou (1997). I focus here on two shows which were themselves created by Black women feature film directors, Shots Fired (Gina Prince Bythewood with Reggie Rock Bythewood) and Queen Sugar (Ava DuVernay). I examine how characters like Pastor Janae (from Shots) and Nova Bordelon (from Sugar) use their spiritual practices in service of social justice, family, and community healing in ways that connect them to the women of Dash and Lemmons’ earlier films.

“Fearfully and wonderfully made”: Black Caribbean women and the decolonization of thick Black female bodies

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamille Gentles-Peart
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Caribbean Women ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
Female Bodies

Black feminists promote decolonization as a strategy to recuperate Black women’s dignity and humanity from racist colonialist ideologies. In order to fully explore Black women’s emancipation, Black feminists have to explicitly consider how Black women break away from the ways in which thick Black female bodies have been defined by dominant white colonial cultures, and how Black women of different ethnicities engage in their own recovery of voluptuous Black female bodies. In this paper, I use a Black feminist intersectional lens to explore the ways in which Black Caribbean women recuperate thick Black female bodies from colonialist and racist ideologies. Specifically, using focus groups, I examine how these women participate in what I refer to as emancipatory thick body politics, discourses that challenge and resist the dehumanization of thick Black female bodies. Findings indicate that Black Caribbean women actively participate in decolonizing thick Black female bodies by forming sisterhood communities with other Black Caribbean women, re-defining womanhood, and engaging in transgressive interpretations of Christian doctrine.

The mediating role of entrepreneurial ambition in the relationship between entrepreneurial efficacy and entrepreneurial drive for female nascent entrepreneurs

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-91
Author(s):  
Randi L. Sims ◽  
Ravi Chinta
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
White Women ◽  
The State ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

Purpose Using Vroom’s expectancy theory of motivation as a theoretical basis, this study aims to test the relationship between female entrepreneurial efficacy, entrepreneurial ambition and nascent entrepreneurial drive, accounting for the potential barriers of race and minority disadvantage. Design/methodology/approach The sample included 950 respondents comprising 213 Black women and 737 White women living in the state of Alabama, USA, who expressed an intention to starting their own business. Findings The results indicate that race and perceptions of minority disadvantage are perceived barriers in the mediated relationship between female entrepreneurial efficacy, entrepreneurial ambition and entrepreneurial drive. However, the findings suggest that, unlike race, minority disadvantage is not perceived as a significant factor in the mediated relationship between entrepreneurial confidence, entrepreneurial ambition and entrepreneurial drive. Research limitations/implications Limitations of this study include the lack of an experimental design and the use of cross-sectional data. Practical implications Results are discussed in terms of the context of the history of racial and gender discrimination within the state of Alabama, USA. Social implications The results show that the direct effects of minority disadvantage on entrepreneurial ambition are significantly higher for the Black women compared with the White women in our sample. Originality/value The results of this study show that the direct effects of minority disadvantage on entrepreneurial ambition are significantly higher for the Black women compared with the White women. For the subgroup of Black women, the greater the perception of minority disadvantage, the greater the entrepreneurial ambition reported.

Incorporating intersectional musicality within the classroom: Black feminism through Nina Simone and Janelle Monáe

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasmine Hines
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Social Justice Advocacy ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Dominant Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Education And Society ◽  
Nina Simone

In an age of social justice advocacy within education, the work of Black women continues to be excluded from the hegemonic educational canon despite the long history of Black feminists advocating for the eradication of systemic oppressive systems in education. By examining the livelihoods and music created by Black feminist musicians, music educators may begin to reflect on how Black women’s positionality within society has had a direct influence on the music they created within a White culturally dominant society. The purpose of this article is to conceptualize how the intersectional musicality of Nina Simone and Janelle Monáe – informed by the conceptual framework of Black Feminist Thought – can speak to the experiences that Black girls and women face within music education and society.

“Proper, Dignified Agitation”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brittney C. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Women Intellectuals ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Critical Theorist ◽  
And Gender

This chapter recuperates Mary Church Terrell as a critical theorist of Black racial uplift. The first President of the NACW, Terrell went on to have a sixty-year career in Civil Rights activism. This chapter moves across the span of her career, mapping her development of a concept called “dignified agitation,” which she introduces in a 1913 speech. She returns to this formulation throughout her career, and the author argues that this idea of dignified agitation is one that she both learned and propagated as part of the NACW school of thought. But it also acts as a bridge concept, and she, as a bridge figure to Civil Rights era Black women intellectuals, who both respected the NACW school of thought and sought to move beyond it in critical ways. Because of the deliberate ways that Terrell wrote about her love of dancing in her autobiography, this chapter also considers the ways in which she is part of a genealogy of Black women’s pleasure politics, even though the current Black feminist discourse on pleasure typically focuses on blues women in this time period. Because Terrell is considered one of the foremost proselytizers of respectability, a turn toward her articulation of pleasure politics richly complicates the manner in which we read her as a theorist of racial resistance and gender progressivism.

Prevalence and Health Implications of Anti-Gay Discrimination: A Study of Black and White Women and Men in the Cardia Cohort

1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Krieger ◽  
Stephen Sidney
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
White Women ◽  
Health Implications ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Lifetime Number ◽  
Number Of Sexual Partners ◽  
And Gender

This study investigates the prevalence of self-reported experiences of discrimination based on sexual orientation among black and white women and men (25 to 37 years old) who are members of CARDIA, a multisite longitudinal study of cardiovascular risk factors. Among the 1,724 participants who responded to a 1989 questionnaire obtaining data on lifetime number of sexual partners and who participated in the Year 7 exam (1992–1993), which included questions about discrimination, 204 (12 percent) reported having at least one same-sex sexual partner: 27 (7 percent) of the 412 black women, 13 (6 percent) of the 221 black men, 87 (14 percent) of the 619 white women, and 77 (16 percent) of the 472 white men. Among these four groups, 33, 39, 52, and 56 percent, respectively, reported having experienced discrimination based on sexual orientation. Additionally, 85 percent of the black women and 77 percent of the black men reported having experienced racial discrimination, and 89 percent of the black women and 88 percent of the white women reported having experienced gender discrimination. In the light of research associating negative stressors with poor health outcomes, including elevated blood pressure, future studies should assess public health implications of discrimination based on sexual orientation, in conjunction with racial and gender discrimination.

scholarly journals Triple Consciousness: The Reimagination of Black Female Identities in Contemporary American Culture

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 296-306
Author(s):  
Nahum Welang
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Black American Women ◽  
And Gender

Abstract My article underscores the intermediate existence of black American women between race and gender by stressing the role white patriarchy and black hypermasculinity play in the marginalisation of black female voices and the prioritisation of white women’s interests within and beyond mainstream feminist spaces. In order to legitimise this intermediate existence of black women, my article develops the triple consciousness theory (TCT). Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, TCT argues that black women view themselves through three lenses and not two: America, blackness and womanhood. Black feminists, TCT affirms, are able to reimagine misguided narratives of black womanhood in contemporary American culture by unpacking the complexity of this threefold consciousness. In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay strives for the inclusion of pluralist voices in the mainstream feminist movement and in Lemonade, Beyonce uses Afrofuturist tropes, reappropriation and gothic imagery to exorcise the generational pain of betrayal by black men and white women. With Insecure, Issa Rae radicalises feminist theory by critiquing archetypes attached to black womanhood and in Marvel’s Black Panther, not only do black women possess the unprecedented agency to shape their own identities on their own terms, there is also an existential reconnection with their past.

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