Remaking Black Power

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley D. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Political Essays ◽  
The Third World

Complicating the common assumption that sexism relegated women to the margins of the movement, Remaking Black Power demonstrates how black women activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. This book illustrates how the new tropes of womanhood that they created--the “Militant Black Domestic,” the “Revolutionary Black Woman,” and the “Third World Woman,” for instance--spurred debate among activists over the importance of women and gender to Black Power organizing, causing many of the era’s organizations and leaders to critique patriarchy and support gender equality. Using a vast array of black women’s artwork, political cartoons, manifestos, and political essays that they produced as members of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Congress of African People, the book reveals how black women activists reimagined black womanhood, challenged sexism, and redefined the meaning of race, gender, and identity in American life.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley D. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Power ◽  
New World ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Angela Davis ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
And Gender

During the Black Power era, ordinary black women from all walks of life developed critical appraisals of the race, class, and gender constructs that governed their lives. They also advanced new ideas about what life might look like if they escaped the crushing weight of white supremacy. Black domestic workers, members of the Black Panther Party, and Black Power feminists all consistently and collectively imagined a new world and their role within it. Yet historical narratives continue to reinforce the idea that black men were the only ones capable of conjuring up new identities and idealized societies. Or, as scholar-activist Angela Davis put it in an October 2013 speech, we are still unable to “imagine and acknowledge what must have been, among these Black women domestic workers, this amazing collective imagination of a future world without racial and gender and economic oppression.”...

The Third World Black Woman, 1970–1979

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley D. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Third World ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
The Third ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
The Third World

Chapter 5 examines the intersection of Black Power and black feminist politics by charting the development of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), a Black Power feminist group. It chronicles how members created the political identity of the “Third World Black Woman,” a radical, intersectional model of womanhood based on black women’s real and imagined commonalities with women in and from Third World countries. Using the TWWA’s construction of the Third World Black Woman through members’ editorials, articles, interviews, and artwork in their newspaper, Triple Jeopardy, this chapter reveals how they bolstered Black Power projects, popularized Black Power among black women and other women of color, and formalized black women activists’ long-standing commitment to intersectional theorizing and activism.

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.

Queering Protest

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-189
Author(s):  
Jodi Rios
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Black Life ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

This chapter uses a framework of queer theory to argue that the particular aesthetic and affect of resistance in North St. Louis County made visible the extreme violence of the state in addition to exposing the inherent contradictions within masculine and heteronormative spaces of Black struggle. This is a critical component of queer of color critique. Similar to an Afro-pessimistic perspective of blackness, which locates Black life as a site of ontological death, the chapter argues that “the problem posed by blackness” is an antagonism rooted in the historically naturalized logics of society, including physical space, and is not a conflict that can be rectified through legal means. Through a more optimistic lens, it also highlights the various ways Black women and gender nonconforming individuals practiced a choreopolitics—of bodies in space—that demanded the terms of visibility be set by those “in view.” This particular practice of visibility and an insistence on simply living as an act of protest illustrate the capacity and power that Black lives and life hold in revealing the truth and thus reconfiguring the metrics of living as fully human.

The Pan-African Woman, 1972–1976

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley D. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Black American ◽  
African Woman ◽  
Black American Women ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Politics And Gender ◽  
And Gender

Chapter 4 explores how black women activists extended these gendered debates beyond American borders. It contextualizes their interest in and identification with the African and Pan-African liberation struggles of the 1970s and explores their speeches and conference resolutions from the 1972 All-Africa Women’s Conference and the 1974 Sixth Pan-African Congress as examples of how they articulated their ideal of the “Pan-African Woman.” The chapter illustrates how black women activists theorized a political identity that advocated for African-centered politics and gender equality across ideological, geographical, and organizational lines. It also foregrounds how they repositioned black American women at the forefront of diasporic liberation struggles, challenging black men’s real and imagined positions as the leaders of global Black Power struggles.

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