Scandalize My Name

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrion L. Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Sociological Inquiry

From sapphire, mammy, and jezebel to the angry black woman, baby mama, and nappy-headed ho, black female iconography has had a long and tortured history in public culture. The telling of this history has long occupied the work of black female theorists—much of which has been foundational in situating black women within the matrix of sociopolitical thought and practice in the United States. Scandalize My Name builds upon the rich tradition of this work while taking a detour from conventional stereotype discourse to argue that black social life defies the limitations of representational thought and practice. By approaching the study of black female representation not as a mechanism of negative or positive valuation but as an opening onto a serious contemplation of the vagaries of black social life, Williamson makes a case for a radical black subject position that structures and is structured by an amorphous social order that ultimately destabilizes the very notion of “civil society.” At turns memoir, sociological inquiry, literary analysis, and cultural critique, Scandalize My Name explores topics as varied as serial murder, reality television, Christian evangelism, and the novels of Toni Morrison, to advance black feminist practice as a modality through which black sociality is both theorized and made material.

scholarly journals Urban specters

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110302
Author(s):  
Asha Best ◽  
Margaret M Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial Method ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The Relationship

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?

Counting Frequency

Social Text ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-49
Author(s):  
Christen A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Body Counting

Abstract Examining Black women's experiences with policing, this article argues that police terror is not predicated upon gender; rather, it enacts gender by undoing gender. Thus, it requires a new arithmetic of time and space in order to read beyond normative, hypermasculine narratives of police violence. While the dominant discourse of race and policing asserts that police terror disproportionately affects Black men, the frequency of Black women's experiences with police terror attunes to a lingering yet deadly impact beyond the linear, Cartesian dimensions of body counting, a frequency the article terms sequelae. Policing stretches and bends time and space as part of its (un)gendering practice. Through a brief survey of cases in Brazil and the United States, this article considers sequelae as a new arithmetic for calculating the multiple frequencies of police terror against Black women. Specifically, the article examines the case of Luana Barbosa dos Reis, a Black lesbian mother who was beaten to death by police officers in São Paulo in 2016. The article argues that her beating was an act of (un)gendering—a desire to both discipline her as a Black female/mother and erase her potential humanity by denying her desired gender identification (female). In this sense, her death was an act of anti-Black terror “in the wake.” Through a close reading of the police ledger, the police report, and the physical violence she endured, the article argues that her story teaches us the need for a new way of counting the frequency of police terror in relationship to time, space, and the Black female/mother body.

Outsiders within: non-conformity among four contemporary black female managers in South Africa

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 148-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugo Canham
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Black Female ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Female Managers ◽  
Women In The Workplace

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to foreground non-conformity in organisational life as it relates to black female managers. My intervention here is to problematise organisational theory in relation to its limited ability to engage with affect and to point to a more generative framework. Through centering the body, the author also seeks to offer a counter narrative to the field of Positive Organisation Scholarship and its drive to primarily engage with happy feelings and harmony. Design/methodology/approach – The author gives a close reading of four black women's interview-based narratives to engage with the ways in which they refuse to conform to organisational scripts of happiness. The author makes a case for using both critical discourse-based and affective readings of everyday experience which social science readings cannot readily account for. Findings – Non-conformity has a number of local effects including negotiating the present from a position of alternative histories of struggle and cultural values, and holding different and conflicting realities and subject positions. Moreover, a reading of these women's accounts suggests that affect is both personal and social and can manifest in multiple, embodied, transformative, and potentially destructive ways. The author comes to new ways of understanding organisations and resistance when the author uses affect as an investigative lens. Research limitations/implications – By virtue of the close reading necessitated by the nature of the study, the sample of this research is small. While the intention is not generality, the findings of the research have to be understood in context and applied within different settings with caution. The implications of this research are that there remains an urgent need for critical-orientated research which centers affect in order to counter the growing positive psychologies which relegate asymmetries to the margins. Social implications – In South Africa where black women constitute the numerical majority, there is an urgent need to understand and reverse their status as a minority in management and social life. This research goes some way in explicating this process. Originality/value – While there is well-developed body of feminist research which seeks to study black women in South Africa, there is a dearth of research into black women in the workplace. This paper therefore presents an original look at black female managers by applying international theoretical tools to a context that is under theorised. This research presents new methodological and theoretical tools and analysis to the South African workplace.

On Anger

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrion L. Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Female Subjectivity

This chapter takes up the position of the infamous “angry black woman” by avoiding righteous, revisionist, or reactionary arguments about black women and anger and instead considering black women’s anger as critical posture. The argument neither begins nor ends with the stereotype, but with the supposition that representational discourse has been largely unable to account for anger as an aspect of black female subjectivity. The case is therefore made that anger is inherently bound up with the notion of claim for black women, and accounting for this interaction requires an interrogation into the most intimate of black female spaces. The chapter ultimately turns to a discussion of reality television, Claudia Rankine’s discussion of Serena Williams, and a brief analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula.

A Sleight of Hair

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-41
Author(s):  
A.E. Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Natural Hair ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Comedies

This essay considers the presence of Black women’s hair as a necessary fact of embodiment that disrupts postfeminist romantic comedies. It focuses on Something New (2006), notable as the first film in which the director, producer, writer, and star were all Black women, arguing that the ontological ruptures created by Kenya, the main character, disrupt the film’s neat classification into the postfeminist romantic comedy genre. The article argues that the Black female body, through the signifier of Black natural hair, invites a chaos into the narrative that makes the film’s contribution to the genre invisible. This calls for a critique of the social order that the genre treats as essential to its foundation.

The Way It Is

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrion L. Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Strong Black Woman ◽  
Social Intimacy ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the trope of the strong black woman by way of the “superwoman” of R&B musical parlance, particularly as expressed by R&B artist Karyn White in her 1988 hit song “Superwoman.” It extends this discussion to a consideration of the reality television series Keyshia Cole: The Way It Is in order to document the complex enactments of black female social intimacy and to say something about how black women collectively navigate trauma and pain by way of their music, as well as through their interactions with each other.

scholarly journals The great zeroing of the sustainability of the global social order through the destruction of socio-cultural identification

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-21
Author(s):  
Oksana Plaksina
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Identification ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Planetary Scale ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
The World ◽  
The Stability

The aim of the article is to deepen the knowledge about ensuring the sustainability of the society’s development as a system. The main methods of work ground on dialectical, systemic and activity-based interdisciplinary approaches and include analysis, synthesis, observation, the method of decomposition, typologization, complementarity, comparative analysis, logical and historical analysis. The novelty of the article lies in the study of the correlation between the destruction of socio-cultural identification and the unprecedented modern process – the zeroing of the sustainability of the general planetary society initiated by the top of the world capitalist class. Conclusions. New philosophical knowledge about the mechanisms of ensuring the stability of society has been received, taking into account the new challenges initiated by the deepening crisis of capitalism. New scientifically based results have been received: the specific of identification as a process and state have been discovered; there the subject of the world society’s sustainable development at this stage of history and in the future have been defined - humanity as a whole, and the object - the environmental functioning and harmonious development of humanity on a planetary scale. The analysis of the super-rich elite’s strategies and socio-political processes in the United States shows the following: 1. The destruction of socio-cultural identification is an effective frontal tool for the destabilization of social life, for the sustainability of individual societies and states, and society in general. 2. General social imbalance and the diminution of social sustainability, in turn, feed the breakdown of socio-cultural identification. 3. The destruction of socio-cultural identification is one of the demonstrations that the great zeroing of the world social order’s sustainability has begun. The main social contradiction of modernity has been revealed and a forecast of its development has been given.

Black Coffee

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-433
Author(s):  
Daicia Price
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Positive Development ◽  
Black Females ◽  
Academic Settings ◽  
Core Components

Thirty-five years of formal education has left me feeling isolated. Daily encounters of racism, sexism, and microaggressions have led to difficulty with academic and professional achievement. All of these matters have affected me as a person who identifies as a Black female/woman in academic settings. In this autoethnography, I engage symbolic narrative prose and core components of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to provide an analysis of my personal experiences in educational settings across my lifespan. I bring forth my individual perspective and analysis that encompasses emotional and physical responses that occur while in academic settings as a Black female. Reflective autoethnography offers an opportunity to explore key themes, potential challenges, strengths, and future strategies for creating spaces in education that are supportive and encourage growth while also nurturing Black women to remain grounded in what feels natural and intrinsic to their cultural heritage and identity and expression of self. “Black coffee with no sugar and no cream” is a colloquial phrase used to describe a Black woman who exudes her individual persona without apologies. Positive development of Black females who present as “Black coffee with no sugar and no cream” is unpropitious without intentional culturally responsive interventions. The addition of strong Black coffee to academic settings is crucial to continue efforts in creating a socially just educational system and society. Using reflexivity and metaphors, I describe my matriculation process in the Midwest region of the United States of America within a dichotomy of African-centered and Eurocentric education practices. Providing concepts to promote efficacious attainment of education, I hope to connect with readers who may have similar experiences or be in a position to reduce the adverse encounters a Black woman has in an academic environment at various levels.

scholarly journals NON-AMERICAN BLACK WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT: A FOURTH-WAVE FEMINISM STUDY ON CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE’S AMERICANAH

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Maria Ardianti Kurnia Sari ◽  
Nur Saktiningrum
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
American Black ◽  
Patricia Hill Collins ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Fourth Wave

Racial issues have been a big problem in the United States of America since the slavery era. Although racism still exists in its society, many people are still migrating to America. For example, non-American Black women go there to try their luck to get a better education, a better job, and a better standard of living. However, some of them experience racism and gender inequality at work, as well as everywhere else in American society. Nevertheless, these experiences of racism and inequality may well be what motivates them to gain empowerment and gender equality. The qualitative method is used in this research. The primary source is a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie titled Americanah (2013). The secondary sources to support this analysis are books, journals, articles, videos, and current news related to the issues. Post-nationalist studies by John Rowe, transnationalism studies by Steven Vertovec, fourth-wave feminism ideas from Nikola Rivers and Prudence Chamberlain, and Black women’s empowerment studies by Sheila Radford-Hill and Patricia Hill Collins are used to analyze the data. The results of this research are: first, there are measures taken by non-American Black women to gain empowerment in the US, which begin with their aspirations to obtain acceptance in society. Second, the redefinition of gender equality through education, employment, and social changes leads to the acceptance of non-American Black women in society. The acceptance and empowerment become evidence of gender equality in education, employment, and social life. Isu rasisme menjadi salah satu masalah besar di Amerika Serikat sejak masa perbudakan. Meskipun rasisme masih terjadi, tetapi tidak sedikit imigran yang datang dan menetap. Wanita kulit hitam dari luar Amerika datang untuk mendapat pendidikan, pekerjaan, dan hidup layak. Tetapi, tidak sedikit mendapatkan rasisme dan ketidaksetaraan gender di dalam dan masyarakat. Dengan demikian, rasisme dan ketidaksetaraan memotivasi wanita kulit hitam non-Amerika untuk memperoleh pemberdayaan dan kesetaraan gender. Metode kualitatif digunakan dalam penelitian ini. Sumber pertama, novel karya Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie berjudul Americanah (2013). Sumber kedua untuk mendukung analisis diambil dari beberapa buku, jurnal, artikel, video, dan berita yang berhubungan dengan isu yang dibahas. Beberapa teori yang digunakan untuk menganalisis, yakni teori pos-nasionalis dari John Rowe, transnasionalisme dari Steven Vertovec, feminisme gelombang keempat dari Nikola Rivers dan Prudence Chamberlain, dan pemberdayaan perempuan berkulit hitam dari Sheila Radford-Hill dan Patricia Hill Collins. Berdasarkan hasil analisa, pertama, pemberdayaan wanita kulit hitam non-Amerika dimulai dari perjuangan mereka untuk mendapatkan pemberdayaan dari masyarakat. Proses perjuangan dan keberanian yang menuntun mereka untuk bisa beradaptasi dengan situasi di Amerika. Kedua, mendefinisikan kesetaraan gender dalam dunia pendidikan, pekerjaan, dan perubahan sosial. Beberapa dampak pemberdayaan menjadi bukti pencapaian kesetaraan gender dalam dunia pendidikan, pekerjaan, dan perubahan kehidupan sosial.

Latino Catholicism

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Matovina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
The United States ◽  
Societal Impact ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The U.S

Most histories of Catholicism in the United States focus on the experience of Euro-American Catholics, whose views on social issues have dominated public debates. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latino Catholic experience in America from the sixteenth century to today, and offers the most in-depth examination to date of the important ways the U.S. Catholic Church, its evolving Latino majority, and American culture are mutually transforming one another. This book highlights the vital contributions of Latinos to American religious and social life, demonstrating in particular how their engagement with the U.S. cultural milieu is the most significant factor behind their ecclesial and societal impact.

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