I assess representations of black women's derrières, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the "unmirrored" black female body.

The prevalence of poor health among young disadvantaged Black mothers and their children has prompted a revival of maternal activism among Black middle-class urban women. A study of the California-based “Birthing Project,” founded in 1988, reveals that such activism is best understood as a modern-day version of Black activist mothering practiced by African American clubwomen from the time of slavery to the early 1940s. This article demonstrates the legacy of “normative empathy” as a significant motivator for middle-class maternal activism and (...) as a basis for a middle-class critique of Black mothering among the disadvantaged. (shrink)

I am interested in exploring the usefulness and limits of traditional categories of feminist theory, such as those laid out by Alison Jaggar. I begin the analysis by critically comparing various treatments of liberal feminism. I focus throughout this investigation on uncovering ways that current frameworks privilege white authors and concerns, recreate the split between theory and activism, and obscure long histories of theoretical and practical coalition and alliance work.

Frederick Douglass (1818?1895) was the most significant African?American leader of the nineteenth century. Secretly acquiring literacy as a slave, he grew into a brilliant speaker whose essential genius was to articulate and impeach the ideologies of the day. Douglass was one of the foremost defenders of black emancipation and women?s rights. He developed a dual philosophy of resistance and integration. He taxed blacks with the need for self?reliance; he recalled whites to the justice of racial equality. Freedom would be won (...) by securing to all workers, white or black, the fruit of their labour. Economic progress and enhanced social equality would be achieved by hard work, thrift, education and sobriety. Underlying all his thought and action was an ideology of free labour conjoined with republicanism. He early embraced the ideal of moral suasion. As the prospect of civil war loomed, he accepted the legitimacy of violence ? in self?defence, and to liberate the slaves. (shrink)

This article argues that changes in the organization of social reproduction, defined to include the activities, attitudes, behaviors, emotions, responsibilities, and relationships involved in maintaining daily life, can explain historical differences in women's political self-organization. Examining the Progressive period, the 1930s, and the 1960s and 1970s, the authors suggest that the conditions of social reproduction provide the organizational resources for and legitimation of women's collective action.

This article offers a reconceptualization of “the political” from the standpoint of women working in and for low-income neighborhoods, with special emphasis on the contradictions between their actions as community workers and their understandings of the political aspects of their work. The author also examines how their gender and race identity influenced their political consciousness and practice. The date are drawn from in-depth interviews with forty-two perdominantly African American and Puerto Rican women from New York City and Philadelphia who were (...) hired in community action programs established by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. (shrink)

Beliefs have the potential to obscure and legitimate, or to challenge, inequalities of gender and race. Through an analysis of the association between education and beliefs about racial and gender inequality, this article explores for whom education is most likely to foster beliefs that challenge social inequality. Data from the 1996 General Social Survey suggest that education tends to have a greater positive impact on rejection of group segregation and rejection of victim-blaming explanations for inequality than it does on recognition (...) of discrimination or endorsement of group-based remedies for inequality. This pattern is consistent with the view that education reproduces rather than challenges inequality, and it is evident for white men, white women, and African American men. African American women present an exception, which is considered in terms of the unique structural location and historical legacy surrounding African American women's relationship to education. (shrink)

This study applies the concept of intersectionality to Black women's entrepreneurial activity. Specifically, the author addresses the ways in which race, gender, and class intersect to inform working-class Black women's decisions and experiences as hair salon owners. By placing Black women at the center of analysis, the author explores business ownership from the perspective of a group that has frequently been overlooked in sociology of entrepreneurship research. The findings indicate that race, gender, and class inequalities shape working-class Black women's entrepreneurship (...) in two areas: the process of becoming entrepreneurs and relationships with stylists. (shrink)

In academic research on interracial relationships, as well as popular discourses such as film and television, Black women are often characterized as angry and opposed to interracial relationships. Yet the voices of Black women have been largely neglected. Drawing from focus group interviews with Black college women and in-depth interviews with Black women who are married interracially, the author explores Black women’s views on Black-white heterosexual relationships. Black women’s opposition to interracial dating is not simply rooted in jealousy and anger (...) toward white women but is based on white racism, Black internalization of racism, and what interracial relationships represent to Black women and signify about Black women’s worth. The impact of racism and sexism are clear, with Black women devalued by white standards of beauty and faced with a shortage of available Black men and a lack of “substantive opportunities” to date interracially. (shrink)

During the highly publicized appeals trial of Mike Tyson, Black feminists launched an antirape campaign that included obtaining signatures in support of a full-page ad while simultaneously educating the Black community about racist and sexist rape myths. Organizers challenged rape-supportive discourse using a distinct Black feminist frame that was influenced by structural as well as culturally engendered factors. Relevant frame alignment processes and the significance of racialized, gendered, and class-based micromobilization strategies are described. A coalition-focused view of the framing process (...) is presented, and its usefulness in Black feminist collective action is underscored. (shrink)

The achievements of Anna Julia Cooper are extraordinary given her life circumstances. Driven by a desire Cooper called "a thumping within," she became a prominent educator, earned her Ph.D., and influenced the thought of W.E.B. DuBois and others. Cooper fought for her educational philosophy, but despite her contributions, her apparent elitism has shaped contemporary assessments of her work. I argue that her views must be considered in social and historical context.

From the perspective of African American women firefighters, the authors examine the social interactions that make them excluded “outsiders within” their firehouses and different from not only dominant white men but also other subordinated groups of Black men and white women firefighters. Drawing on extensive survey data from 24 Black women career firefighters nationwide and detailed interviews with 22 of these, the authors found persistent and pervasive patterns of subordination through the exclusion of Black women, reflected in insufficient instruction, coworker (...) hostility, silence, close supervision, lack of support, and stereotyping. Perceived differences of Black women from white and Black men as well as white women created strained relations, especially when Black men and white women gained some acceptance by virtue of their gender and race, respectively, and thus reportedly distanced themselves from Black women. The experiences of African American women firefighters highlight the omnirelevance and intertwining of race and gender. (shrink)

Researchers have given some attention to women law enforcement officers' experiences and perceptions of sexual harassment. Yet, few studies have determined how the interaction of gender and race affect African American women's perception of this workplace impediment. This article explores one group of women's experiences in a U.S. sheriff's department. Interview data gathered from 65 African American women who are active and former law enforcement officers provide a comprehensive examination of how African American women in nontraditional criminal justice occupations experience (...) racialized sexual harassment. Differences in degree and frequency of harassment are found among the women in different cohorts based on their job tenure, marital status, and the race of their harassers. (shrink)

Black feminist theory has shown how respectability politics shape cultural discourses about African American women's sexuality. Responding to ‘silent’ depictions resulting from racial uplift strategies among turn-of-the-century middle-class black women, subsequent work theorises alternative discourses that portray a desiring and agentic black female sexual subject. Locating these alternative discourses in a ‘politics of irreverence’, I argue that respectability/irreverence oppositional logic narrowly frames theorising of black female sexuality. Although recent work emphasises dialectical – rather than oppositional – dynamics, this analytic approach (...) is unevenly applied. Binary frameworks continue to shape analyses of women's rap. Drawing upon lyrics of rappers Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, I highlight three discursive strategies whereby women rappers render the respectability/irreverence binary problematic: (1) using irreverence to claim respectability, (2) ‘claiming both’ or, embracing contradiction, and (3) beating to the punch. This analysis shows how dialectical approaches account for potential ‘third spaces’ where more complex representational politics are possible. (shrink)

I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the “unmirrored” black female body.

The paradox of girls’ academic gains over boys, across race and class, has perplexed scholars for the last few decades. Through a 3-year longitudinal ethnography of two predominantly economically marginalized and racially minoritized schools, I contend that while racially marginalized girls may have made academic gains, school is nevertheless a hostile institution for them. Focusing on the case of Black girls and recent immigrant girls of color, I identify three specific ways in which school functions as hostile institution for them: (...) gendered racial harassment from teachers, erasure of intellect, and estrangement within their communities. Furthermore, the denigration of immigrant girls becomes the conduit for misogynoir. I find that the gains of some racially marginalized girls in school often justify hostility against all of them. Bringing into conversation a feminist analysis of schooling that rejects girls’ educational gains as ubiquitous evidence of a gender revolution with a Black-colonial education framework that emphasizes schooling as a technology of oppression, I explore the current role of school as a hostile institution for Black girls and immigrant girls of color. (shrink)

This article examines the cross-generational continuity of community work performed by women living and working in low-income communities and demonstrates the complex ways in which gender, race-ethnicity, and class contribute to the social construction of mothering. The analysis of low-income women's community work challenges definitions of mothering that are limited to biological and legal expressions, thus neglecting the significance of community-based nurturing work for geographic communities and racial-ethnic and class-based groups. The analysis utilizes a broadened understanding of labor and contests (...) the divisions between paid and unpaid work traditionally used to discuss women's work. The article compares and contrasts the experiences of African-American and Latina community workers from low-income communities in New York City and Philadelphia. The findings of the research further demonstrate the ways that knowledge generated from the standpoint of women from different classes and racial-ethnic backgrounds transforms our understanding of politics, labor, and mothering. (shrink)

A Black feminist disability framework allows for methodological considerations of the intersectional nature of oppression. Our work in this article is twofold: to acknowledge the need to consider disability in Black Studies and race in Disability Studies, and to forward an intersectional framework that considers race, gender, and disability to address the gaps in both Black Studies and Disability Studies. By employing a Black feminist disability framework, scholars of African American and Black Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Disability (...) Studies have a flexible and useful methodology through which to consider the historical, social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of disability. (shrink)

It is widely believed that gendered expectations are communicated to children in the process of socialization. However, there is reason to ask whether and how gender is constructed in Black families. An early perspective that still continues to inform some contemporary research is assimilationism, which assumes that Black people embrace and pass on to their children the gender norms of the dominant white society. The Afrocentric perspective challenges this view, maintaining that the unique historical experiences of Blacks have militated against (...) an emphasis on rigid gender distinctions, and that relative gender neutrality exists in Black families' child-rearing practices. The development of multicultural feminist theory, which argues that the impact of race on gender varies by social class, implies that both assimilationism and Afrocentrism may be overgeneralizations. Yet, little systematic research has been done on whether race makes a difference in how parents view gender. The authors use data from surveys completed by a nonrandom sample of parents in 202 African American and 204 white families in two large metropolitan school districts to examine the impact of gender, race, and class on parents' self-reports of their immediate priorities and long-term goals for their children, their view of the parenting role, and their discipline strategies. The findings are consistent with multicultural feminist theory: Race and social class interact to shape the intergenerational construction of gender in families. (shrink)

In both popular culture and academic disciplines, feminism, especially feminisms of women of color, is increasing in popularity. But with that popularity comes certain challenges. It would seem that, due to its popularity, Black feminism has gained a nominal invite to professional philosophy’s (largely) white school social affair. But it has been invited by hosts who don’t quite know what to do with Black feminism once it’s arrived.

In this article, I argue that members of the Women's Caucus of ACT UP/la formed a boundary between themselves and male members to increase the WC's power within the feminist-friendly organization. The WC's boundary-making strategies—formalizing women's space and reinscribing gender difference—combatted “slippage” of ACT UP/la's focus away from women's issues precipated by men's greater numbers in the group. ACT UP/la's feminist-friendly politics, legitimated WC efforts, and caused male members to defer to the WC; the WC became “official women,” gaining control (...) over their agenda, over their participation within ACT UP/la, and over male contributions to the WC itself. Boundary making had an unintended effect, compartmentalization, whereby women's issues became the sole responsibility of the WC. I conclude that the WC's boundary making in ACT UP/la's feminist-friendly milieu was at once successful and problematic, and that the efforts of feminists in such organizations deserve greater scrutiny. (shrink)

I am interested in exploring the usefulness and limits of traditional categories of feminist theory, such as those laid out by Alison Jaggar (1977; 1983). I begin the analysis by critically comparing various treatments of liberal feminism. I focus throughout this investigation on uncovering ways that current frameworks privilege white authors and concerns, recreate the split between theory and activism, and obscure long histories of theoretical and practical coalition and alliance work.

Historical dynamics around feminism, race, and rape discouraged extensive early Black involvement in anti-rape work in the United States. In Los Angeles, concern among women of color in the movement and a state initiative to fund poorly served areas converged to produce two new Black rape crisis centers in the mid-1980s. Ironically, state funding, an otherwise conservative influence on the anti-rape movement, has facilitated the progressive goal of expanding racial and ethnic diversity in the Los Angeles anti-rape movement. Racially homogeneous (...) organizations contributed more to diversifying the movement than integration within organizations. Despite differences in political perspective, women from older feminist groups and the new community-oriented centers now successfully work in coalition. (shrink)

Many men who work in women's professions experience a glass escalator effect that facilitates their advancement and upward mobility within these fields. Research finds that subtle aspects of the interactions, norms, and expectations in women's professions push men upward and outward into the higher-status, higher-paying, more “masculine” positions within these fields. Although most research includes minority men, little has explicitly considered how racial dynamics color these men's encounters with the mechanisms of the glass escalator. In this article, the author examines (...) how intersections of race and gender combine to shape experiences for minority men in the culturally feminized field of nursing and finds that the upward mobility implied by the glass escalator is not uniformly available to all men who do “women's work.” The author concludes that the glass escalator is a racialized concept and a gendered one and considers the implications of this for future studies of men in feminized occupations. (shrink)

This article focuses on social reformer Caroline Bartlett Crane and her association with club women for municipal reform during the Progressive Era. Using archival material, the author examines the actual process of Progressive social reform in which Crane used social networks, sociology, and Social Gospel ideals to achieve positive social change. The author also addresses recent critiques of Progressive women reformers regarding their motivations, accomplishments, and their ultimate legacy in Progressive Era social change.

How is it possible for human subjects who are socially constructed to engage in effective and authoritative acts of resistance to the social norms and institutions within which they were formed? Judith Butler, in her engagement with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, locates this possibility in the nature of `speech acts', and in resistance to social norms emanating from the abjected margins of social life. She criticizes Bourdieu for undermining the promise of agency contained in habitus by reducing it to (...) the social field in which it was constituted, thus re-closing `the iron cage' of structural/institutional determination. For Butler, social norms and institutions, dependent as they are on reiterative performance, are intrinsically open to disruption. It is possible, she claims, using as her example Rosa Parks's historical act of resistance in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, to resist with authority, yet without prior institutional authorization. This article argues that Butler's theory of iterability works to endow the capacity to authorize against the grain of institutional authority with individuals and their acts and hence neglects the social contexts that inform and de-limit this capacity. `Resisting with authority' is possible precisely because it is not endowed by individuals or their acts, but is collective and interactional. (shrink)

In the Montgomery bus boycott and the South African anti-pass campaign, women's autonomous organizations initiated actions that catalyzed the mass movements for racial justice and national liberation. The activism of women and their organizations sprang from their particular positioning within systems of multiple oppressions simultaneously experiencing racial/ethnic, class, and gender oppression. In both the United States and South Africa, the particular structural location and autonomous resistance of women of African descent was an important aspect of the political opportunity structure and (...) served as a catalyst that catapulted their respective movements for racial justice and/or national liberation to higher levels. This study employs a gendered and comparative approach to these two resistance campaigns to understand better the effects of interactive and multiplicative inequalities on movement processes and the gendered nature of political opportunities. (shrink)

This article looks at two strains of urban community organizing, distinguished by philosophy and often by gender, and influenced by the historical division of American society into public and private spheres. The authors compare the well-known Alinsky model, which focuses on communities organizing for power, and what they call the women-centered model, which focuses on organizing relationships to build community. These models are rooted in somewhat distinct traditions and vary along several dimensions, including conceptions of human nature and conflict, power (...) and politics, leadership, and the organizing process. The authors conclude by examining the implications of this analysis and questions for further research and practice. (shrink)

What is African American Politics? What form should it take? How does it conceptualize white supremacy? In In the Shadow of Du Bois, Robert Gooding-Williams uses the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Fredrick Douglass to provide answers to these questions. While the choices of Douglass and Du Bois make a great deal of sense, they reproduce the tendency of confining political theory to literature – a move that bounds the genre in problematic ways. In this article, I (...) in effect attempt to “unbound” the genre by considering Ella Baker, a civil rights era political organizer. (shrink)

The author discusses the contributions of grounded theory and grounded action to the development of a new, and evolutionary, theoretical framework for understanding diversity as a complex phenomenon. She discusses the work of Thomas and Gregory as pioneers in expanding the conceptualization of diversity, arguing that this new understanding increases the potential for creative action in systems.

This article focuses on the ways gendered experiences varied by race with regard to women's recruitment and participation in the civil rights movement of Mississippi. The author analyzes 13 interviews with both African American and white women who were connected to the movement. By privileging the voices of movement actors, this study begins to illuminate the ways recruitment and participation varied by race. Three types of women's participation are distinguished: high-risk activism, low-risk institutional, and activist mothering and “women's work.” Explanations (...) for these different forms of participation are found in examining two primary patterns of recruitment. (shrink)

This article focuses on the most important woman in Garveyism: Amy Jacques Garvey, Marcus Garvey's second wife. Amy Jacques Garvey's true value in the Garvey movement has rarely been acknowledged; most authors and scholars have misleadingly depicted her as Marcus's “helpmate.” This article proposes that Amy Jacques Garvey was a key architect of Garveyism and a lifelong advocate of social justice in her own right. The author also examines the relationship among race, class, and gender as it pertains to Amy (...) Jacques Garvey's life and social thought. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how class and racial dynamics generate different styles of activism among women's movement organizations. Based on a comparative study of two feminist organizations—one composed of lower-class women of color and another of upper-class white women—it charts the formation of divergent types of gender politics. First, it explores how differences in the class and racial backgrounds of the memberships create distinct organizational needs; second, how these divergent political interests motivate contrasting organizational ideologies, activities, and structures; and finally how (...) they motivate different approaches to the wider women's movement. At the conclusion, implications are drawn for cross-class/race alliances among grassroots women's organizations. (shrink)