In this essay, I offer an epistemological accounting of Pauli Murray’s idea of Jane Crow dynamics. Jane Crow, in my estimation, refers to clashing supremacy systems that provide targets for subordination while removing grounds to demand recourse for said subordination. As a description of an oppressive state, it is an idea of subordination with an epistemological engine. Here, I offer an epistemological reading of Jane Crow dynamics by theorizing three imbricated conditions for Jane Crow, i.e. the occupation of negative, socio-epistemic (...) space, reduced epistemic confidence, and heightened epistemic disavowal. To this end, Jane Crow seems to require routine epistemic failings. In the end, I propose that an epistemological narrative of Jane Crow may also shed light on why invisibility frames figure so prominently in US Black feminist thought. (shrink)

This article takes direction from the transnational feminist lesbian encounter that took place between the Dutch collective Sister Outsider and Audre Lorde in the 1980s to reflect on the role of archives within transnational feminist research. Drawing on archival materials from the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV) at Atria (Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History) in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States, I consider how (...) fragmented archives offer stories on kinship, intimacy and loss. Taking into account the ‘absences’ and ‘presences’ (Lewis, 2017) produced in this archival research project, I propose an archival research methodology that is rooted in a practice of ‘orientation’ (Ahmed, 2006a, 2006b), ‘listening’ (Campt, 2017) and ‘intervention’ (Appadurai, 2003). (shrink)

The Argonauts combines high theory and the everyday. It does this by combining lofty thought, the quotidian, close attention to words and ideas and stray thoughts, and desire. It does this through form, the way it blends and refuses genre, the way it skips from one thought or story to another, and making them connect by virtue of contiguity. The Argonauts refuses form in a way that parallels how Maggie's and Harry's bodies and identities refuse gender taxonomy. It also refuses (...) genre, referred to variously as theory, memoir, and autotheory. While it queers form and family, it also queers feelings. (shrink)

This article asks how interracial sex and/or sexual attraction might be an integral part of cross-racial feminist work. Focusing on the work of black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde, I argue that for some black women sex and intimate relationships with white women during the Women’s Movement were an important part of their survival and their feminist and anti-racist praxis. Drawing on recent black feminist scholarship, I read Lorde’s work against the grain of the anti-pornography feminist movement contemporaneous with her (...) career and suggest that sex with white women was often a productive, enriching and necessary experience for her as she worked to build cross-racial political alliances. (shrink)

(2008). Charting “Unexplored Territory” in the Social Foundations: Pedagogical Practice in Urban Teacher Education. Educational Studies: Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 229-245.

‘Intersectionality’ has taken on a complex position in the field of feminist scholarship over the last decade. Debate on the concept has swung back and forth, from buzzword to harsh critique. Amid these discussions, many feminist scholars have thought about Audre Lorde and the role of her writings in the debates over intersectionality. Lorde’s radical literary feminism has often been seen both as reflecting a politics of identity, on the one hand, and as shifting and situational, on the other. Intersectionality (...) has also been claimed either to be recycling the ideas of identity politics or to be forging new ways to grasp decentered identity positions and power structures. This article aims to tell a story about the roots of intersectionality through – and alongside – the legacy of Lorde’s feminism, by revisiting certain identity-political ideas. The radical nature of Lorde’s thinking is in many ways connected to politicized writing styles and rebellious literary forms. The main focus in this article is therefore extended to cover the role and implications of radical writing styles for intersectionality. The article argues that the oeuvre of telling the story of intersectionality through Lorde’s feminism opens up a new perspective on the genealogy of intersectionality. (shrink)

Gay neighborhoods across the United States are de-concentrating in today’s so-called “post-gay” era as sexual minorities assimilate into the mainstream and disperse across the city. This context creates a problem of measurement. If by “culture” we mean to say a particular way of life of a group or subgroup of people like sexual minorities, and if that way of life is blending with other aspects of the metropolis, then how can we detect distinct urban sexual cultures? In this article, I (...) use 125 interviews with Chicago residents to propose a two-pronged strategy. First, gay neighborhoods continue to house anchor institutions, despite ongoing residential out-migrations. These are the primary engines of community building, and they locate the material culture of a group in a specific place. Commemorations serve as a second indicator for a culture, and they too put meanings into form. Although it is a fact of city life that all neighborhoods change, anchors and commemorations are analytic devices that scholars can use to observe urban sexual cultures. More generally, they provide a framework for how to measure the shifting geographic profile of a historically stigmatized group as it experiences positive change in public opinion. (shrink)

Breastfeeding advocates and global health agencies have been sounding alarms about the dangers of digital marketing practices of the formula-feeding industry. This study comprised a feminist discourse analysis of materials produced (blog, social media posts, comments) in a paid partnership between baby formula brand Enfamil and an influencer, Marilou Bourdon from Trois fois par jour. Our analysis reveals a sophisticated marketing campaign that co-opts feminist critiques of breastfeeding promotion discourse while carefully avoiding explicitly violating the International Code of Marketing of (...) Breast-milk Substitutes. Underlying this campaign is a rhetoric reliant on pathos to assuage maternal guilt and shame for feeding formula. (shrink)

The late black American feminist lesbian poet Audre Lorde was known in feminist communities in the United States, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere for her poetry and prose about how to survive various forms of oppression. Though Lorde authored many political and spiritual poems and essays in her adulthood, little has been written about Lorde’s early psycho-spiritual spiritual journey from Catholicism to I Ching, which informed her adult integrated African spirituality, which in turn informed her political and social consciousness. (...) Lorde’s poems to God, written during puberty and post-puberty, and her embrace of I Ching nondualism, provides insight into how Lorde understood the psycho-spiritual challenges of surviving through hopelessness and despair, and into confidence and hopefulness. (shrink)

Pelagia Goulimari interviews Talia Bettcher on core issues and concepts in Women Writing Across Culture, both in relation to Bettcher’s work and in the context of wider debates in feminist, queer and transgender theory. How to theorize “woman,” “trans woman,” “trans woman of colour,” “trans feminism”? How to put together experience, local knowledge, and communication across worlds? How to amplify experiments crossing the boundaries between theory, literature and life-writing? How to pursue an intersectional ethics of intimacy and “interpersonal spatiality”?

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of the Muse of Greek oral poetry to rethink the relationship between mimesis and narration, and the shaping power of the act of narration on the subject. I suggest that Cavarero’s reading of the Muse provides an understanding of mimesis that moves beyond representation to a form of contagion between embodied and temporal subjectivities. To clarify this, I show how Cavarero’s Muse anticipates her critique of rectitude in Inclinations and makes it clear that (...) the inclined subject is not only the vulnerable and open subject as opposed to the vertical and autonomous one, but also the subject that has the power to incline the narratives that mimetically straighten it. The aim is to understand mimetic inclinations as destabilising voices of vertical narrations. As a concrete example of the troubling power of mimetic inclinations, I propose a rereading of Cavarero’s technique of theft presented in In Spite of Plato as a strategy of mimetic resistance. (shrink)

This essay is part of a recent version of a talk I have given by way of introducing Lesbian Ethics. I mention ways in which lesbian existence creates certain conceptual possibilities that can effect conceptual shifts and transform consciousness.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the role of collective memory in ethno-national projects. In addition, there has been an expansion of research utilising memory work and auto/biographical methods, which have been particularly effective in the writing of feminists of colour. The paper is prompted by a return to Avtar Brah's ‘The Scent of Memory’ that it uses as a starting point to explore the relationships between competing accounts of ‘private’ memories of racialisation that come from (...) mixed-race siblings growing up in a mainly white town. Drawing on interviews, the paper uses familial narratives and their individual telling, to show how sense is made of divergent experiences and memories of childhood and teenage in 1960s and 1970s Britain. The paper shows how narrative accounts are often negotiated through multiple senses, revealing them as both imagined and recalled, contested and negotiated. The paper considers the strengths and limitations of narrative analysis in understanding the relationship between individual and collective memories at both national and familial levels. It argues that the ways in which the social and personal memories are connected in the processes of subjectivation are unstable and opaque, and can only ever be partially known through the process of narrativisation. (shrink)

This paper examines the plays of African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962) and The Owl Answers (1963), which remain important for their engagement with notions of African-American identity, resistance and agency through their attention to mixed race female characters or mulattos who experience bodily and psychological traumas that demonstrate the abuse of the colonized on a deeply visceral level. Kennedy's plays have remained controversial because of their failure to comply with the nationalistic orientation of the Black Arts (...) Movement (BAM) of 1960s America. I aim to examine these plays through a framework of postcolonial-feminist performance analysis that finds its way back to histories of colonization and slavery, enabling through such returns, a compelling critique of the manoeuvrings of racial hierarchies and power imbalances. As well, I argue that Kennedy's protagonists are de-essentialized fractured beings who fail to embody either White superiority or Black nationalist pride, as they oscillate between two polarities. Such failure (on the part of Kennedy's mulattos) allows for a strategic de-essentialization of identity that interrogates fixed categorization. As well, through a form that is fluid, fragmented and blurs the distinctions among history, memory, space and time, her works impart political agency to the characters and enable an empowered sense of the ‘self-in-process.’. (shrink)

This article argues that there is a lack of theorizing about sexuality within social policy in what is referred to as the mainstream and more surprisingly within feminist social policy. This is particularly surprising given the presence of sexuality in recent as well as past social policies as well as in social theory. The purpose of this article is not merely to argue that a relationship between sexuality and social policy should be examined but rather to explore and outline the (...) specific nature of the relationship and its implications for both sexuality and the discipline of social policy. Specifically, how do prevalent sexuality discourses inform and constitute social policy and what are the social relations involved in this process? Correspondingly, what role does social policy play in constituting what we know to be the ‘truths’ of sexuality? What exclusions and inclusions result from these dominant social relations and discourses when ‘played’ through social policy? That sexuality has failed to be analytically incorporated within the discipline of social policy is addressed. First, reasons for the lack of theorizing are explored. Specifically, the historical development of the discipline and the formation of an implicit consensus about what constitute the real concerns of welfare. Second, there is an examination of the ways feminist social policy has or has not engaged with sexuality. The final section posits an emergent framework for integrating sexuality into social policy analyses and critiques. (shrink)

The question of whether a (queer) politics of utopia can be located in the past, the future or the present conjures a set of ambivalences and dichotomies, of which the creativity–negativity debate and the (non)future of neoliberalism are cogent for feminist praxis. Convergences can be traced between understandings of utopia grounded in everyday experimentation and queer feminist critiques of normativity as a life project as well as an ongoing educational project. This article dissects social critic, psychologist, poet, novelist and anarchist (...) Paul Goodman’s essay ‘The politics of being queer’ (1969), reading it through a queer feminist lens in order to shed new light on his ‘buried conversations’ with feminism. Mindful of and in opposition to Goodman’s controversial avowal of ‘masculinities’—most notably in his Growing Up Absurd (1960)—the article situates his idea(s) of freedom-autonomy and the disidentifications he proposed—with gay liberation agendas/movements, with bisexuality, with ‘masculinity’—within a wider feminist educational/pedagogical project of experimenting with utopia in the here and now. Goodman’s calls for a liberated society left us a utopian imaginary for engaging with an embodied politics for the present—for teaching, educating, loving and living differently. (shrink)

Narratives of street life from British Bangladeshi Muslim mothers, collected in the aftermath of the suicide bombings in London in 2005, are the focus of this article. The author examines how temporal schemas that combine the unpredictable time of racist events with a rendering of a foreseeable linear temporality of racism and of intergenerational identifications in the future provide the women with a means of living with ontological insecurity and threat. Although this reproduction of linear time can appear to exclude (...) the singularity of unknown futures, with regard to the demands of multicultural living, understanding of time can be more open and undecided. The author locates an ethicality to the mothers’ deliberations in how to live in situations marked by racism and multiculturalism in both their negotiation of temporal registers and in the sharing and interrogation of perspectives and strategies with others. Particular attention is given to the ambivalent use of temporality as an instrument of narrative agency. The discussion also considers how the methodological apparatus of the focus group is engaged with matters of intimate citizenship, conveying and participating in the production of the research problem. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship of shame to class and to desire in Michelle Tea's memoirThe Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America. Through applying a class analytic to the framework of shame recently advanced by feminist, queer, postcolonial, and affect theorists, I foreground shame as central to the experience of being poor and queer, and examine shame as not only negative and positive, but as productive. I operationalize an “oppositional reading strategy” to insist on attention to (...) the materiality of embodied desire and labor, in particular queer desire and sex work, that is made available in poor and working‐class women's life‐writing. Tea's memoir demonstrates how writing about an ambivalent relation to shame is an act of resistance, an opportunity to transform private, individual experiences into public, and therefore collective, articulations. (shrink)

This book review discusses Ashley J. Bohrer's book Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism. The author explores the possible connections between Marxism and intersectionality, in order to construct a framework that would be capable of challenging the systems of domination as they are produced under contemporary capitalism. By considering their histories and debates, Bohrer attempts to formulate a possible shared future for the two schools of thought.