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This essay engages contemporary narratives of black maternal ambivalence to unsettle residual attachments to choice within the frame of reproductive justice. The contemporary fiction of Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Tayari Jones's An American Marriage, as well as Black feminist work on Assisted Reproductive Technologies, reconsider the difficult ways that race and 'choice' have been in tension with each other in political and medical discourse around reproductive rights. Feminist choice debates have been intentionally reframed away from 'rights' and toward 'justice' as an attempt to account for the hyper-control of Black reproduction across a modern history that includes enslavement, mass incarceration, and myths of hyper-reproduction. Complex narrative accounts of thwarted or uncertain Black reproduction built from the embodied experiences of blackness can consider both choice and justice without romanticising motherhood or autonomy. This article troubles the weight on black feminism to conceive and carry children – symbolic and material – into and through precarious life chances into secure (political) futures. Through thick descriptions of the reproductive that run through desire, uncertainty, debt, and vulnerability, black feminist thought and expressive culture can displace autonomy as the underpinning and endgame of feminist reproductive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article posits self-care as a powerful analytic in contemporary anthropology, one that provides insight into both long-standing anthropological concerns about the person, power, and inequality and more contemporary questions about relationality, futurity, and anthropology itself. The cascade of crises that defines the now results in a collective preoccupation with care, the self, and self-care. In this moment, the work of scholars who have long theorized systemic abandonment and the unequal distribution of care is crucial not just to understanding the present but to imagining a new way forward. Proposing what an anthropology of self-care might look like, we start with the term's emergence in Black feminist thought and Foucault's late writing. We then explore how it moves through anthropology and how it has been defined by Indigenous, disability, queer, and Black feminist epistemologies. We end with sections on what we term literatures of refusal and self-care's relation to these. We thus argue that self-care provides a unique angle through which to grapple with the discipline's legacy and to imagine a new anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afro-descendant women in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, are amongst the most marginalized groups in the country. Living in a region severely affected by environmental degradation due to multiple and overlapping forms of resource extraction, they also face the impacts of drug-trafficking conflicts crossing the Colombian border, as well as institutional and everyday racism. Many of these conditions are rooted in a long history of colonialism. In this article, we highlight the relative absence of Afro-Ecuadorian women's voices, histories and experiences from research on resource extraction and argue that Black feminist theoretical approaches provide an essential tool for understanding intersections of gender, race and activism, as well as (alternatives to) development, and the impacts of natural resource extraction in Ecuador. In so doing, the article proposes a theoretical framework to open up spaces that situate Afro-Ecuadorian women's knowledge at the centre of efforts to resist marginalization and extractivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article commemorates the legacy of bell hooks by bringing core themes in her oeuvre to bear on several debates on the conceptualization and use of qualitative research methods in sociology. Despite the uptake of qualitative research methods in sociology as a launching point for critical inquiry with analytical and political overtones, they have been fragmented threefold by debates about their politics (whether to humanize research subjects), practice (whether to intervene in field research), and epistemology (procedural, craft, and bricolage orientations). Reflecting on the legacy of bell hooks, this article articulates a Black feminist approach by unearthing methodological and epistemological themes underwritten in hooks' work (inclusive pedagogy, creative dialogue, and reflexive accountability) to offer new perspectives on the three debates and, in so doing, to identify ways to better qualitative research methods as tools for emancipating the marginalized – by invigorating cross-professional and transdisciplinary dialogue, collaboration, and love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delves into the possibilities and challenges of digital media for the Black feminist movement in Brazil in an era of data colonialism and the rise of the far right. Barros asks: how does communicating through social media and the web alter how we relate to each other, the way we organize and perform political acts, and defend our rights, including the right to communicate and to inform? In response, Barros shares a vision and explores the conditions of possibility for a diverse and nonextractive digital sphere to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Black feminist critical inquiry, I theorize the politics of race, gender, and geography in the context of a liberatory Black pedagogical space located in the United States. Using curated interview and observation data, I position an anti-racist pedagogue as a cartographer who employed method, content, style, and technique to map freedom routes away from schooling, a Dumasian site of suffering for Black students. I paint a narrative portrait that foregrounds sights, sounds, and felt tensions emerging from two manifestations of Black affective networks that constellated in the Black male critical pedagogue's classroom. Ultimately, I call for attention to the construction of liberatory education spaces created to address the comfort and needs of not only racially minoritized learners but also students who embody sexes, genders, and gender performances marginalized in white-dominant culture. Such pedagogical spaces, I argue, can be a refusal to indulge the ontological, epistemological, and existential project of whiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by the three core tenets of a Black feminist love-politic, this article offers a framework of communion for Black men within higher education. Emanating from the embodied experiences of Black men in academe participating in the “site” of communion (i.e. The Gathering) through an Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) virtual symposium session, four core dimensions of theory emerged: spiritual, relational, material, and political. Life-notes from each session participant are used to capture each dimension of communion. Implications for praxis related to the spiritual and material well-being of Black men within higher education are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have drawn on youth voice as a way of learning about educational inequity from the perspective of those closest to it. Yet, methodological engagements with youth voice tend to elide considerations of how coloniality and raciality operate in the very interpretive strategies leveraged to represent youth voice in academic knowledge produced about inequity. Following anticolonial black feminist critique and method-making, the inquirer turns to a radical reading practice for engaging youth feedback at a summer achievement program dedicated to promoting racial and educational justice and reversing summer learning loss. Key to this radical reading practice are methodological and analytical moves that: (a) pivot from earlier interpretations of youth feedback; (b) trace raciality in educational text to demonstrate how the text relies on modern signifying strategies that hide Man, his descriptive statements for existence, and the attendant power structures that facilitate global capital; and (c) consider how youth feedback illustrates coloniality and raciality at work within the out-of-school program. In all, the paper demonstrates how a black inquiry approach complicates educational equity's federally mandated, state-monitored, and locally enacted pursuit at an out-of-school program to collectively consider alternatives to our current ethical-political education demands, and how we might engage the task of posing those alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent works in and around Black feminist and queer studies have explored the figure of unbearable life through different forms of forgetting. A forgetting attends every act of conceptual or cultural invention, but forgetting also marks a range of cognitive deteriorations in and around experiences of disability, death, and dying. Working between the discourses of afro-fabulation, afropessimism, and Black feminism, the article details the ways every act of invention is also a form of forgetting, and every instance of loss is also a form of creativity. Afro-fabulation, as one name for a Black queer mode of invention, is at once a mode of creating bearable forms of life from abjection, and a form of forgetting. In their shared attention to cognitive deterioration and death as forms of loss, Black feminism and afropessimism open space for reckoning with the impermanence and indeterminacy central to the Black radical tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The starting point of this essay is the author's acknowledgment that Evelynn Hammonds's "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality" has been a throughline for her scholarly and personal development. That relationship to Hammonds's text and its author shifts, and the changing nature of these connections marks important milestones in Bailey's academic and adult life. The essay waxes poetic about the substance of Hammonds's "Black (W)holes" as its meanings exceed its arguments: its very writing serves as a possibility model both in terms of the kind of scholarship Bailey imagined she could write and the kind of life she could live as one keen to bridge Black feminism and medicine. "Black (W)holes" is one of the first academic writings where Bailey saw herself reflected, both in the content presented and in the identities held by Hammonds. Black alphabet children of Spelman College, straddling the line between medical science and feminism, Hammonds and Bailey have much in common. Hammonds's essay inspired Bailey to want to get to know the now legendary alumna, and this essay recounts how she embarked on a campaign to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay employs the autotheoretical critique of the university and celestial cartography pioneered in Evelynn Hammonds's "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality" to understand the dynamic relationship between the silencing of black academics and black women/feminists in various sites of the neoliberal university. Narrating two experiences at Ivy League institutions, this essay meditates on the voids created and inhabited when the gravity of black study's insistence on blackness as essential to the construction of modernity collapsed into and under the name of Afropessimism. The essay interrogates how looking for the distortion of the academic spaces that surround and engage black thought—namely, American studies, ethnic studies, and women and gender studies—renders visible (presuming we have the right instruments) the production of black (w)holes. Finally, it is interested in how the black intramural's gender dynamics and the heteropatriarchy of its surrounds continue to silence black feminists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay returns to Evelynn Hammonds's field-changing essay "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality," with a focus on the labor of knowledge production under fraught institutional conditions, characterized in this essay as languaging. The simultaneous desire for and impossibility of accurate language to describe racialized, gendered, and sexual subjectivity drive Hammonds's essay as well as a number of other key texts in Black feminist sexuality studies. This essay (re)introduces the diagnostic category of dysphoria to speak to this paradox: here, dysphoria describes the affective and psychic condition of institutional illegibility and fungibility for racialized and gendered people. Using the analytic of dysphoria to characterize and connect the political economy of Black feminist knowledge production and the life narrative of A. Dionne Stallworth, a Black trans woman activist, this essay directs urgent attention to the simultaneously material, spiritual, psychic, and affective dimensions of self-, knowledge-, and world-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Special educators are increasingly drawing from intersectionality and Black feminist theory to make sense of the disproportionate deleterious outcomes experienced by racialized students labeled with disabilities. While intersectionality gains a stronger hold in special education discourse, agencies like the Florida Department of Education are misrepresenting Black feminist theory and intersectionality as "ranking people" based on their social identities. Audre Lorde—a member of The Combahee River Collective credited for generating an intersectional shift in feminist discourse—called on the creative use of difference to push back on the marginalization of multiply-marginalized women. Lorde asserted that explicitly attending to the diversity within human experiences challenges harmful attitudes that frame differences as markers of inferiority, deviance, or failure. In this article, I draw from Black feminism and Audre Lorde's theorizing about difference to present a framework for educators who advocate for specialized education programming that affirm student differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Streets Belong to Us makes a significant contribution to multiple fields, most principally the history of race, gender, sexuality, incarceration, and state violence in the United States. It is a definitive history of the changing nature of police power, and the ways that it defined, defended, and enforced the logics that undergirded racial segregation. Illuminating the significant degree to which urban policymaking and planning depended on state violence, Anne Fischer compels us to better appreciate the relation between the making and the remaking of the modern city and the consolidation of police power. To do so, we must see that this connection was made possible through the surveillance, harassment, and sexual criminalization of Black women. Women's bodies, particularly Black women's bodies, acted as the constitutive material that made up the very fabric of state power and racial segregation. Along with presenting an analysis of the racial and gendered dimensions of morals law enforcement, The Streets Belong to Us moves Black women out of the shadows of urban history by grounding the analysis within the intellectual production by Black feminist organizers and scholars. Their concept of gendered anti-Blackness proved indispensable to feminist antiviolence struggles of the late twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although emerging research on families of color explores internalized oppression and resistance, there is a gap in the literature on these phenomena's incidence among Kanaka ̒Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) ̒ohana (families) and the Lāhui (Hawaiian people, nation). Furthermore, scholars have yet to contextualize internalized oppression and resistance as huikau (confusion) and kū̒ē (to oppose, protest, resist), respectively. This conceptual article thus addresses this research gap while interweaving metaphors from Black feminist and Indigenous literature. This article provides a historical analysis of how internalized oppression and huikau came to afflict Kanaka ̒Ōiwi (Native Hawaiians) and conceptualizes the potentiality for kū̒ē at the ̒ohana dimension to generate a widespread disruption of huikau in communities and the Lāhui for collective social change. This conceptualization is offered as a culturally responsive intervention for educators, social workers, and health practitioners who engage with Kanaka ̒Ōiwi ̒ohana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the mechanisms of white supremacy within digital spaces in relation to the body/embodiment, social justice movements, and the nature and expression of contemporary feminism. New digital political economies work through social media such as Instagram to colonise, disempower and obscure the work of Black feminists in the sphere of fat liberation (re‐framed as 'body positivity'), and in terms of imperatives for self‐care, which have been co‐opted by an emerging online wellness industry. I call to account the pervasiveness of neoliberal logics which are re‐shaping (post)feminism and re‐inscribing white supremacy onto bodies online and offline through 'disciplined whiteness'. This paper explores the mechanisms of white supremacy within digital spaces in relation to the body/embodiment, social justice movements, and the nature and expression of contemporary feminism. New digital political economies work through social media such as Instagram to colonise, disempower, and obscure the work of Black feminists in the sphere of fat liberation (re‐framed as 'body positivity'), and in terms of imperatives for self‐care, which have been co‐opted by an emerging online wellness industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWe discuss reproductive justice in the context of Finland, a Nordic welfare state often considered as having achieved exceptionally high ethical standards in reproductive health and overall justice. Every now and then, however, this reproduction is interrupted by ghosts in the machine: the problems, past and present, of marginalised, racialised, and/or otherwise non-normative people whose presences provoke specific Finnish hauntings, seething presences of reproductive injustice that suggest something is to be done. Instead of offering data analysis, this article aims to envision transformative reproductive justice futures through processual, collaborative theory development. This study uses an intersectional lens to understand how interlocking systems of oppression shape our lived experiences through an interdisciplinary, ethical analysis that suggests that what is required to resolve such hauntings is moral vigilance and care for a consistent reproductive justice orientation in global solidarity. Specifically in Finland, it requires the willingness to disavow the imperative to protect Finnish whiteness and active and meaningful solidarity across differences. Building on Black feminist and queer thought, we urge queer white people who may be tempted to become enfolded by homonationalism to take a more encompassing view of reproductive justice for a more sustainable welfare state ethic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black feminist survivors and advocates of sexual violence have been integral in recognizing their intersecting identity, using their voice and stories to enlighten society and to reinforce the importance of visibility and inclusion in the sexual violence research, prevention, intervention, and treatment. Despite the historical and present-day sexual violence against the Black female body, this population continues to find ways to heal and overcome the attack on her personhood. This article highlights the identities, unique needs, and considerations of the Black female survivor of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in relation to the racism, sexism, and overarching oppression that are often added layers for this population. This article also explores the personal narrative of a Black female survivor of CSA, the discovery of self, and an encouragement to speak ones’ truth after victimization, into survival, and beyond. The article concludes with a focus on the significance of the Black female survivors’ reconnection to culture and the ancestors as a tool for healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police violence shapes the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, and while much has been written about strategic responses to police, missing is an examination of how black women navigate interactions with officers. Based on 32 interviews with black women, we find that they use witnessing, or the mobilization of others as observers to police encounters. Research demonstrates the rising role of videos and smartphones in documenting encounters with officers. We find that black women adapt witnessing techniques based on their surroundings, available resources, and network contacts. Three forms of witnessing are observed: physical witnessing , mobilizing others in close proximity to interactions with officers; virtual witnessing , using cellphone or social media technology to contact others or record interactions with officers; and institutional witnessing , leveraging police or other institutional contacts as interveners to interactions with officers. Black women mobilize witnessing to deescalate violence, gather evidence, and promote accountability. Attuned to both the interactional and structural dynamics of police encounters, black women conceptualize witnessing as a way to survive police encounters and navigate their legal estrangement within the carceral system. We theorize black women's witnessing as a form of resistance as they work to reconfigure short- and long-term power relations between themselves, their communities, and police. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As scholars, teachers, and researchers within academe we have, at times, felt the gravity, nuance, and depth of Black feminist theories and epistemologies have resulted in articulations and manifestations so flat they are rendered illegible and almost always universally synonymous. While there are certainly deep and rich connections among and between Black feminist theories, and while their proliferation has been often mutually facilitative, they are worthy of distinction. Our paper explores how the genealogy of Black women's theorizing has survived through its varying conceptualizations through explicating Womanism; Black Feminist Thought; and Endarkened Feminisms. We illustrate the genealogy of Black women's theorizing and suggest moving away from the singular meanings that, ultimately, reduce their public force and utility in higher education research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer, post-colonial and Black feminist scholars and activists have long cautioned against the dangerous exclusions and complicities entailed in even the best-intentioned efforts to counter sexual violence. The rhetoric of protecting women from sexual violence is frequently and effectively invoked in order to rehabilitate old colonial projects and justify new ones that persecute sexual dissidents, police gender, sexual and caste transgressions and re-inscribe neoliberal and neo-conservative rationalities across the globe. This article argues that many of the exclusionary, violent and coercive consequences of efforts to protect women from sexual violence are rooted in mischaracterisations or mis-descriptions of the subject of sexual violence, and enabled by particular (mis)orientations towards this subject. Specifically, I suggest that the imagination and representation of the subject of sexual violence is subtended by a politically dangerous and conceptually untenable victim/agent binary. Mediated by rationalities of caste, race, class and religion, women are imagined either as vulnerable victims in need of protection, or as capable (even culpable) agents, but never simultaneously both. The failure to reconcile victimhood and agency within discourses of sexual violence is precisely the condition of possibility for a range of violent, exclusionary and regulatory outcomes. This article tracks the effects of the victim/agent binary in dominant responses to sexual violence, before assembling the foundations from which to rethink victimhood and agency away from their binary orthodoxy, drawing centrally on the radical subjectivity of pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chapter identifies the COVID-19 pandemic as not just a public health crisis but also an information crisis. The authors argue that a deeper understanding of the role of culture in information practices is critical for the future of research and theoretical development around humanity's relationship to information (i.e., why information is or is not created, represented, avoided, sought, retrieved, used, shared, or hidden). This chapter highlights the Black Feminist Information Community (BFIC) framework, especially the voice and information aspect of the model in the context of community justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surviving R. Kelly (Part I) (SRK) was intended to amplify the voices of tens of Black and Latino women who have faced sexualized violence at the hands of singer Robert Kelly. The creators hoped to highlight the fact that these women's testimonies had been deemed untrustworthy by the American legal system, and accosted within mainstream American media. Given that a lack of mainstream outrage regarding the violent experiences of Black women is neither new nor isolated to those victimized by Kelly, and considering that SRK documents the stories of visibly Black women, the docuseries constitutes a potential space for resistance to the harms perpetrated against Black girls and women overall. Thus, I will use a feminist critical theoretical lens to examine the extent to which SRK disrupts the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal paradigm within which Black girls' and women's accounts of sexualized violence are systematically denied credibility and/or attention. I argue that, while SRK begins to critique the harmful social norms that hinder the testimonies of Black victims/survivors from being both heard and believed, the docuseries falls short of holding responsible both the people and the systems complicit in the marginalization of Black female victims/survivors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019 I designed and taught two iterations of “Plato and Black Feminist Thought”, a special topics version of a course on Plato. It combined a reading of the Republic with texts from the Black feminist tradition with thematic connections to Plato's dialogue. The course seemed to be highly successful both in promoting student engagement generally and as an approach to teaching Platonic philosophy in particular. In this paper I describe the course in detail and offer an account of my experience teaching it, as well as some student perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have utilized the allegory of Reconstruction to trace threads between the historical and contemporary struggles for freedom. In this article, I highlight the ways that abolition has always been a dual project and remains as such in our present time. It calls for the complete destruction of oppressive structures while simultaneously demanding that we consider our world once those structures are ameliorated. Using (Re)construction as a framework, I examine how historical Black women teachers built and created alternatives and struggled for an abolition democracy in the afterlife of abolition. (Re)construction also invites us to explore these alternatives in our current time, with the aim of constructing a New World full of radical (im)possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in a Black feminist approach (Collins, 2022; Evans-Winters, 2019), in this article, I weave together the personal and professional to share what I have learned as a Black Latina educator, researcher, and abolitionist who for the past twelve years has worked in carceral spaces alongside numerous men, women, youth, and gender expansive people. I bridge what I have learned from theories of the flesh (Madison, 1993; Moraga & Anzaldúa 2021) to what I have learned as a researcher who works with incarcerated youth and use it as a lens to better understand and study youth confinement. Drawing on data from a three-year critical ethnographic study focused on teaching, learning, and identity development in a juvenile detention center, this article explores young people's experiences living and learning while confined. Using three distinct vignettes, this article touches on the lives of Black and Mexican heritage youth who at the time were detained in a juvenile detention center and the life-affirming practices and spaces they created in response to their dehumanization. Although youth were in a state of unfreedom (Gilmore, 2008), many refused their dehumanization and developed life-affirming strategies and third spaces for themselves and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous sectors and institutions engage in 'predatory inclusion', purporting to satisfy the unmet needs of historically marginalized groups under exploitative terms. However, extant scholarship has yet to robustly examine why they target certain groups. Drawing on Black feminist Marxism, I theorize how predatory inclusion depends on precarity, and I redefine 'precarity' as a structural position of vulnerability to violence based on excess responsibilities and the denial of means to meet them – or, 'alternativelessness'. I convey the usefulness of my definition of precarity and my theorization of the relationship between precarity and predatory inclusion through empirical sections that demonstrate how for-profit colleges ('for-profits') prey upon the alternativelessness of Black women, the race-gender demographic group with the highest rates of debt-financed enrollment in for-profits. By examining the training materials for admissions 'counselors' at for-profits, I illuminate how for-profits succeed at enrollment growth by manipulating the pain, urgency, and relationality of this precarity. I also reveal how descriptive statistics of Black women's enrollment and financial need in for-profits correspond to the sector's predation of precarity. I contend that precarity must be contested for the sake of ending the predatory inclusion of Black women and all others positioned alongside them as ideal prey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up Leslie Jones's 2014 debut performance on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update," in which she introduced her "#1 Slave Draft Pick" joke. Within the framework of Black Feminist Comedic Performance (BFCP), I analyze Jones's performance to introduce the concept of "Extraness," a strategic mode of Black feminist comedic embodiment. I schematize Extraness as performing excessive acts of self-expression, subverting stereotypes, and articulating an affective and phenomenological outsideness. The concept extends beyond mere excess, evolving into a strategic technique for self-actualization and embodied critique as it confounds linear conceptions of time and progress. The article posits Extraness as the reclaiming of the unruliness assigned to Black women's bodies across time and space. I explore the dynamic relationship between the joke and audience perception, shedding light on the role of Extraness in shaping spectatorship, and highlight the complexity of Extraness, which may agitate some viewers' sensibilities while fostering a sense of community among others. I contend that Extraness, though challenging for some audiences, remains an essential tool for Black women comedians to confront and reshape narratives about their experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black feminist theorizing developed outside the formal academy to meet the needs of Black women but did not end there. This review offers entrée to some current "wars" and debates on politics of knowledge about Black feminist theories, concepts, and praxis that have deepened within sociology and increasingly extend into live conference panels, online debates, and legislatures. Shared characteristics within Black feminism include persistent and critical attention to Black women's knowledge production, power, and social change—but there is much more. Drawing on sociology and other disciplines, this review of Black feminism/intersectionality covers families of Black feminisms, disciplinary citation trends, methodological considerations, and tensions around embodiment in claims to Black feminism and intersectionality. In the conclusions, we propose directions to untether conflicts, unsettle wars, and move toward joy and liberation as the struggle continues. A Spanish translation is available online at https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-030424-062839 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Children of Blood and Bone and The Hunted, Tomi Adeyemi and L.A. Banks reclaim the isolated Black womb and reattach it to the human to which it belongs, thus humanizing Black women. This humanization of Black women combats the dominant narrative that seeks to reduce Black female identities to what their bodies can produce for the Western patriarchy world founded on capitalist exploitation. Their wombs are a counternarrative to the tired trope of the almighty phallus that disfigures phallic power into a deadly weapon, only suitable for destruction. Banks' and Adeyemi's placement of symbolic wombs highlights the power of wombs as a space where spirit and body meet to upend oppressive world orders rooted in spiritual darkness. Here, even the phallus achieves greater power. The womb exposes the phallus's ability to invest life and further incubates that life to create revolution. Together the phallus and womb work to display the necessary fetation of rebellion, resistance, and liberation. Banks and Adeyemi join the scores of Black feminist writers who insist on the unity of Black masculinities and Black feminism to ensure the futurity of Black liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current qualitative study, we explored father (and varying father figures') ethnoracial and gendered socialization messages toward Latina and Black college women. We conducted six focus group interviews with Black (n = 3 groups) and Latina (n = 3 groups) college women. Guided by Chicana and Black feminist interpretive phenomenological analysis, we identified four clusters which detailed perceived paternal influences in the lives of these college women: (a) paternal caring, (b) gender socialization, (c) value of education, and (d) developing platonic and romantic relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speculative Black Feminist Epistemologies of Worldbuilding for XR is a methodology attempting to address space, the production of space, permission of space, the economy of space, and evading the confines of space by activating possible imaginaries in the development of XR (Extended Reality) environments. Through a praxis straddling academic and artist writing, the argument explores an experimental approach to Worldbuilding for XR by upending the role of Cartesian coordinates as the default measurement of 3D space. The possibilities afforded XR technologies allow for experimenting with unrestricted navigation of Black women's cartographic movements, which is impossible in real-world geography. The core proposition of the Black Feminist Episteme of Worldbuilding is the praxis of de-mapping. This praxis foregrounds fugitive movements and spaces by utilizing XR Worldbuilding affordances as a speculative container for reimagining navigation for identities under conditions of subjugation. Researching and speculating about the affordances of XR is a critical intervention attempting to counter mainstream development and deployment of immersive media technology dedicated to the pedagogical tasks of gaming, militarization, and other real-world training applications. The first move toward the praxis of de-mapping, an arrival, is acknowledging the material composition and operation of XR technology. The second move and the first departure explore intentional disorientation. The third move interrupts the linearity of departures and arrivals to establish mobility as a countercartographic methodology by referencing the female protagonists in the study by Octavia E. Butler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study uses the decolonial lens to disrupt the contentious dominance of whiteness in leadership development, not to mention in coaching, in management and organization studies (MOS). It contributes insights into how a decolonizing coaching space enables and guides a coachee to reflect and rethink the navigation of the realities of her decolonial identity. The decolonial identity encapsulates the authentic self and the neoliberal identity is the plastic self in a neoliberal university context. Universities' pervasive and normalized neoliberal discourse has become a "paradigm"--the overarching worldview through which universities' visions, missions, strategic objectives, and values are constructed. For academics to thrive in their performance and "walk on water" in achieving performance targets, they ought to embrace being academic capitalists, which shapes idealized neoliberal identities--conforming identities, complicit in undermining social, economic, and epistemic justice. Qualitative research methods were utilized to conduct a reflexive study, and data collected from the reflections and reflexive dialogues in leadership development coaching sessions and journals were thematically analyzed. The study reveals that the coach and coachee's shared decolonial identity offered counter-narratives that unmask the dominant great "white" man leadership in organizations. It also illuminates insights into the significance of black feminist pedagogy in the coaching process to honor the coachee's decolonial identity and rich cultural experiences. It enabled her to explore them critically and derive meanings from developing decolonizing, critically conscious leadership strategies for emerging transformation challenges. Meaningful dialogue dimensions emerged, which served as lenses that steered a decolonial approach in supporting the coachee to reflect and rethink the leadership performance vision, strategic objectives, action plans, implementation, and monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece explores the visual art and performance of Wynnie Mynerva (1992–), interpreting their aesthetic use of violence and sadism. My reading of Wynnie's work articulates cholanness in relation to Blackness, unearthing the colonial etymology of "cholo." I argue that the body of chola women is at very center of the "abigarrado cholo sex," a sexual/reproductive system of extraction of labor and pleasure. Wynnie's visual experimentation toys with castration and revenge, and with the non-generative pleasures of anal sex and anti-natalism. To think through the contemporary uses of chola, I use the work of Black feminist scholars in the US and the Caribbean, establishing hemispheric connections with Latin American feminist scholars and activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a brief yet comprehensive comparative analysis of historical and contemporary racial authoritarian violence in the United States and Brazil. Utilizing Black feminist historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman's theorization of the "afterlife of slavery" and Michael Dawson's linked fate, I examine how the processes of racialization and the racial logics of subordination have and continue to shape the contours of Black life in the United States and in Brazil. Moreover, in this work, I interrogate the afterlife of George Floyd and the afterlives of Black Brazilian victims and survivors of racial authoritarian violence; the political, transnational, and symbolic impacts of Floyd's death; and Diasporic understandings of linked fate on racial authoritarian violence between Black communities in the United States and in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this conversation, Black radical feminist artist kai lumumba barrow and abolitionist geographer Lydia Pelot-Hobbs discuss the praxis of Black geographies, abolitionist play, and radical imagination in barrow's multifaceted artistic project [b]reach. Together they dialogue about the radical abundance of Blackness; the role of play and performance in abolitionist world-making; and the contradictions and discomfort of freedom projects past, present, and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the spatial vision of a house for Black women north of Chicago. Founded in 1924 by the Iroquois League—a Black women's club—the North Shore Community House was a "home-away-from-home" for Black women arriving in Evanston, IL, for education and domestic work. Rooming houses were a common source of additional income for Black residents in Great Migration cities but drew much social criticism. Rooming houses were considered to be places of vice, immorality, and deviance. Like fellow women's clubs, the Iroquois League hoped to protect and uplift their residents through collective living and cultural programs. But when faced with the threat of closure, they shifted their emphasis away from the moral character of their residents and toward the structural politics of housing. Drawing on archives from the Evanston History Center and Shorefront Legacy Center, this essay offers a close study of world-building and shows how one club secured space for Black women in a city that rendered them invisible beyond their labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black females have always played an important role in literature. Amanda Gorman and Maya Angelou are two of the most pivotal literary figures whose art has contributed to the liberty and independence of black women all over the world. They have employed their literature in order to discuss social problems, and this is the reason why their poetry can be regarded as political poetry. This research intends to analyze the theme of love and the way it is politicized in some poems by Gorman and Angelou. In fact, this study inspects the amalgamation of love and a black feminist politics since the examination of the penetration of love into politics reveals that black feminism's politicization of love exceeds the problems of identity politics, primarily intersectionality. In order to achieve this goal, hooks has been selected as this paper's main theoretician owing to her preoccupation with the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she has labeled as these three features' aptitude to cause and extend women's suppression and class dominion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though promoting student advocacy has become an essential part of leadership education, few studies explore development of advocacy in leadership education. This article offers how distortions, an aspect of a Black feminist reframing of dissonance, is related to existing leadership education literature. It then introduces students' voices demonstrating the importance of the realization of distortions in student advocacy development and links distortions with how power communicates and upholds systemic oppression. Finally, we offer practical recommendations based on a case scenario that utilize Black feminist perspectives of dissonance in refining student advocacy leadership education. Such insight prompts more effective strategies in student advocate development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, African women have participated in the Black feminist struggle for women's rights and racial, social, economic, and political justice (Collins 2017; Tamale 2020). In the 1950s, during the fight for independence across the continent, a radical and transnational feminist movement emerged with African women's protests to "crack the norms of gender and colonial order" (Ndengue 2016) in both urban and rural postcolonial contexts (Falola and Paddock 2011; Mougoué 2019; Nchoji Nkwi 1985; Ndengue 2018). Protests have transnational effects (Johnson-Odim 2009; Terretta 2013). Today, transnationalism relies on social media platforms as sites of calls to action. They constitute alternative public spaces for expression and activism in constrained political environments (Ngono 2018) and platforms that facilitate informal transnational connections. These transnational connections are accompanied by explicit and assertive claims of feminism by a growing number of (young) women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the US approaches an intense inflection point in this grand experiment with democratic ideals, a pinched nerve in the form of a presidential election, this second special anniversary forum considers what resources (I almost said weapons) lay undiscovered or undervalued with which we may forge a future. Fortunately, there are gems – brilliant in the proper light – available for use; from the Global South to the US South, this forum imagines more than geographic places, but rather forms of care and powerful Black feminist community-building and critique of the retrenchment of multiple forms of racialized domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The migrations of Indigenous people across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa can be seen as a pattern that is both dispersal and arrival: the paradox of being native and in diaspora. The experiences of people who express Indigenous genders (breaking colonial binaries) while away from our ancestral homelands are an intersection of (not) belonging that hatch 'knew' strategies for body/land reclamation. Drawing on Indigiqueer, Black Trans* Feminist and land epistemologies, I collaborated with a small group of bakla, takatāpui and irawhiti artists in Aotearoa/New Zealand to ask: is it possible for Indigenous people to be in diaspora if our bodies are made of our original lands and waters? We wanted to understand how our embodied Indigiqueer and trans* knowledge impacted our navigation of body/land sovereignty. Using a creative practice research approach that drew on somatic listening, on-site ritual and performance, we built a bahay kubo (traditional Filipino bamboo dwelling), according to original teachings, and moved it through the streets of Wellington in search of rest. Over the course of this six-month ritual, when we learned to build and transport the bahay kubo from our building site (Kirikiriroa, 'Hamilton') to Te Whanganui-a-Tara ('Wellington') for an ephemeral installation and performance, we externalised our experiences as Indigiqueer people in diaspora and homeland. In return for offering our vision of home despite displacement, we uncovered a 'kinstellation' (Recollet & Johnson, 2019) in unexpected places. This is a story of the Indigi-Trans* power to transform binaries of (not) belonging into ground for (re)connection and (re)clamation of land/body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bioethics increasingly recognizes the impact of discriminatory practices based on social categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation or ability on clinical practice. Accordingly, major bioethics associations have stressed that identifying and countering structural discrimination in clinical ethics consultations is a professional obligation of clinical ethics consultants. Yet, it is still unclear how clinical ethics consultants can fulfill this obligation. More specifically, clinical ethics needs both theoretical tools to analyze and practical strategies to address structural discrimination within clinical ethics consultations. Intersectionality, a concept developed in Black feminist scholarship, is increasingly considered in bioethical theory. It stresses how social structures and practices determine social positions of privilege and disadvantage in multiple, mutually co-constitutive systems of oppression. This article aims to investigate how intersectionality can contribute to addressing structural discrimination in clinical ethics consultations with a particular focus on mental healthcare. To this end, we critically review existing approaches for clinical ethics consultants to address structural racism in clinical ethics consultations and extend them by intersectional considerations. We argue that intersectionality is a suitable tool to address structural discrimination within clinical ethics consultations and show that it can be practically implemented in two complementary ways: 1) as an analytic approach and 2) as a critical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the concept of epigenomic stories to analyze how scientists describe and study the relationships between environmental epigenetics, health inequities, and social justice. Based on a multisited ethnography of epigenetic knowledge production and its circulation across laboratories, clinics, and communities in the United States and Canada between 2016 and 2021, we build on Black feminist and science studies scholarship to convey the racial, gender, and epistemic consequences of epigenomic stories. We argue that these stories reflect how scientists position epigenetics as a way of providing biological evidence of social harms and shifting responsibilities from individuals to broader structures. Yet these stories also reflect the limits of epigenetic methods and models in effectively capturing and addressing lived experiences of oppression. Thus, while scientists envision epigenetics as a resource for social change, they do so in ways that privilege biological ways of knowing. In analyzing the values and power relations embedded in these practices, we argue that epigenomic stories reflect what is at stake socially, politically, and materially when we tell stories with science. We contend that efforts to mobilize epigenetic knowledge for social justice must therefore center marginalized peoples' knowledge and experiences and address how racism and sexism shape science and its social consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how an alternative accounting system developed by a marginalised group of women enables them to counter oppressive systems built at the intersections of gender, class and race. Design/methodology/approach: The authors draw on diary notes taken over a period of 13 years in France and Senegal in the context of the first author's family interactions with a community of ten Black immigrant women. The paper relies on Black feminist perspectives, namely, Lorde's work on difference and survival to illuminate how this community of women uses the creative power of its "self-defined differences" to build its own accounting system – a tontine – and work towards its emancipation. Findings: The authors find that to fight oppressive marginalising structures, the women develop a tontine, an autonomous, self-managed, women-made banking system providing them with cash and working on the basis of trust. This alternative accounting scheme endeavours to fulfil their "situated needs": to build a home of their own in Senegal. The authors conceptualise the tontine as a "situated accounting" scheme built on the women's own terms, on the basis of sisterhood and opacity. This accounting system enables the women to work towards their "situated emancipation", alleviating the burden of their marginalisation. Research limitations/implications: This paper gives visibility to vulnerable women's agentic capacities through accounting. As no single story captures the nuances and complexities of accounting, further exploration is encouraged. Originality/value: This paper contributes to the counter-accounting literature that engages with vulnerable, "othered" populations, shedding light on the counter-practices of accounting within a community of ten Black precarious women. In so doing, this study problematises these counter-practices as intersectional and built on "survival skills". The paper further outlines the emancipatory potential of alternative systems of accounting. It ends with some reflections on doing research through activist curiosity and the need to rethink academic research and knowledge in opposition to dominant epistemic standards of knowledge creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article turns attention to the contemporary Black feminist trade book, which I argue introduces a new, highly visible, and highly profitable genre: Black feminist self-help. This article thinks critically about Black feminist self-help, tracking the exceedingly narrow conception of the political that it advances. If all feminist work might be understood as a form of self-help, as championing "the personal is political" and suggesting that political transformation begins with the self, Black feminist self-help insists that the entirety of political transformation is self-improvement, that self-work is synonymous with political work, that feeling better is political and politically radical. The idea of the radical promise of self-improvement permeates this archive, from the transformative promise of self-love in Sonya Renee Taylor's The Body Is Not An Apology to the resistant potential of simply lying down in Tricia Hersey's manifesto Rest Is Resistance. And the idea that feeling better is radical permits the reader to heed the call of these books, to take on the labor that their authors demand even as the authors often hide the fact that their books ask their readers to work. Further, this ideas allows the authors to claim that the acts of reading, working, and thinking differently are political tasks that remake both the self and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meaning of self-care is expansive and ambiguous. Today it encompasses disparate products and practices from scented candles to vegan diets to bingeable television; it includes both healthy habits and extravagant indulgences; it is simultaneously heralded as a political act and a necessary reprieve from politics. It is material and purchasable as well as intangible and existential. Because of its ties to conspicuous consumption, influencer culture, and neoliberal feminism, self-care is perhaps easily dismissible as insignificant and apolitical white feminine navel-gazing. In one sense, this is understandable, given that terms like "feminism," "empowerment," and "freedom" are mobilized to market luxury items to white wealthy women. Relatedly, white wellness discourse foregrounds health-promoting perks for employees of wealthy corporations and places responsibility for health squarely on the shoulders of individuals rather than the state. However, I argue that feminist critiques of self-care are often undergirded by constructs of self that do not map onto Black feminist traditions or Black women's lived experiences. Indeed, both are overlooked by the pervasive view that self-care is antipolitical, at odds with collective action, and no more than an uninspired neoliberal construct. When the self is the very site of domination, exclusion, and erasure, self-care demands assiduous political analysis. This article contends that, for Black women, self-care has been a mode of resistance to and survival under white domination since slavery. However, it is often obscured as such, both by the commodification of self-care in the economy and by the hegemonic white constructs of self in the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short commentary is part of a book symposium about Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism, edited by Khayaat Fakier, Diana Mulinari, and Nora Räthzel. It discusses certain chapters from a French materialist lesbian feminist perspective, as well as from a decolonial feminist perspective. Introducing Colette Guillaumin's sexage proposal and referring to Monique Wittig's analysis of the heterosexualization of women and of the "straight mind," the essay recalls the importance of Black feminists in the United States and elsewhere and proposes a theory of the interlocking social-structural relations of sex, race, and class as complementary elements moving toward a renewal of Marxist-feminist reflections from a historical perspective that also accounts for the colonial roots of today's discussions on care and reproductive labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]