Search Results

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s leadership in creating a black feminist movement to challenge the critical linkages between all forms of oppression, especially racism and sexism. By 1972, while she was excited about the growth of the predominantly white feminist movement, she was also profoundly disappointed that the struggle still did not fully embrace a black feminist position and make challenging racism as well as sexism central to its political agenda. Thus, Kennedy worked to create interracial feminist organizations that emphasized a black feminist praxis. Her activism during this period was central to building a women’s movement that included women of all races as well as an independent black feminist movement. To Kennedy’s thinking, Shirley Chisholm’s quest for the presidential nomination was the perfect opportunity for white feminists to build an alliance and support a black feminist politics. In 1971 she created the Feminist Party in hopes of bringing together an inclusive group of feminists to support not simply the candidacy of the black congresswoman but black feminism more generally. Equally interested in advancing black feminist praxis, she worked to create the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973 and pushed black women to form their own autonomous black feminist movement.

This chapter examines the ways in which Flo Kennedy brought her legal expertise and political knowledge to the campaign to repeal New York State’s restrictive abortion laws. She served as counsel for Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, the first class-action suit in which women themselves insisted on their right to be heard. Coupling speak-outs and demonstrations with constitutional arguments, the case helped to convince the legislature to amend the law before it was settled in court. The tactics from this case would be used in Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 federal case that legalized abortion nationally. Although by the late 1960s she was one of the country’s best-known black feminists, her role in helping to legalize abortion has long since been forgotten.

This chapter focuses on abstract painter Howardena Pindell and her controversial Free, White, and 21 (1980), a video art piece in which Pindell—playing all parts—staged a dialogue between reincarnations of herself and a caricature of a white feminist who callously debunks the veracity of her experiences. The chapter interprets the video as a black feminist counterpublic that is not simply about critique, but also racism-as-trauma; furthermore, it detail Pindell’s performative engagements with cross-racial embodiment and avatar-play. Yet, in efforts to contextualize both the video’s content and Pindell’s career, the chapter begins with an examination of the various political and artistic communities Pindell participated in, or was denied access to, in the late 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, the chapter’s aim is to render visible not only the manifold tensions that arose from the merging of art and politics in this period, but more explicitly the difficulties in being a black woman artist excluded from avant-garde circles (both black and white), partly for making abstract work that was deemed not sufficiently “black.” The last part of the chapter discusses Pindell’s vociferous rebuke of “art world racism” through her involvement in PESTS, an anonymous arts organization. It turns to PESTS’s remains—a flyer, poster replicas, and two obscure newsletters—that serve as public engagements with the invisibility, exclusion, and tokenism faced by artists of color.

This chapter concludes the book by briefly examining Flo Kennedy’s multifaceted political actions in the mid-to-late 1970s and the early 1980s. Specifically focusing on her organizing against racism, sexism and a range of other oppressions during the 1984 Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, the International Year of the Woman conferences in Mexico City, Mexico and Canberra, Australia and through COYOTE, an organization in support of sex workers. Kennedy’s protests and flamboyant self-presentation have puzzled some organizers and scholars. In part, this confusion accounts for some of the reasons why Kennedy has been largely ignored and why her theoretical and strategic insights have not been incorporated into radical political perspectives of feminist and Black Power histories. To the people who worked with and learned from Kennedy, she was a teacher, a catalyst, a lawyer, a cheerleader, a bridge to other organizers and to expansive and broad concepts, an exacting critic, a complex thinker, and a sharp leader who animated political engagement and made political organizing less intimidating and far more appealing. Her black feminist intersectional analysis enlarged the scope of possible political alliances and both broadened and deepened the promise of radical social transformation.

This chapter is set in Kansas City, Missouri and Los Angeles, California and demonstrates how Flo Kennedy’s parents contributed to the formation of her black feminist radicalism. Her parents not only stood up for themselves and their daughters against racist white authorities but also held progressive views about personal autonomy and female sexuality. Kennedy’s mother allowed her to kiss boys on the front porch and to discuss taboo topics, such as the scents and sensations of a woman’s body. Both her mother and father actively defended themselves against entrenched forms of power and had numerous run-ins with the Ku Klux Klan, white employers, and black school officials. They taught Kennedy not to defer to any type of authority. The sexual freedom that Kennedy experienced and the battles with both black and white authorities that she witnessed helped her to embrace a black feminist politics and reject the politics of respectability and other social constraints that inhibited black women’s political activism and mobility.

The introduction sheds light on the crisis of premature birth among Black women. It lays out the theoretical terrain on which premature birth is generally understood and develops the rationale of linking the issue to past ideologies and practices of medical racism. Premature birth and medical racism are introduced through the birth story of a young African American woman who was a college student when she became pregnant and later gave birth to a daughter, born three months prematurely, who was admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Grounded in a Black feminist framework, which privileges Black women’s experiences as a site of knowledge production, the chapter describes the book’s theoretical foundation; its methodological approach; and its use of birth stories, interviews, ethnographic observations, and archival sources to understand Black women’s medical encounters.

This chapter examines black women’s participation in BDSM and how these performances illustrate a complex and contradictory brokering of pain, pleasure, and power for the black female performer. I reveal BDSM as a critical site for reconsidering the entanglement of black female sexuality and violence. Within BDSM, violence becomes both a mode of pleasure and a vehicle for accessing and contesting power. The chapter begins with a brief section that frames black women practitioners of BDSM in the context of still very vigorous feminist debates surrounding sexuality, violence, and BDSM. Here, I stage the unique theoretical and practical challenges of the unspeakable pleasures aroused in racial submission and domination that BDSM presents to black women specifically. I examine race play as a particularly problematic yet powerful BDSM practice for black women, one that unveils the contradictory dynamics of racialized pleasure and power via the eroticization of racism and racial-sexual alterity. In particular, I argue that race play unsettles the dichotomies of transgression/compliance, subversion/reproduction, mind/body, and fantasy/reality that buttress BDSM. This chapter unveils performances of black female sexual domination and submission in BDSM as critical modes for and of black women’s pleasure, power, and agency.

This chapter provides an overview of intersectionality theory and locates its origins in Black feminist thought in the United States, establishing the theoretical foundation necessary to apply the theory in the context of international human rights. The notion that multiple systems of oppression intersect in people’s lives and affect different individuals and groups of people differently opens up space for discussion about inter-group differences (e.g., differences between women and men) but also discussion about intragroup differences (e.g., differences in the experiences of discrimination among white women and women of color). Although its antecedents in Black feminist thought appeared much earlier, intersectionality theory surfaced in the late 1980s partly as a response to conceptual and pragmatic deficiencies in feminist legal theory and critical race theory. In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw published a germinal essay defining intersectionality theory. In Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, Crenshaw demonstrated how neither feminist nor anti-racist advocacy fully captured the marginalization of women of color. Building on Crenshaw’s significant contributions, the chapter explores the evolution of intersectionality theory, its transformative tenets, and the critiques of the theory.

This chapter introduces early 1970s feminist antirape theorizing and organizing. The feminist antirape movement emerged within the context of the larger women’s liberation movement, sometimes also referred to as second wave feminism. Feminist antirape activists critiqued the failings of the law, medicine, and society at large in responding to rape. Initially a mostly white group, feminist antirape activists pursued a variety of organizing strategies—from demonstrations and speak-outs to creating rape crisis centers and hotlines to support victims. Over the course of the decade the movement diversified and black feminists pushed the broader movement to incorporate an intersectional analysis into their antirape agenda. Feminists of all racial and ethnic backgrounds held particular contempt for the legal system which, from local police to the state courts, dramatically failed to meet the needs of rape victims. In law journals nationwide, feminist legal scholars exposed the inadequacies of rape law, argued that the legal system was totally ineffectual in stopping rape, and advocated for significant law reform.

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s battle to challenge discrimination once she arrived in New York City during World War II. During her first decade in the city, she was an undergraduate at Columbia University and then a law student in Columbia’s Law School. In this stimulating and diverse political and social milieu, she began to expand and sharpen her family’s “take no shit” position. The combination of her formal education and her individual protests outside the classroom encouraged her development as a black feminist. Already concerned with challenging both racism and patriarchal expectations about her freedom of movement and sexual expression, she began in her late twenties and early thirties to critique capitalism, make direct connections between racism and sexism, and confront these interlocking systems of oppression.

The conclusion reflect on the meaning of Hip-Hop dance as witnessed in the U.S. embassy’s diplomatic convention “America in 3D: Diplomacy, Development, and Defense” (2011) in the Philippines. It argues for more engagement between Black feminist theory and Filipina performances, like “Pinays Rise,” a dance within the convention that challenged gender and class stereotypes of Filipinas as caregivers. The conclusion first analyzes “Pinays Rise,” and then connects the convention’s theme to the historical significance of stereoscopy, or the depth-enhancing imaging technique. The conclusion reviews the book’s main arguments and addresses the potential uses for performative euphemism in academic studies of culture and race. Finally, it calls for a holistic approach to Hip-Hop that reckons with discourses of Filipino cultural politics and dance.