Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Re-Envisioning Community-Engaged Healing For Black Women, Reanae Mcneal, Marqua Harris, Vanessa Oliphant

Journal of International Women's Studies

Black women in the United States continue to face multilayered forms of anti-Black gendered oppression leading to severe health disparities and inequities that have a dire impact on their well-being. This paper recognizes the urgency to attend to Black women’s health and healing in the pursuit of creating health equity. The authors call for the creation of sacred spaces for Black women to participate in embodied and community-engaged healing, grounded in a gender justice that is inextricably tied to racial justice. This research is inspired by the long, rich line of Black American women activist-healers that have called for the …

Real #Hotgirl Sh*T: Practical Application Of Intersectional Re-Presentation Instruction, Jessica F. Love

Feminist Pedagogy

This critical commentary outlines how the Real #HotGirl Sh*T: Megan Thee Stallion & Mediated Hip Hop, Black Feminist and Communication Pedagogy promotes active learning via popular culture and digital media, and it provides a practical model for employing intersectionality in classroom settings. Previous critical media pedagogy exploring minority media re-presentation primarily focused on the effects of master narratives produced by traditional media. This syllabus's incorporation of social and digital media helps students understand how collective minority groups use and interact with media as a political tool to challenge re-presentational regimes. More importantly, this syllabus employs real-world examples of popular culture …

“I Live A Model Life, Now I’M Ready To Be A Top Wife”: Stereotypical Representations Of Black Women In Reality Television, Joy C. Enyinnaya

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Stereotypical representations of Black women have endured throughout various forms of media for decades, with one of the most recent platforms being reality television programming. The theory of encoding and decoding posit dominant stereotypes are key in television encoding. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper demonstrates that the dominant ideologies in the eleventh season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta are social class norms and negative depictions of Black women. I present evidence that RHOA continues to reinforce upper-class ideologies while perpetuating the Jezebel, Sapphire and the Strong Black woman stereotypes. I also identify a correlation with the strong Black …

Claiming Power In African American Women Storytelling, Heather Bergeson

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Beginning with slave narratives and continuing to the contemporary day, black autobiographers have shared and perpetuated the values and experiences of their communities through the medium of stories, which seek to expose perspectives that are often withheld or overshadowed by white voices. Tracy K. Smith’s memoir Ordinary Light participates in this tradition as she writes about her experiences as an African American woman in the United States. Near the text’s close, Smith asserts that storytelling is an act of “claiming the power to name and state and face the events, even the most awful events, making up a life” (279). …

Presumed Nonhuman: Black Women Intellectuals And The Struggle For Humanity In The Academy, Andrea N. Baldwin

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this article I engage with the work of Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and Kevin Quashie, weaving in my own personal narrative of being presumed nonhuman to detail the everyday struggles Black women academics face. Herein I also illustrate how these struggles become sites of resistance, building, and hope.

The Professional Is Political: On Citational Practice And The Persistent Problem Of Academic Plunder, Brittney M. Edmonds

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

(Re)Imagining Haiti Through The Eyes Of A Seven-Year-Old Girl, Iliana Rosales Figueroa

Journal of International Women's Studies

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s new novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013) explores themes of love, loss, and death. The first character that is presented to us is Claire of the Sea Light, a seven-year-old girl, whose mother died giving birth to her and who is missing. It is at the intersection of this little girl’s loss that all the other characters and topics unfold. Madame Gaëlle, an upper class woman who has a fabric shop in Ville Rose, decides to adopt Claire in order to give her a better life. In this essay I demonstrate that Edwidge Danticat articulates …

Desperate Choices: Why Black Women Join The U.S. Military At Higher Rates Than Men And All Other Racial And Ethnic Groups, Julia Melin

New England Journal of Public Policy

The enlistment of black women in the U.S. military has been a persistent and growing demographic trend over the past three decades. Black women now constitute nearly one-third of all women in the U.S. military. At around 30 percent, this number is twice their representation in the civilian population and higher than that of men or women of any other racial or ethnic group. This article analyzes the changing economic, social, and political landscape in the United States to identify what has motivated this cohort to enlist at such high rates. Based on this analysis, a case can be made …

Black Women In Durham Politics, 1950-1996: From Grassroots To Electoral Politics, Grace Walton

New England Journal of Public Policy

Based on the author's senior thesis in African-American history; this article about black women by a black woman was conceived to educate Americans about a different kind of history. It illustrates the silent political struggles of black women in Durham, North Carolina, and their gradual acceptance into American politics from 1950 to 1996. The oral history design demonstrates that black women's political activity underwent a transformation from grassroots politics to full electoral participation, which brought them to the forefront of Durham politics. Through both types of political activity, the unique political consciousness of black women continues to have a great …

Women Creating Social Capital And Social Change, Marilyn Gittell, Isolda Ortega-Bustamante, Tracey Steffy

Trotter Review

As Community Development Organizations (CDOs) are the primary vehicle for development in low-income neighborhoods, scholars have begun to examine them in terms of the degree to which they increase citizen participation, increase civic capacity, as well as stabilize and revitalize neighborhoods through the creation of social capital. According to Putnam, civic action requires the existence of social capital; he defines social capital as "norms, trust, and networks." As Gittell and Vidal note, there has been a "virtual industry of interest and action created around the implication of Putnam's findings for the development of low-income communities."

This article is an excerpt …

Black Women In The Economy: Facing Glass Ceilings In Academia, Bette Woody, Diane Brown, Teresa Green

Trotter Review

The shrinking population of Black male doctoral degree holders may hold much of the key to the problems of Black women. Declines in Black male interest in doctoral degrees, has clearly not spelled gains for the recruitment of Black female scholars. New evidence of these patterns is visible in the latest government data on academic achievement of Black women and teaching job success. While Black women are achieving at high rates, they are also systematically by-passed by an expanded recruitment of African and Caribbean males to fill teaching positions in doctoral and research institutions. This new trend has probably reduced …

Business Ownership Patterns Among Black, Latina, And Asian Women In Massachusetts, Russell E. Williams

Trotter Review

Using data from the most recently released Survey of Minority Businesses, this article explores the significance of businesses owned by minority women in Massachusetts. I describe the number of such businesses, the rates at which the number of such businesses are expanding, and the average sales and receipts of women-owned businesses — and I compare these statistics for White, Black, Latino and Asian businesses.

Black Women And The American Political System, Dorothy A. Clark

Trotter Review

Black women and politics—it is an association rarely made by the American electorate. As a group, black women have never been prominent players in the nation's political arena. In a system of decision making and power holding designed and dominated by white men, black women are an alien group in the formal political process. Their participation in that process has been limited—indeed often blocked—by a hierarchical system of race, gender, and class oppression that relegates black women to the lowest rungs of the political power ladder.