Feminist StudiesPub Date : 2023-07-11DOI: 10.1353/fem.2023.a901592
Candice Lyons
{"title":"On Imagined Innocence: Emerging Black Feminist Approaches to Slavery Studies","authors":"Candice Lyons","doi":"10.1353/fem.2023.a901592","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a901592","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Building on the scholarship of historians like Thavolia Glymph, who challenged depictions of chattel slavery as a (literally) paternalistic institution within which white planter women were reluctant participants, the three reviewed texts each continue this project of grappling with the nuances lost and the violences erased when slavery is regarded as the ultimate expression of patriarchal violence rather than a manifestation of white supremacy that traversed gender.Spanning the diaspora, with Fuentes rooting her work in urban Caribbean spaces, Jones-Rogers locating hers in the pre-Emancipation U.S. South, and Young looking to “the wake of the Black Atlantic and the sea tack toward the Indian Ocean” (12), these texts underscore that, across geographical contexts, the exploitation of Black women’s bodies and labor was not specifically the domain of white men; rather, such exploitation was often the means by which white slaveholding women sought to negotiate their own social and financial freedom. Collectively, these three works constitute a shift in the literature toward investigations of slavery’s histories that complicate presupposed notions of agency, power, solidarity, and innocence.","PeriodicalId":35884,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"13 - 30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41866659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist StudiesPub Date : 2023-07-11DOI: 10.1353/fem.2023.a901593
J. Ellison
{"title":"“Wear Your Most Daring Clothes, Honey”: The Transvestite/Transsexual Legal Committee and the Emergence of Trans-feminine Feminist Movements","authors":"J. Ellison","doi":"10.1353/fem.2023.a901593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a901593","url":null,"abstract":"In 1971, a communIty of Black transvestItes and transsexuals in Chicago created the Transvestite/Transsexual Legal Committee (TLC), one of the city’s first formal trans political organizations. TLC was founded following the 1970 police murder of James Clay Jr., a Black transvestite or street fairy.1 TLC was a radical group that called for the liberation of feminine trans people of color. During an era that saw the emergence of radical movements advocating for cisgender gay men and lesbians, people of color, and women, TLC found allies in other Chicago organizations, including the lesbian separatist organization the Flippies. Over the next decade, TLC grew into a multiracial, multigender group focused on the needs of Midwestern transvestites and transsexuals, an emerging coalition. In order to describe its membership to a contemporary audience while respecting the group’s complexity, I describe TLC’s community as “trans feminine” and “trans femmes.” “Trans femmes” refers to people","PeriodicalId":35884,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"31 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46802169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Richardson, E. Brown, Trystan T. Cotten, Che Gossett, Lavelle Ridley, C. Snorton
{"title":"Between Inconceivable and Criminal: Black Trans Feminism and the History of the Present","authors":"M. Richardson, E. Brown, Trystan T. Cotten, Che Gossett, Lavelle Ridley, C. Snorton","doi":"10.1353/fem.2022.0052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2022.0052","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The terms \"Black,\" \"Trans,\" and \"Feminist\" do not always have an easy association with each other. This roundtable features six Black trans scholars–Eve Brown, Trystan Cotten, Che Gossett, LaVelle Ridley, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton–who gathered to discuss what it means to be a Black trans feminist and how Black trans feminisms could shape the future of feminist theory and politics.","PeriodicalId":35884,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"807 - 823"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49341902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Navigating Online Misogyny: Strategies, Methods, and Debates in Digital Feminism","authors":"Cara Snyder","doi":"10.1353/fem.2022.0050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2022.0050","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The far right movements that have increasingly gained traction in the U.S. and around the world are connected to violent, white supremacist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic communities on the internet. In the U.S., the hate that was on full display during the election and administration of the 45th president, culminating in the Capitol Riot (January 6, 2021) are, in part, results of marginalized movements mobilizing online and entering the mainstream. The books herein reviewed contribute understandings of how misogyny operates online. This is essential knowledge for activists who must anticipate anti-feminist backlash to be able to deal with it. Writings about mediated misogyny and misogynoir recognize the need to be on the internet (as a place where policy and culture are shaped) at the same time as they underscore the danger of being a feminist there. The internet is not self-contained: misogyny on and offline are mutually reinforcing and have real, damaging effects on the women who are targets. Misogynist violence is rife with racism, classism, heterosexism, transphobia and other interconnected forms of oppression. Women, feminists, and gender non-conforming folks are especially targeted in traditionally male dominated areas like sports, technology, and religion. While there is still too little recourse for those being gendertrolled, each monograph challenges online misogyny through their varying calls to action directed to different audiences.","PeriodicalId":35884,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"776 - 789"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42186692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Karen Weingarten, J. Schoen, Belinda Waller-Peterson, Heather Latimer, Melissa Huerta, L. Reagan
{"title":"Fifty Years since Roe v. Wade: Forum","authors":"Karen Weingarten, J. Schoen, Belinda Waller-Peterson, Heather Latimer, Melissa Huerta, L. Reagan","doi":"10.1353/fem.2022.0053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2022.0053","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:January 22, 2023 will mark the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion across the United States. This forum considers the case's legacy in light of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the case on June 24, 2022, which almost immediately caused half of American states to outlaw or curtail access to abortion. With contributions from Karen Weingarten, Johanna Schoen, Belinda Waller-Peterson, Heather Latimer, Melissa Huerta, and Leslie Reagan, this forum reflects on how Roe shaped—and sometimes limited—abortion access in the United States and the stories we tell about that access. Each of the contributors also considers Roe's legacy and its racial, economic, and gendered repercussions for bodily autonomy and reproductive health in today's political and cultural landscape. As several contributors note, the elimination of a national right to abortion will not impact all people equally, just as Roe's passage did not ensure equal access to abortion in 1973. This forum offers an elegy for Roe while also acknowledging its limitations as a means for securing the right to abortion.","PeriodicalId":35884,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"824 - 849"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43759851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Loss, Hope: The University in Ruins, Again","authors":"Robyn Wiegman","doi":"10.1353/fem.2022.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2022.0043","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay offers a retrospective account of debates about the institutionalization of feminism in the US academy by paying attention to the apocalyptic tenor of current global politics.","PeriodicalId":35884,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"616 - 637"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42747816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intersectional Saturation: Toward a Theory of Feminist Organizations' Intersectionality","authors":"A. Chatillon","doi":"10.1353/fem.2022.0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2022.0049","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:A growing interdisciplinary body of scholarship analyzes feminist organizational efforts toward practicing intersectionality, generating a variety of theoretically distinct ways to understand organizations' struggles and successes. These diverse frameworks render it difficult either to compare efforts across organizations or to capture the nuances of organizational intersectionality more broadly. This article develops a multi-faceted analytic tool for assessing and improving \"intersectional saturation\": the extent to which intersectionality permeates an organization's work and discourse. Intersectional saturation comprises three independent aspects: (1) rhetorically claiming intersectionality as part of the organization's work, (2) demonstrating a deep and thorough conceptual understanding of intersectionality, and (3) consistently applying that understanding to counter or dismantle particular structures of power through the organization's discourse and actions. I illustrate the intersectional saturation framework through case studies of the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority Foundation websites. Based on analysis of a complete set of mission documents from each organization for each year between 1996 and 2019, as well as the organizations' online coverage of Black Lives Matter between 2011 and 2019, I argue that neither organization should be understood to be intersectionally saturated.","PeriodicalId":35884,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"744 - 775"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47082868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Gay Genes\" and the Contested Origins of Same-Sex Desire","authors":"Meg Wesling","doi":"10.1353/fem.2022.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2022.0051","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay interrogates the increasingly widespread popularity of biological explanations for gay and lesbian identity, to consider what it means for queer and feminist politics when biological etiology is held up as the central facet of a progressive agenda. It asks how might we explain the fact that, despite the robust critique of biologization in feminist scholarship, this thinking has become even more pervasive in recent years. Tracing how the very invention of our contemporary understanding of homosexuality as a distinct category of identity is inextricably linked to the scientific justification of white supremacy, as racial difference was established in large part through the imagined sexual difference of African women that continues to have an impact on all people of African descent, I argue that the biological framework for understanding sexual identity is not only inadequate to the complexity of lived experience, but also antithetical to the political work of liberation. It is in linking sex to power, not biologized identity, that feminist critique finds one of its most powerful tools. The very omnipresent nature of heteronormativity makes choosing not to be heterosexual a radical reminder that heteronormativity continues to be a central facet of the subordination of women. This is a call, then, for a renewed feminist interrogation of the danger of making biology do the work of politics.","PeriodicalId":35884,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"790 - 805"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48227361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Moving Mountains and Uprooting Weeds: Literary Subjectivity, First Wave Feminism, and Women's Magazines in Latin America and Japan","authors":"Amy C. Obermeyer","doi":"10.1353/fem.2022.0059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2022.0059","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that first-wave feminism is best understood as a relatively concurrent, multipolar irruption of women's claims to subjectivity wherein suffrage was not the main objective, but rather just one particular historically contingent outcome among many. It seeks to overturn models that understand early feminism as a Euro-American phenomenon to which women in the so-called third world or non-western world were latecomers. In a close reading of the Argentine literary journal Búcaro Americano (1896-1908) headed by established author Clorinda Matto de Turner and Japan's Seitō (1911-1916), a feminist literary journal headed by up-an-coming author and feminist Hiratsuka Raichō, I trace the specific articulations of subjectivity proffered by the journals' writers and editors. Specifically, I find that the specific subjectivity evinced by the women producing these journals was a fundamentally internationalized one owing on the one hand to the economic changes to the global economy wrought by liberalism and on the other to women's exclusion from national discourse by both law and custom. Ultimately, I argue that by understanding these texts as part of larger feminist movement that arose contemporaneously in multiple locations around the world, a more holistic and less imperialist view of first-wave feminism becomes apparent.","PeriodicalId":35884,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"850 - 879"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46303552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}