{"title":"Copying and Conjugation: Lesbian Autohistoriography as Reproduction in Alicia Gaspar de Albas Sor Juana's Second Dream","authors":"N. Kang","doi":"10.1353/fro.2021.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2021.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In her biographical novel, Sor Juana's Second Dream (1999), Chicana writer Alicia Gaspar de Alba formulates a counternarrative to readings that have concentrated on the rise of the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-95) as a criolla intellectual while downplaying or effacing her identity as a woman who loved women. Using a self-referential genre that may be termed \"lesbian autohistoriography,\" Gaspar de Alba re-creates the historical figure as a symbolic foremother of contemporary Chicana lesbians' ongoing struggles for legitimacy and voice among heteropatriarchal institutions such as the Catholic Church. Sor Juana emerges as a passionate protofeminist artist whose intellectual ascent countered the misogynistic social restrictions of her time. This analysis harnesses the trope and semiotics of reproduction (in particular, copying and conjugation) to illuminate the need for a wider spectrum of creative choices for women beyond biological motherhood. Consolidating critical interventions by such contemporary Latina feminists as Emma Pérez, I argue that Gaspar de Alba's version of Sor Juana strips reproduction of its exclusively heterosexual underpinnings and offers a lesbian hermeneutics of selfhood that recalibrates and diversifies women's hard-earned right to create, coexist, and resist concurrently.","PeriodicalId":46007,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers-A Journal of Women Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"133 - 157"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42798059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postindustrial Futurities in Contemporary Black Feminist Theater: Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, and Lisa Langford’s The Art of Longing","authors":"Julie M. Burrell","doi":"10.1353/fro.2021.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2021.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article takes up the turn to the postindustrial working class in recent and celebrated African American women’s theater: Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Sweat (2015), Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew (2016), and Lisa Langford’s The Art of Longing (2017). These Black feminist plays at once predict and confront the two racialized narratives of US deindustrialization that emerged with force around the 2016 presidential election: the first, a tale of a white American heartland whose future had been jeopardized by economic restructuring; and the second, that of a depopulated yet also Black-inhabited space of death inherently devoid of all productive futurity, a ghetto, a slum, a no-place. Morisseau, Langford, and Nottage participate in what Patricia Hill Collins terms “Black feminist standpoint epistemology,” which exposes how the racialization of US labor is inextricable from its formations of class, gender, and sexuality. By commemorating the difficult labor of industry and women’s reproductive labor, contemporary Black feminist drama celebrates affective attachments between Black, queer, and trans characters, reworking an elegy for a dying white working class into a Black feminist exploration of the intersectional dimensions of race, gender, class, and national belonging. These dramas stage what Christina Sharpe has called “living in the wake” of the afterlives of slavery, staging moments of quotidian kin and care work that testify to living in and living against a time and space of the purportedly postindustrial, a temporal ordering that consigns industrial laborers to a murky and derelict past.","PeriodicalId":46007,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers-A Journal of Women Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"58 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/fro.2021.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49164163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Posin’ a Threat: Countering the Colonial Project from Jay-Z’s “Moonlight” to the US Senate","authors":"Leticia Ridley","doi":"10.1353/fro.2021.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2021.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores how Jay-Z’s music video “Moonlight” riffs off the Academy Awards debacle surrounding the award-winning film Moonlight and, in doing so, critiques the ability for Black cultural production and art to thrive and prosper within parameters controlled and mediated by white gatekeepers. Adding another layer to this commentary, I also argue that “Moonlight” inadvertently reinforces the silencing of women of color by positioning them in the service of men. Strikingly, both the intended and unintended arguments in “Moonlight” are evidenced through the video’s parody of the popular NBC television sitcom Friends. By adopting Frantz Fanon’s framework of decolonization, this essay analyzes these multiple layers to demonstrate how performance has been a site for Black artists to reconfigure stereotypical images and champion embodied experiences of blackness as a way of knowing. Moreover, this article also interrogates both inter-and intraracial tensions by rigorously addressing the issue of gender. While I argue that the music video for “Moonlight” gifts audiences with a performance that interrogates, disrupts, and reconfigures oppressive racialized narratives, I also contend that it reveals the need to recognize and address the vital role that gender plays in the ability to activate—or evade—a holistic process of decolonization.","PeriodicalId":46007,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers-A Journal of Women Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"141 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/fro.2021.0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45202488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sensing History’s Hold: Touch and Black Queer Representation after Moynihan","authors":"Darius Bost","doi":"10.1353/fro.2021.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2021.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores moments of touch and haptic sensation in Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight (2016) and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play Choir Boy (2012) to refigure the relations between black maternity and black masculinity under modernity. Drawing from contemporary black feminist theory, I analyze moments of touching and holding in the film and play as generative of alternative sensations of history. I demonstrate how black queer performances of touch exceed the captive representational logics theorized by Hortense Spillers in the wake of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the black family.","PeriodicalId":46007,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers-A Journal of Women Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"108 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/fro.2021.0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42574386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Here We Are”: Ogoni Women’s Nonviolent Resistance","authors":"D. Keys","doi":"10.1353/fro.2021.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2021.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This study examines the activism of the Ogoni women of southern Nigeria who have organized with their community since the early 1990s to speak against the state and multinational oil companies’ exploitation of their people and resources between 1993 and 2017. The article intends to shed light on the women’s practices of resistance in their movement for self-determination. Through the example of Ogoni women’s activism I provide an illustration of nonviolent resistance as an appropriate mode of resistance to the coloniality of gender because it works to fight the invisibility of Black women. I reveal the operations of the coloniality of gender in the experiences of Ogoni women and their participation in the Ogoni movement. Then I identify ways the Nigerian colonial and neocolonial state denies the women’s existence, and I discuss how they act to insist upon their humanity. In turn, I respond to María Lugones’s call to shed light on the various modes operating in the “oppressing/resisting process at the fractured locus of the colonial difference.”","PeriodicalId":46007,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers-A Journal of Women Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"178 - 203"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/fro.2021.0011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44980479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interview with Harris Smith","authors":"Nadia Harris Sine, H. Smith","doi":"10.1353/fro.2021.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2021.0002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46007,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers-A Journal of Women Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"12 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/fro.2021.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41337593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Hawaiʻi to Okinawa: Confronting Militarization, Healing Trauma, Strengthening Solidarity","authors":"K. Compoc, J. Enomoto, Kasha Hoʻokili Ho","doi":"10.1353/fro.2021.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2021.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:(roundtable discussion and photo essay): Three women of color activists from Hawaiʻi discuss their participation in the Ninth International Women’s Network Against Militarism (IWNAM) gathering in Okinawa in 2017. IWNAM began twenty years ago in Okinawa and now includes delegations from South Korea, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guåhan (Guam), Hawaiʻi, Japan, and the United States. Kasha Hoʻokili Ho, Joy Lehuanani Enomoto, and Kim Compoc reflect on the trip and how Okinawa, site of one of the most vibrant peace movements in the region, has influenced their work for a free and independent Hawaiʻi. They discuss how their families have been both victims and perpetrators of US militarism, the pleasures and the difficulties of doing demilitarization work, and the profound lessons they learned about war and peace in Okinawa. They offer this conversation as an example of decolonial feminist world-building, particularly as women in the Pacific build transnational solidarity for more peaceful and sustainable futures.","PeriodicalId":46007,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers-A Journal of Women Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"204 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/fro.2021.0012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48438698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Angelina Weld Grimké, K. Hammer, Abel Meeropol, Billie Holiday’s
{"title":"“Blood at the Root”: Cultural Abjection and Thwarted Desire in the Lynching Plays and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké","authors":"Angelina Weld Grimké, K. Hammer, Abel Meeropol, Billie Holiday’s","doi":"10.1353/fro.2021.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2021.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Well before Billie Holiday’s doleful rendition of “Strange Fruit,” African American women playwrights directly confronted the subject of lynching. In addition, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1916) offers a prime example of how Black lesbian writers used coding and nuance to present queer content in lynching dramas. This reading of Grimké’s work reveals how the Black lynched body and the Black lesbian body both become culturally abject within the sexual economy of lynching. Taking a holistic view of Grimké’s oeuvre, I analyze Rachel alongside her erotic poetry and short stories, establishing multiple connections between the theme of lynching and lesbian longing. Grimké kept her own longings private, submerged in her literary output, yet similarities in themes, figures, and images suggest that Grimké resisted racism and homophobia simultaneously. By listening closely for how lesbian desire appears, often through absence, critics can develop new perspectives on these often overwrought, sentimental writings from the earliest moments of the Harlem Renaissance. I urge a more expansive approach to women’s queerness in these incipient years, prior to Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), or the “downlow” coolness of Black women’s blues music.","PeriodicalId":46007,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers-A Journal of Women Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"27 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/fro.2021.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49553593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Play (Loudly): The Racialized Erotics of Blacksound in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing","authors":"Gabriel A. Peoples","doi":"10.1353/fro.2021.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2021.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In her essay “Counter-Hegemonic Art: Do the Right Thing,” feminist cultural critic bell hooks writes that most viewers do not see Radio Raheem’s death in Do the Right Thing (1989) as a brutal murder, nor do critics mention it, and that the film portrays Black men’s oppression as solely racial—unrelated to gender or class. I take up her call in this essay, written on the film’s thirtieth anniversary. I also argue that intimate feelings, desires, and touch between humans are bound to imaginings of race evoked by sound, what I call the racialized erotics of sound. My performance analysis of Radio Raheem meditates on the synesthesia of his sonic and visual dissonance in white male spaces and harmony in Black and Brown spaces. The music from his boombox is a medium that brings attention to Black masculinity’s perceived loudness and homosocial/erotic engagements. Radio Raheem possesses a volume, timber, and vividness of color whose recognition leads to the increased surveillance and subduing of his unmuted presence. Radio Raheem’s rapidly circulated ubiquitous performance is a Black virality that is a synecdoche for Black men who have played and will play their radios loudly. Additionally, Radio Raheem conjures Black men perceived as so powerful that their decibels, inseparable from their racialized gender, are a threat to the peace of white spaces and the livelihood of white bodies.","PeriodicalId":46007,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers-A Journal of Women Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"109 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/fro.2021.0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42406578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}