Browsing by Subject "Black Feminism"
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Item Black Cyborgs: Blackness Narratives in Technology, Speculative Fiction, and Digital Cultures(2020-06) Gunn, CaitlinThis project draws from the deep well of Black science fiction, original interviews with Black science fiction authors, and popular media case studies and analysis to generate new discourses about Black people and technology. Exploring the ways Black people have taken up both science fiction and technology, I argue that Black feminist thinkers can use both as blueprints for survival, joy, and community-building. Seeking to find strategies for effective communication within our shared political and technosocial lives, this project advances speculative fiction and cyborg theory as dynamic tools which we must utilize to build the future of feminist studies, Black studies, and digital political organizing. Beginning with Donna Haraway’s essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” and expanding to recent explorations of the cyborg from women of color theorists like Joy James and Jasbir Puar, I situate Black feminist cyborgs in the current field of feminist cyborg theory. I offer a “part-time” Black feminist cyborg theory, a practical aesthetic which aids Black people’s movement and theorizing in digital spaces, chronicled by hashtags and characterized by the fast-paced nature of digital communication. To illustrate the possibilities of such an aesthetic, I engage Chicana philosopher Maria Lugones’ theory of traveling to the metaphorical “worlds” of other women. I extend her work, envisioning a part-time Black feminist cyborg optimized for travel to and through the digital worlds of social media like Facebook and Twitter, asking how Black people arrive in these worlds and what they experience once there. Illuminating a tradition of technological engagement by Black communities and calling attention to dreams of futures free of oppression, my interdisciplinary project shapes the future directions of Black feminist theory, digital organizing, and political resistance to entrenched and renewed white supremacy.Item Making Black Girls Real: Reconstructing Black Girlhood In the U.S., 1861-1963(2016-06) Owens, TammyFrom the 1861 publication of Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to Norman Rockwell’s iconic image of first-grader Ruby Bridges walking alongside U.S. marshals to integrate her elementary school in 1960, the black-girl figure and performances of black girlhood are present within popular texts, images, archival materials, and cultural work produced in the U.S. Yet, black girls and their girlhoods are noticeably absent in dominant historical conversations of childhood, and thus Jacobs’s narrative of slave-girl life in bondage or Ruby Bridges’s integration of her school are not read as constituting a visible history of black girlhood or a significant period in the formation of black female political as well as intellectual identity in the U.S. History scholars of the U.S. Civil War through Civil Rights Movement have begun to recognize children as important historical actors and childhood as a key site of cultural knowledge. However, these scholars have failed to examine the epistemological, historical, or theoretical importance of black girls or their girlhoods. As a result, the historical record endorses racialized ideologies of childhood that render black girlhood illegible and black girls exempt from the analytical category of children or girls in U.S. culture. My dissertation addresses the exemption of black girls from the socially-constructed categories of childhood and girlhood by recovering black girls as historical actors and illuminating constitutive elements of black girlhood in the U.S. from the antebellum period through the Civil Rights Movement. I argue that within historical discourses of childhood and in the dominant visual field, the intersections of race, class, gender, and age render black girls illegible, or incapable of being read or “seen” as girls with valuable girlhoods. To make black girls and their lived experiences legible, I draw on Black Feminist and Queer theories to inform my discursive, literary, and visual cultural methods of investigating a diverse collection of nineteenth-century slave narratives, popular novels, images in popular press, children’s literature, and archival sources including the unpublished autobiography of black-girl Civil Rights activist Brenda Travis.Item Manufacturing Urban America: Politically Engaged Urban Black Women, Renewed Forms of Political Censorship, and Uneven Landscapes of Power in North Minneapolis, Minnesota(2015-05) Lewis, BrittanyRacialized public policies further concentrated poverty in central cities across the nation, necessitating the continued deconstruction and redevelopment of the “slums” staging the next sequence of dramatic acts in Black women’s history of resistance. In most discussions of inner-city renewal, Black women are framed as objects for study: single mothers, "welfare queens," drug addicts, and other stereotypes abound, situating these women at best as victims, at worst as sources of urban decay. But Black women share a long legacy of urban activism in local neighborhoods that, if recognized, could shift the conversations that shape the urban renewal agenda. My research complicates the study of race, gender, and urban politics by centering Black women’s activist experiences to better understand how communities experience and resist the racialized legacies of housing segregation, redlining, and concentrated poverty in North Minneapolis, MN. By magnifying how Black women “talk back” within a competitive urban context framed by dominant material and political interests I shed new light on the ways that Black women undermine the states claim for regulatory control over Black urban space. I investigate Black women's actions in: (1) public housing; (2) community economic development; and (3) efforts to utilize neighborhood associations as participatory empowerment bodies for all those affected by urban transformation. All of these domains of neighborhood resilience and renewal have been influenced by hegemonic urban renewal discourse, policies, and practices. My research explains how this discourse has shaped a political environment that does not invite rigorous debate and critique by all affected residents. Yet, politically engaged urban Black women continue to challenge these restrictive forms of privatized political engagement exposing uneven landscapes of power. As such, my dissertation asks the following questions: (1) How can the strategic political actions of urban Black women challenge dominant power and its discursive frame, particularly when Black women are often framed as culprits in urban decay? (2) What social, political, and/or economic barriers hamper Black women’s efforts to reframe the urban renewal agenda considering local histories of urban development (and underdevelopment) as well as the intersections of race, class, gender, and gentrification? And (3) what can we learn about citizen participation and the limits of dominant frameworks for urban renewal by centering the resistant innovations of Black women activists?