2.2: Key Theorists, Movements, and Principles

Contouring Black Feminism 

When tracing the evolution of Black Studies from its early constructions and concerns, Cultural Studies theorist Stuart Hall observes that the field initially concerned itself with “the absence and marginality of the [B]lack experience but with its simplification and its stereotypical character” to “a struggle over the relations of representation to a politics of representation itself.”[1] Hall calls to our attention a particular juncture in the crossroads: “[B]lack is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories, and which therefore has no guarantees in nature.”[2] This idea creates the possibility to recognize the different and diverse historical and cultural presentations and experiences of Blackness, which then lead to a greater truth: we cannot assume that race and the signifier of Black will cohere into any particular and/or specific lived or cultural experience. As such, what emerges is the end of any essential embodiments of Blackness, and by extension, this demands we consider Blackness as a historical formation or idea that is formulated according to space/time conditions. This becomes important when considering the construction of Black Feminism/Womanism, because from here we are able to acknowledge that identities are constructed out of other categories and divisions: notions of class, gender, sexuality, which all become essential embodiments at play in Black subjectivity. Within this conversation, Stuart Hall brings to the surface a historic tension within Black Studies: “a great deal of [B]lack politics, constructed, addressed and developed directly in relation to questions of race and ethnicity, has been predicated on the assumption that the categories of gender and sexuality would stay the same and remain fixed and secured.”[3] Hall acknowledges that Black radical politics have historically coalesced around ideas of Black masculinity that elude and excise otherwise genders and representations of sexuality, namely Black women, Black lesbians, Black bisexuals, Black queers, Black gay men, and Black Transgender men and women.

This chapter begins with this discussion about the temperamental, temporal, and perhaps ephemeral and perilous nature of identify because it is here, within this conflicted and strained, conditional ground that we might begin to understand the construction of Black Feminism and its often-strained relationship with Africana Studies and Feminist Theories. To be clear and definitive, Black Feminist Studies amplifies Africana Studies by demanding the inclusion of concerns raised by those gendered female and otherwise, while it also problematizes Feminist Studies with the concerns of those racially marked African or Black. Black Feminist Studies broadens and problematizes Africana and Feminist Studies, forcing each school of thought to think dynamically about Intersectionality and Intersectional Consciousness.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Black Feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw. (CC-BY-SA; Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung via Flickr)

Spotlight: Intersectionality

Intersectionality, coined by Kimberly Crenshaw in 1989, refers to the belief that gender, race, class, and sexuality combine and intersect to create an intersectional space of oppression and discrimination. It argues that when we consider social identities and their related configurations and constructs of oppression, discrimination, domination, and prejudice we must consider all of the social constructions that are overlapping and interdependent to create systems, institutions, and experiences of disadvantage. 

For a more in depth understanding of Intersectionality, please view the following video of Kimberlé Crenshaw.

(Re)Defining Woman 

In “One is Not Born a Woman,” Monique Wittig quotes Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that a woman is not born, she becomes, and proceeds to challenge the definition of woman that is imposed upon females. Wittig argues that the “myth of woman” is an imaginary material construction, while women is a product of its différance from men, its social relationship and production.[4] Wittig argues that “[f]or women to answer the question of the individual subject in materialist terms is first to show, as the lesbians and feminists did, that supposedly “subjective,” “individual,” “private” problems are in fact social problems, class problems; that sexuality is not for women an individual and subjective expression, but a social institution of violence.”[5] We might return to Simone de Beauvoir who argues that women are defined as a negation or Other of men. For de Beauvoir and Feminist constructions of sex, women’s oppression resides within their humanity being visible only as a comparative construction of men. Woman, therefore, is not an autonomous being, but instead she is the other men decide and describe her to be. De Beauvoir reads the struggle for women to gain autonomy analogously with the struggle for Black people to gain emancipation. She theorizes that both are working towards emancipation from a “master class” that wishes to keep them in a place of submission and domination, both are seen as either “good” or “bad” iterations of their subjectivity based on their ability or willingness to be dominated, both are deemed infantile and in need of the patriarchy or paternalism to save them; essentially, de Beauvoir reads an analogous relationship between Black people and white women because both are ensnared within a dominating system that deems them inferior to the Euro-hetero-male.[6] While Black people and white women are oppressed by the Euro-hetero-male oppressor, Black Feminism/Womanism problematizes this equivalency, as it fails to account for the particular ways racism and sexism combine with classism to oppress Black women. It cautions us against equating any dimension of Black male oppression to white women’s oppression. Thus, observing the common oppressor and failing to account for the particularities of racism, sexism, and classism becomes a failure of thinking and one’s critical intellect, as well as an embarrassment of privileges afforded to those gendered male and racialized white.

Nevertheless, following Wittig and de Beauvoir we might turn to Judith Butler, who problematizes the category of woman further; she questions, “does feminist theory need to rely on a notion of what it is fundamentally or distinctively to be a “woman”? The question becomes a crucial one when we try to answer what it is that characterizes the world of women that are marginalized, distorted, or negated within various masculinist practices.”[7] Butler adds to the weakness of Wittig and de Beauvoir’s query of woman, and the particular political closures that occurs when Feminist theory demands that the category of women be foundational to any further political claims because “[w]hen the category is understood as representing a set of values or dispositions, it becomes normative in character and, hence, exclusionary in principle.”[8] As a result, Butler observes the following,

A variety of women from various cultural positions have refused to recognize themselves as “women” in the terms articulated by feminist theory with the result that these women fall outside the category and are left to conclude that (1) either they are not women as they have perhaps previously assumed or (2) the category reflects the restricted location of its theoreticians and, hence, fails to recognize the intersection of gender with race, class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and other currents which contribute to the formation of cultural (non)identity.[9]

The Intersections and Interventions of Black Feminism 

Butler’s observation of women from differing cultural positions illustrates the way the Feminist idea of “woman” has been challenged by the intersections of race. In order to understand this fully, we must turn to Kimberlé Crenshaw, who’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” problematized the neat categories of women traced above by Wittig and de Beauvoir. Crenshaw problematizes identity politics not because it fails to exceed difference but because it does the opposite—it fails to see and account for the intragroup differences that further problematizes the relational differences Hall identifies.[10] Crenshaw demands that when we locate identities, we locate all the different identities that intersect to ensnare or oppress.[11]

We might think further about the ways Black Feminist have pushed the development of gendered embodiment and representation separately from Feminist theory and widened Africana Studies by way of Hortense Spiller’s notions about the theft of the body marked on the Black female subject. Through her theory of theft, Spillers traces the objectification and theft of the body—it is stolen, it is a being for the captor, and as such it becomes the foundation of an insatiable and wounding sensuality.[12] However, Spillers produces an embodied queerness that we must be attentive too: Spillers is attentive to the ways gender was disembodied in the body’s theft: “[u]nder [slavery’s] conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”[13] Spiller calls out the ways flesh became a concentration of ethnicity, yet scholars continued inattentively to the ways gender embodied specific types of oppressive suffering, stating, “that the African female subject, under these historic conditions, is not only the target of rape—in one sense, an interiorized violation of body and mind—but also the topic of specifically externalized acts of torture and prostration that we imagine as the peculiar province of male brutality and torture inflicted by other males.[14]

This attentiveness to gender forces us to contend with the failures of scholars to render the female flesh or female embodiment in critiques of dispossession and discourses concerned with oppression and suffering. Spillers argues that the “materialized scenes of unprotected female flesh—of female flesh “ungendered”—offers a praxis and a theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations. These mediations become queer within Spillers’ praxis and theory through the transfiguration of the body into both male and female. The body thus, becomes male, female, not-male, not-female, and male/female. This queering of the body allows us to attend to all the ways of embodiment, ensuring that all kinds of suffering are legible and accountable in theory and praxis.

This conversation is particularly useful in thinking about the labor Black women did in and out of the plantation fields and the other labors their bodies engaged in. They were queered in their positioning in and between laboring in the fields alongside men and laboring inside, at night, doing “feminine” work to care for others’ bodies. Their predicament was different from the Black males and White females because they were queered between the two and forced to perform the gendered, raced, and sexed work of both.

We see this dual embodiment and queering, again, when we read deeply within Alice Walker’s production of Womanist. First, in her definition of Womanist, Alice Walker defines a Womanist as a Black Feminist or a Feminist of color which clues us in that we cannot connote or conflate the ideas of Black feminism with white feminism. Second, she describes a Womanist as someone who is “[c]omitted to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” Finally, and most strikingly for me, she states “Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.”[15] Most read this final analogy as stating that Womanist and Feminist are two different shades of the same color; while I agree they share the same hue I am mindful and particularly attentive and animated that they do not share the same tone or embodiment. Purple is a deeper shade of lavender, perhaps alluding to the color difference between Black and white women. But also, particularly animating is the difference in tone—one is brighter, stronger, a more pigmented hue than the other; it is fuller. I provoke this différance[16] because it alludes to the relational, conditional, provisional distinction that happens when we place one next to the other. Indeed, when we see lavender we see a purple hue, yet when we see lavender alongside or in relationship to purple it recedes and becomes a less concentrated permeation of its hue. Womanist or Black Feminism diverges from and challenges Feminism because it does what Crenshaw and Spillers charges—it forces us to account for the intersectionality of identities and the ways oppression has enacted a particular theft of the Black body that registers an ungendering of the female body, both failures of white feminism. Womanism amplifies and by extension, intensifies the concerns of white or mainstream feminism by its positionality and its ability to problematize the limited concerns of mainstream feminism. Likewise, Womanism and Black Feminism also problematize traditional Black Studies because it forces Black Studies to account for the tension and problems within—the assumption and connotation of Blackness with masculinity that silences the unique conditions of being Black, woman, and occupying any other marginalized gendered/sexual positions society defines.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Black feminist activist and writer, Audre Lorde, (1934-1992). (CC-BY-SA; Elsa Dorfman via Wikimedia Commons.)

We might witness this problematization through several Africana scholars who identify as woman, other, or queer. In “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” Audre Lorde argues, “[c]ertainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.”[17]

This situating of intersectional issues widens the ideas of race to account for the embodiment of sex, demanding that we account for the differences and distortions. This widening that Lorde does impacts Feminism as well as Africana Studies because it demands that both provide for the other identities of women of color, particularly the position(s) that Black women occupy. In “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface,” Lorde argues, “Black Feminism is not white feminism in blackface. Black women have particular and legitimate issues which affect our lives as Black women and addressing those issues does not make us any less Black.”[18] She goes on to make a clear point about Black feminists’ agency: “Black feminists speak as women because we are women and do not need others to speak for us.”[19] This point is one that addresses the break within Africana studies that queries Black women to choose their gender or race. Lorde effectively problematizes this inquiry by signaling that the Black woman is not in need of any other to speak for her condition, whether that other is white woman or Black man. Lorde acknowledges the chasm between Black women and Black men but redirects it, stating,

“Black men’s feelings of cancellation, their grievances, and their fear of vulnerability must be talked about, but not by Black women when it is at the expense of our own “curious rage.” If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing? And why should Black men accept these roles as correct ones, or anything other than a narcotic promise encouraging acceptance of other facets of their own oppression.”[20]

This argument of Lorde brings the tension between Black men and women to the forefront, but instead of allowing the work to rest on either of them, it makes the argument that society should be challenged and changed—not Black women. Lorde also uses this opportunity to encourage Black men to fight against their own oppression.

Here lies one of the tonal differences between Black feminism and white feminism, which allows us to read a more nuanced understanding of how Black scholars have conceptualized gendered embodiment and representation differently between Africana Studies and Feminist Theory. Here, Lorde provides a Womanist response to the illusion that Black women are responsible for the oppression of Black men. Lorde does not dismiss the oppression Black men experience as a result of their double consciousness, instead she uses it as an opportunity to chastise society and call Black men to labor against their oppression. If we return to Walker’s definition of a Womanist, we see that a Womanist is “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.”[21]

This definition provides a distinct difference between Womanist theory and Black feminism and White feminism, which labors against men and sees men as constituting the grounds that wholly define and subject women to oppression.

 

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): Black feminist, activist, and writer Angela Davis. (CC-BY-SA; Oregon State University via Flickr)

A turn to Angela Davis’ Women, Culture & Politics is helpful for she provides a political and cultural reading of the Black feminist that allows us to speak to issues of race and class, as well as gender. Here, Davis’ focus allows inclusion of all oppressed people, which differs from white feminism that is not concerned with women of color and Third world women, but Davis’ focus also stretches Africana Studies to account for the oppression women face due to their gender. Davis’ text, and others like hers, allows us to see that when we place ourselves in the position to elevate the lives of all oppressed and suppressed people—women of color and Third World women, we work against all oppressions.[22] Particularly, Davis’ thoughts on working-class women’s issues are helpful in thinking about issues pertaining to race, gender, and class. In “Let Us All Rise Together,” for example, Davis explicates the challenges Susan B. Anthony faced while trying to recruit Black and white working-class women into fights for political equality. Davis highlights that for these women, political equality was not equal to liberation.[23] Further, Davis goes on to enumerate how the Black Feminist motto, “lift as we climb” highlights the need to elevate and uplift all oppressed and suppressed people (including all women and Black men with Black women) out of dispossession. Davis effectively argues that Black women bring a consciousness to the most progressive issues society face (joblessness, domestic violence, poverty, health disparities, racism, homelessness, wage disparities, racial violence, working conditions, ageism, homophobia, and immigration issues to name a few), and as such calls for a united women’s movement that is revolutionary, multiracial, and seriously takes up issues facing poor and working-class women.[24] This concern, which is echoed throughout this collection, forces Africana scholars to consider how removing concerns of women from Africana scholarship is anti-revolutionary.

Finally, my thoughts turn to the ways Black women have drawn upon the corporeal to imagine otherwise possibilities of being and knowing and used the flesh to bear witness to the metaphoric Africa or Blackness that forces one to imagine survival otherwise while enduring struggle. In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde acknowledges that there are other kinds of power and that the erotic represents a deeply female and spiritual well that has been suppressed as a source of building capacities of knowledge.[25] She ascribes the mis-naming of the erotic by men as pornography, and charges men with weaponizing erotic power against women.[26] For Lorde, the erotic is a sensual capacity to fully know ourselves, and as such it represents a fullness of knowledge that we must not deny or ignore because it provides the capacity to experience a greater fullness and contentment with life.[27] In this use of the erotic, Lorde is forcing us to recognize the body as both a material condition and a material site of knowing and experiencing knowledge and joy/fullness. The body thus becomes a metaphor for living a human praxis that echoes Sylvia Wynter’s ideas of human as praxis.[28] Wynter relies on the idea of the bio/narrative notion to have us think about the body as a site of narration. If the body provides the opportunity for us to experience a sensuality that enables a full and joyful condition, as well as the space for us to practice humanity through its ability to provide us with narration—the body then transforms our capacity to survive, to know, and to be through our proximity to corporeal consciousness. In this way, Lorde and Wynter moves Africana studies to think about identity and representations of identities through an embodiment that is female, sensual, and desiring/desired.

The preceding discourse is useful in providing a foundational knowledge and genealogy of the contested position Black Feminism/Womanism occupies within Africana Studies and Feminist Studies. Crenshaw and Spillers provide the field with the tools and language to witness the ways Black women’s bodies were/are problematized in their positioning in and between laboring in the fields alongside men and laboring inside, at night, doing “feminine” work to care for others’ bodies. Black women’s predicament emerges differently from gendered Black males and white females because they exist in excess of the two—as they were/are forced and/or expected to simultaneously perform the gendered and raced work of both. Through this rich comprehension of the historical and theoretical conjectures surrounding Black Feminism/Womanism, a fuller appreciation of the differing eras emerges.

Early History (Enslavement through 19^th Century) 

Chattel Slavery and the Slave Trade provides the inciting incident for Black women’s desire for rights. Their position as property by white people alongside the violence they experienced based on race and gender drives their desires for basic human rights. During this period, Black Feminism emerged alongside and in reaction to Women’s Suffrage, arguing “Ain’t I a Woman” when excluded from mainstream Feminism/Women’s Suffrage. While the term “Intersectionality” is not used, we see the roots of Intersectional thinking as Black women argue for inclusion based on their suffering within Slavery due to their race and their plight as Black women subjected to rape, forced reproduction, stolen children, as well as being required to work alongside men in the fields or within the plantation.

Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\): Sojourner Truth, on a speaking card that reads, "I sell the shadow to support the substance." Truth sold these cards at speaking engagements to support her activism. (Public Domain; U.S. Embassy The Hague via Flickr)

Notable Leaders

• Maria W. Stewart, Black American abolitionist, writer, and orator who was famous for her role within abolitionist and women's suffarage movements. 
• Sojourner Truth, Black American abolitionist and activist who championed Black-American civil rights and women's suffrage and rights. Truth was born into slavery and able to escape to freedom. 
• Anna Julia Cooper, Black American feminist activist who wrote, taught, and championed educational rights for Black American women. 
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, one of the first Black American women to publish work in the United States, Harper was an abolitionist, suffragist, poet, and activist. She taught, wrote, and was an orator. 
• Ida B. Wells, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Wells was renowed journalist, activist, researcher, and champion for civil rights. 

Late-Early History (Beginning – mid 20^th Century)

The failure of Reconstruction impacts and creates the early distinctions between mainstream Feminism and Black Feminism. Mainstream Feminism’s focus on the Suffrage movement and other concerns particular to white women disregarded the particular needs of Black women. Despite the lack of inclusion, Black women refused to be excluded or left behind and organized a separate movement that fought for rights that were particular to the Black women’s experience. Early on, this led to the creation of separate clubs/organizations focused on Black women’s needs during post-reconstruction failures.

Notable Leaders

• Mary McLeod Bethune, Black American educator, philantrhopist, humanitarian, womanist, civil rights champion and activist. 
• Zora Neale Hurston, Black American writer/novelist, anthropologist, and folklorist who wrote about the racial struggles of the American South during the early 20th century. 
• Mary Church Terrell, one of the first Black American women to earn a college degree, Terrell was a civil rights activist, journalist, and teacher who advanced and supported civil rights and racial quality, along with women's suffrage. 
• Rosa Parks, Black American civil rights activist and investigator, known for her critical role within the Montgomery bus boycott. Parks was honored by the U.S. Congress as the "first lady of civil rights' and the "mother of the freedom movement." 
• Recy Taylor, Black American sharecropper, who as a 24-year-old mother was kidnapped and gang-raped by six white men in Alabama, 1944. Taylor refused to be quiet, and raised the attention of sexual abuse of Black American women in the Jim Crow South. 

Late History (Mid 20^th Century – Late 20^th Century)

As civil rights grew into a movement, Black women continued to organize as they experienced the distinct intersectionality of being a Black woman within male dominated civil rights movements and denied leadership roles despite their deep contributions. During the second half/late 20th century, Black feminism relied more deeply on art and literature as a means to fight for and argue for rights, as the Black Power and Black Arts movements continued to be male dominated. This period sees the biggest schism between Black feminism and mainstream feminism with Womanism, Black Lesbian Feminism, and Transnational Feminism all emerging out of the movements of the 1960s and 70s.

After the civil rights movements in the 20th mid-century developed, transnational feminism began to see its birth as an idea as globalization emerged post-WWII along with the rise of greater international market expansion. Transnational feminism grew as a movement and ideology during the later half of the 20th century as feminist began collaborating across and outside of nation-states and borders. During this period, white women’s feminism is regarded as “western feminism” and is seen as a US, white, privileged-based movement that centers white women and disregards the particular needs of women of color. During this time, transnational feminism’s concerns about race, colonialism, imperialism, economics, class, and human suffering intersected with Black feminism and some Black Feminists identify with the term, “Third World Feminism,” which is eventually replaced by Transnational Feminism. Black Feminist often found kinship with the concerns of Transnational feminist due to their socio-economic position within the US.

As the century begins to draw to a close, Hip Hop Feminism emerges as Black women respond to the misogyny in rap music. Hip Hop Feminism emerged from Transnational/Black Feminist who sought to combine Hip Hop culture with the concerns within Black Feminism, Womanism, and Transnational Feminism.

Notable Leaders

• Ella Baker, Black American civil rights and human rights activist who worked behind the scenes with the most notable civil rights leaders of the 20th century.
• Where We At! Black Feminist Group, a collective of Black women artists connected to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s focused on art within the Black community as tool of consciouness and liberation. The group consisted of artists Dindga McCannon, Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, Carol Blank, Jerri Crooks, Charlotte Kâ (Richardson), and Gylbert Coker. 
• National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), was started to address the issues the burdens of racism and sexism on Black women in America. 
• Combahee River Collective, was a Black feminist/lesbian socialist organization that sought to address the needs of Black women, particularly Black lesbians. 
• Audre Lorde, Black American writer, philosopher, professional, Black feminist, poet, and civil rights activist. 
• Barbara Smith, Black American lesbian-feminist, and socialist who has played a major role in the development of Black feminism through her work as a scholar, critic, lecturer, author, and writer/publisher of Black feminist thought. 
• June Jordan, Black American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. Jordan's writings explored gender, race, immigration and representation, and she was a critical and influential voice for Black libration. 
• Alice Walker, Black American poet, fiction-writer, essayist, and social activist. Walker was the first Black American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel, The Color Purple (1982). 
• Toni Morrison, Black American fiction-writer, essayist, editor, and social activist. Morrison won the Pulitzer prize for her novel, Beloved (1987), and wen on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993). 
• Black Women Poets: Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Maya Angelou, etc., Black women poets in the contemporary period who wrote at the intersection of race and gender, and used their texts as social activism towards liberation. 
• Joan Morgan, Jamaican-American journalist, author and cultural critic who coined the term "hip hop Feminist" in 1999, with the text When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. 

Contemporary History (21^st Century)

21st Century Black Feminism continues to shift away from mainstream and traditional feminism with the focus on Intersectionality, a term coined by Crenshaw, but having roots within the initial movement of Black Feminism rooted in the peculiar concerns of enslaved women. The largest advancement of the 21st Century, to date, is the inclusion of technology and the growth of online activism to foster activism. This digitalization of feminism has led to mainstream movements started by Black women–Black Lives Matter and Black Girl Magic, while also expanding on Black Feminism/Womanism, Transnational Feminism, Hip Hop Feminism, and Transfeminism/Queer Studies who are focused on Misogynoir, a theory that looks at misogyny particularly focused on both cisgendered and transgendered Black women.

Notable Leaders

• Kimberlé Crenshaw, Black American civil rights activist and advocate, scholar of Critical race theory, professor; Crenshaw coined the term "Intersectionality," in her article "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," in 1989. 
• Clenora Hudson-Weems, PhD, Black American theorist, professor, and writer who created the theoretical construct for Africana womanism. 
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Black American academic, writer, and professor who champions and works towards liberation through Black politics, social movements, and dismantling racial inequality in the United States. 
• Patricia Hill Collins, Black American academic and professor, who works at the intersection of race, gender, social class, sexuality, and nation. Collins is the author of the critical text, Black Feminist Thought. 
• Barbara Christian, Black American scholar within Black women's literary feminism. Christian was the first Black woman to gain tenure at UC Berkeley (1978). 
• Hortense Spillers, Black American literary critic and scholar, professor and Black feminist theorist. 
• bell hooks, Black American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who wrote about race, feminism, and class. 
• Sylvia Wynter, Jamaican novelist, dramatist, critic, theorist, essayist, who works through the intersection of natural sciences, humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles. 
• Angela Davis, Black American political activist, theorist, academic, author, and professor. Davis is a critical figure in the prison abolition movement and was one of the founders of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to prison abolition.
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Black American prison abolitionist, author, and scholar, who is known for her critical work and activism for abolition of the prison-industrial complex. 
• Alicia Garza, Black American civil rights activist and author who co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement and #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in 2013. She is recognized and known for her work as a social and racial justice activist, focusing on issues facing marginalized communities such as Black women, LGBTQ+, and immigrants.
• Patrisse Cullors, Black American activist, and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. Cullors is also an artist and writer, and is the co-creator of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in 2013. 
• Ayo (formally Opal) Tometi, Nigerian American human rights activist, writer, and community organizer, who co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement and #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in 2013. Tometi is a champion for migrant rights and social justice, and has worked on behalf of the United States' first national immigrant rights orgnaization for people of African descent, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). 
• Aisha Durham, Black American professor and scholar of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Humanity who writes about the relationship of media representations and the quotidian. 
• Brittany C. Cooper, Black American professor of Women and Gender studies, author, activist, and cultural critic who studies and writes at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, Hip Hop, Black Intellectual History, and Black Feminist Thought. 
• Susana M. Morris, Black American English professor, writer, editor, and co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective. Morrison is a Black feminist cultural critic, whose work explores Black women, Afrofuturism, feminism, body positivity, politics, pop culture, race, and self-care. 
• Moya Bailey, Black American feminist scholar, professor, writer, and activist. Bailey coined the term misogynoir, which she describes as the unique intersection between misogyny and anti-Black racism that Black women experience.
• CaShawn Thompson, Black American educator, childcare development expert, doula, author, and social media influencer. Thompson, a Black cultural pioneer, created the concept "Black Girls Are Magic," which became popular in 2013 when she started using the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic to uplift and praise the beauty, culture, and accomplishments of Black women.

---

Endnotes

[1] Stuart Hall. “New Ethnicities.” Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality, edited by Linda Martín, Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 90-95.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, 93.

[4] Wittig, Monique. “One Is Not Born a Girl” in Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2003),162.

[5] Ibid.

[6] De Beauvoir, Simone. “Introduction from The Second Sex” in Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, (149-157).

[7] Butler, Judith. “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse” in Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta, Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 201.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence

Against Women of Color” in Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 149-157.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 206.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 207.

[15] Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Womanist Prose (Orlando: Harcourt, 1983), xi-xii.

[16] For more information about différance as I intend it here, see Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.”

[17] Lorde, Sister Outsider, 116.

[18] Ibid., 60.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid., 61.

[21] Walker, xi.

[22] Davis, Angela. Women, Culture & Politics. New York, Vintage Books, 1990.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. 1984, Crossing Press, 2007.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. 1984, Crossing Press, 2007.

[28] For more, see: Wynter, Sylvia. Sylvia Wynter: on being human as praxis, Edited by Katherine McKittrick, Duke University Press, 2015.