This guide is for students and researchers in Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (WGSS).
Recommendations
This page offers articles and books relating to Women's and Gender Studies, and breaks down this collection into different categories that often overlap with WGSS. These sources are not exhaustive of the knowledge produced in WGSS and adjacent or imbricated fields. They are starting points from which you may come to know more about a specific subdiscipline of WGSS.
No Archive Will Restore You
by
At once memoir, theory, poetic prose, and fragment, NO ARCHIVE WILL RESTORE YOU is a feverish meditation on the body. Departing from Antonio Gramsci's summons to compile an inventory of the historical traces left in each of us, Singh engages with both the impossibility and urgent necessity of crafting an archive of the body. Through reveries on the enduring legacies of pain, desire, sexuality, race, and identity, she asks us to sense and feel what we have been trained to disavow, to re-member the body as more than itself. "I am in love with this book. It is so smart, so lucid, so necessary, so honest, so compelling, so edifying, so terrifying, so poignant, so wise. No archive may restore us, but Julietta Singh is exactly the kind of company I want for the ride, to bear witness to the pains and pleasures of our being here, in these bodies, in these times." Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts "If Gramsci proposes the task of archiving - and analyzing - the detritus that history has deposited in us, Julietta Singh has a counter-proposition for what to do with that depository. What to call her method: Anarchivist? Gynarchivist? Though steeped in theory, it's adamantly corporeal, and deeply moving. Returning to various crime scenes, she examines the traces left upon her body by ravages historical, political, physical and sentimental. But she also courageously accounts for the shit she herself produces: 'I want to be responsible to and for my body, for everything it yields.' Attending carefully, even lovingly, to all that's come into and out of her body - food, pain, flesh, life, feces, feral moans, poetry - she invites you, reader, to take stock of the fecundity of your own dis-ordered archive." Barbara Browning, author of The Gift
Producing the Archival Body
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Producing the Archival Body draws on theoretical and practical research conducted within US and Canadian archives, along with critical and cultural theory, to examine the everyday lived experiences of archivists and records creators that are often overlooked during archival and media production. Expanding on the author's previous work, which engaged archival and queer theories to develop the Queer/ed Archival Methodology that intervenes in traditional archival practices, the book invites readers interested in humanistic inquiry to re-consider how archives are defined, understood, deployed, and accessed to produce subjects. Arguing that archives and bodies are mutually constitutive and developing a keen focus on the body and embodiment alongside archival theory, the author introduces new understandings of archival bodies. Contributing to recent disciplinary moves that offer a more transdisciplinary emphasis, Lee interrogates how power circulates and is deployed in archival contexts in order to build critical understandings of how deeply archives influence and shape the production of knowledges and human subjectivities. Producing the Archival Body will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of archival studies, library and information science, gender and women's studies, anthropology, history, digital humanities, and media studies. It should also be of great interest to practitioners working in and with archives
Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies
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The contributors to Turning Archival trace the rise of "the archive" as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge. Highlighting the growing significance of the archival to LGBTQ scholarship, politics, and everyday life, they draw upon accounts of queer archival encounters in institutional, grassroots, and everyday repositories of historical memory. The contributors examine such topics as the everyday life of marginalized queer immigrants in New York City as an archive; secondhand vinyl record collecting and punk bootlegs; the self-archiving practices of grassroots lesbians; and the decolonial potential of absences and gaps in the colonial archives through the life of a suspected hermaphrodite in colonial Guatemala. Engaging with archives from Africa to the Americas to the Arctic, this volume illuminates the allure of the archive, reflects on that which resists archival capture, and outlines the stakes of queer and trans lives in the archival turn.
Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work
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Urgent Archives argues that archivists can and should do more to disrupt white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy beyond the standard liberal archival solutions of more diverse collecting and more inclusive description. Grounded in the emerging field of critical archival studies, this book uncovers how dominant western archival theories and practices are oppressive by design, while looking toward the the radical politics of community archives to envision new liberatory theories and practices. Based on more than a decade of ethnography at community archives sites including the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), the book explores how members of minoritized communities activate records to build solidarities across and within communities, trouble linear progress narratives, and disrupt cycles of oppression. Caswell explores the temporal, representational, and material aspects of liberatory memory work, arguing that archival disruptions in time and space should be neither about the past nor the future, but about the liberatory affects and effects of memory work in the present. Urgent Archives extends the theoretical range of critical archival studies and provides a new framework for archivists looking to transform their practices. The book should also be of interest to scholars of archival studies, museum studies, public history, memory studies, gender and ethnic studies and digital humanities.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval
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In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them--domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty--and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.
Archival Experiments, Notes and (Dis)orientations
By: Nydia Swaby, Chandra Frank, Yasmin Gunaratnam
From: Feminist Review (vol. 125, no. 1, 2020)
There has been substantial work in recent years, from different contexts and traditions, on the use of archives. The possibilities and limitations of the archive, as theoretical concept as well as material site, are picked up widely by queer, feminist and decolonial scholars. The past decade has seen an increase in publications, special issues, events and exhibitions grappling with the idea of the archive and its role in feminist, queer and diasporic contexts. Recent significant special issues include Radical History Review (2014), which questions what it means to ‘queer’ the archive; Australian Feminist Studies (2017), exploring the role of archives in new modes of feminist research; and a special issue on decolonial archival praxis in Archival Science (2017). Feminist Review has also published a number of articles on archives and archival practice, from pieces that rethink the role of the archive in feminist visual art (Zapperi, 2013) or the role of archives in the articulation of black diaspora feminist identity and consciousness (Burin and Sowinski, 2014; Swaby, 2014), to a manifesto for feminist archiving that underlines alternative methods for reading the archive (Digital Women’s Archive North, 2017). The Feminist Review Collective also offers a three-month fellowship for early career scholars to critically engage with the Feminist Review archive. These interventions demonstrate the continued engagement with the archive as a complex, lively and material site.Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography
By: Savannah Shange
From: Transforming Anthropology (vol. 27, no. 1, 2019)
Written at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, this essay is an ethnography of social death in gentrifying San Francisco. I argue the gendered and raced patterns of school discipline at a San Francisco high school help us apprehend the afterlife of slavery. Within the context of schooling, the particular association of Black girls as loud and disobedient is well‐documented in the literature. Using flesh (Spillers ) as a hermeneutic to understand Black embodiment in the late liberal US, the essay centers on two young women who are targeted for school push out. Ultimately, the self‐making strategies employed by young Black women in San Francisco flummox the progressive political project and model “Black girl ordinary” as a practice of ethical refusal, both within and beyond the academy.In Search of the Black Women's History Archive
By: Ashley Farmer
From: Modern American History (vol. 1, no. 2, 2018)
Questions of evidence have sat at the center of black women's history since the field entered the academy over thirty years ago. Historians of black women's lives and labors have filled bookshelves by “mining the forgotten” to render them visible. Scholarship pioneered in the 1980s and 1990s established black women as prominent and indispensable historical actors, and key to understanding such eras as slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement. Subsequent works built upon the bedrock that these initial studies provided, incorporating nuanced gender analyses into the history of black women's thought, experiences, and political action. The past ten years have seen a proliferation of publications that have extended the reach of the field to include such genres and approaches as girlhood studies, intellectual history, and black internationalism. This groundswell of research has foregrounded a persistent methodological quandary for scholars of black women's history: how should they address the paradox of simultaneously finding copious archival records on some black women, while also accounting for the deafening archival silence on others?Out of Sorts: A Queer Crip in the Archive
By: Ryan Lee Cartwright, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Chandra Frank, Nydia Swaby
From: Feminist Review (vol. 125, no. 1, 2020)
" I could try to write in the voice of a body easily arranged, a body requiring only a thoughtless stretch of limb or a self-controlled fidget to achieve comfort. Since that simple, graceful body is not my own, that would be the same as writing without a body. (Hershey, 2011, p. 131) By the time I arrived at the John F. Kennedy Library, I was already out of sorts. I had travelled across the country, from San Francisco to Boston, to conduct research on the origins of the 1960s US ‘War on Poverty’. The Kennedy Library, which holds these records, sits remotely at the end of a peninsula. I was staying at the nearest hotel, but it was a few miles away. Before making my reservation, I had been assured by three different hotel staff members that their shuttle to the nearest subway station, where I would catch a bus to the archive, was wheelchair accessible. It was not. What the hotel had instead was part-time access to a wheelchair accessible van; the van was primarily used for transporting cargo, but if someone made a fuss it could be called upon to transport wheelchair-users. I made a fuss. Driving the van was a rotation of men who had no knowledge of how to secure a wheelchair in the back of a van and deeply resented being assigned to cripple duty. After I waited an hour for the ‘special’ van to arrive and another few minutes for the driver to move his non-human cargo out of the way, I manoeuvred my chair up the ramp and into the van. I contorted my neck awkwardly to avoid hitting the ceiling, as whoever designed the van had not considered the fact that the wheelchair might be accompanied by a human user, whose torso might stretch taller than the chair itself. As the driver took off, I braced myself, my unsecured chair sliding to and fro with the van’s fitful, lurching movements. The motion, combined with my attempts to resist it, sent my muscles into spasms. My inevitable failure to keep my head from acquainting itself with the ceiling left me with a dull headache. The heat from waiting outside triggered a chronic neurological condition, so I was on the edge of consciousness by the time I transferred from the hotel van to the city bus that took me the rest of the way. So yes, I was out of sorts when I arrived at the gleaming Kennedy Library overlooking Boston Harbor." - Ryan Lee Cartwright
Black Disability Politics
by
In Black Disability Politics Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present. Schalk shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue deeply tied to race and racism. She points out that this work has not been recognized as part of the legacy of disability justice and liberation because Black disability politics differ in language and approach from the mainstream white-dominant disability rights movement. Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women's Health Project alongside interviews with contemporary Black disabled cultural workers, Schalk identifies common qualities of Black disability politics, including the need to ground public health initiatives in the experience and expertise of marginalized disabled people so that they can work in antiracist, feminist, and anti-ableist ways. Prioritizing an understanding of disability within the context of white supremacy, Schalk demonstrates that the work of Black disability politics not only exists but is essential to the future of Black liberation movements.
The Disability Studies Reader
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"The Disability Studies Reader" collects for the first time representative texts from the newly emerging field of disability studies. This volume represents a major advance in presenting the most important writings about disability with an emphasis on those writers working from a materialist and postmodernist perspective. Drawing together experts in cultural studies, literary criticism, sociology, biology, the visual arts, pedagogy and post-colonial studies, the collection provides a comprehensive approach to the issue of disability. Contributors include Erving Goffman, Susan Sontag, Michelle Fine and Susan Wendell.
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
by
"First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare's revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer established him as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation. With a poet's devotion to truth and an activist's demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. Here readers will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually live with the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the root of Clare's exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible to everyone. With heart and hammer, Exile and Pride pries open a window onto a world where our whole selves, in all their complexity, can be realized, loved, and embraced." - Duke University Press
Feminist, Queer, Crip
by
In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.
Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life
by
"A very important study that will appeal to a disability studies audience as well as scholars in social movements, social justice, critical pedagogy, literacy education, professional development for disability and learning specialists in access centers and student counseling centers, as well as the broader domains of sociology and education."
---Melanie Panitch, Ryerson University
Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies
By: Sami Schalk, Jina Kim
From: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (vol. 46, no. 1, 2020)
This article envisions and details a critical framework we term feminist-of-color disability studies. In offering a feminist disability studies grounded in the genealogies of US feminist-of-color theory, we identify, challenge, and counter the tendency of feminist disability studies scholars to exclude the intellectual output of women and queers of color. We contend that feminists of color have long written and theorized on topics of illness, health, and disability, yet their vital insights remain largely disregarded by practitioners of feminist disability studies. Within the article, we detail critical methods and approaches essential to integrating race into feminist disability studies. Then, building upon Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s groundbreaking “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” we identify and discuss what we name as the central domains of feminist-of-color disability studies: discourse, state violence, health/care, and activism. Overall, this article aims to trace an alternate lineage of feminist disability studies that centralizes the scholarship of feminists of color by identifying potential sites of analysis and opportunities for cross-pollination as well as providing a substantive foundation for future feminist-of-color disability studies scholarship across a variety of disciplines.Mothering While Disabled
By: Angela Frederick
From: Contexts (vol. 13, no. 4, 2014)
Sociologist Angela Frederick argues the legacy of the Eugenics movement persists today. She explores how mothers with disabilities continue to face pervasive threats to their right to parent.Out of Sorts: A Queer Crip in the Archive
By: Ryan Lee Cartwright, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Chandra Frank, Nydia Swaby
From: Feminist Review (vol. 125, no. 1, 2020)
" I could try to write in the voice of a body easily arranged, a body requiring only a thoughtless stretch of limb or a self-controlled fidget to achieve comfort. Since that simple, graceful body is not my own, that would be the same as writing without a body. (Hershey, 2011, p. 131) By the time I arrived at the John F. Kennedy Library, I was already out of sorts. I had travelled across the country, from San Francisco to Boston, to conduct research on the origins of the 1960s US ‘War on Poverty’. The Kennedy Library, which holds these records, sits remotely at the end of a peninsula. I was staying at the nearest hotel, but it was a few miles away. Before making my reservation, I had been assured by three different hotel staff members that their shuttle to the nearest subway station, where I would catch a bus to the archive, was wheelchair accessible. It was not. What the hotel had instead was part-time access to a wheelchair accessible van; the van was primarily used for transporting cargo, but if someone made a fuss it could be called upon to transport wheelchair-users. I made a fuss. Driving the van was a rotation of men who had no knowledge of how to secure a wheelchair in the back of a van and deeply resented being assigned to cripple duty. After I waited an hour for the ‘special’ van to arrive and another few minutes for the driver to move his non-human cargo out of the way, I manoeuvred my chair up the ramp and into the van. I contorted my neck awkwardly to avoid hitting the ceiling, as whoever designed the van had not considered the fact that the wheelchair might be accompanied by a human user, whose torso might stretch taller than the chair itself. As the driver took off, I braced myself, my unsecured chair sliding to and fro with the van’s fitful, lurching movements. The motion, combined with my attempts to resist it, sent my muscles into spasms. My inevitable failure to keep my head from acquainting itself with the ceiling left me with a dull headache. The heat from waiting outside triggered a chronic neurological condition, so I was on the edge of consciousness by the time I transferred from the hotel van to the city bus that took me the rest of the way. So yes, I was out of sorts when I arrived at the gleaming Kennedy Library overlooking Boston Harbor." - Ryan Lee Cartwright
As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance
by
Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking. Indigenous resistance is a radical rejection of contemporary colonialism focused around the refusal of the dispossession of both Indigenous bodies and land. Simpson makes clear that its goal can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic. Instead, she calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.
The Decolonial Imaginary: writing Chicanas into history
by
Emma Pérez discusses the historical methodology which has created Chicano history and argues that the historical narrative has often omitted gender. She poses a theory which rejects the colonizer's methodological assumptions and examines new tools for uncovering the hidden voices of Chicanas who have been relegated to silence.
Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples
by
To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited third edition, this bestselling book includes a co-written introduction features contributions from indigenous scholars on the book's continued relevance to current research. It also features a chapter with twenty-five indigenous projects and a collection of poetry.
Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization
by
We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of "Native" and "settler" define the status of being "queer," Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society. Morgensen's analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people. Presenting a "biopolitics of settler colonialism"--in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers--Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.
The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
by
In 1761 and again in 1768, European scientists raced around the world to observe the transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. In The Transit of Empire, Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement that serves as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd argues that contemporary U.S. empire expands itself through a transferable "Indianness" that facilitates acquisitions of lands, territories, and resources. Examining an array of literary texts, historical moments, and pending legislations--from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma's vote in 2007 to expel Cherokee Freedmen to the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill--Byrd demonstrates that inclusion into the multicultural cosmopole does not end colonialism as it is purported to do. Rather, that inclusion is the very site of the colonization that feeds U.S. empire. Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground from which to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are not only visible and, in turn, grieveable, but where indigenous peoples have agency to transform life on their own lands and on their own terms.
Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies
By: Qwo-Li Driskill
From: GLQ (vol. 16, no. 1-2, 2010)
One of the strongest aspects of emergent queer of color critiques is their ability to employ a multiplicity of tactics to decode nationalist (both colonizing and colonized) strategies. Yet the absence of Native peoples and histories in formulating these emergent theories should give us pause. The fact that Native people and an analysis of ongoing colonialism for Native nations have largely been left out of queer of color critiques points to a major rupture in these theories. Native people, then, must with the very critiques that claim to be decolonial and counter hegemonic interventions for queer people of color in order to build viable theories for Native communities. Drawing on the Cherokee basketry tradition of doubleweave, in which two independent yet interwoven designs result, this essay asserts the necessity of Two-Spirit critiques that centralize Native peoples, nations, identities, land bases, and survival tactics, and invites an alliance between Native studies and queer studies through doubleweaving theories that can strengthen our theories and practices.Toward a Decolonial Feminism
By: Marìa Lugones
From: Hypatia (vol. 25, no. 4, 2010)
"In 'Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System' (Lugones 2007), I proposed to read the refotion between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of gender, race , and sexuality. By this I did not mean to add a gendered reading and a racial reading to the already understood colonial relations. Rather I proposed a rereading of modem capitalist colonial modernity itself. This is because the colonial imposition of gender cuts across questions of ecology, economics, government, refotions with the spint world, and knowledge, as well as across everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it. I propose this framework not as an abstraction from lived experience, but as a lens that enables us to see what is hidden from our understandings of both race and gender and the rehtion of each to normative heterosexuality." - Marìa LugonesRace, Tribal Nation, and Gender
By: Renya Ramirez
From: Meridians (vol. 7, no. 2, 2007)
Abstract: Too often there is the assumption in Native communities that we as indigenous women should defend a tribal nationalism that ignores sexism as part of our very survival as women as well as our liberation from colonization. In contrast, in this essay, I assert that race, tribal nation, and gender should be non-hierarchically linked as categories of analysis in order to understand the breadth of our oppression as well as the full potential of our liberation in the hope that one day we can belong as full members of our homes, communities, and tribal nations. Indeed, both indigenous women and men should develop a Native feminist consciousness based on the assumption that struggles for social autonomy will no longer include the denial of Native women's gendered concerns and rights.
Decolonizing Methodologies
by
To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory.This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.Now in its eagerly awaited third edition, this bestselling book includes a co-written introduction and features contributions from indigenous scholars on the book's continued relevance to current research. It also features a chapter with twenty-five indigenous projects and a collection of poetry.
Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues
by
In this collection, Sandra Harding interrogates some of the classic essays from the last fifteen years of feminist social science literature in order to explore the basic and troubling questions about science and social experience, gender, and politics which they raise. A valuable introduction to crucial methodological and epistemological issues.
Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis
by
This Handbook presents both a theoretical and practical approach to conducting social science research on, for, and about women. It develops an understanding of feminist research by introducing a range of feminist epistemologies, methodologies, and emergent methods that have had a significant impact on feminist research practice and women's studies scholarship. Contributors to the Second Edition continue to highlight the close link between feminist research and social change and transformation.The new edition expands the base of scholarship into new areas, with 12 entirely new chapters on topics such as the natural sciences, social work, the health sciences, and environmental studies. It extends discussion of the intersections of race, class, gender, and globalization, as well as transgender, transsexualism and the queering of gender identities. All 22 chapters retained from the first edition are updated with the most current scholarship, including a focus on the role that new technologies play in the feminist research process.Discover the latest news from Author Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber: Visit http://www.fordham.edu/Campus_Resources/eNewsroom/topstories_2397.asp
Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research
by
Researchers frequently experience sexualized interactions, sexual objectification, and harassment as they conduct fieldwork. These experiences are often left out of ethnographers' "tales from the field" and remain unaddressed within qualitative literature. Harassed argues that the androcentric, racist, and colonialist epistemological foundations of ethnographic methodology contribute to the silence surrounding sexual harassment and other forms of violence. Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards challenge readers to recognize how these attitudes put researchers at risk, further the solitude experienced by researchers, lead others to question the validity of their work, and, in turn, negatively impact the construction of ethnographic knowledge. To improve methodological training, data collection, and knowledge produced by all researchers, Harassed advocates for an embodied approach to ethnography that reflexively engages with the ways in which researchers' bodies shape the knowledge they produce. By challenging these assumptions, the authors offer an opportunity for researchers, advisors, and educators to consider the multiple ways in which good ethnographic research can be conducted. Beyond challenging current methodological training and mentorship, Harassed opens discussions about sexual harassment and violence in the social sciences in general.
Becoming Method(ologist): A feminist posthuman autoethnography of the becoming of a posthuman methodology
By: Katie Warfield
From: Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (vol. 10, no. 2-3, 2019)
This paper contributes to the intersections of post qualitative methods, digital methods, and internet studies, by describing the becoming of a digital posthuman visual method. I use posthuman autoethnography to argue that in the production of this method, the “auto” or my academic selfhood is decentered and entangled amidst an assemblage of material, discursive, and affective forces such as neoliberalism, Trump era terror, and dataism. I introduce a multitude of data points typically not made to matter but through which these material, discursive and affective forces importantly flowed in this production of this method: emails, personal correspondences, restaurant conversations, self-reflection, conferences talks and responses to conference talks. I focus specifically on the moments where the values and principles of feminist posthumanism were jarred and destabilized or where I was made to choose between foregoing my values or redesign my method and myself as methodologist. I argue academics have a response-ability to show both the forces at play behind the becoming of qualitative methods and knowledge in academia.Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography
By: Savannah Shange
From: Transforming Anthropology (vol. 27, no. 1, 2019)
Written at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, this essay is an ethnography of social death in gentrifying San Francisco. I argue the gendered and raced patterns of school discipline at a San Francisco high school help us apprehend the afterlife of slavery. Within the context of schooling, the particular association of Black girls as loud and disobedient is well‐documented in the literature. Using flesh (Spillers ) as a hermeneutic to understand Black embodiment in the late liberal US, the essay centers on two young women who are targeted for school push out. Ultimately, the self‐making strategies employed by young Black women in San Francisco flummox the progressive political project and model “Black girl ordinary” as a practice of ethical refusal, both within and beyond the academy.Toward a Trans method, or Reciprocity as a Way of Life
By: Chase Joynt, Jules Rosskam
From: Feminist Media Histories (vol. 7, no. 1, 2021)
It is reductive yet accurate to assert that Chase Joynt and Jules Rosskam first met because they are both trans people who make documentary films. While the alignment of these affinities does not necessarily prefigure a friendship—in fact, many would argue and experience the opposite—they have found kinship in their shared approach to positions as institutionally embedded academics who are also publicly exhibiting artists. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s “Friendship as a Way of Life” (1997) and the cross-disciplinary, conversational theory making of Lisa Duggan and José Muñoz, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, and Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, they use dialogue to extend the intimate interdisciplinary legacies and potentials of thinkers collaboratively discussing social issues. Together, they ask what might be possible in envisioning, theorizing, and enacting a trans cinematic method—a praxis for artists and scholars alike to be in meaningful, mutually supportive, world-sustaining relationships.
Black Looks: Race and Representation
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In the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship--in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film--and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: "the essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert." As students, scholars, activists, intellectuals, and any other readers who have engaged with the book since its original release in 1992 can attest, that's exactly what these pieces do.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
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Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities--race, class, gender, and sexuality--systemic to women of color oppression and liberation." Reissued here, forty years after its inception, this anniversary edition contains a new preface by Moraga reflecting on Bridge's "living legacy" and the broader community of women of color activists, writers, and artists whose enduring contributions dovetail with its radical vision. Further features help set the volume's historical context, including an extended introduction by Moraga from the 2015 edition, a statement written by Gloria Anzaldúa in 1983, and visual art produced during the same period by Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, Yolanda López, and others, curated by their contemporary, artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez. Bridge continues to reflect an evolving definition of feminism, one that can effectively adapt to and help inform an understanding of the changing economic and social conditions of women of color in the United States and throughout the world.
Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics
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Winner, 2023 NCA Diamond Anniversary Book Award Winner, 2023 RSA Fellows' Early Career Award Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics explores how race, migration, gender, and disability entwine in conceptions of deserving citizens. V. Jo Hsu explores three archives of trans and queer Asian American (QTAPI) rhetorics, considering a range of texts including oral histories, photography, personal essays, and performance showcases. To demonstrate how QTAPI use personal narrative to critique and revise the conditions of their exclusion, Hsu forwards a critical approach to storytelling, homing, which deliberately engages sites of alienation and belonging. Through a practice of diasporic listening, Hsu tracks confluences among seemingly divergent journeys and locates trans and queer Asian American experiences within broader US and global politics. The stories at the heart of Constellating Home center the voices of trans and nonbinary people, disabled people, and others often overlooked in conceptions of US citizenry. Hsu's analyses demonstrate the inextricability of Asian American activism from queer politics, disability activism, and racial justice, and they consider how stories network individual experiences with resonant histories and struggles. Finding unlikely intimacies among individual and communal histories, Constellating Home provides tools for fostering mutual care, revealing harmful social patterns, and orienting shared values and politics.
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
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"In the last several years, Black feminism has reemerged as the analytical framework for the activist response to the oppression of trans women of color, the fight for reproductive rights, and, of course, the movement against police abuse and violence. The most visible organizations and activists connected to the Black Lives Matter movement speak openly about how Black feminism shapes their politics and strategies today. The interviews I have compiled in this book -- with the three authors of the Combahee River Collective Statement, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Alicia Garza, and historian and activist Barbara Ransby -- are an attempt to show how these politics remain historically vibrant and relevant to the struggles of today. As Demita Frazier says, the point of talking about Combahee is not to be nostalgic; rather, we talk about it because Black women are still not free." -- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, from the introduction.
Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife
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"In Resurrecting the Black Body, Tonia Sutherland examines the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans--and the records that document them--from slavery through the present, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of remembering, and the rights and desires of humans to be forgotten. From the popular image of Gordon (also known as "Whipped Peter"), photographs of the lynching of Jesse Washington, and the video of George Floyd's murder to DNA, holograms, and posthumous communication, Sutherland draws on critical archival, digital, and cultural studies to make legible Black bodies and lives forever captured in cycles of memorialization and commodification. If the Black digital afterlife is rooted in historical bigotry and inspires new forms of racialized aggression, Resurrecting the Black Body asks what other visions of life and remembrance are possible, illuminating the unique ways that Black cultures have fought against the silence and erasure of oblivion"-- Provided by publisher.
Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography
By: Savannah Shange
From: Transforming Anthropology (vol. 27, no. 1, 2019)
Written at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, this essay is an ethnography of social death in gentrifying San Francisco. I argue the gendered and raced patterns of school discipline at a San Francisco high school help us apprehend the afterlife of slavery. Within the context of schooling, the particular association of Black girls as loud and disobedient is well‐documented in the literature. Using flesh (Spillers ) as a hermeneutic to understand Black embodiment in the late liberal US, the essay centers on two young women who are targeted for school push out. Ultimately, the self‐making strategies employed by young Black women in San Francisco flummox the progressive political project and model “Black girl ordinary” as a practice of ethical refusal, both within and beyond the academy.In Search of the Black Women's History Archive
By: Ashley Farmer
From: Modern American History (vol. 1, no. 2, 2018)
Questions of evidence have sat at the center of black women's history since the field entered the academy over thirty years ago. Historians of black women's lives and labors have filled bookshelves by “mining the forgotten” to render them visible. Scholarship pioneered in the 1980s and 1990s established black women as prominent and indispensable historical actors, and key to understanding such eras as slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement. Subsequent works built upon the bedrock that these initial studies provided, incorporating nuanced gender analyses into the history of black women's thought, experiences, and political action. The past ten years have seen a proliferation of publications that have extended the reach of the field to include such genres and approaches as girlhood studies, intellectual history, and black internationalism. This groundswell of research has foregrounded a persistent methodological quandary for scholars of black women's history: how should they address the paradox of simultaneously finding copious archival records on some black women, while also accounting for the deafening archival silence on others?Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies
By: Sami Schalk, Jina Kim
From: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (vol. 46, no. 1, 2020)
This article envisions and details a critical framework we term feminist-of-color disability studies. In offering a feminist disability studies grounded in the genealogies of US feminist-of-color theory, we identify, challenge, and counter the tendency of feminist disability studies scholars to exclude the intellectual output of women and queers of color. We contend that feminists of color have long written and theorized on topics of illness, health, and disability, yet their vital insights remain largely disregarded by practitioners of feminist disability studies. Within the article, we detail critical methods and approaches essential to integrating race into feminist disability studies. Then, building upon Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s groundbreaking “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” we identify and discuss what we name as the central domains of feminist-of-color disability studies: discourse, state violence, health/care, and activism. Overall, this article aims to trace an alternate lineage of feminist disability studies that centralizes the scholarship of feminists of color by identifying potential sites of analysis and opportunities for cross-pollination as well as providing a substantive foundation for future feminist-of-color disability studies scholarship across a variety of disciplines.Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender
By: Renya Ramirez
From: Meridians (vol. 7, no. 2, 2007)
Abstract: Too often there is the assumption in Native communities that we as indigenous women should defend a tribal nationalism that ignores sexism as part of our very survival as women as well as our liberation from colonization. In contrast, in this essay, I assert that race, tribal nation, and gender should be non-hierarchically linked as categories of analysis in order to understand the breadth of our oppression as well as the full potential of our liberation in the hope that one day we can belong as full members of our homes, communities, and tribal nations. Indeed, both indigenous women and men should develop a Native feminist consciousness based on the assumption that struggles for social autonomy will no longer include the denial of Native women's gendered concerns and rights.Ways of Knowing, Feeling, Being, and Doing: Toward an Asian American and Pacific Islander Feminist Epistemology
By: Jennifer Yee
From: Amerasia Journal (vol. 35, no. 2, 2009)
Yee provides an overview of the Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) feminist epistemology and presents its implications. Advocating that AAPI women develop a feminist epistemology in order to subvert oppressive familial and community structures has tremendous implications. First, as a solution to a problem, this theory may seem to imply that individual consciousness-raising can effect social transformation without changes in the political, economic, global and social context that have created and fostered this oppressive hierarchy. Second, the theory implies that relationships in the family and community structures can change and be maintained. A third implication of this theory involves what happens during and after AAPI women come to identify with or shift to a feminist epistemology. Moreover, Yee also suggests that women and men must both recognize and work toward a shift in values, beliefs, and attitudes about traditional gender roles, and sometimes defy prevailing expectations of family, in order to move toward a feminist moment.
Living a Feminist Life
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In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique--often by naming and calling attention to problems--and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions--such as forming support systems--to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.
Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism
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In Muddying the Waters, Richa Nagar uses stories, encounters, and anecdotes as well as methodological reflections, to grapple with the complexity of working through solidarities, responsibility, and ethics while involved in politically engaged scholarship. Experiences that range from the streets of Dar es Salaaam to farms and development offices in North India inform discussion of the labor and politics of co-authorship, translation and genre blending in research and writing that cross multiple--and often difficult--borders, Nagar links the implicit assumptions, issues, and questions involved with scholarship and political action, and explores the epistemological risks and possibilities of creative research that brings these into intimate dialogue. Daringly self-conscious, Muddying the Waters reveals a politically engaged research and writer working to become "radically vulnerable," and on the ways a focus on such radical vulnerability could allow a re-imagining of collaboration that opens new avenues to collective dreaming and laboring across sociopolitical, geographical, linguistic, and institutional borders.
No Archive Will Restore You
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At once memoir, theory, poetic prose, and fragment, NO ARCHIVE WILL RESTORE YOU is a feverish meditation on the body. Departing from Antonio Gramsci's summons to compile an inventory of the historical traces left in each of us, Singh engages with both the impossibility and urgent necessity of crafting an archive of the body. Through reveries on the enduring legacies of pain, desire, sexuality, race, and identity, she asks us to sense and feel what we have been trained to disavow, to re-member the body as more than itself. "I am in love with this book. It is so smart, so lucid, so necessary, so honest, so compelling, so edifying, so terrifying, so poignant, so wise. No archive may restore us, but Julietta Singh is exactly the kind of company I want for the ride, to bear witness to the pains and pleasures of our being here, in these bodies, in these times." Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts "If Gramsci proposes the task of archiving - and analyzing - the detritus that history has deposited in us, Julietta Singh has a counter-proposition for what to do with that depository. What to call her method: Anarchivist? Gynarchivist? Though steeped in theory, it's adamantly corporeal, and deeply moving. Returning to various crime scenes, she examines the traces left upon her body by ravages historical, political, physical and sentimental. But she also courageously accounts for the shit she herself produces: 'I want to be responsible to and for my body, for everything it yields.' Attending carefully, even lovingly, to all that's come into and out of her body - food, pain, flesh, life, feces, feral moans, poetry - she invites you, reader, to take stock of the fecundity of your own dis-ordered archive." Barbara Browning, author of The Gift
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
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How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor Adrienne Maree Brown finds the answer in something she calls 'Pleasure Activism,' a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism.
Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy
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The aim of this volume is to open up reflection on the nature of vulnerability, the responsibilities owed to the vulnerable, who bears these responsibilities, and how they are best fulfilled. In canvassing responses to these questions, the contributors engage with a range of ethical traditionsand with issues in contemporary political philosophy and bioethics. Some essays in the volume explore the connections between vulnerability, autonomy, dignity, and justice. Other essays engage with a feminist ethics of care to articulate the relationship between vulnerability, dependence, and care.These theoretical approaches are complemented by detailed examination of vulnerability in specific contexts, including disability; responsibilities to children; intergenerational justice; and care of the elderly. The essays thus address fundamental questions concerning our moral duties to each otheras individuals and as citizens. Contributing significantly to the development of an ethics of vulnerability, this volume opens up promising avenues for future research in feminist philosophy, moral and political philosophy, and bioethics.
Becoming Method(ologist): A feminist posthuman autoethnography of the becoming of a posthuman methodology
By: Katie Warfield
From: Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (vol. 10, no. 2-3, 2019)
This paper contributes to the intersections of post qualitative methods, digital methods, and internet studies, by describing the becoming of a digital posthuman visual method. I use posthuman autoethnography to argue that in the production of this method, the “auto” or my academic selfhood is decentered and entangled amidst an assemblage of material, discursive, and affective forces such as neoliberalism, Trump era terror, and dataism. I introduce a multitude of data points typically not made to matter but through which these material, discursive and affective forces importantly flowed in this production of this method: emails, personal correspondences, restaurant conversations, self-reflection, conferences talks and responses to conference talks. I focus specifically on the moments where the values and principles of feminist posthumanism were jarred and destabilized or where I was made to choose between foregoing my values or redesign my method and myself as methodologist. I argue academics have a response-ability to show both the forces at play behind the becoming of qualitative methods and knowledge in academia.
Epistemology of the Closet
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What is at stake in male homo/heterosexual definition? Through readings of Melville, Nietzsche, Wilde, James and Proust, the author argues that the vexed imperatives to specify straight and gay identities have become central to every important form of knowledge of the 20th century.
Ethnomusicology, Queerness, Masculinity: Silence=Death
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This open access book explores the disciplinary, disciplined, and recent interdisciplinary sites and productions of ethnomusicology and queerness, arguing that both academic realms are founded upon a destructive masculinity--indissolubly linked to coloniality and epistemic hegemony--and marked by a monologic, ethnocentric silencing of embodied, same-sex desire. Ethnomusicology's fetishization of masculinizing fieldwork; queerness's functioning as Anglophone master category; and both domains' devaluation of sensuality and experience, concomitant with an adherence to provincial, Western conceptions of knowledge production, are revealed as precluding the possibilities for equitable, dialogic pluriversality. Enlisting the sonic as theoretical intervention, the disciplined/disciplining ethno and queer are reimagined in relation to negative emotions and intractable affect, ultimately vanquished, and replaced by explorations of sound, sex/uality, and experiential somaticity within a protean, postdisciplinary space of material/epistemic equity. This uncompromising, long-overdue critique will be of interest to researchers and students from numerous theoretical backgrounds, including music, sound, gender, queer, and postcolonial/decolonial studies.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
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Since its publication in 1990, Gender Trouble has become one of the key works of contemporary feminist theory, and an essential work for anyone interested in the study of gender, queer theory, or the politics of sexuality in culture.
Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability
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In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favor of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political activism and political recognition. What happened in the last few decades to prompt such an extensive rethinking of our understanding of gendered embodiment? How did a stigmatized identity become so central to U.S. and European articulations of self? And how have people responded to the new definitions and understanding of sex and the gendered body? In Trans*, Jack Halberstam explores these recent shifts in the meaning of the gendered body and representation, and explores the possibilities of a nongendered, gender-optional, or gender-queer future.
Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation
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Even as feminism has become increasingly central to our ideas about institutions, relationships, and everyday life, the term used to diagnose the problem--"patriarchy"--is used so loosely that it has lost its meaning. In Vexy Thing Imani Perry resurrects patriarchy as a target of critique, recentering it to contemporary discussions of feminism through a social and literary analysis of cultural artifacts from the Enlightenment to the present. Drawing on a rich array of sources--from nineteenth-century slavery court cases and historical vignettes to writings by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde and art by Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu--Perry shows how the figure of the patriarch emerged as part and parcel of modernity, the nation-state, the Industrial Revolution, and globalization. She also outlines how digital media and technology, neoliberalism, and the security state continue to prop up patriarchy. By exploring the past and present of patriarchy in the world we have inherited and are building for the future, Perry exposes its mechanisms of domination as a necessary precursor to dismantling it.
Whose feminism is it anyway? The unspoken racism of the trans inclusion debate
By: Emi Koyama
From: The Sociological Review (Vol. 68, no.4, 2020)
This essay was first published on Emi Koyama’s website eminism.org in 2000. Koyama examines how constructs of universal womanhood have operated to exclude many from feminist spaces. Much of the language surrounding trans identities and bodies has changed in the 20 years since its authorship. Yet, the central tensions, illustrated through a critical account of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s trans-exclusion policy, remain. Koyama’s powerful argument that ‘no-penis’ policies are inherently racist and classist continues to offer an important challenge to white feminists, be they trans or cis.EID login required
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