Toward a Feminist Turn

JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies

This article reflects on the long-term and recent developments in the interdisciplinary field of American studies and its imbrications with its cultural and political contexts. Pushing back against premature assertions of feminism's obsolescence, I argue that scholars and teachers of American studies and media studies must take the popular seriously―popular film and television as well as popular political movements. Given the growing demand from students for a deeper and more sustained engagement with intersectional feminism, the article works through some short case studies to urge even the confirmed feminists to rethink and refresh their approaches to teaching and performing scholarship to best provide students with the theoretical tools to strengthen and define their feminism as a discipline as well as an attitude. Inspired by the popular 2014 movement, "The Year of Reading Women," the #metoo and #timesup phenomena, and the popularity of and backlash against celebri...

Feminist Review, 2021

From yoga to the Anthropocene to feminist theory, recent calls to 'decolonise' have resulted in a resurgence of the term. This article problematises the language of the decolonial within feminist theory and pedagogy, problematising its rhetoric, particularly in the context of the US. The article considers the romanticised transnational solidarities produced by decolonial rhetoric within feminist theory, asking, among other questions: What are the assumptions underpinning the decolonial project in feminist theory? How might the language of 'decolonising' serve to actually de-politicise feminism, while keeping dominant race logics in place? Furthermore, how does decolonial rhetoric in sites such as the US continue to romanticise feminist solidarities while positioning non-US-born women of colour at the pedagogical end of feminist theory? I argue that 'decolonial', in its current proliferation, is mainstreamed uncritically while serving as a catachresis within feminist discourse. This article asks feminism to reconsider its ease at an incitement to decolonise as a caution for resisting the call to decolonise as simply another form of multicultural liberalism that masks oppression through imagined transnational solidarities, while calling attention to the homogenous construction of the 'Global South' within decolonising discourse.

philoSOPHIA, 2017

The last election cycle in the United States featured an unprecedented moment in history. For the first time in the life of the nation, a woman was the presidential nominee of a major political party. The feeling in my heart of hearts is that, because of the axis of race, Hillary Clinton's political agenda and my own political priorities as a black woman may have nothing in common. Upon winning, her administration might have proven me wrong, but this is where I begin my encounter with her candidacy for president. I begin with the assumption that, as a white woman, her fight is not my fight. 1 Perhaps my ambivalence is really less about the kind of president Hillary Clinton herself would have been, and more about the kind of feminism that I've come to reasonably expect from white women. It's easy enough for white women (like Hillary Clinton) to assume that their concerns are sufficiently representative of all women's concerns, because the whiteness of their womanhood often serves to center not only their conceptions of what it means to be a woman, but also their understanding of gender oppression, and the content of their feminist program of liberation. The black womanhood that arises at the intersection of gender oppression and racial oppression may not figure into such accounts, precisely because, in being thus centered in terms of whiteness, these accounts remain blind to their own racialization. I could be wrong about this. Indeed, I want to be wrong about this. Nevertheless, my hesitation toward Clinton's candidacy seems to be part of the much larger stakes of our exchange about continental feminism. I understand

Hypatia

Gender <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&amp;"/> History, 1999

Histories are re-writing what Sherna Berger Gluck famously called the ‘master historical narrative’ of the US WLM, especially in historicizing the efforts of feminists of colour. This paper echoes this by exploring how white feminists embraced racial justice politics, particularly during the early 1970s, when it is often assumed that white feminists failed to enact racial justice. In historicizing the efforts of white anti-imperialist feminists in greater Boston, I maintain that the ‘master historical narrative’ wrote not only black, Chicana and multiracial feminisms out of history, but that it skewed our understanding of the race politics of white, US feminists.

European Quarterly of Political Attitudes and Mentalities, 2013

2011

OF DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico

Journal of feminist scholarship, 2011

2013

The article explores two intertwined ideas: that the United States is a settler colonial nation-state, and settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process. The article engages Native feminist theories to excavate the deep connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy, highlighting five central challenges that Native feminist theories pose to gender and women’s studies. From problematizing settler colonialism and its intersections to questioning academic participation in Indigenous dispossession, responding to these challenges requires a significant departure from how gender and women’s studies is regularly understood and taught. Too often, the consideration of Indigenous peoples remains rooted in understanding colonialism as an historical point in time away from which our society has progressed. Centering settler colonialism within gender and women’s studies instead exposes the still-existing structure of settler colonialism and its powerful effects on Indigenous peoples and settlers. Taking as its audience practitioners of both “whitestream” and other feminisms and writing in conversation with a long history of Native feminist theorizing, the article offers critical suggestions for the meaningful engagement of Native feminisms. Overall, it aims to persuade readers that attending to the links between heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism is intellectually and politically imperative for all peoples living within settler colonial contexts.