Lex's McDuffie post

Erik McDuffie's Sojourning for Freedom (2011) uses historical methods to demonstrate that black left feminists were the first to articulate an intersectional feminist analysis. In doing so, he uses a transnational women of color intersectional methodology as both an analytical framework and part of his object of study. The "alternative genealogy" (McDuffie, 2011, p. 16) that he has constructed demonstrates the contingent and somewhat uneven trajectories of black left feminism.

At the beginning of chapter 5, "We are Sojourners for Our Rights," McDuffie states that the Sojourners, the organization that is the focus of that chapter, provides a lens through which to better understand black left feminism during the Cold War. (2011, p. 161). Employing a practice, object, or in this case, an organization as something to look through to better know or explain a larger phenomenon is useful for my own work. I found McDuffie's Chapter 5 to be one of the most effective in his book, in part because of the way he set up his argument for that chapter. Using noninvasive prenatal screening both as a technology and a practice as a lens through which to understand how knowledge gets produced and maintained about disability in clinical settings.

McDuffie details how black left feminists during the Cold War continued to theorize triple oppression and form the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, even as the larger context became increasingly difficult and altered public perceptions of both communism and black feminist organizing. The links, for instance, between the Cold War's emphasis on familialism and the Sojourners' use of essentialized gender roles represent a break with previous black left feminism, and interrupt a linear conception of history by demonstrating that more radical gender reforms had been called for as early as the 1930s.

Through this example, and others throughout the book, it becomes clear that McDuffie's use of "conjunctural description" (Clifford, 1997) is very effective in that it demonstrates the (sometimes) uneven interactions betweeen structure and agency. McDuffie's use of a historical moment as a "lens" will hopefully be useful for my work, but I also wonder about the limits of that methodological device in speaking about the present. That is, does it work better in a historical setting? I'll have to think through this as my object of study is sort of a moving target. One of the things that McDuffie does so well is contextualize his arguments through his previous chapters and arguments. I think he does this so skillfully we don't even notice (at least I didn't until I went back and looked over my notes). This is more challenging for me to do since I'm not technically doing historical methods. I'll need to contextualize things, of course. But one of the questions people have asked me about my proposal is how I'll show the difference in terms of what was going on, cultural production wise, before this new technology came on the scene. I'm not sure yet how to deal with this-is doing a thematic review of the literature enough? There are similar monographs and qualitative articles that deal with similar subject matter, and a lot of them are from the 1990s. Should I do a kind of historiography (even if just in my introduction) to set the stage? I was not planning on constructing a comparative argument in terms of, that was then, this is now. It's not that simple. But how do I show the contingent nature of the present moment without history? McDuffie's book makes me realize the potential effectiveness of historical work.

One of the other merits of this book is how it could be used for courses. As Emily ( I think it was Emily) mentioned, the common narrative is that intersectionality began in the 1980s. The utility of McDuffie's work is far-reaching in terms of its implications for how we as feminists conceptualize feminism itself. Decentering and interrupting the "wave" metaphor, this work responds to the deconstructive moment of poststructuralism by providing an alternative historical reconstruction.

Indira Neill Hoch

Erik McDuffie’s Sojourning for Freedom a “black left feminism” framework to place the lives and actions of black female American Communist Party members into a genealogy of black feminism that has previously focused on the 1960s and 1970s. He draws from archival material (personal writings, CPUSA records, FBI surveillance files, etc.) and interviews in order to reconstruct the personal, professional and activist lives of women tied to CPUSA and trace personal continuities and disjuncture as well as how these women’s lives fit into the continuities and disjuncture of the radical left more generally.

While he tries to fill in the gaps of these women’s lives, the text is filled with conditional statements and hedges. For the most part, these women did not write about themselves, and when they did, it was often part of a “communist conversion” narrative that culminated with enlistment into the party to the erasure of the particular path they took into the party and the sexism, racism, and classism they faced as part of the party many of them nonetheless felt was their best chance for effectively fighting for systematic change. When recounting their personal lives for communist documentations, the very textures of personal narrative that McDuffie is committed to articulated are smoothed out.

McDuffie’s method, and his conditional writing, drawing attention to what is circumstantial or likely, rather than confirmed, highlights the constructed nature of his method. In my own work, I come back again and again to the theme of a website’s architecture influencing the tone/texture of social interaction and usage patterns on the site. I try not to cast such statements in a technological deterministic light, even though I know some readers have taken it as such. My argument isn’t that we’re somehow locked into the coding of a site, but that prior interaction and behaviors on other websites inform subsequent sites (particularly social media sites where interaction and personal sharing are stated as explicit goals). The site is an interlocutor just as the participants on a given site take up social roles. Because coding is flexible, social media sites can “talk back” to their users.

Facebook is one such example. In 2004 one prominent feature of “the Facebook” was a field to input your class schedule (this was before you could friend people from other schools). You could use Facebook to tell whether or not someone else from your school was currently in class, or likely to be available. “Oh, well she’s in class until 1:30, so I can probably meet her for lunch after that.” Having the option to display class schedules prompted informal, in-person meetings on my small residential campus. As the site expanded, this feature was dropped. The site became less about people in your proximity, and more about maintaining relationships at a distance (everyone can be linked to everyone else, the timeline documents events that are remote from me that my friends participated in, rather than individual photo albums that may have been taken at a party I actually attended).

McDuffie is aware of these same sorts of conditional documentation and speech. In several cases, he cannot confirm if this particular individual read this bit or that bit of writing by another black leftist feminist. While women of the 1960s and 1970s may have been aware of Claudia Jones’ writings on triple exploitation after they wrote and published similar positions on the interlocking oppressions facing black women, McDuffie shows how the movement of these women through literal space, crossing Harlem, the Soviet Union, and Mississippi, along with a shared language between them in what they did write, demonstrate structural links between diverse women. The difference in trajectory between Jones, who was educated and elevated within the party, and Moore, who never finished school and came up through the “bottom” of the party at the level of on-the-ground organizing, makes their similarities all the more striking. The social architecture of CPUSA produced certain analytic perspectives that moved between and among these women, even as they may have only occasionally physically crossed paths.

The idea of a social architecture without code helps me conceptualize how social network site architecture is not a technologically deterministic argument. It is an argument about social constraint and formalization of practice. As black female CPUSA members encountered different external conditions, McDuffie traces how individual women negotiated new constraints, such as the targeting of their husbands or facing deportation themselves. With the introduction of McCarthyism, more radical concepts of sexuality and gender were subsumed in order to ensure material safety. While the women in McDuffie’s book react to constraints in different ways, there remains some ideological consistency, even if at some times it is as bare as the party still offering the best route to change. Adhering to this ideological position produced a chain or subsequent reactions, such as performing respectability. This action has repercussions that also enter the genealogy and the black feminist left.

This is a little more specific than simply arguing that every action has a reaction, because it remains that most of these women (and all of the leading women in McDuffie’s genealogy) did share the organizational tie of being members of CPUSA. Furthermore, they were women assigned formal leadership positions within the organization at various levels. What they did write about themselves was often within the context of their party activity. While McDuffie wants to cast them as women who came to the party in diverse ways, they are by-and-large women who publically did want to been see at least in the context of political action and party membership/leadership. These structures of affiliation and the reproduction of behaviors that are seen to align with affiliation of a specific group can be seen all over the internet and social network sites.

When I say “I don’t have a Facebook,” this is a (dis)affiliation move. It means more than just “I do not have a Facebook account.” I know that there will be a follow-up question. I try not to be that person who can’t shut up about how I don’t have a Facebook anymore, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m asked about it, or that many of my social behaviors are influenced by my choice to (dis)affiliate. People literally forget to invite me to social events. I never see pictures from the parties I do get invited to, and no one knows what I’m doing with my life.

I see again and again on Tumblr (my social media addiction of choice, if the semester hasn’t made it obvious) people (dis)affiliating with Facebook and instead affiliating with Tumblr. Still, they admit that they interact less with other Tumblr users when compared to when they are/were on Facebook. They “know” their Tumblr followers less than their Facebook friends, but still often say that they “like” their Tumblr followers more. They may have never spoken a word to their Tumblr users (you can send messages between users privately via the ask box, or reblog someone else’s post and add your own comment, displaying both the original and your addition on your blog), but they feel a sense of connection with them. I rarely engage directly with my Tumblr followers, but I reblog posts from them all the time. When someone reblogs a post from me, I do get a warm feeling, like we shared something because we both enjoyed the same post. It’s strange and abstract and indirect, like the crossing paths of affiliation McDuffie relies on to move between women, time, and place. I do consider the reactions of my followers when I choose to reblog something rather than simply like it. They won’t see my liked posts on their own dash, but they will see my reblogs. These are parts of the social architecture of Tumblr as a site. The code has contributed to my actions, certainly, but I’m complicit in the reproduction of behaviors, both my own and others’.

Michael - McDuffie

            Sojourning for Freedom is the kind of work I always love to read, specifically due to its topic. Any work that recovers the actions and thoughts of radical women of color, pre-1960s, is of great value to academia and the public. McDuffie used archival materials, such as personal papers, periodicals, FBI surveillance files, and the records of the US Communist Party and other non-Communist-affiliated black protest groups, to shed light on the experiences of black women communists and their influence on the black feminism of the 1960s. He also attempted to fill the gaps from archival sources by collecting oral histories from those women he centers in his analysis, as well as their spouses, friends, and family members. In the end, this monograph is what McDuffie calls “an alternative genealogy.” Beyond the actual content of his book, McDuffie’s methodology offers several insights that I can connect to my own work, even though I am not doing historical work. I was particularly interested in his approach to collectivities, mobility, and historical progression.

            McDuffie notes that previous work on Old Left radical black women had largely centered on individual women. His work is a wider analysis of black leftist women’s collective engagement with black radicalism. He says, “Calling attention to black left feminism demonstrated how black women collectively forged their own coherent, free-standing, radical praxis within this larger black radical tradition” (15). He emphasizes the importance of black women’s relationships, and it was through these relationships that black leftist thought emerged, rather than a result of an extraordinary individual.

            I intend to take a similar approach in my work. I want to tap into the collective identities of Latina artist in Chicago and San Antonio. As individuals, their racialization and gender results in marginalization both within the art world and their everyday lives. So, they often turn to other Latina artists for support. Through these connections they are able to share knowledge but also create alternative spaces of their own. It is these collective actions and affinities that I am most intrigued by. What kind of knowledge can we all learn from them to address injustice? McDuffie mentions Chela Sandoval’s theory of oppositional consciousness. Black left feminists’ oppositional consciousness led them to create collective identities that were always in the making and led them on multiple paths through the Communist Left. So, what does current Latina social justice artist oppositional consciousness look like? What paths have they traveled?

            Along with ideological and tactical mobility, black left feminists were also physically mobile. They collectively pursued a transnational approach. The influences on these women extended outside of the US borders. As a result, McDuffie follows these women to the Soviet Union, because “traveling to the Soviet Union was vital to nurturing black leftist women’s global outlooks” (18). He does not allow US borders to bound his inquiry, and weaves transnational processes within his narrative.

            I will be focusing on artists in Chicago and San Antonio, but that does not mean I should only look at processes within those cities. The may travel to other cities and other countries. Beyond traveling, they may have strong connections in other places that are important for their own consciousness. For example, the artist I’m currently working with has done work in Mexico City and Iceland. These experiences have no doubt played important roles in her understanding of herself and her work. I think it will be important to consider the role of technology, specifically social media, in these artists building and maintaining transnational networks.

            Lastly, McDuffie does not take a view of history that sees it as progressive and linear. Instead, he says, “this book highlights both the breaks and the continuities in the black freedom movement and black women’s struggles before and after the red scare by examining the personal and political costs of anti-Communism on black left feminists” (22). Contrary to the wave model of development, McDuffie takes an approach that understands the history of feminist thought as filled with moments of simultaneous disruption and continuity. Black left feminist did pass on their knowledge to the next generation, but various social, political, and personal events also created various disruptions in collective identity formation. We tend to want to create clean, progressive narratives about the topics we research. McDuffie shows that this isn’t necessary.

            While I am not doing historical research, I still think his methodology is useful. The artists I work with are not necessarily always progressing towards something better. They may have experiences that serve as shifting points. They may make mistakes and learn from them. Some of their strategies in working with the state or non-profits may not go the way they expected. It will be helpful to take this into consideration when doing my research. Some things may progress while others are met with constant breaks.

Jody-- McDuffie

Two methodologies McDuffie (2011) employs are relevant for my future project on biomedicalization and transgender identities.  First, he draws connections across time, paying attention to continuities and ruptures.  He shows how concepts developed by black left feminists were picked up by, or predated, black feminists organizing in the 1960s and 1970s.  For example, the idea of “triple oppression,” formulated by black left feminists, reflected what we would now call an intersectional theory of oppression.  McDuffie highlights personal connections between the earlier movement and radical activists during the so called “second wave,” such as Angela Davis.

The second methodological approach I find useful is the type of questions McDuffie (2011) asks.  “I am concerned with understanding the process of how a small group of black women, who hailed from divergent social backgrounds and geographic locations…forged a dynamic community of left-wing activists, and profoundly shaped modern black feminism,” (16, emphasis in original).  Asking a “how question” is different than asking what? or why? questions.  The “how” is important to McDuffie’s project because it underlies a historical search for processes, not just people and places.

Connecting across historical times with varying politics and varying biopolitics will be a central element for my project.  Tracing the continuities and ruptures between a pre-medicalization era, the hey day of the gender clinics and development of a diagnosis, and the current biomedicalized era should be part of the project’s historical piece.  Additionally, investigating how shifts in the relationship between transgender and biomedicine occurred will require me to pay attention to the people involved.  I will look at how trans-activists and medical providers constructed a medical category, sometimes cooperatively but sometimes through trans individuals and trans advocacy organizations pushing back against doctors and medical institutions.  I will also look at how trans individuals navigate contemporary biomedical diagnoses and relationships with service providers.  How the state limits and often refuses to recognize transgender subjects will be important to my analysis of sovereignty.

What McDuffie’s methodology makes me think about is the importance of paying attention to the changes across time in all of the “hows.”  By including more than a superficial historical piece in the project, and by not assuming a linear trajectory or progression, the complexities of the relationship between transgender, biomedicine, and sovereignty will be better illuminated.

Eric McDuffie. 2011. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rannie McDuffie

In this book, McDuffie uses a historical methodology, tracing black women’s journeys through the Communist Left movement and how that led them to construct radical black feminist politics, which is the groundwork for black feminism of the 1970s. In order to carry this out, McDuffie uses a variety of different sources of materials: Archival records, personal records from the women featured in the book and their Communist writings, records from various Communist organizations, FBI surveillance files, newspapers and interviews conducted both by the author and interviews conducted by others. The interviews were carried out with the women themselves as well as their spouses, children and associates , to create oral histories of the movement, the women involved and the time period.

I found this to be an interesting way of constructing the narrative, almost like reading a novel on the subject. This is quite different from what I’ve seen previously in academic writing. Perhaps this is the result of using several different sources of materials (like the archival records and interviews), which allows the author to come to such conclusions. For example, when discussing Thompson and Edward’s trip to the Soviet Union, McDuffie explains not just their behaviors, but also their thoughts: “The Soviet Union helped these women come to think critically about gender, race and class in a global context. They also wrestled with Soviet contradictions.” (p. 63). I am somewhat torn in what I think of this. McDuffie does not tell us how he knows what these women were thinking (did it come from interviews with themselves or others in the movement? Or is McDuffie drawing these conclusions from texts and speeches that these women wrote?). This is just one example, but it is indicative of how McDuffie tells the story of these Black Communist Feminists. The academic texts I have read are usually quite careful in citing their sources and information is presented on its own, with the analysis of the writer. At the same time, McDuffie’s text flows very well and is a comfortable read. The narrative is quite easy to follow and I found most of it quite convincing. I do know that I would not get away with academic writing like this, which perhaps just reflects how social science oriented my discipline is. That being said, I believe that this book could be of interest to people outside of the academy, not just for its subject matter, but also because the topic is made quite accessible with the writing. Perhaps this is one of the trade-offs of writing in the academy, you can either be very specific in citing sources and careful in analyzing and drawing conclusions, and then you run the risk of writing dry and difficult prose. On the other hand, being less clear about where you got your information and how you are interpreting it for the sake of constructing a clear narrative, can serve to make the book more accessible to people outside of the academy, which is probably good thing.

I also appreciated the tracing of intersectionality so far back in history, for example seen in the opening quote: “Over the whole land, Negro women meet this triple exploitation- as workers, as women, as Negroes.” (Louise Thompson, “Toward a brighter dawn”). Later in the introduction, McDuffie explains that the idea of triple oppression was the key historically significant part of the Black left feminists. Overlooking race and gender within worker’s movements is further victimization of Black women because it does not address their experiences or things that may be important to them. Also, one system of oppression cannot be dismantled without other oppressive systems also falling apart.

Intersectional methodologies can also be very important in work on violence against women, because survivors tend to be such a heterogeneous group. This is why flexibility is very necessary in the community response to domestic violence, for example, because women will have very diverse needs. For example, some women may need help with housing, while others face serious psychological issues that they may need counseling to help with. I think that an important part of intersectionality is not just that people live at the intersections of different demographic categories, but also that salience of certain identities is different for them (and may also change over time). In this way, race only becomes important when women view it as an important category of difference that has impacted their lives.

Like McDuffie discusses, the women of the Black Communist party generally did not examine things with a sexual orientation lens, nor see domestic violence as part of their cause. Today, feminists generally argue that domestic violence is an incredibly important part of women’s oppression by men. This can be seen in a literal way on women’s bodies, and with silencing of the issue in families and communities, but also as a more general form of oppressing women and showing that men have power over them.

Finally, I found it interesting that many of the women in the book refused to identify as feminists, even though McDuffie labels them as such. The women did not identify as feminists because they associated the term with the National Women’s Party, which they saw as bourgeois and separatist. That organization also became more conservative, racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Communist with time. I agree with McDuffie that the beliefs of the women in the book are in line with much of modern feminist thought and if they hadn’t perceived the National Women’s Party so negatively, they have used the term for themselves. It is also possible that the term feminism was too associated with White women, and with race being such a central construct of this struggle, that black women wanted to distance themselves from white women’s movements.  However, labeling people as something that they actively resisted made me a little hesitant, because we have so often emphasized listening to people’s voices and allowing them to self-identify in whatever ways they want.

Emily Ruehs - Sojourning for Freedom (McDuffie)

In comparison to the last several readings, I had a much easier time following both the argument and the theory/methodology behind this book. As I am already somewhat familiar with intersectionality and Black feminism (though not necessarily Black left feminism), I could easily pull out some important and useful themes in the book. At the same time, through its focus on Black left feminism and a much more in depth and complete history of concepts such as intersectionality, I felt this book to be incredibly useful for both my research and how I understand and teach intersectionality.

In the introduction, McDuffie states that this book is meant to be a “recovery” of Black left feminism. As with many other social movements and political ideas, McDuffe argues that Black women communists were foundational in many social movements, although they are rarely given credit. McDuffie’s goal is to move these thinkers from the margins to the centers in order to understand social movements in the U.S. McDuffie explains: “Given black women’s location at the interstices of multiple oppressions, black left feminists charged that black women across the African diaspora, not white working-class men, represented the vanguard for transformative change globally” (4). Although he does not label it as such, I believe that this sentences sums up the methodology behind the book: by centering the struggle of women facing “triple oppression” we can uncover transformative change. In my own work, I am already trying to do something similar by centering the border crossing experiences of individuals who represent multiple oppressions. While previous scholars have looked at human smuggling as a standard experience (with some notable exceptions of those who study violence against women on the border), I am proposing that we understand this experience by centering the most vulnerable migrants: children, women, and Central Americans, in particular. Drawing upon McDuffie, the idea here is to look at the center of multiple oppressions as the first step in understanding both the experience of immigration and to see how to transform the border region.

One aspect that I found compelling and important to McDuffie’s methodology was his decision to forgo the oft-used understanding of feminism as several waves. He explains that this understanding obscures the important work the Black left feminists have been doing through these “waves.”  Instead, he “recover[s] these linkages” (13) of intergenerational connections and, again, centers the experience of Black left feminist whose work does not fit neatly into the white-women-led waves. In terms of my work, restructuring how we think about history could prove to be useful. Like feminism, immigration is certainly looked it in terms of “waves.” In fact, my original plan (which has since been changed) was to look at some recent shifts in immigration and how these shift impacted smuggling networks. However, following McDuffie’s reasoning, I am now challenged to look at how immigrants who have been at the “margins” might have a different story to tell about the projection of immigration history. In particular, I wonder if looking at youth migrants (who are rarely centered in research) would have a different response to economic or border control trends. Although I would have to do more historical research before exploring this further, I do think the idea of restructuring history and recovering linkages and connections could be very useful.

On page 5, McDuffie explains that the women he studies would not have labeled themselves “feminists”; indeed, they consciously distanced themselves from the term. McDuffie, however, choose to continue to use the term to describe these women because it “makes sense” (5). He claims that their understanding of intersectionality, multiple consciousness, and sexism makes “feminist” an appropriate title. I disagree with this assessment, especially considering McDuffie’s positionality. I thought that the work in and of itself was an interesting one for a man to undertake, and I was disappointed to find that he did not address his own positionality in writing this book. Furthermore, it struck me as insensitive to give a label to a group of people who explicitly rejected that very label, especially as someone who is writing from a relatively privileged position. In this sense, I think the book is actually lacking in some of the methodological development.

In the same vein, in order to complete this history, McDuffie relies on both archival evidence and oral histories. Similar to the lack of positionality in the book, I think more analysis of the methodology behind these particular methods could have been used. His explanation of the methods is brief, and his only analysis is to briefly question the reliability of one of his interlocutors. Again, I question his lack of further analysis and the lack of self-awareness in this particular issue. In other books throughout the semester, we have found excellent examples of how individuals position themselves in research—particularly ethnographer or oral histories—and how they have analyzed their influence, the “silence” of their participants, etc. I have been able to take away valuable  

 As a side note, in terms of my teaching: for the first few years of graduate school, I understood intersectionality as a theory developed in the 80’s. With a class called Racial Capitalism, I began to understand that this theory developed “before” that, although I still didn’t have a good understanding of its precursors. However, McDuffe provided some important name and ideas that I hope to use in the future:

- -          Claudia Jones: triple Oppression

-  -        Boyce Davis: Superexploitation of Black women

-  -       Grace Campbell

-   -      Louise Thompson Patterson – Triple exploitation

Paige Sweet Week 14 McDuffie

While reading Erik McDuffie’s Sojourning for Freedom, I felt that the theoretical motivations underlying his methods were centered on a process of recovery. McDuffie sets out to uncover marginalized stories, ones that have been left out of social movement history or brushed aside in racist activist canons. Combining archival research with oral history interviews, McDuffie does not simply apply a new theoretical lens to existing data, but he actually recovers lost stories, integrating them into their sociopolitical contexts. This process reminds of Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, such that “recovery” is an essential tool for groups whose histories have been colonized, their knowledge production and collective self-making ignored and denied. Because McDuffie’s activists are at the axes of several controversial political groups, – Marxists, black women feminists, black political activists – their stories are particularly vulnerable to being white-washed away. This “recovery” process is important for my project, too, as long as these recovered stories are connected to their structural contexts; McDuffie does a good job of this type of historical contextualization, refusing to abstract or romanticize the activists’ stories. Because I will be looking at the history of the psy-sciences construction of trauma through a feminist lens, my project will also, in some sense, be a recovery project – a recovery of a particular kind of history about scientific knowledge, one that is attentive to gender.

While there were moments during McDuffie’s narrative where I felt that he began to tell too rosy a picture about his activist subjects, he also resisted making their stories hang too neatly together. For example, McDuffie writes, “Indeed, there was no monolithic black Communist woman’s experience. Rather, there were many. It was this tension between common and individual experiences with the Communist Left that helps explain both the dynamism of black left feminism and its contradictions” (17). I appreciate this perspective, especially because historical accounts often gloss over contradictions and multiplicities in order to narrativize a cohesive story. Keeping this tension in play between collective histories (e.g. the production of scientific knowledge about trauma) and individual stories (e.g. domestic violence victims’ experiences of accessing trauma services) will certainly be a challenging task in my project. On the one hand, this is a struggle between micro and macro perspectives. However, McDuffie’s writing has shown me that this is also a struggle between collective knowledge production (in my project, “science”) and individual/interpersonal experiences. How can I sync these stories in a meaningful way, attending to “dynamism” and “contradictions,” as McDuffie suggests? It seems that one of the best ways to approach this task will be tell the story of institutionalized knowledge through victim’s narratives, always grounding stories of scientific knowledge production in its impact on people.

One of my McDuffie’s larger projects in the book is to “expand the boundaries of what is commonly understood as black feminism” (9). In this sense, McDuffie uses his “recovery” methodology to unhinge accepted notions of how “black” and “feminism” operate together in the activist and political sphere. Again, this is useful for my project – I hope that examining the history of the feminist anti-violence movement in conjunction with the history of trauma will expand the boundaries of what we think of as “second-wave” or “third-wave” feminism. Indeed, we often think of feminism as detached from antagonistic to biomedicine/psy-sciences, especially because of the massive impact of the women’s health movement on “feminism,” broadly conceived. However, I believe it will become clear through these intersecting histories (trauma and anti-violence work) that feminist discourses have long been influences by the psychiatric knowledge and the way it constructs “the self.” From this perspective, I hope to expand two histories at once: on the one hand, I hope to make the history of trauma more attentive to impact of feminist knowledge and its insistence on publicly narrativizing violence; on the other hand, I hope to provide acknowledgement of the way psychiatric knowledge gets institutionalized through feminism “self-help” services such as domestic violence shelters and support groups. McDuffie’s writing provides a useful example of such work – weaving women’s stories through existing knowledge about a social movement while also using those stories to push the borders of taken-for-granted knowledge about a set of historical moments.

Militz-Frielink Animacies

Animacies “interrogates how the fragile division between animate and inanimate—that is, beyond human and animal—is restlessly produced and policed and maps important political consequences of that distinction."  Chen asserts that the book is “the first to bring the concept of animacy together with queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies and disability theory.”  In Animacies, Chen successfully shows how “animacy tends to hide its own contradictions, the transsubstantiations, and the transmattering that go underneath, through, and across it.”

Overall, I found Animacies very engaging as the author weaved complex animacy theories into intersecting performances of race, gender, and disability.  I liked how the author incorporated contemporary examples of how intricate aspects of animacy manifest materially in art, pop culture, family structures, medical tests, and the American press. 

This book is very useful for my study of research methodologies as I hope to successfully draw upon critical pedagogy, philosophy of education, African American History, and transnational feminist theory in my research.  I want to be the first scholar to bring the concept of African American Spiritual Feminist Epistemology to the forefront of philosophy of education. Philosophy of education is a major part of the field social foundations of education. While the nature of social foundations is very interdisciplinary (as a field it specializes in sociology of education, history of education, philosophy of education, and educational policy) most foundations scholars choose to focus on one or two of those disciplines within the social foundations field for their research. However, some of the brightest foundations scholars combine philosophy of education with American History, African American History, Native American History, and educational policy.  Joel Spring has successful merged all the histories of indigenous peoples with educational philosophy and policy.  (See his book Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality, which was published in 2006 by McGraw-Hill and categorized as Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages.) 

The pedagogical implications for studying African American Spiritual Feminist Epistemology under a philosophical lens are astounding.  My students will develop a rich, nuanced understanding of African American studies, Black feminism, critical pedagogy, and spirituality as a part of the humanities.  They also get a glimpse into an emerging field in academia—contemplative studies.  Students will also cultivate higher order thinking skills (like they would from studying a book like Animacies) because it models how different fields in academia can merge to create new theories.  These new theories have profound implications for praxis and social change. For example, Hanhardt’s Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence presented new research about racialized violence in gay neighborhoods under the lens of Gay and Lesbian studies, American Studies and Urban Studies. Thus, the research Hanhardt collected via historiography will have a profound impact on social policies in gay neighborhoods.