The defining quality of Black womanhood is strength, states Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant in Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman. But, she argues, the idea of strength undermines its real ...function: to defend and maintain a stratified social order by obscuring Black women's experiences of suffering, acts of desperation, and anger. This provocative book lays bare the common perception that strength is an exemplary or defining quality of "authentic" Black womanhood.The author, a noted sociologist, interviews 58 Black women about being strong and proud, to illustrate their "performance" of invulnerability. Beauboeuf-Lafontant explains how such behavior leads to serious symptoms for these women, many of whom suffer from eating disorders and depression.Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, cultural studies, and women's history, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman traces the historical and social influences of normative Black femininity, looking at how notions of self-image and strength create a distraction from broader forces of discrimination and power.
In Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, black women, especially poor black women, are rarely considered leaders of social movements let alone political theorists. But in the northeastern city ...of Salvador, Brazil, it is these very women who determine how urban policies are established. Focusing on the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood in Salvador's city center,Black Women against the Land Grabexplores how black women's views on development have radicalized local communities to demand justice and social change.
InBlack Women against the Land Grab, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry describes the key role of local women activists in the citywide movement for land and housing rights. She reveals the importance of geographic location for understanding the gendered aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women-led social movements. How have black women shaped the politics of urban redevelopment, Perry asks, and what does this kind of political intervention tell us about black women's agency? Her work uncovers the ways in which political labor at the neighborhood level is central to the mass mobilization of black people against institutional racism and for citizenship rights and resources in Brazil.
Highlighting the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts often represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt,Black Women against the Land Graboffers a valuable corrective to how we think about politics and about black women, particularly poor black women, as a political force.
Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848-2016explores how black women in France itself, the French Caribbean, Gorée, Dakar, Rufisque, and Saint-Louis experienced and reacted to French ...colonialism and how gendered readings of colonization, decolonization, and social movements cast new light on the history of French colonization and of black France. In addition to delineating the powerful contributions of black French women in the struggle for equality, contributors also look at the experiences of African American women in Paris and in so doing integrate into colonial and postcolonial conversations the strategies black women have engaged in negotiating gender and race relationsà la française.Drawing on research by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and countries, this collection offers a fresh, multidimensional perspective on race, class, and gender relations in France and its former colonies, exploring how black women have negotiated the boundaries of patriarchy and racism from their emancipation from slavery to the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Previous work discussing Black beauty has tended to concentrate on Black women's search for white beauty as a consequence of racialization. Without denying either the continuation of such aesthetics ...or their enduring power, this book uncovers the cracks in this hegemonic Black beauty. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research amongst British women of Caribbean heritage, this volume pursues a broad discussion of beauty within the Black diaspora contexts of the Caribbean, the UK, the United States and Latin America through different historical periods to the present day. With a unique exploration of beauty, race and identity politics, the author reveals how Black women themselves speak about, negotiate, inhabit, work on and perform Black beauty. As such, it will appeal not only to sociologists, but anyone working in the fields of race, ethnicity and post-colonial thought, feminism and the sociology of the body.
Objective Limited evidence suggests that higher levels of serum vitamin D (25(OH)D) protect against SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) infection. Black women commonly experience 25(OH)D insufficiency and ...are overrepresented among COVID-19 cases. We conducted a prospective analysis of serum 25(OH)D levels in relation to COVID-19 infection among participants in the Black Women's Health Study. Methods Since 1995, the Black Women's Health Study has followed 59,000 U.S. Black women through biennial mailed or online questionnaires. Over 13,000 study participants provided a blood sample in 2013-2017. 25(OH)D assays were performed in a certified national laboratory shortly after collection of the samples. In 2020, participants who had completed the online version of the 2019 biennial health questionnaire were invited to complete a supplemental online questionnaire assessing their experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including whether they had been tested for COVID-19 infection and the result of the test. We used logistic regression analysis to estimate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the association of 25(OH)D level with COVID-19 positivity, adjusting for age, number of people living in the household, neighborhood socioeconomic status, and other potential confounders. Results Among 5,081 eligible participants whose blood sample had been assayed for 25(OH)D, 1,974 reported having had a COVID-19 test in 2020. Relative to women with 25(OH)D levels of 30 ng/mL (75 nmol/l) or more, multivariable-adjusted ORs for COVID-19 infection in women with levels of 20-29 ng/mL (50-72.5 nmol/l) and <20 ng/mL (<50 nmol/l) were, respectively, 1.48 (95% CI 0.95-2.30) and 1.69 (95% CI 1.04-2.72) (p trend 0.02). Conclusion The present results suggest that U.S. Black women with lower levels of 25(OH)D are at increased risk of infection with COVID-19. Further work is needed to confirm these findings and determine the optimal level of 25(OH)D for a beneficial effect.
Objective Limited evidence suggests that higher levels of serum vitamin D (25(OH)D) protect against SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) infection. Black women commonly experience 25(OH)D insufficiency and ...are overrepresented among COVID-19 cases. We conducted a prospective analysis of serum 25(OH)D levels in relation to COVID-19 infection among participants in the Black Women's Health Study. Methods Since 1995, the Black Women's Health Study has followed 59,000 U.S. Black women through biennial mailed or online questionnaires. Over 13,000 study participants provided a blood sample in 2013-2017. 25(OH)D assays were performed in a certified national laboratory shortly after collection of the samples. In 2020, participants who had completed the online version of the 2019 biennial health questionnaire were invited to complete a supplemental online questionnaire assessing their experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including whether they had been tested for COVID-19 infection and the result of the test. We used logistic regression analysis to estimate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the association of 25(OH)D level with COVID-19 positivity, adjusting for age, number of people living in the household, neighborhood socioeconomic status, and other potential confounders. Results Among 5,081 eligible participants whose blood sample had been assayed for 25(OH)D, 1,974 reported having had a COVID-19 test in 2020. Relative to women with 25(OH)D levels of 30 ng/mL (75 nmol/l) or more, multivariable-adjusted ORs for COVID-19 infection in women with levels of 20-29 ng/mL (50-72.5 nmol/l) and <20 ng/mL (<50 nmol/l) were, respectively, 1.48 (95% CI 0.95-2.30) and 1.69 (95% CI 1.04-2.72) (p trend 0.02). Conclusion The present results suggest that U.S. Black women with lower levels of 25(OH)D are at increased risk of infection with COVID-19. Further work is needed to confirm these findings and determine the optimal level of 25(OH)D for a beneficial effect.
In this comprehensive history, Ashley D. Farmer examines black women's political, social, and cultural engagement with Black Power ideals and organizations. Complicating the assumption that sexism ...relegated black women to the margins of the movement, Farmer demonstrates how female activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. This compelling book shows how the new tropes of womanhood that they created--the "Militant Black Domestic," the "Revolutionary Black Woman," and the "Third World Woman," for instance--spurred debate among activists over the importance of women and gender to Black Power organizing, causing many of the era's organizations and leaders to critique patriarchy and support gender equality.Making use of a vast and untapped array of black women's artwork, political cartoons, manifestos, and political essays that they produced as members of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Congress of African People, Farmer reveals how black women activists reimagined black womanhood, challenged sexism, and redefined the meaning of race, gender, and identity in American life.
Vénus Noire Mitchell, Robin
2020, 2020-06-30, Letnik:
36
eBook
Shows how literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape France's post-revolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian ...Revolution. The stories of these women reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.
To Defend this Sunrise examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under ...conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state’s co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of “multicultural dispossession.” This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.
PDF
