Africana & Black Studies

The Black Women's Studies (BWST) Booklist connects foundational texts of critical race and gender scholarship to newer publications. This comprehensive bibliography identifies long-term trends and places recent contributions in historical context. Beyond a "generative" project, the BWST Booklist identifies past, present, and forthcoming work to create a robust, regenerative discussion. The BWST Booklist enables more clarity in the formal study of Black women's theories, identities, academic disciplines, activist work, and geographic locations.

Historically, the voices of Black diasporic women in speculative fiction and science fiction have often gone unrecognized and not given their just due. Despite this omission, their voices and stories have undoubtedly challenged past and present political and social climates, while transforming the way we understand and reimagine the bodies of Black women. Literature, particularly speculative fiction, has been a space to call home for many Black women writers like Octavia Butler, LA Banks, Tananarive Due, and Nnedi Okorafor to tell their stories while paving new pathways of Black and diasporic imagination. In recent years, Black speculative fiction has made some exciting strides. These include the uncovering of W.E.B. DuBois’s papers and unpublished fantasy story, “The Princess Steel,” from Britt Rusert and Adrienne Brown, and re-readings of George Schuyler’s Black No More and Black Empire. However, it is now time to bring focus and attention to the works of Black women speculative writers and their subjects. Bodyminds Reimagined becomes the discovery that celebrates these writers and subjects, while challenging the status quo within speculative fiction and (dis)ability studies, and moves them from marginalized objects to realist representations.

Black Americans generally express egalitarian views about gender norms in families and communities. They believe that mothers and fathers who live in the same household should share parenting and financial responsibilities. However, Black Americans are more likely to attend congregations where men’s financial role in the family and involvement in the community is emphasized more than women’s. Majorities say their congregations strongly emphasize that men should financially support their families and should also be involved parents, role models in Black communities, and active congregants. Smaller shares say their congregations stress these same roles for women, with the exception of parenting.

After discussing Conceptualizing Gender, I realized the root of the problem with the gender discussion in my class: we were making assumptions about the meanings of gender, namely Black masculinity and womanhood, that led us to create a hierarchy of Black people’s experiences of gender-based oppression. Feminist theory has become the foundational framework through which to understand gender in the US. Over decades, feminist theorists have worked to define and illuminate how masculinity operates. One of the most enduring contributions of feminist theory is the claim that there is a gendered hierarchy, with men occupying the highest social, economic, and political positions, in both the public and private spheres. While this claim has revealed how power operates in some circumstances, it does not fully account for the diversity of ways in which gendered power operates in varied racial and ethnic contexts. This is what Oyèwùmí’s work so clearly illuminates — the gender hierarchy that scholars have theorized for US-based articulations of gender is not universal, especially for various African, and Black diasporic, communities. In the traditional Yoruba tribe, for instance, “family can be described as a non-gendered family. It is non-gendered because kinship roles and categories are not gender differentiated.” Instead, age provides the hierarchy, not gender, and all groups can participate in familial labor, regardless of gender. Working with this perspective in mind forces those engaging in Gender Studies in Black communities to reconsider what is assumed to be true.

The author of Vexy Thing is Imani Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University where she also holds affiliations with the Program in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of numerous books: Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press), More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the US (New York University Press), May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (University of North Carolina Press) and Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Beacon Press), as well as numerous articles in the fields of legal history, cultural studies and literary studies.