Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom

'As the Occupy movements take on economic inequality, organizers must confront participants frustrated with inequality within the movement related to gender, race, sexuality, and other identities. The negotiations between participants over leadership, messaging, inclusivity, and harassment offer lessons for the future of big-tent organizing in progressive movements'

In Beyoncé in Formation, Tinsley now takes her rich observations beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital new-millennium narratives.Woven with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of African studies and a cisgender femme married to a trans spouse, Tinsley's “Femme-onade” mixtape explores myriad facets of black women's sexuality and gender. Turning to Beyoncé's “Don't Hurt Yourself,” Tinsley assesses black feminist critiques of marriage and then considers the models of motherhood offered in “Daddy Lessons,” interspersing these passages with memories from Tinsley's multiracial family history. Her chapters on nontraditional bonds culminate in a discussion of contemporary LGBT politics through the lens of the internet-breaking video “Formation,” underscoring why Beyoncé's black femme-inism isn't only for ciswomen.

Cutting across the humanities and social sciences, and situated in sites across the black diaspora, the work in this book collectively challenges notions that we are living in a post-racial age and instead argue for the specificity of black cultural experiences as shaped by gender and sex.

Black Women's Bodies and the Nation develops a decolonial approach to representations of iconic Black women's bodies within popular culture in the US, UK and the Caribbean and the racialization and affective load of muscle, bone, fat and skin through the trope of the subaltern figure of the Sable-Saffron Venus as an'alter/native- body'.

In engaging and provocative style, bell hooks introduces a popular theory of feminism rooted in common sense and the wisdom of experience. Hers is a vision of a beloved community that appeals to all those committed to equality, mutual respect, and justice. hooks applies her critical analysis to the most contentious and challenging issues facing feminists today, including reproductive rights, violence, race, class, and work. With her customary insight and unsparing honesty, hooks calls for a feminism free from divisive barriers but rich with rigorous debate. In language both eye-opening and optimistic, hooks encourages us to demand alternatives to patriarchal, racist, and homophobic culture, and to imagine a different future.

Chickenheads informs and educates, confronts and charms, raises the bar high by getting down low, and, to steal my favorite Joan Morgan phrase, bounced me out of the room.” —Marlon James, Man Booker Prize–winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings Still as fresh, funny, and ferociously honest as ever, this piercing meditation on the fault lines between hip-hop and feminism captures the most intimate thoughts of the post-Civil Rights, post-feminist, post-soul generation.Award-winning journalist Joan Morgan offers a provocative and powerful look into the life of the modern Black woman: a complex world in which feminists often have not-so-clandestine affairs with the most sexist of men, where women who treasure their independence frequently prefer men who pick up the tab, where the deluge of babymothers and babyfathers reminds Black women who long for marriage that traditional nuclear families are a reality for less than forty percent of the population, and where Black women are forced to make sense of a world where truth is no longer black and white but subtle, intriguing shades of gray.

The first major anthology to trace the development of Black Feminist thought in the United States, Words of Fire is Beverly Guy-Sheftall's comprehensive collection of writings by more than sixty Black women. From the pioneering work of abolitionist Maria Miller Stewart and anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett to the writings of feminist critics Michele Wallace and bell hooks, Black women have been writing about the multiple jeopardies--racism, sexism, and classism--that have made it imperative to forge a brand of feminism uniquely their own. In the words of Audre Lorde, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house"--Words of Fire provides the tools to dismantle the interlocking systems that oppress us and to rebuild from their ashes a society of true freedom.