Framing Black Women’s Resistance: A Black Feminist Intersectional Approach

T hinking about black women’s politics mandates that we think about how black women have resisted structural intersectionality. It also requires that we examine their lives using an intersectional analytical framework that privileges the subjective, representational, institutional, and geographic contexts through which their politics emerge. In this book, structural intersectionality refers to the interlocking systems of social violence that circumscribe black people’s lives. These include, but are not limited to, racism, sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, neoliberalism, and entrenched poverty. When we situate black women’s politics within structural intersectionality, we are better able to see and appreciate the various ways that black women act to resist negative attitudes, practices, and social processes. These violent processes include historic and ongoing discourses and practices of gendering, racialization, and heterosexualization (Dhamoon 2011, Yuval-Davis 2009, Hancock 2007). It is useful to distinguish between “structural intersectionality,” “intersectional analysis,” and black feminist intersectional approaches to knowledge production and praxis. Furthermore, it is important to make use of a bottom-up intersectional approach to magnify how macro-level ideological processes impact people at the level of the individual, neighborhood, and community. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.