Together, We Can

🌌 Gemma Pfaff

2 min read

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A Call and Refrain

Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins and Maverick Feminist: To Be Female and Black in a Country Founded Upon Violence and Respectability by Kemeshia Randall Swanson focus on feminist action taken by girls and women that defy societal gender norms of respectability that suppress progressive change. This “outsider-within perspective” expressed by Collins is depicted in the written stories and lived experiences of those whose oppression shapes activism. Individual agents of change are presented by Collins as “self-identified, self-sexualized, and self-actualized women.”

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To overcome the generational disenfranchisement brought on by capitalistic patriarchal forces and white supremacy, women must brave the intersectional violence to redefine, reclaim, and re-establish an inclusive femininity in the world. Embracing these new forms of feminism, black feminists find an ideology formed and represented by their own voices. Zora Neale Hurston in 1937 published Their Eyes Were Watching God and made history. Writing about Janie, Hurston gives black female readers a black female lead character who rejects early 20th century concepts about women’s sexual experiences to give a frank description of personal joy and struggle to live beyond the boundaries of respectability politics. This theme is continued with The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah in which Winter Santiago provides an untethered version of growing up the daughter of a drug kingpin and in Souljah’s words “how he descends back into poverty and slavery.” Graphic and unveiled, the descriptions of Winter’s life experiences give light to a world seldom spoken of.

The characters in the stories chronicled in Maverick Feminist are presented to the readers as characters who do not put a distance between themselves and the reader. Like research done by Collins in Black Feminist Thought, these characters bring to the forefront “the ideas of ordinary African-American women” as much as they do women of social prominence and esteem. Was Swanson inspired to present these stories in her book this way as an homage to Collins? She does reference her work. Both authors “validate the epistemological stance” Collins refers to as “fundamental for Black feminist thought.”