More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The Black Feminist in Public series continues with a conversation with Kaila Adia Story, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Louisville, co-host of the award-winning podcast Strange Fruit and is the author of the recently published The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf: On the Myth of LGBTQ+ Solidarity.
“Black feminist thinkers and scholars are the blueprint for not only Black feminist liberation but queer liberation, trans liberation,” said Kaila Adia Story.
Autumn Breon is using performance and mixed media art to both celebrate Black women’s achievements and honor their struggles. Her latest performance, Dignity Denied, shines a light on the case of Adriana Smith.
“I wanted to show what lack of autonomy, what surveillance looks like, and durational performance felt like the best way to highlight her situation.”
“You might have a six-week abortion ban. You might have whatever other oppressive policies in place. We have always found ways to aid and abet each other, and we always will.”
“Langston Hughes called [A’Lelia Walker] the ‘Joy Goddess’ of Harlem’s 1920s,” said A’Lelia Bundles, great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker and author of Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, out June 11.
“Now, her life was not always happy. But I think his idea was that she used her wealth, her influence and her homes to create a joyful space and a welcoming space for a wide range of people.”
When women assume a position of power, does she represent feminist leadership? Can she govern according to feminist principles? What is the difference between women’s leadership and feminist leadership?
This public syllabus on feminist leadership, assembled by Ms. contributing editor Janell Hobson and students in her graduate research seminar at the University at Albany, is an attempt to respond to these questions by exploring different examples of feminist leaders and feminist movements—both globally and historically.
We hope this syllabus can educate us on the kind of feminist leadership that will move us forward toward an inclusive democracy.
(This is Part 2 of a two-part series on women leaders and feminist leadership. Part 1—out last week—breaks down Angela Bassett’s role as U.S. president in the latest and final installment of Mission: Impossible, and how her representation on screen blurs the line between the impossible fictions and possible realities of women’s power in American politics.)
The Combahee River Raid was a military operation during the American Civil War led by Harriet Tubman on June 1-2, 1863. Historian Edda L. Fields-Black—this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History—reflects on Tubman’s revolutionary Civil War raid and the power of preserving Black history in the face of political pushback.
“What I speculate is that the Union told the enslaved people who she was. And her presence facilitated the enslaved people in trusting the Union. We know, from some of the sources I’ve brought together in [my latest book] Combee that Harriet Tubman was on the ground in the raid, that she participated in the burning of buildings, and that she went to the slave cabins and coaxed the people there to come onto the boats and come to freedom. So how she convinced them to do that, we don’t know, but they did trust her, even if they didn’t know her entire backstory.”
Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning featured Tom Cruise’s action hero Ethan Hunt deep-sea diving through a submarine 500 feet under the sea, swimming naked in sub-zero temperatures, and sky diving in the middle of a plane duel. And yet, perhaps the most implausible fiction was… a Black woman president of the United States?!
Black male presidents in film and TV set the stage for Barrack Obama’s election. Could more depictions of Black female leaders pave the way for a Black woman president?
(This is Part 1 of a two-part series on women leaders and feminist leadership. Part 2—out Monday, June 2—continues with a public syllabus.)
Sinners is rightly recognized as a Black Southern gothic tale, with a plot driven by its male characters. Indeed, the film highlights the camaraderie and community of these men as sharecroppers working alongside their pregnant wives, or as wizened blues musicians who experienced and witnessed enough real-world evil to rival any vampirism.
However, if this “conjuring” is visceral and emotive through the blues music, it is the blues woman and conjure woman who provides its intellectual heft.
This film is a triumph and righteous rebuke of our present era of anti-DEI policies and ideologies. May this way of thinking survive and thrive beyond the vampiric impulse to erase and dominate.
In movie roles, we want women—even when they are tough or funny or sassy—to always be vulnerable, to open themselves up to our judgment and our sympathy.
From Anora to Enilia Perez to Wicked, this year’s Oscars reflect what we value in women’s performances.
From the battlefields of World War II to the Super Bowl stage, The Six Triple Eight, Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé expose the patriotic ironies of Black service, artistry and resistance in a nation that still struggles to honor its own ideals.
With all the upheaval, just two weeks in, that has accompanied the second term of the current presidential administration, the 67th annual Grammy Awards show came and went Sunday night like a welcome distraction. Even calling the event a “distraction” misses the serious work of art and its purpose in troubled times: to mobilize the masses, reaffirm our values and spread joy and light amid the darkness.
The big night, however, went to pop star Beyoncé, who not only made history as the first Black woman to win Best Country Album, but finally earned Album of the Year for her politically salient album Cowboy Carter, after previously losing in the category. The album, which opened with a “requiem” for America and closed on a prayer that “we’ll be the ones to purify our fathers’ sins,” calls on all of us to witness this nation’s history and its present, to reckon with its “sins” of exclusion and discrimination and demand that we purify it toward the democratic promise it has always held out for all of us and not just a select few determined to set us back on a backward course.