Intimate justice : the black female body and the body politic / Shatema Threadcraft.

Author
Threadcraft, Shatema [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2016]
Description
xii, 207 pages ; 22 cm

Availability

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks E185.86 .T448 2016 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Summary note
    In 1973, the year the women's movement won an important symbolic victory with Roe v. Wade, reports surfaced that twelve-year-old Minnie Lee Relf and her fourteen-year-old sister Mary Alice, the daughters of black Alabama farm hands, had been sterilized without their or their parents' knowledge or consent. Just as women's ability to control reproduction moved to the forefront of the feminist movement, the Relf sisters' plight stood as a reminder of the ways in which the movement's accomplishments had diverged sharply along racial lines. Thousands of forced sterilizations were performed on black women during this period, convincing activists in the Black Power, civil rights and women's movements that they needed to address, pointedly, the racial injustices surrounding equal access to reproductive labor and intimate life in America. As horrific as the Relf tragedy was, it fit easily within a set of critical events within black women's sexual and reproductive history in America, which black feminists argue began with coerced reproduction and enforced child neglect in the period of enslavement. While reproductive rights activists and organizations, historians and legal scholars have all begun to grapple with this history and its meaning, political theorists have yet to do so.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    Contents
    • Introduction: black female body politics
    • "What free could possibly mean": the intimate sphere in enslaved women's visions of freedom
    • Racial violence and the post-emancipation struggle for intimate equality
    • Intimate injustice, political obligation and the dark ghetto
    • Intimate justice.
    ISBN
    • 9780190251635 ((hardcover ; : alk. paper))
    • 0190251638 ((hardcover ; : alk. paper))
    • 9780190909710
    • 0190909714
    LCCN
    2016006849
    OCLC
    945433925
    Statement on language in description
    Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage. Read more...
    Other views
    Staff view

    Supplementary Information