Sep 27
Black Femicide and Morrisonian Democracy
Shatema Threadcraft is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy and Political Science at Vanderbilt University and a 2023–24 Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellow at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. She is the author of Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford University Press, 2016), winner of the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2017 Sara A. Whaley Award for the best book on women and labor, the 2017 W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2017 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Race, Ethnicity and Politics Organized Section (Best Book in Race and Political Theory).
Join her lecture Black Femicide and Morrisonian Democracy. Black women are 10% of the U.S. female population yet represent 59% of women murdered. From 1999 to 2020, Black women aged 25 to 44 were six times more likely to be murdered than their white counterparts. Most of those deaths were instances of intimate partner violence, and thus, a form of Black femicide.
The situation is dire and yet the violence and disproportionate risk of death to which Black women and femmes are exposed receives relatively little attention from the broader public. Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that “There’s never been a moment in our society where there’s been a reckoning with the particular kinds of violence that’s meted out against Black women.” In this lecture I challenge Crenshaw’s assertion that such a reckoning is necessary and argue that Toni Morrison’s conception of democracy, a conception practiced by ephemeral collectives of Black women throughout history and today, is best for responding to the disproportionate violence to which Black women are subject.
In this lecture she challenges Crenshaw’s assertion that such a reckoning is necessary and argue that Toni Morrison’s conception of democracy, a conception practiced by ephemeral collectives of Black women throughout history and today, is best for responding to the disproportionate violence to which Black women are subject.
Her lecture is part of the Global Blackness in the 21st Century conference, but this event is open to the campus community. Registration is not required.
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