Sep 27

Black Femicide and Morrisonian Democracy

Fri, September 27, 2024 • 12:00pm - 2:00pm (2h) • Wetiz 236
Shatema Threadcraft

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.

Black femicide is the misogynoiristic killing of Black women because they are Black women as well as the misogynistic killing of Black women facilitated by gendered racial capitalism, gendered racialized housing discrimination, residential segregation and housing insecurity, medical racism, including obstetric racism, easy access to guns in insecure and under resourced social contexts, gendered racially discriminatory policing, as well as the intersections of the above with ableism, homophobia, transphobia, femmephobia and whorephobia. Black Femicide can be, according to the UN’s “Latin American Model Protocol for the Investigation of Gender-Related Killings of Women (Femicide/Feminicide),” both active and passive. Pregnancy-related deaths are one such passive form of femicide and Black women are three times more likely to die of pregnancy related complications than white women. Pregnancy and the postpartum period are actually a particularly vulnerable time for women generally, and Black women in particular. "Homicide" - though the appropriate term here, again, is femicide - is the leading cause of death for all pregnant women in the United States; more pregnant women are murdered than die from hypertensive disorders, hemorrhage, or sepsis. Indeed, researchers have suggested that pregnancy-related murders may drive most of the racial disparities in murder between Black and white women. Pregnant Black women were three times more likely to be murdered than their pregnant white and Latinx peers and eight times more likely to be murdered than their non-pregnant Black peers.  Black women account for 44.6 percent of all pregnancy-related fatal intimate partner violence in the United States. Additionally, recent studies suggest that much of the disproportionate violence to which trans persons are subject is, in fact, a form of Black femicidal violence. While transgender citizens may be at lower risk for homicide than their cis peers a large majority of transgender homicide risk is borne by young Black and LatinX transfemmes.

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.

from Africana Studies

Event Contact: Deya Ortiz
Event Link: for More Information

Event Summary

Black Femicide and Morrisonian Democracy
  • Intended For: General Public, Students, Faculty, Staff, Emeriti, Alums, Prospective Students, Families
  • Categories: Diversity, Lecture/Panel, Meeting/Conference/Workshop

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