Black Women in Politics

This book explores how Diasporic Black women engage in politics, highlighting three dimensions—citizenship, power, and justice—that are foundational to intersectionality theory and politics as developed by Black women and other women of color. By extending beyond particular time periods, locations, and singular definitions of politicsBlack Women in Politics sets itself apart in the field of women's and gender studies in three ways: by focusing on contemporary Black politics not only in the United States, but also the African Diaspora; by showcasing politics along a broad trajectory, including social movements, formal politics, public policy, media studies, and epistemology; and by including a multidisciplinary range of scholars, with a strong concentration of work by political scientists, a group whose work is often excluded or limited in edited collections. The final result expands our repertoire of methodological tools and concepts for discussing and assessing Black women's lives, the conditions under which they live, their labor, and the politics they enact to improve their circumstances.

List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments

Black Women’s Political Labor: An Introduction
Julia S. Jordan-Zachery and Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd

Part I: Black Feminists Doing Intersectionality Work

1. Why Political Scientists Don’t Study Black Women, but Historians and Sociologists Do: On Intersectionality and the Remapping of the Study of Black Political Women
Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd

2. “I Ain’t Your Darn Help”: Black Women as the Help in Intersectionality Research in Political Science
Julia S. Jordan-Zachery

Part II: Black Feminist Policy Analysis

3. The Politics of Black Women’s Health in the UK: Intersections of “Race,” Class, and Gender in Policy, Practice, and Research
Jenny Douglas

4. Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women Felons Reentering Society
Keesha M. Middlemass

5. Lost Tribes: An Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis of How US HIV/AIDS Policy Fails to “Rescue” Black Orphans
Julia S. Jordan-Zachery

Part III: Diasporic Black Women and the Global Political Arena

6. El pan, el poder y la politica: The Politics of Bread Making in Honduras’s Garifuna Community
K. Melchor Quick Hall

7. Woman Out of Place: Portia Simpson-Miller and Middle-Class Politics in Jamaica
Maziki Thame

8. “We Want to Set the World on Fire”: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in theNew Negro World, 1940–1944
Keisha N. Blain

Part IV: Discourses, Movements, and Representation

9. Morrisonian Democracy: The Literary Praxis of Black Feminist Political Engagement
Judylyn S. Ryan

10. Illegitimate Appetites: Michelle Obama’s Anti-Obesity Campaign as Sexual Regulation
Grace E. Howard

11. “We Always Resist: Trust Black Women”: Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Activism in the Wake of Health Care Reform
Tonya M. Williams

Contributors
Index