ONLINE: Race, Gender, Rights, and the Politics of Black Ladyhood

press release: In her Black feminist treatise, A Voice from the South (1892), Anna Julia Cooper cites herself and other “well-bred” Black women as firm evidence against the “supercilious caste spirit in America which cynically assumes ‘A Negro woman cannot be a lady.’” What can feminists learn from Cooper’s contention that a subset of Black women can and should regard themselves as ladies? Part of the answer is that “lady” is neither an unattainable social marker for Blacks nor one that necessarily inculcates them into an oppressive model of femininity. The more complex reality is that Black women have long defined themselves as ladies in ways that reproduce patriarchal racism and legitimate their right to participate in the public sphere. Cooper’s vision of Black ladyhood also reveals something else - that laying claim to one’s “rights” is neither a foolproof means of obtaining racial, gendered, and other kinds of political equality nor a misguided, individualistic act that undermines marginalized groups’ collective political claims. Instead, feminists should read such rights-based assertions as normatively nuanced, strategic acts that gain resonance during particular moments in time including post-emancipation systems of intersecting racist and patriarchal governance.  

This virtual Friday Lunch talk will be delivered via Zoom. Registration is required. Please sign up here.  

Keisha Lindsay is an associate professor in the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and teaching interests include feminist political theory, Black feminism, Black masculinities, and gender-based politics in the African diaspora. She pays particular attention to how Black people articulate their gendered and racialized identifications via popular and scholarly conversations about a range of topics including public schools, gay marriage, Black female respectability, and police brutality. Professor Lindsay is the author of In a Classroom of their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools (University of Illinois 2018) as well as several article-length manuscripts.