BLACK QUEER FEMINISMS by Orion Klassen

2024-10-01 23:27:25 UTC

A quote that really stuck with me from the Combahee River Collective Statement: "To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough."

Readings

2024-10-01 23:27:31 UTC

I've read the Combahee River Collective statement like three times now for different classes, and every time I feel like I find something new to appreciate

Pariah

orionwklassen13650627 — 2024-10-01 23:27:52 UTC

"Breaking is freedom...I am not broken, I am free."

From “A Black Feminist Statement”

2024-10-01 23:27:57 UTC

Thought concept that if Black Woman are free everyone is free was really important

2024-10-01 23:28:35 UTC

I found it interesting that the Combahee River Collective was dealing with specifically capitalism as well as racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc.

2024-10-01 23:29:18 UTC

a quote that stuck with me was "while black (heterosexual) women intellectual and community work were marginalized, if not erased, homosexuality was effectively "theorized" as a "white disease" that had "Infected" the black community

2024-10-01 23:29:19 UTC

In the Black Feminist Statement, it really stuck with me when the authors described how no one else had considered or fought for Black women's freedom, so Black Women had to do it themselves.

Pose Episode 5

2024-10-01 23:29:19 UTC

POSE does a fantastic job of examining familial estrangement from a trans perspective, and all the complicated feelings it includes.

Quote from "A Black Feminist Statement"

2024-10-01 23:29:27 UTC

In talking about various forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classicism and homophobia, the Combahee River Collective wrote that "The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives". I found that quote to be an extremely succinct yet powerful way of stating what Black Queer Feminism essentially is: a way to combat every single form of oppression, deeply intertwined with intersectionality. As it stated in the readings, they understand that nobody is really free until everybody is free.

Quote from Combahee River Collective

2024-10-01 23:29:31 UTC

"We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are."

Combahee River Statement

2024-10-01 23:29:49 UTC

"racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression [...] The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives"

What We Believe from "A Black Feminist Statement"

2024-10-01 23:30:23 UTC

"Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy".

Black Queer Feminisms

2024-10-01 23:30:48 UTC

In this reading, I enjoyed learning about the intersectionality aspect that the ideology of Black Queer Feminism includes.

Poets in the Kitchen

2024-10-01 23:30:59 UTC

There's a part in the Combahee River Collective's statement that reminded me of an article by Paule Marshall that I read a few weeks ago. The Collective states "Many black women have a good understanding of both sexism and racism, but because of the everyday constrictions of their lives cannot risk struggling against them both." Marshall expresses a similar idea in "Poets in the Kitchen" about how the black women she was surrounded by as a child may not have had the education to put specific academic terms to their oppression, but they still understood it far better than anyone else.

Warm Up

2024-10-01 23:31:00 UTC

The intersections of activism are tolling black women the most heavily making it the most complex and evidently hard to define/explain forms of activism

2024-10-01 23:31:00 UTC

the idea of queering queer spaces in service of Blackness to center Black experiences and as these spaces are often exclusionary racist

A quote that stood out to me was from the Sullivan piece . "The term “intersectionality” was first coined in 1989 by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the simultaneous impacts of racism and sexism on black women," It shows that the work of black women scholars is integral in making the space for intersectionality in black studies

2024-10-01 23:31:21 UTC

2024-10-01 23:31:27 UTC

I thought it was interesting how the Combahee river collective said that black women's liberation is seen as a threat to black men's power and their "role" (defined by gender) in the household

Warm up

2024-10-01 23:35:07 UTC

I liked that "A Black Feminist Statement" and the idea that if black women were free, then everyone else would be and the systems of oppression would be destroyed: it would be a quantitative measurement.

I feel like the readings had a lot of definitions and outlining but not as much theory and practice, they lacked some individual stories.