Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic

by Shatema Threadcraft

In 1973, the year the women's movement won an important symbolic victory with Roe v. Wade , reports surfaced that twelve-year-old Minnie Lee Relf and her fourteen-year-old sister Mary Alice, the daughters of black Alabama farm hands, had been sterilized without their or their parents' knowledge or consent. Just as women's ability to control reproduction moved to the forefront of the feminist movement, the Relf sisters' plight stood as a reminder of the ways in which the movement's accomplishments had diverged sharply along racial lines. Thousands of forced sterilizations were performed on black women during this period, convincing activists in the Black Power, civil rights and women's movements that they needed to address, pointedly, the racial injustices surrounding equal access to reproductive labor and intimate life in America. As horrific as the Relf tragedy was, it fit easily within a set of critical events within black women's sexual and reproductive history in America, which black feminists argue began with coerced reproduction and enforced child neglect in the period of enslavement.

While reproductive rights activists and organizations, historians and legal scholars have all begun to grapple with this history and its meaning, political theorists have yet to do so. Intimate Justice charts the long and still incomplete path to black female intimate freedom and equality--a path marked by infanticides, sexual terrorism, race riots, coerced sterilizations and racially biased child removal policies. In order to challenge prevailing understandings of freedom and equality, Shatema Threadcraft considers the troubled status of black female intimate life during four antebellum slavery, Reconstruction, the nadir, and the civil rights and women's movement eras. Taking up important and often overlooked aspects of the necessary conditions for justice, Threadcraft's book is a compelling challenge to the meaning of equality in American race and gender relations.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Gender Studies

221 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 3, 2016

About the author

Shatema Threadcraft is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (2016).

Reviews

[Leah Rachel von Essen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally ordered Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic by Shatema Threadcraft to include it in my review of work outlining the bias in medicine against women. While this book doesn't quite fit the specificity of that topic, it was an excellent and necessary read about the Black female body and its space within the body politic.

Threadcraft argues expertly and forcefully that intimate justice—encompassing sexuality, reproduction, and care-giving—has been sidelined in the primary arguments for racial justice and equality, leaving the Black female body neglected and at risk in conversations around liberation, resistance, and violence. She discusses the history and the troubling implications of practices including coerced reproduction, sterilizations, sexual assault, street harassment, racially biased child removal policies, the spatial politics of the city, and more. It is a theory-driven and academic text that pushes for a conceptual shift in how we fight for Black women's rights and think about racism itself, pushing for positive liberty–style support and resources.

Threadcraft's book was seriously thought-provoking and massively educating—my book is dog-eared, annotated, and highlighted—and is a crucial book for thinking about misogynoir as well as about modern-day resistance against racism as a whole.

[India Lenear · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very intriguing take on the Black radical tradition and how it has been embodied male. This book was heavy but tender. Threadcraft really makes the case for liberation to be theoretically embodied via Black feminine bodies. I really enjoyed the book!!!