Abolition Feminisms Vol 1

This groundbreaking double-volume engages the theme of abolition feminisms, a political tradition grounded in radical anti-violence organizing, Black feminist and feminist of color rebellion, survivor knowledge production, strategies devised inside and across prison walls, and a full, fierce refusal of race-gender pathology and punitive control. This analysis disrupts the politics of carceral feminism as conversations about the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex continue.

Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate—even incompatible—political projects. In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century. This pathbreaking book also features illustrations documenting the work of grassroots organizers embodying abolitionist feminist practice. Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated out of vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. highlights necessary historical linkages, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to imagine a future where we can all thrive.

In this expansive companion to Abolition Feminisms Vol. I, contributors confront multiple paradigms of punitivity—the foundational logics of family, borders, heterosexuality, colonial violence, and more—to disengage us from root systems of carcerality. The book transcends various modes and forms: through grassroots praxis, critical research, storytelling, diagrams, poetry, and visual art, these pieces build on the legacies of feminist thinkers who formulated abolitionist critiques of policing, surveillance, and control. The resulting framework provides readers with the resources to cultivate and inhabit a post-carceral world of radical freedom and possibility.

A major collection of essays and speeches from pioneering freedom fighter Angela Y. Davis For over fifty years, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for abolition and feminism and the fight against state violence and oppression. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, the first of two important new volumes, brings together an essential collection of Davis’s essays, and speeches over the years, showing how her thinking has sharpened and evolved even as she has remained uncompromising in her commitment to collective liberation. In pieces that address the history of abolitionist practice and thought in the United States and globally, the unique contributions of women to abolitionist struggles, and stories and lessons of organizing inside and beyond the prison walls, Davis is always curious, always incisive, and always learning. Rich and rewarding, Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises will appeal to fans of Davis, to students and scholars reflecting on her life and work, and to readers new to feminism, abolition, and struggles for liberation.

Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice, offers wide-ranging feminist abolitionist methods for liberation forged in collectivity, radical care, and transformation.

In this striking study of the pre–Civil War literary imagination, Karen Sánchez-Eppler charts how bodily difference came to be recognized as a central problem for both political and literary expression. Her readings of sentimental anti-slavery fiction, slave narratives, and the lyric poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson demonstrate how these texts participated in producing a new model of personhood—one in which the racially distinct and physically constrained slave body converged alongside the sexually distinct and domestically circumscribed female body. Moving from the public domain of abolitionist politics to the privacy of lyric poetry, Sánchez-Eppler argues that attention to the physical body blurs the boundaries between public and private. Drawing analogies between black and female bodies, feminist-abolitionists use the public sphere of anti-slavery politics to write about sexual desires and anxieties they cannot voice directly. However, Sánchez-Eppler warns against exaggerating the positive links between literature and politics. She finds that the relationships between feminism and abolitionism reveal patterns of exploitation, appropriation, and displacement of the black body that acknowledge the difficulties in embracing “difference” in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth. Her insightful examination of these issues makes a distinctive mark within American literary and cultural studies. This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.

Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies re-examines the field’s foundational assumptions by identifying and critically analyzing eighteen of its key terms. Each essay investigates a single term (e.g., feminism, interdisciplinarity, intersectionality) by asking how it has come to be understood and mobilized in Women’s and Gender Studies and then explicates the roles it plays in both producing and shutting down possible versions of the field. The goal of the book is to trace and expose critical paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the language of Women’s and Gender Studies—from its high theory to its casual conversations—that relies on these key terms. Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies offers a fresh approach to structuring Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses in Women’s and Gender Studies.

A landmark account of a key radical feminist organization, offering lessons for today’s women’s liberation movement. Activist members of the radical feminist organization Boston Female Liberation provide an inside account of the group’s history, strategy, and legacy in this compelling contribution to the historiography of Second Wave feminism. Boston Female Liberation member Nancy Rosenstock expertly weaves together the reflections of her fellow-activists, describing how they became feminists, recounting the breadth of their organizing work, and linking their achievements and experience to contemporary struggles against sexism. The book also includes ten radical feminist documents crucial to contextualizing the activity and thinking of the organization and its members.