“This Day, We Use Our Energy for Revolution” is a collaborative ethnography of activist endurance, which I have researched and written alongside the leaders of Women With A Vision (WWAV) in New Orleans, a black feminist health collective founded in 1989. Grounded in three years of fieldwork and a decade of engaged partnership, this dissertation centers the often-hidden histories, practices, and geographies of struggle in America’s zones of abandonment and asks how visions for living otherwise become actionable. Two events frame its inquiry: On March 29, 2012, WWAV overturned a law criminalizing sex work as a “crime against nature,” thereby securing the removal of more than 800 people from the Louisiana sex offender registry list; two months later, on May 24, still unknown arsonists firebombed and destroyed the organization’s headquarters. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this dissertation excavates the histories of violence and struggle that surround these events in order to render visible a complex geographic story of religion, conquest, and refusal. Post-Katrina New Orleans has been imagined as a “resilient” city fulfilling secular visions for progress and development. I argue, by contrast, that this spatial project of renovation rests on centuries-old colonialist logics, wherein blackness figures as the foil upon which “resilience” establishes its own significance. As such, I read the attacks on WWAV not as exceptional, but rather as clues into the enduring spatial threat that black women’s material, spiritual, and intellectual labors pose. For generations, southern black women have been doing history outside of established historiography. Their archives take many forms: texts written, bodies resurrected, communities made whole. So do their narratives. The deft two-step of southern black women’s history-making both refuses and reframes the dominant discourses into which they enter, as well as the places they have been assigned by white supremacy, gender injustice, and state power. I argue that this generations-honed black feminist praxis opens new directions for understanding the work of crafting social life and political vision since emancipation. Complementing historical studies on how black women fashioned authority within mainline and charismatic Christian institutions, this dissertation looks beyond the pews to the blues, to front porches and to Afro-Caribbean traditions––to locate and theorize black women’s ethics, aesthetics, and epistemologies for crafting more livable human geographies.

It has become commonplace within feminist theory to claim that women's lives are constructed by multiple, intersecting systems of oppression. In this thesis, l challenge the consensus that oppression is aptly captured by the theoretical model of "intersectionality." While intersectionality originates in Black feminist thought as a purposive intervention into US antidiscrimination law, it has been detached from that context and harnessed to different representational aims. For instance, it is often asserted that intersectionality enables a representational politics that overcomes legacies of exclusion within hegemonic Anglo-American feminism. largue that intersectionality reinscribes the political exclusion of racialized women as a feature of their embodied identities. That is, it locates the failure of political representation in the "complex" identities of "intersectional" subjects, who are constructed as unrepresentable in terms of "race" or "gender" alone. Further, largue that intersectionality fails to supplant race- and class-privileged women as the normative subjects of feminist theory and politics. [...] / Dans la théorie féministe, l'énoncé selon lequel la vie des femmes est structurée par de multiples systèmes d'oppression qui se croisent est devenu un lieu commun. La présente thèse conteste l'accord général que le modèle théorique connu comme « l'intersectionalité » explique adéquatement l'oppression. Alors que l'intersectionalité a ses origines dans le féminisme noir comme intervention spécifique dans la loi antidiscriminatoire des États-Unis, elle a depuis été arrachée à ce contexte et consacrée à d'autres buts. Par exemple, on affirme souvent que l'intersectionalité permettrait une politique de représentation qui surmonte l'héritage d'exclusion du féminisme hégémonique anglo-américain. Je soutiens que l'intersectionalité réinscrit l'exclusion politique des femmes racialisées, cette fois comme caractéristique de leurs identités incarnés.[...]

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves195-202). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss &rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR11894

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file as well as 2 gif files and 10 jpg files. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on March 23, 2009) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010. / Title from screen (viewed on February 26, 2010). Department of Communication Studies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Catherine A. Dobris, Ronald M. Sandwina, Kim D. White-Mills, Kristina H. Sheeler. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-70).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 197-207).

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis sought to understand the messages Black women receive from contemporary images and how these messages may be used to help them develop a sense of womanhood. The framework for the analysis used in this research lies within the feminist standpoint theory and Black feminist thought. The interviews conducted for this research helped to reveal that young Black women recognize patterns within the images of Black women in contemporary media. The images help them to understand the treatment of Black women and about the Black women they want to be.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-12-11T11:58:53Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Sulamita Jesus e Assunção.pdf: 2758582 bytes, checksum: 376d58f672780152ad929db1f666f317 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-12-11T11:58:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sulamita Jesus e Assunção.pdf: 2758582 bytes, checksum: 376d58f672780152ad929db1f666f317 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-10-29 / Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq / The aim of this dissertation is to know the feminist-politic-artistic’s activities maden by black women and black lesbians, organized in feminist movements, that take place in the South suburb of São Paulo City. This research intends to present how such movements promote narratives that undermine sexist and racist speeches, helping new sense making to individual and group experiences. It can be noted that interventions and activities undertaken by women open possible paths against discrimination, stigma and submission given by gender, race, sexuality and class social markers. Research-Action-Participant in women activities, their production examination, personal interviews (3 women) and a focus group were conducted to keep track of women’s performance in this scenario, since their narratives and practices also emerge from the unregular critical space that I am in. Feminist epistemology were applied, supported by black feminists, women, lesbians and latin american perspectives, which were considered proper references because they reflect on different women oppression experiences, in many contexts / Esta dissertação pretende conhecer as ações, de cunho feminista-política-artística, desenvolvidas na periferia sul da cidade de São Paulo, pelas mulheres negras e lésbicas negras organizadas em coletivos. A pesquisa intenciona apresentar como esses encontros possibilitam narrativas que subvertem os discursos racistas e sexistas, para contribuir com novas produções de sentidos para as experiências individuais e coletivas. Observa-se que as atividades e intervenções empreendidas pelas mulheres oferecem caminhos possíveis de rompimento com a discriminação, estigma e submissão que são atribuídos pelos marcadores sociais de gênero, raça, sexualidade e classe. Para acompanhar a atuação das mulheres neste cenário, uma vez que suas narrativas e práticas também partem do plano crítico incomum em que estou inserida, foram realizadas observações a partir da pesquisa-ação participante nas atividades produzidas, análise dos materiais elaborados por elas, entrevistas individuais com três mulheres e um grupo focal. A epistemologia feminista é utilizada, apoiada nas perspectivas feministas negras, lésbicas e latino-americanas referenciais que se mostram apropriados, pois refletem sobre as experiências de opressão de diferentes mulheres em variados contextos