Calls to protect Black women have garnered national attention, drawing attention to the axes of racialized and gendered violence that are central to this dissertation project: the intersecting mis/recognition of Black women’s vulnerability and affect within and outside of their own racial communities constrains their possibilities to seek repair and justice for harm. Baltimore community members used social media platforms to call attention to gendered violence, joining movements like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s #SayHerName and Tarana Burke’s #MeToo Movement to address the erasure of violent experiences of Black women and girls; yet the mis/recognition of their affective experiences persists through the societal focus on Black male vulnerability.
Through careful ethnographic study with Baltimorean anti-gendered violence activists, Black gendered violence survivors, and Black community healers, this dissertation analyzes how these women and non-binary people mobilize emotions to construct memorial spaces, community-based movements, and their own lives in the midst of pervasive state and interpersonal violence. I investigate the affective and political processes of Black urban place-making, self-making, and memorialization to answer: How do Black women define their own subjectivity at the intersections of antiblack and gendered violence? How does their political mobilization of emotions such as fear and grief transform gendered and racialized understandings of affect? To answer these questions, I use a Black feminist care practice to examine the themes of haunting, violence, home, and care and to conceptualize new analytic tools for writing about violence against Black women.
The first chapter of my dissertation undertakes a Black feminist reading of ethnographic interview data, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), examining themes of reproduction, violence, and slavery’s afterlife that ripple from the novels’ pages to my and my interlocutors’ lives. I locate the haunting inside and outside of the Black female body, and I discuss the particular way that Black trans life illuminates that haunting. In my second chapter, I explore the (im)possibility of gendered Black affect through a Black feminist mapping of the myriad practices Black people use to create home as a transitory, affective, symbolic, and metamorphic place. This chapter employs autoethnography and interlocutor photographs of emotional sites as analytical and methodological tools to answer its driving questions.
The third chapter discusses Black gendered memorialization practices for victims of state-sanctioned and interpersonal violence. I develop my conceptualization of imagined (after)life and self power using ethnographic and archival data, using the aftermath of Korryn Gaines’s and Breonna Taylor’s state-sanctioned murders as primary texts. The fourth and final chapter of my dissertation focuses on Black anti-gendered violence activism and its challenges and failures in Baltimore. By examining the lived experiences of Black activist-organizers, I highlight the complexities inherent in the pursuit of Black liberation. Using a Black feminist abolitionist framework, I analyze photographs, art, and poetry from local artist-activists to illustrate how (after)lives of interpersonal violence survivors can be made radical. My analysis of the affective experiences of Black women and nonbinary people in Baltimore and the gendered politics of grievability in Black anti-violence movements ultimately demonstrates how these movements re-entrench white supremacist patriarchal norms that undermine the pursuit of Black liberation. Thus, we must turn to Black feminist abolitionist praxis to achieve liberation for all Black people.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/4de1-1t17 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Tynes, Brendane |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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