ABSTRACT
Race matters in feminist movements both on the national and global level. Since the women’s suffrage movements of the late nineteenth century, Black and Indigenous women, and those living under imperialism, have advocated that justice for women cannot only be achieved through gender equality but must also include racial justice and decolonization. In this essay, we center the experiences of women of color who created a feminist praxis that examines racism and sexism as intersecting forms of oppression. Historically, race and racialism have always been tied to gender and have been used to categorize and control different populations since the eighteenth century. Black and Indigenous women and women living under imperialism developed theories such as intersectionality to name the particular interlocking oppressions of sexism, racism, and classism that they lived with and, in doing so, developed a vital component of feminist critique of power. In our essay, we show how an intersectional approach to studying the lives of women is essential in order to both understand and rise against the multiple forms of domination in their lives. Focusing on the work of Black feminists in the Black Atlantic diaspora, we show how the theories they developed allow feminists to raise critical questions and search for new ways to build different accounts of human variation and their role in social worlds. Drawing from Chicana feminism, Black feminism, Indigenous feminism, Asian American feminism, and transnational feminism, we show the possibilities for global justice laid out through an intersectional feminist analysis that is attuned to the many different power structures that define the lives of marginalized women across the globe.
