ABSTRACT
Black feminism and the “black feminist intelligentsia” that fought for its undertaking amid myriad sociological debates permanently changed the language of the discipline and the value of the critique itself. Black feminism, because of early Black feminist sociologists, in part, made way for contemporary methods, modes, and analytics to highlight Black women’s affective locations as knowledge production. Dr. Nash’s treatments of black feminism are part of a larger black feminist genealogy in contemporary scholarship. This genealogy breaks the institutional bounds of what constitutes “critical” scholarship in institutional settings, how disciplinary boundaries are formed and traversed, and the valuable intellectual labor of Black women both inside and outside these bounds. The “language,” or “the entire range of methods, theories, and tools used” when talking about black mothers has changed the field of sociology permanently and, working in tandem with Black feminist creative thinkers, has broken barriers and prevailing protocols of white, patriarchal modes of knowledge production in all intersecting fields.
