The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism - Softcover

 
9780385721028: The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385721021 ISBN 13: 9780385721028
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Young feminists today are becoming activists on behalf of many causes beyond the classic—and indispensable--feminist ones of reproductive rights and equal pay for equal work. In The Fire This Time, Dawn Martin, one of four founders of The Third Wave Foundation--a multiracial, multi-issue, and multicultural activist organization--and Vivien Labaton, its first executive director, offer an exciting cross section of feminist voices that express new directions in activism, identity, and thought. Ayana Bird dissects the role of black women in hip-hop; Joshua Breitbart and Ana Noguiera demonstrate how Indimedia can break the hold of the corporate media over the news; and Jennifer Bleyer reviews the exhilarating power unleashed by the GirlZine movement. Anna Kirkland’s analysis of transsexual and transgendered people and the law is deeply thoughtful, and Shireen Lee's piece on women, technology, and feminism envisions empowering prospects for women..

Ranging from media and culture to politics and globalization, The Fire This Time is a call to new frontiers of activism, and helps reinvent feminism for a new generation.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vivien Labaton is a third-year law student at New York University Law School. She was the founding Director of the Third Wave Foundation, the only national young feminist organization in the country, and currently serves on the boards of Third Wave, Political Research Associates, and the Women’s Funding Network. She lives in Brooklyn, New York

Dawn Lundy Martin is one of four cofounders of the Third Wave Foundation. She has a long history of activism in anti-war, queer rights, and environmental justice movements. A Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, she is also an award-winning poet and author of the chapbook, The Morning Hour. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Young feminists today are becoming activists on behalf of many causes beyond the classic--and indispensable--feminist ones of reproductive rights and equal pay for equal work. In The Fire This Time, Dawn Martin, one of four founders of The Third Wave Foundation--a multiracial, multi-issue, and multicultural activist organization--and Vivien Labaton, its first executive director, offer an exciting cross section of feminist voices that express new directions in activism, identity, and thought. Ayana Bird dissects the role of black women in hip-hop; Joshua Breitbart and Ana Noguiera demonstrate how Indimedia can break the hold of the corporate media over the news; and Jennifer Bleyer reviews the exhilarating power unleashed by the GirlZine movement. Anna Kirkland's analysis of transsexual and transgendered people and the law is deeply thoughtful, and Shireen Lee's piece on women, technology, and feminism envisions empowering prospects for women..
Ranging from media and culture to politics and globalization, The Fire This Time is a call to new frontiers of activism, and helps reinvent feminism for a new generation.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Claiming Jezebel: Black Female Subjectivity

and Sexual Expression in Hip-Hop

Ayana Byrd

Ayana Byrd is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. She is an entertainment journalist whose work has appeared in Vibe, Rolling Stone, Honey, TV Guide, and Paper magazines. She is the coauthor of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America.

All it used to take was one "bitch" reference in a song, one gratuitous ass shake in a video and I was on a roll, criticizing the sexism of black men, denouncing the misogynistic societal structures set up by white men who supported it from their music industry corner offices, lamenting the misrepresented ways that black female bodies were on display. It didn't take much to get me back on my soapbox. But that, apparently, was a long time ago. Because today, allowed a receptive audience and the opportunity to wax passionately and even philosophically about the state of women in hip-hop-the art form that I once believed most defined me-I draw a big blank, barely able to muster up a halfhearted "You won't believe what I just heard . . ."

What happened since my rankled ire over Snoop Doggy Dogg's 1993 Doggystyle album cover of a black female behind wiggling, naked, out of a doghouse? Things haven't gotten any better. The "feminist rapper" Queen Latifah now uses the once taboo B word in her lyrics. Alongside Chaka Khan, who sings the hook for "It's All Good," the onetime "conscious" group De La Soul had a video complete with a Jacuzzi overflowing with near-naked women. Since the debut of rap videos, outfits in videos are skimpier, the sexual references lewder, and the complicity by women in their own exploitation more widespread. Yet all I generally feel is an apathy.

I can now listen to a song with the hook "Hoes/I got hoes/in different area codes" and instead of cringing at thoughts of debasement, chuckle at the artist Ludacris's witty delivery. Maybe it's that I've defined my own sexuality and know for sure what I only suspected in the past-that these men aren't talking about me. The problem is, they don't know they're not talking about me. Further, a lot of women, particularly girls and young adults, aren't sure that they don't want to be talked about in this way. These songs, and the videos that illustrate them, offer the most broadly distributed examples of seemingly independent black women that many young and sexually pubescent girls see. And unfortunately few girls transitioning into womanhood understand that the representation of female bodies in rap videos is not an empowering power-of-the-pussy but a fleeting one.

Because I grew up in the 1970s and '80s, I find it easy to list all the people who looked like me that were on television. There was Penny on Good Times, Tootie from The Facts of Life, and the occasional appearance of Charlene on Diff'rent Strokes. In the mid-eighties, there were as well the wholesome Huxtable daughters of the Cosby Show. Those of us who came of age then had a near void of images upon which to draw for representations of black women our age, negative or positive. It was a decade devoted both to saving and to condemning the "Endangered Black Male." But teen pregnancy was skyrocketing, and often the predominant young black female faces on television were in public service spots against babies having babies. Yet there were few policies or social organizations that were addressing their need to be saved or uplifted.

As the eighties progressed, things didn't get much better. In film as well as television, portrayals of black women were at either extreme of the sexual spectrum. In Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, which has been raked over the coals by feminists since its release, the lead, Nola Darling, was, among other atrocities, raped by one of her lovers (the supposed nice one) and got back together with him for a short time. On The Cosby Show, the television program that perhaps came closest to engaging and entertaining an entire generation of black kids, the female characters were completely desexed. On one episode we learn that Denise, the "wild child" of the family, was a virgin until her wedding night. Though their cousin Pam and her friend Charmaine both flirt with the idea of "giving it up" to their boyfriends, they seem less interested in actually having sex than in keeping their mates happy.

As popular culture weighed in on young black female sexuality, there were also deeply embedded societal stereotypes with which to contend. The lingering effects of the Moynihan Report, the controversial paper by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a U.S. Senator, were still being felt. It asserted that black social immobility was caused by a crisis in the black family, and that Black Superwomen had emasculated black men, causing a fissure in the normal family setting.1 President Reagan had effectively constructed the idea of the Welfare Mother: a black woman who refused to get a job and be a normal contributor to society but instead sat at home all day (most likely in the projects), maybe hitting the crack pipe, having babies by a host of men, living off welfare checks that came out of the pockets of decent, hardworking (white) Americans. Outside of academic conferences, few observers pointed out that the majority of women in the country on welfare were white, and that most women stayed on public assistance for two years or less.

By the early nineties there were other messages in which black women were made into villains. While the media highlighted the Tawana Brawley case, in which the fifteen-year-old black girl alleged a racist attack by white police officers but was found by a grand jury to be lying,2 they virtually ignored the 1990 case of five white student athletes who were charged with sodomy and sexual abuse for repeatedly sexually assaulting a Jamacian woman in a fraternity house at St. John's University. In the latter case, there was more than enough evidence to convict, but according to one juror, the acquittal was based on the jury's desire to save the boys' lives from "ruin." Together the cases colluded in delegitimizing claims of rape by black women. There was also Mike Tyson's 1991 conviction for raping Desiree Washington. As vehemently as the white press sought to turn Tyson into a beast, many blacks cried foul to the champ's imprisonment. "What was she doing in his room anyway?" "That bitch set him up!" "How was she laughing and smiling at the show if just the night before he had raped her?" There was often more talk about how he had been framed than about the fact that Tyson had a history of physical abuse toward women. Around the same time, Clarence Thomas's self-declared "high-tech lynching" was played out on television screens across the nation, although it was women-Anita Hill and black women in particular-who were left feeling like the ones hanging from the tree of political, if not necessarily public, opinion.

So what does any of this have to do with hip-hop? It is telling that the women-whether they're the rappers topping the charts or the dancers in the videos-formed their own identities at a time when black female sexuality in the cultural marketplace was not at all positive. The way black women experience and interpret the world has indeed been determined by our having to wage constant battles in order to determine our subjectivity-to say that we are not whores à la Desiree Washington, tricksters and liars à la Tawana Brawley, or disgruntled spinsters à la Anita Hill. In Black Looks the cultural theorist bell hooks writes, "The extent to which Black women feel devalued, objectified, dehumanized in this society determines the scope and texture of their looking relations. Those Black women whose...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385721021
ISBN 13 
9780385721028
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Herausgeber
Labaton Vivien, Martin Dawn Lundy
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9
Plovdiv
Bulgarien