feminism

Abolish Border Imperialism! – Seeking Proposals for a Convergence

Call for Proposals:

Abolish Border Imperialism!

a weekend convergence for working towards abolition and decolonization

October 6-8, 2017 – Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota

Resurgent border imperialism is producing a new round of repressions, deportations, and bans. It is emboldening white fascism and militarizing walls. From the reservation to the city, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, women, workers, queer and trans folks, Black and brown communities are facing criminalization, exploitation, deportation, incarceration, harassment, and violence. The organizing collective of Abolition: a journal of insurgent politics invites your proposals for a multi-faceted, multi-group convergence in the Twin Cities this fall!

Breaking bricks with George Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics: Some friendly engagements and reflections

by Matt Evans

What is to be done? This question centers George Ciccariello-Maher’s new book, Decolonizing Dialectics, which addresses racism and colonialism through the works of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel, channelling Marxism in a praxis grounded in explaining colonialism and local conditions of the non-Western world.

Refusing to Be Broken: Hartwick College Criminalizes Black Female Self-Defense against Racist White Male Assaults

– by Jallicia Jolly –

… Black female resistance is always greeted with punishment as young Black women are forced to accept both the apology and justification for their violation. Viewed as a bearer of an incurable immorality, Black girls and women remain culpable for the suffering caused by their dynamic dehumanization. Ask Marissa Alexander – a Black woman from Florida charged with firing a warning shot at her abusive ex-husband.

Yet, Black women continue to fight against murderous embodiments of racist patriarchy. It is this context that makes the use of their own bodies as weapons of resistance revolutionary. It is in the battlefield of legal visibility, public recognition, and personal safety that their self-defense asserts their right to life, protection, care, and dignity. …

What a Trump Administration Means for Health in the Black Caribbean

by Jallicia Jolly and Veronique Ignace –

As echoed by many reproductive justice advocates, the lives and health of many Black women remain subject to the whims of American politics. Alongside the white nationalist revival and nativism that accompanies Trump’s platform of bigotry, the recent divestments in health evoke a special terror in the Caribbean – U.S.’s “backyard”, a region that continues to be a “strategic ‘battlefield’ for US geopolitics no matter the human costs.”
Health remains an important political tool used to define the quality of life of Black women as it characterizes historically disenfranchised groups as the repository of social death.

The Pitfalls of Being the Best Black Surrogate a White Woman Could Hope For

– by Janine Jones –
Michelle Obama is being hailed as Hillary Clinton’s best surrogate. Arguably, this is as it should be. However, black women, at the very least, should be concerned with such praise, especially when historically they have been white women’s–white families’–best surrogates, and, more recently, have become the best gestational mothers a white woman could buy.

MOTHERS OF THE MOVEMENT, appearing at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, PA. (MARIA HAMILTON, WANDA JOHNSON, GWEN CARR, GENEVA REED-VEAL, LUCIA MCBATH, SYBRINA FULTON, CLEOPATRA PENDLETON, and LEZLEY MCSPADDEN). The picture is a Creative Commons licensed image from ABC / Ida Mae Astute (via Flickr).

Hillary’s Baby, Donald’s Maybe? Reproductive Injustice in the Era of Electoral Politricks

– by Jallicia Jolly –
An abolitionist politic in the era of electoral politricks strikes at the heart of what it means to be human, black, and woman in the 21st century United States.

Notes on Photography, Power, and Insurgent Looks

by Stefanie Fock [This intervention is part of Abolition’s inaugural issue.] On July 8, 2015, twenty-eight year old Çilem Doğan got arrested in Adana, Turkey, after she had shot her ex-husband who had repeatedly abused her and tried to force her into prostitution. For …

Read moreNotes on Photography, Power, and Insurgent Looks