In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women’s innovations, from well-known movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool. For some, these online dialogues provide an introduction to the work of Black feminist icons like Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, and the women of the Combahee River Collective. For others, this discourse provides a platform for continuing their feminist activism and scholarship in a new, interactive way.
Complex conversations around race, class, and gender that have been happening behind the closed doors of academia for decades are now becoming part of the wider cultural vernacular—one pithy tweet at a time. With these important online conversations, not only are Black women influencing popular culture and creating sociopolitical movements; they are also galvanizing a new generation to learn and engage in Black feminist thought and theory, and inspiring change in communities around them.
Hard-hitting, intelligent, incisive, yet bursting with humor and pop-culture savvy, Reclaiming Our Space is a survey of Black feminism’s past, present, and future, and it explains why intersectional movement building will save us all.
INTRODUCTION
It All Started When . . .
CHAPTER 1
#BlackFeminism 101
CHAPTER 2
#BlackFeminism 102
CHAPTER 3
Thread!
CHAPTER 4
The Influencers
CHAPTER 5
Talk Like Sex
CHAPTER 6
Black Girls Are Magic
CHAPTER 7
Twenty-First-Century Negro Bedwenches
CHAPTER 8
Black Mamas Matter
CHAPTER 9
“I’ve Always Been Good to You People!”
CHAPTER 10
Mammy 2.0: Black Women Will Not Save You, So Stop Asking
CHAPTER 11
Combahee Lives
Acknowledgments
Notes
"Smart, savvy, and unapologetically fierce.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Jones’s entertaining book . . . astutely analyzes the nuances of black female identity.”—Publishers Weekly
“If you want to understand the rising preeminence of black women in our modern day sociopolitical landscape, you would be smart to start with Feminista Jones, a black woman writing and working at the forefront of our movements.” —Ijeoma Oluo, author of the New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race
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