This special issue considers how black women’s historical and contemporary experiences critically inform questions of class, gender, labor, sexuality, and racial capital.
BLACK WOMEN’S LABOR: ECONOMICS, CULTURE, AND POLITICS (Vol. 18 #1/ Jan-Mar 2016)
Guest Editors:
Dayo Gore, University of California, San Diego
Prudence Cumberbatch, Brooklyn College
Sarah Haley, University of California, Los Angeles
With the publication of Tera Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom in 1997, a new era of scholarship in African American women’s labor and working class history was born. Historians working to recover and reimagine the narratives of working-class black women as they negotiated public housing, joined labor movements and encountered the carceral state have enriched and complicate the fields of labor, gender and cultural studies as well as scholarly approaches to studying economic justice, social movements and labor in the U.S. Such scholarship centering African American women has also profoundly altered our understanding of a range of practices, institutions, and sectors such welfare, migration, sex work, policing, war industries and protest. This special issue builds upon these foundations to consider how black women’s historical and contemporary experiences critically inform questions of class, gender, labor, sexuality, and racial capital.
