“We care about feminist notions of genuine security” A Conversation with Margo Okazawa-Rey. By Katrin Meyer

Margo Okazawa-Rey is Professor Emerita at San Francisco State University. Her research develops an understanding of security from an intersectional, transnational, and activist perspective. She examines the connections between militarism, economic globalization and the impacts on local and migrant women in East Asia, as well as the role of feminist research in activism, women’s empowerment and policy change. She was a founding member of the Combahee River Collective, which articulated a theory of intersectionality in the 1970s. The following interview with Margo Okazawa-Rey took place on September 24, 2019 by video call.

#NoGoingBack: Queer leaps at the intersection of protest and COVID-19

The concurrency of quarantine and protest has highlighted the trappings of a modernist realism whose conservative solutions reveal a paucity of methods and dreams. The wins that the uprisings against anti-Black police violence have put on the horizon, from the dismantling of carceral institutions to the uplifting of alternatives, have been long seeded by social movements that demanded the impossible. This includes ancestors, many of whom Black, queer and abolitionist, who prepared to take fantastic leaps, in the words of the Combahee River Collective. The following meditation holds up this legacy in order to reckon with the racism accompanying this latest crisis, from the Orientalist origin story of the coronavirus to a global quarantine paradigm that is haunted by racial capitalism. At the dystopic crossroad of the pandemic and the uprisings, a multiracial and multi-species spectre of planetary interdependence appears. This is illustrated by a mutual aid movement that uses digital and offline tactics in order to norm beyond the normal. In the place of a state-led surveillance and a single-issue environmentalism that are hostile to those most vulnerable to the virus, an urban environmental justice becomes palpable whose methods are queer.

From Suffragists to Pink Pussyhats: In Search of Intersectional Solidarity

The 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment is an opportunity to reflect on the role of women in American politics. The tools of intersectionality allow scholars to pinpoint the progress and pitfalls produced by ongoing modes of sexism and patriarchy as well as racism and classism. It is now well known that major movements for the rights of American women have not always addressed the issues specific to black women (Simien 2006). Indeed, in 1851, Sojourner Truth discussed this issue of not being included in conversations about women’s rights (or civil rights for blacks) in her alleged “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Similarly, the fact that Ida B. Wells and other black women were told to process at the back of the 1913 Women’s March on Washington is another illustration of the historical exclusion of black women by their white counterparts (Boissoneault 2017). Decades later and even after the 1965 Voting Rights Act enforced black women’s enfranchisement, the Combahee River Collective (1977) noted the exclusion of issues that affect black women by both 1970s white feminist movements and male-dominated anti-racist movements.

Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought

This article, a Black feminist mixtape, blends music, interviews, and critical analysis in order to demonstrate some of the ways in which Black women have impactfully engaged with the video game industry. Organized as musical “tracks,” it uses lyrics by Black women performers as a critical and cultural frame for understanding some of the work Black women have done with video games. In prioritizing the personal as not only political but also instructive for how we might think about digital media histories and feminism, each mixtape track focuses on Black women's lived experiences with games. As it argues throughout, Black feminism as defined and experienced by the Combahee River Collective of the 1970s has been an active and meaningful part of Black women's labor and play practices with video games.

Radical politics, intersectionality and leadership for diversity in organizations

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership for diversity informed by intersectionality and radical politics. Surfacing the political character of intersectionality, the authors suggest that a leadership for diversity imbued with a commitment to political action is essential for the progress towards equality. Design/methodology/approach Drawing lessons from the grassroots, political organizing of the black and Indigenous activist groups Combahee River Collective and Idle No More, the authors explore how these groups relied on feminist alliances to address social justice issues. Learning from their focus on intersectionality, the authors consider the role of politically engaged leadership in advancing diversity and equality in organizations. Findings The paper finds that leadership for diversity can be developed by shifting towards a more radical and transversal politics that challenges social and political structures that enable intersectionality or interlocking oppressions. This challenge relies on critical alliances negotiated across multiple intellectual, social and political positions and enacted through flexible solidarity to foster a collective ethical responsibility and social change. These forms of alliance-based praxis are important for advancing leadership for diversity. Originality/value This paper contributes to studies of leadership and critical diversity studies by articulating an alliance-based praxis for leadership underpinned by intersectionality, radical democracy and transversal politics.

From Combahee resistance to the Confederate: Black feminist temporalities and white supremacy

In the weeks preceding the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, VA on 12 August 2017, HBO responded to criticism of Game of Thrones’ whiteness by announcing a new series from its producers called Confederate that imagined an alternative history in which the Confederacy became its own nation and slavery still existed. A few weeks later, Representative Maxine Waters’ refusal to listen to white male practices of diversion and condescension under the guise of flattery made national news when she interrupted Treasury Secretary Mnuchin's stalling to “reclaim my time.” In this paper, I examine these events as representative of the prevalent contention in the United States that the post-2016 election era is an era of crisis, but look outside the ruling temporality of crisis as it is framed through white supremacy. Reinterpreting this crisis through the lens of black feminist insurgencies against white supremacy demonstrates how the ruling temporalities of mainstream feminism are implicated in the election of 2016 and the events following. In returning to the year 1977 and aligning two feminist moments from that year, the Combahee River Collective Statement and the National Women’s Conference, I argue for a recalibration of feminist temporalities that will allow us, as Lisa Lowe argues, to recuperate the future in the tense of the past conditional, to see “what could have been” as that which may yet be.

Remarks for a Roundtable on Transnational Feminism

In 1977 a collective of Black Lesbian Feminists published the Combahee River Collective Statement, a manifesto that defined and described the interlocking oppressions that they and other women of color were experiencing and the deleterious impact of these oppressions upon their lives. They committed themselves to a lifelong collective process and nonhierarchical distribution of power as they struggle(d) to envision and create a just society. Twenty-nine years after the appearance of the Combahee River Collective Statement, over one hundred African Feminists met in Accra, Ghana to formulate their own manifesto and ultimately adopt the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists, which was first published in 2007 simultaneously in English and French. This paper reviews both statements and acknowledges their critical contributions to the evolution of Transnational Feminisms.

Occupation of Racial Grief, Loss as a Resource: Learning From ‘The Combahee River Collective Black Feminist Statement’

The methodology of ‘occupation’ through re-reading The Combahee River Collective Black Feminist Statement (The Combahee River Collective, in: James, Sharpley-Whiting (eds) The Black Feminist Reader. Blackwell Publishers Ltd., Oxford, pp 261–270, 1977) demonstrates the necessity of temporal linkages to historical Black feminist texts and the wisdom of Black feminist situated knowers. This paper argues that racism produces grief and loss and as long as there is racism, we all remain in racial grief and loss. However, in stark contrast to the configuration of racial grief and loss as something to get over, perhaps grief and loss can be thought about differently, for example, in terms of racial grief and loss as a resource. This paper questions Western Eurocentric paternalistic responses to Black women’s ‘talk about their feelings of craziness… [under] patriarchal rule’ (The Combahee River Collective 1977: 262) and suggests alternative ways of thinking about the psychological impact of grief and loss in the context of racism. In this paper, a Black feminist occupation of racial grief and loss includes the act of residing within, and the act of working with the constituent elements of racial grief and loss. The proposal is that an occupation of racial grief and loss is a paradoxical catalyst for building a twenty-first century global intersectional Black feminist movement.