Resisting intersectional marginality by developing a mestiza consciousness : undergraduate women of color challenging and shaping power

This critical qualitative study explores how power shapes the experiences of undergraduate Women of Color engaged in activism and advocacy on social justice issues at the University of Missouri. The development and design of this study is grounded in a Critical Race Feminist (CRF) epistemology. The research questions were: 1) How does power shape the experiences of undergraduate Women of Color engaged in activism and advocacy at the University of Missouri? 2) How do Women of Color experience exclusion in their activist/advocacy work and/or spaces on campus? 3) What strategies do Women of Color employ to resist marginalization on campus " in and outside of activist work? The research focused on the experiences of five Women of Color undergraduate students at the University of Missouri, four of whom were in their fourth year at the institution and one of whom was a junior. More specifically, there was one Black woman, a Chicana, a mixed-race Mexicana who is also White, and two South Asian Indian women. the use of testimonios, plnticas, and sista circles, participants shared their stories and experiences. The identification of these frames and methods is partly a result of my own position as a Boricua, Woman of Color, who seeks to conduct research in a way that is liberatory and reciprocal for participants. The findings of this research were interpreted using intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 2019) and Mestiza consciousness (Anzaldna, 1997). I found four over-arching themes: Engaging and Adjusting Behavior, Culture of Exploitation, Distrust Confirmed and Cultivated, and Developing a Mestiza Consciousness. Overall findings demonstrate how participants activism largely came in the form of creating awareness for others, predominantly White people. In addition, findings showed how those with privilege and power regulate participants' emotions; a lack of intersectional praxis and analysis in all areas of campus life, including equity and diversity work; a performative diversity culture that haed in equity and justice; dominant representation reflecting political investments; and how the development of a Mestiza consciousness is used by participants to challenge intersectional marginalization. Finally, this study demonstrates how participants' consciousness and activist work are continuously evolving and how they work to meet their needs and find reciprocity in their activist and advocacy efforts.

Historicities

In the works of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, a philosophy of history developed to consider how thought and culture are historically situated and to present human civilization as an organizing force that subdues nature toward a form of progressive improvement. This new sense of being situated in history subsequently shaped philosophies of “historicity” in the writings of Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, and others. It also led to less desirable political investments in collective fate and destiny. Against these teleological and culturally reductive forms of historicity, poststructuralist articulations of multiple historicities conceive of historical engagement as a cyclic or stratigraphic configuration of unlimited potential. Theorists such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Baudrillard provide more open, associative, and playful approaches to historical frameworks. An understanding of historicity requires the articulation of related terms such as historiography (the writing of history) and historicism (the analysis of culture through historical context). Historicity as a sense of historical development as well as of future potential is an important theme for discussions of diverse topics, including identity, community, empire, globalization, and the Anthropocene. Literary engagements with historicity range from the rejection of history to the interrogation of historicism as a series of competing and contradictory narratives. Historicity is a vital concept used by literary theorists to critique authoritative accounts of history, as well as a self-reflexive mode for considering institutional and disciplinary biases. The following article surveys different forms of historicity in philosophical and theoretical traditions, analyzes institutions that influence official accounts of history, and posits literary and imaginative engagements with the past as an important mode of social and cultural critique.

Pasolini’s Specters of Paul

This essay explores the remarkable radicalities as well as ironies of the Paul featured in both Pasolini’s screenplay and other receptions of Paul’s letters. Pasolini’s depiction stages a series of potential historical correspondences by setting the words written or attributed to the apostle (in those letters and the Acts of the Apostles) into the times of Pasolini’s own life. This juxtaposition allows for a more complex view of the radical, passionate, but manipulative saint and more recent politics of revolution, corruption, and accommodation. The tension between two different views of Paul, organizing militant cells and struggling with bodily weakness, then, provide entry points for identification with and interrogation of notions of sexual liberation and political transformation. These political investments are brought into further relief throughout by situating both Pasolini and Paul in a genealogy of Marxist thinkers and organizers, from Engels and Lenin, through Benjamin, to Agamben and Badiou, surfacing important new insights about the Paul of history and of reception in the West.

Cross-ideological coordination by private interests: Evidence from mortgage market regulation under Dodd-Frank

Rulemaking pursuant to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act provides a useful setting to assess theories of interest group influence. In the wake of the financial crisis, Congress delegated new rulemaking authority to federal agencies to regulate mortgage markets. A critical aspect of this new regulatory regime engendered significant controversy from affected interests: “credit risk retention” would require sponsors of asset-backed securities to retain a stake in the risk of securitized assets. Contrary to unrefined industry capture-based accounts stressing the disproportionate role of larger, well-established regulated entities in setting policy, we find little evidence of sustained effort by large lenders to dilute regulatory standards via political investments. Rather, a diverse coalition of housing sector, community, and civil rights groups, backed by an ideologically diverse swath of legislators, forced substantial regulatory retrenchment. Our analysis suggests a more nuanced view of private influence, in which coordination plays a more substantial role than political investments alone.

‘Where might we go if we dare’: moving beyond the ‘thick, suffocating fog of whiteness’ in feminism

This article explores the multi-pronged relation between individual and collective haunting and political investments in divergent feminist and queer formations. Taking the form of an interview conversation, it traces the trajectories of a political life in sites ranging from the kitchen and the demonstration to the conference and the writing page, and on the way marking the possibilities and limitations of various political-intellectual traditions linked to social justice and freedom in pursuit of being and becoming otherwise. It foregrounds a refusal to accept the terms set by dominant political framings alongside and through a commitment to intersubjectivity and exploration of creative possibility opened up in spaces of excess.

Beauty between Empires

This chapter examines how and why Korean plastic surgery consumption occupied the minds of Jezebel (a mainstream US feminist blog) writers, editors, and millions of readers as well as Womenlink’s (Korea’s premiere feminist non-profit organization) members, panelists, and forum attendees at roughly the same time from 2012 to2013—feminists from opposite ends of the world so to speak. By closely reading Jezebel’s coverage of the topic and juxtaposing it with Womenlink’s activism in Korea, this chapter examines first, the role of social media sites in US discourses about Korean women’s bodies. How have social media sites renewed fetishized interest in Korean bodies while fueling cosmetic surgery consumption in Korea itself? Second, both groups agree that Korean plastic surgery consumption is a feminist “problem,” yet their differing geopolitical locations and political investments affect their articulation and understanding of this particular problem. How might we think about these two feminist groups relationally?

Maya Youth Literatures in the Diaspora

Maya youth literatures in the diaspora are creative works of literature that defy easy categorization. Instead of focusing on form or genre, these works emphasize the refugee experience in relation to issues of state violence and migration in Guatemala and the United States. Mayan youth use do-it-yourself (DIY) publishing as a strategy to create narratives that embrace their experiences with their families and at schools, and in their efforts to create a Mayan community. As a result, these stories are reflective of not just their own experiences, but also their own political investments in how their Maya community is represented and written into existence.

Effectiveness of KCCA in the Traffic Management and Solid Waste Management Sectors in Kampala

The authors of this chapter provide an in-depth comparative analysis and discussion of the effectiveness of Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) in regulating and enforcing laws related to traffic management and solid waste management (SWM) in Kampala. The findings reveal that SWM is better regulated as compared to traffic management despite operating under similar conditions. Unlike the SWM sector, the presence of strong associations, diversity of uncoordinated rival players, massive youth population, and heavy political investments in the informal public transport sector has made it difficult for KCCA to regulate traffic in the city. The informal SWM sector in Kampala has received limited political interest. Thus, one would expect that the city traffic sector should be well regulated compared to the SWM sector. However, this is not the case; KCCA has registered significant more success in the regulation of the informal SWM than the latter. On the contrary, KCCA and the city police continue to have running battles with the operators of informal public transport.

Conclusion

By and large, during the postwar years, Jewish resistance to middle-class norms took the form of verbal and written warnings that did not translate to concrete change. The gap between the widespread denigration of middle-class Jewish life and the minimal attempts to create alternatives to it represents more than just a quirk of postwar American Jewish history. Instead, these critiques of Jewish upward mobility comprised, in and of themselves, a crucial means by which American Jews adapted to prosperity and social acceptance, and an important means by which Jews, and especially their leaders, articulated their difference from other middle-class Americans. Significantly, this manner of asserting their Jewishness did not jeopardize the social and economic security that this new status afforded them. Even so, this continued tendency among middle-class American Jews to identify with histories of poverty and marginalization has continued to influence Jewish political investments and ideologies well into the contemporary moment.

Safe Space?

In this chapter, I focus on the the 2004 Minneapolis Take Back the Night march and rally, especially the way people encountered others with different experiences and political investments. By focusing on divergent understandings of safety articulated by different participants in the context of shifting norms of feminist organizing, I explore how simplistic understandings of safety can shut down rather than open up opportunities for social change and public co-presence.