1st Edition

Feminists Talk Whiteness

Edited By Leigh-Anne Francis, Janet Gray Copyright 2025
368 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

368 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Feminists Talk Whiteness offers a multidimensional introduction to whiteness as an ideology and a system of institutional practices, exploring how and why whiteness is a feminist issue. Readers will gain insights and strategies for action from the chapters and poems, which approach whiteness through multiple perspectives and disciplinary approaches. The contents are organized into sections on... Read more

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Introduction

 

Part I. Histories and Counterstories

Introduction: Women, Feminism, and Whiteness: Histories

 

Chapter 1 Strategic white womanhood: Challenging white feminist perceptions of “Karen”

Ruby Hamad

 

Chapter 2 White Women’s Participation in the Attempted Genocide of Native American Peoples

Karla J. Strand

 

Chapter 3 White women as white supremacist political actors: From the suffragists to the Karens

Christina Cavener

 

Chapter 4 “The good, the bad, and the indifferent”: The political pedagogy of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Leslie K. Dunlap

 

Chapter 5 The unbearable whiteness of lesbian studies

Stephanie Andrea Allen

 

Chapter 6 bell hooks: Black indigeneity, ancestral memory, and lessons on resistance

Reanae McNeal

 

La sangre llama

Denise Zubizarreta 

 

Questions, Activities, and Resources

 

Part II. Theory and self-reflection

Introduction: Building critical consciousness

 

Chapter 7 On white privilege and anesthesia: Why does Peggy McIntosh’s knapsack feel weightless?

Alison Bailey

 

Chapter 8 Fear, loathing, and las whiteness: Whiteness as fearfulness

Andrea Warmack

 

Chapter 9 Academic survival: Troubling the tensions between race, gender, and class in a predominantly white academic institution

Carolyn Tinglin

 

Chapter 10 Colorism in the Latina community: The internalization of racialized sexism

Melissa K. Ochoa

 

Chapter 11 Feminists talk whiteness: Disrupting the grip of white supremacy culture on feminist movement building

Ann Russo

 

Chapter 12 Beyond choice: A dialogue on the whiteness of liberal feminism and reimagining freedom beyond individual choice

Houda Ali and Britt Munro

 

Amazing Grace (for the children of John Newton)

Liseli A. Fitzpatrick

 

My Body is a River

Rachel O’Hanlon-Rodriguez

 

What chou mean we, white girl, revisited

Becky Thompson

 

Questions, Activities, and Resources

 

Part III. Feminist antiracism praxis

Introduction: Resisting hiteness

 

Chapter 13 From performing equity to loving equity: Combating whiteness in emerging allyship movements

Meena Mangat

 

Chapter 14 The ally’s tools: Racialized power and privilege within antiracist praxis

Samantha L. Vandermeade

 

Chapter 15 Whiteness and indigeneity: Feminism as a settler colonial discourse

Ruth Alminas and Cory Pillen

 

Chapter 16 Teaching transgender studies: Experiential knowledge and race

Dana Ahern

 

Chapter 17 Shame work: Reducing supremacy and the violence of white men

Cameron Rasmussen

 

Chapter 18 Like, share, tweet: Antiracist cyberactivism vs. performative slacktivism

Sara Blanchard and Misasha Suzuki Graham

 

Chapter 19 Making mistakes: A conversation  

Peggy Diggs and Lucy R. Lippard

 

and i am sorry

Anais Peterson

 

White me: A check list

Ivy T. Schweitzer

 

MIRANDA WAIVER FOR WHITE PEOPLE

Becky Thompson

 

Questions, Activities and Resources

 

Index

Biography

Leigh-Anne Francis is a Black queer associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and African American studies at The College of New Jersey. Her publications examine Black women and the carceral state, queer and trans people of color, and the continuum of subaltern resistive strategies in US history.

Janet Gray is a white professor emerita of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The College of New Jersey. She has published on whiteness in nineteenth-century American women’s poetry and on the convergences of feminist, peace, and environmental studies.