DOC Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam by Nile Green in History

Description

In 1973; the year the women's movement won an important symbolic victory with Roe v. Wade; reports surfaced that twelve-year-old Minnie Lee Relf and her fourteen-year-old sister Mary Alice; the daughters of black Alabama farm hands; had been sterilized without their or their parents' knowledge or consent. Just as women's ability to control reproduction moved to the forefront of the feminist movement; the Relf sisters' plight stood as a reminder of the ways in which the movement's accomplishments had diverged sharply along racial lines. Thousands of forced sterilizations were performed on black women during this period; convincing activists in the Black Power; civil rights and women's movements that they needed to address; pointedly; the racial injustices surrounding equal access to reproductive labor and intimate life in America. As horrific as the Relf tragedy was; it fit easily within a set of critical events within black women's sexual and reproductive history in America; which black feminists argue began with coerced reproduction and enforced child neglect in the period of enslavement. While reproductive rights activists and organizations; historians and legal scholars have all begun to grapple with this history and its meaning; political theorists have yet to do so. Intimate Justice charts the long and still incomplete path to black female intimate freedom and equality--a path marked by infanticides; sexual terrorism; race riots; coerced sterilizations and racially biased child removal policies. In order to challenge prevailing understandings of freedom and equality; Shatema Threadcraft considers the troubled status of black female intimate life during four moments: antebellum slavery; Reconstruction; the nadir; and the civil rights and women's movement eras. Taking up important and often overlooked aspects of the necessary conditions for justice; Threadcraft's book is a compelling challenge to the meaning of equality in American race and gender relations.