Mikki Kendall | |
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Born | Chicago, Illinois, United States | October 23, 1976
Occupation | Writer |
Language | English |
Genres | Essays Cultural critic |
Notable work | Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists Hood Feminism |
Website | |
mikkikendall |
Mikki Kendall (born October 23, 1976) is an author, activist, and cultural critic. Her work often focuses on current events, media representation, the politics of food, and the history of the feminist movement. Penguin Random House published her graphic novel Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists in 2019, while her political nonfiction book Hood Feminism was released in early 2020. [1]
Kendall was born in Chicago, Illinois [1] on October 23, 1976 [2] and was raised in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. [3] Kendall is a 2005 graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. [4] [ better source needed ] Kendall also has a Masters in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University. [5] [6]
A veteran of the United States Army, [3] Kendall worked in government service until 2013 when she left her job at the Department of Veterans Affairs [7] to pursue her writing career full-time.
Kendall is currently an essayist and cultural critic. She has written for The Guardian , [8] The Boston Globe , [9] NBC News, [10] The Washington Post , [11] Bustle , [12] Essence [13] and Eater [14] (with her essay in Eater "Hot Sauce in Her Bag" named a Best Food Essay by the Association of Food Journalists [15] ). She has appeared as a cultural commentator on NPR, [16] Al Jazeera English , [17] and the BBC. [18]
She is recognizable as a member of Black Twitter. [19] Kendall is also the creator of the viral Twitter hashtags #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, [20] which criticized racism in the feminist movement, [21] as well as #FastTailedGirls, a reference to the hypersexualization of Black girls, and #FoodGentrification, about the marginalization of traditional foods by commercial interest. [3]
Kendall edited the science-fiction anthology Hidden Youth for Crossed Genres Press in 2016. [22] Kendall's graphic novel history Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women's Fight for Their Rights was released in November 2019 by Ten Speed Press [23] and her political-nonfiction book Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot was released in February 2020 by Viking Books. [24] It criticizes the feminist movement for being largely "the province of the privileged" and ignoring problems that disproportionately impact communities of color, including poverty, housing, medical care, and racism. [25]
Title | Publisher | Year | ISBN | Note |
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Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History [27] | Crossed Genres Publications | 2016 | ISBN 9780991392124 | Editor (with Chesya Burke) |
Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women's Fight for Their Rights [28] | Ten Speed Press | 2019 | ISBN 9780399581793 | illustrated by A. D'Amico |
Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot [29] | Viking Press | 2020 | ISBN 9780525560548 | |
Title | Publication | Date | Note |
---|---|---|---|
When Black Girls Hear That ‘Our Bodies Are All Wrong’ | The New York Times | February 21, 2020 | [30] |
Feminism Claims to Represent All Women. So Why Does It Ignore So Many of Them? | Time | February 24, 2020 | [31] |
The Neoliberal Misunderstanding of Black Education | Literary Hub | February 27, 2020 | [32] |
Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade, was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.
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Grace Atkinson, better known as Ti-Grace Atkinson, is an American radical feminist activist, writer and philosopher. She was an early member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and presided over the New York chapter in from 1967-68, though she quickly grew disillusioned with the group. She left to form The Feminists, which she left a few years later due to internal disputes. Atkinson was a member of the Daughters of Bilitis and an advocate for political lesbianism. Atkinson has been largely inactive since the 1970s, but resurfaced in 2013 to co-author an open statement expressing radical feminists' concerns about what they perceived as the silencing of discussion around "the currently fashionable concept of gender."
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Meredith Jane Tax was an American feminist writer and political activist.
Feminist views on transgender topics vary widely.
Hip hop feminism is a sub-set of black feminism that centers on intersectional subject positions involving race and gender in a way that acknowledges the contradictions in being a black feminist, such as black women's enjoyment in hip hop music and culture, rather than simply focusing on the victimization of black women in hip hop culture due to interlocking systems of oppressions involving race, class, and gender.
Meghna Pant is an Indian author, journalist and speaker. She has won a variety of awards for her contribution to literature, gender issues and journalism. In 2012, she won the Muse India National Literary Awards Young Writer Award for her debut novel One-and-a-Half Wife. Her collection of short stories, Happy Birthday and Other Stories was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Award.
The socio-political movements and ideologies of feminism have found expression in various media. These media include newspaper, literature, radio, television, social media, film, and video games. They have been essential to the success of many feminist movements.
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White feminism is a term which is used to describe expressions of feminism which are perceived as focusing on white women but are perceived as failing to address the existence of distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges. Whiteness is crucial in structuring the lived experiences of white women across a variety of contexts. The term has been used to label and criticize theories that are perceived as focusing solely on gender-based inequality. Primarily used as a derogatory label, "white feminism" is typically used to reproach a perceived failure to acknowledge and integrate the intersection of other identity attributes into a broader movement which struggles for equality on more than one front. In white feminism, the oppression of women is analyzed through a single-axis framework, consequently erasing the identity and experiences of ethnic minority women the space. The term has also been used to refer to feminist theories perceived to focus more specifically on the experience of white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied women, and in which the experiences of women without these characteristics are excluded or marginalized. This criticism has predominantly been leveled against the first waves of feminism which were seen as centered around the empowerment of white middle-class women in Western societies.
Feminist businesses are companies established by activists involved in the feminist movement. Examples include feminist bookstores, feminist credit unions, feminist presses, feminist mail-order catalogs, and feminist restaurants. These businesses flourished as part of the second and third-waves of feminism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Feminist entrepreneurs established organizations such as the Feminist Economic Alliance to advance their cause. Feminist entrepreneurs sought three primary goals: to disseminate their ideology through their businesses, to create public spaces for women and feminists, and to create jobs for women so that they did not have to depend on men financially. While they still exist today, the number of some feminist businesses, particularly women's bookstores, has declined precipitously since 2000.
Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. The term criticises the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
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