The Race for Theory

From blues women to b-girls: performing badass femininity

“…Performance spaces allow women to openly play with identity, as well to encode counter-narratives in and through the language of music and dance. In fact, black vernacular expressive practices and the body itself were platforms for hidden transcripts, indicative of African diasporic expressive practices in the Americas (Christian 1988;Hall 1992;Rose 1994). Out of the margins of society, blues women performed a badass femininity in counter-distinction to dominant notions of bourgeois femininity of the 1920s.…”

From Gidget to Gonad Man: surfers, feminists and postmodernisation

“…5 For the links between technology and social processes see MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985) 6 The argument that 'culture' constitutes 'structure' is not new; see Eisenstadt (1992: 68). 7 Also see Hartsock (1990) and Christian (1988).…”

“The Shape of Mystery”: The Visionary Resonance of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“…Historically, however, black women's storytelling is often invisible as a form of theorizing. Before Barbara Christian's “The Race for Theory,” the notion that black women's writing constitutes worthy sites for analysis, that these works are capable of theorizing black female subjectivity in innovative ways, was often disregarded. As Christian writes, “people of color have always theorized,” but their theory was willfully rendered illegible because they did so “in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic” (68).…”