Seminars

Saying that sisters are important in crime narratives is about as groundbreaking as noting that there are a lot of orphans in literature. Sisterhood is low-hanging metaphoric fruit for examining women’s lives and what we do and should mean to one another. But is a sister someone who comes to your rescue, who helps you hide the body? Or is she part of the trauma that honed your detective (or killing) skills in the first place? Does powerful sororal identification lead to justice, or to rumination and destruction, like in the rape revenge film “Promising Young Woman”? International crime narratives by and/or about women are increasingly drawn to violence and reflect a skepticism towards the kinds of female solidarity across differences that are necessary to deliver a more just world. And while sisterhood seems self-evidently universal, we know that our understanding and representation of familial relations are culturally specific. If transnational critical work might prefigure global feminist solidarity, how do we avoid the errors of a second wave feminism that flattened difference in order to organize around shared oppression? What can we learn from crime narrative’s army of angry women in a time when the moral arc that would bend away from patriarchy has flatlined?

In 1900, domestic work was the chief occupation of Black women in both Southern and Northern cities, though conditions differed sharply. In the South, this work was largely confined to Black women; in the North, white and immigrant women shared these roles. Using individual-level Census data from 1900–1950 across ten U.S. cities, this study traces the persistence of racial labor hierarchies and the enduring costs of occupational segregation for Black women.

The Ancestor’s Weave is the memoir of an Irish American activist who takes on the U.S. government and the Catholic church over its treatment of women and LGBTQI people, specifically women of color in the HIV epidemic, and later the U.S. government’s response to her mother’s death on 9/11. Much later in life she learns that every choice she has made was foreshadowed by the lives of her female ancestors. Blending historical fiction with identifiable facts, the book reclaims disappeared narratives and lives and the clear record of joyful resistance.