The End of Respectability: Black Feminism and Ratchet Politics
Channel: Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
Date: 2022-09-25

A lecture by Brittney Cooper examining the construction and practice of respectability politics as rational and rooted within a specific historical context as a means to secure claims to citizenship, political and social power, and selfhood for Black people, which have ultimately failed to materialize. Instead, Cooper argues that the practice of respectability politics are anachronistic and unproductive, and instead proposes that political possibility lies in the refusal to conform to power structures, and to acknowledge the costs of patriarchy, heteronormativity, and Black exceptionalism in order to get free.

This event was co-sponsored by the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, the Afro-American Studies Program, and the Young, Gifted, and Black Coalition at UW-Madison.

Brittney Cooper is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in 2009. She also has an M.A. from Emory (2007) and bachelor’s degrees in English and Political Science from Howard University (2002). Professor Cooper is currently completing her first book Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual Tradition, 1892-Present. Her work focuses extensively in the area of Black women’s intellectual history, Black feminist thought, and race and gender politics in hip hop and popular culture. She has two forthcoming articles about hip hop feminism in Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society and African American Review. Professor Cooper has also published book chapters on Black women’s history in fraternal orders and the Janet Jackson Superbowl incident. She is co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective blog, which was named a top feminist blog by New York Magazine in 2011 and a top race blog by TheRoot.com in 2012. She writes for the CFC as “crunktastic.” More information on Professor Cooper is available on her website and the Freshspeakers website.