Abstract
One of the marks of a genuine breakthrough in political theory is that it seems impossible, in retrospect, to have tried to understand political life without it. Shatema Threadcraft’s notion of intimate justice effects such a conceptual shift. Centering the historical and ongoing violation and exploitation of black women’s intimate capacities—sexual, reproductive, and caretaking—Threadcraft’s book brings black feminist thought to bear on obstructions to the apprehension and redress of intimate injustice in both feminist political theory and Afro-Modern thought. At the same time, this rigorous engagement builds on key strengths of each of these streams of political thinking. The result is an important intervention into both, as well as into broader theorizations of freedom and justice.
Threadcraft defines the conditions of intimate justice as (1) no undue constraints on anyone’s intimate capacities; (2) contexts that support and enable the equal realization of intimate capacities; (3) racial-group membership must not entail violation of the intimate sphere; and (4) interpersonal and institutional violence should not attend the exercise of intimate capacities (33). Opening the volume with the stories of two black women powerfully demonstrates the continuum of state and interpersonal violence that has precluded intimate justice. Elaine Riddick, a kidnapping and rape victim, was sterilized by the North Carolina eugenics board in the 1960s. Decades later, Ms. B suffered serial sexual assaults by white male Chicago police officers. Threadcraft also signals the centrality of black women’s resistance to her account by profiling Riddick’s own organizing against sexual violence, and concurs with activist scholar Beth Richie that black communities themselves must redress gendered patterns of violence. Yet Threadcraft clearly addresses her own claims to a state and polity founded on intimate injustice. What, she asks the reader, do we all owe to black women? What must the polity do to foster intimate justice given this history?
In pursuit of these questions, Threadcraft joins the powers of black feminist thought with the strengths of feminist political theory and Afro-Modern thought, while holding each accountable for their oversights. With regard to feminist thinking, Threadcraft shifts a familiar horizon of events, figures, and concepts by revealing their relations to black women’s experiences and black feminist theorizing. After reading Threadcraft’s text, it is impossible to think about Roe v Wade without thinking of Relf v Weinberger, the case that highlighted the US government’s massive involuntary sterilization program, which victimized the twelve- and fourteen-year-old Relf sisters the same year as Roe. We cannot think of the “second shift” without thinking about the “tragic second shift” of black women: devoting their time to white bodily well-being at the expense of their own families and intimate spheres (29). And we cannot think “motherhood” without the insights that Threadcraft draws from Hortense Spillers on enslaved females’ navigation of being paradoxically “both mother and mother-dispossessed” (57–58). Nor can we think of violence against women without the Richie’s work on disproportionate violence targeting black women in homes and streets. Drawing on classic critiques by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and others, Threadcraft maintains that white feminist political theorizations still tend to neglect the full scope of black women’s subjection under patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.
Threadcraft’s engagement with Spillers is part of a standout chapter, “What Free Could Possibly Mean.” This chapter begins, again, with a story, this time that of Margaret Garner’s 1856 infanticide. Threadcraft builds an account of enslaved female agency through comparing the armed resistance of Margaret’s husband, Robert, with Margaret’s act of preventative violence toward her own offspring. For Threadcraft, Robert’s gunshots emblematize the conventional understanding of enslaved resistance as directed toward external constraints. Margaret’s subjection to intimate violence, particularly the fact that she was forced to reproduce human commodities, requires an understanding of internal constraints as well. To this end, Threadcraft draws on Nancy Hirschmann’s theorization of freedom, which emphasizes both material conditions of patriarchy and the ways that women’s desires and meaning-making capacities are themselves configured by that oppression (though Hirschmann is insufficiently attentive to differences between black and white patriarchal contexts). Garner’s act, Threadcraft argues, must be understood both as a strike against the slave regime’s extreme intimate violence, and a tragic attempt to make her children mean otherwise. It is precisely this latter move, what Spillers denotes the generative “monstrosity (of a female with the potential to ‘name’),” that explains the infanticide’s enduring resonance. Corrective racial justice under contemporary conditions also requires attention to the internal modes of constraint that persist as legacies of enslavement, especially the positioning of black women as “the proper target of violence” (67). This must in part entail public support for black women’s cultural work toward reconstructing the meanings of black womanhood (68).
Battles over these meanings are, of course, not new. Threadcraft finely thematizes the tensions between the respectable womanhood of uplift-minded black clubwomen like Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper, and the openly erotic, often queer womanhood enacted by blueswomen like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith—the latter’s political valences interpreted by Angela Davis. Drawing out the contributions of both, she argues for an intimate sphere both “respectable” and “outrageous”: simultaneously ensuring the integrity of black women’s bodies and unabashedly embracing a vision of intimate expressivity and transgressive abundance.
Such intimate sphere concerns, Threadcraft contends, have been largely absent from Afro-Modern thought. Threadcraft argues that this issues from the tradition’s focus on the absence of civic bonds between the white polity and black subjects, both implicitly masculine, brilliantly characterizing this as an anti-black version of Hobbes’s state of nature (99). She sees W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, even in their rivalry, as sharing similarly masculinist prioritizations of the public sphere. Key contemporary Afro-Modern thinkers Tommie Shelby and Charles Mills, Threadcraft argues, have likewise neglected intimate concerns. She affirms Shelby’s crucial attention to the ways that the racialization of space has created different parameters of political obligation and civic norms; pursuits and attitudes conventionally defined as “deviant” become viable pursuits. But Shelby represents his ghetto denizens in terms no less masculinist than his predecessors: able-bodied adults without biological needs or caregiving responsibilities—even as intimate violation and appropriation are central to the injustice that Shelby analyzes. Forwarding instead a relational conception of ghetto-dwelling actors, Threadcraft correspondingly expands the category of actually salutary “deviant” practices to reflect intimate concerns, including refusing child removal by an apartheid foster care system. Moreover, drawing on black feminist analyses of intraracial street harassment, she argues that black men have an obligation to foster an empowering climate for their female counterparts. But this obligation, she argues, must receive support from a white-majority public that has long parasitized and violated black women’s intimate capacities.
Threadcraft elaborates her concept of intimate justice most explicitly through intervening in Shelby and Mills’s competing accounts of racial justice, leveraging Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Rawls’s neglect of the family, relationality, and human interdependency to diagnose the contractarian limitations of both. Threadcraft makes clear throughout the text that her account of in/justice is grounded in Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. She argues here that Nussbaum’s list of ten capabilities necessary for human flourishing “provid[e] the best way to ‘embody’ corrective racial justice” (142). This is because, first, the nonhierarchical ordering of human capabilities pre-empts masculinist deprioritization of the intimate sphere, allowing a full accounting of the black women’s intimate deprivations; second, because capabilities require a supportive context for their realization, grounding claims for community and state obligations; and third, because, on Threadcraft’s reading, Nussbaum, like Hirschmann, apprehends internal as well as external forms of constraint (144–45). Threadcraft argues that corrective racial justice must triangulate the capabilities approach with Mills’s and Shelby’s respective insights: Shelby’s abovementioned focus on racialized space and Mills’s notion of white opportunity hoarding. This would allow us to “extend the list of opportunities that whites have hoarded with explicit reference to Nussbaum’s list . . . Life, Bodily Health, Bodily Integrity, and Emotion.” Positive support for these capabilities would additionally entail an overhaul of gendered racial geographies, from reproductive health care institutions to public transportation. “Bringing Nussbaum, Shelby, and Mills together,” Threadcraft argues, helps us envision the unprecedented possibility of black women “no longer disadvantaged with regard to bodily integrity relative to white women” (147).
This concluding vision of justice offers some satisfyingly concrete steps toward actualization. Yet this particular trio of critical liberals holding the key to intimate justice for black women feels oddly disconnected from the currents of the earlier chapters. There is no specification, for example, of what features distinguish Nussbaum’s feminism from the implicit white-centricity of other feminist political theorists. More substantially, the account of justice here bears no clear correspondence to the book’s rich theorizations of freedom grounded in the work of Spillers and Davis, who refuse to take existing white heteropatriarchal capitalist understandings of human being—including especially gender, sexuality, kinship—as their reference point. Mills’ zero-sum account of hoarding and deprivation indeed offers significant purchase on the mechanisms of white supremacist policy and practices. Yet in making justice about equalizing advantage “relative to white women,” we lose the agonistic insistence on insurgent forms of life and relation that threads through both Spillers’s and Davis’s work. On this last element, it is also noteworthy that Threadcraft includes no discussion of the term “woman” in relation to black feminist, queer of color, decolonial, or trans studies’ theorizations of race and gender binarism.
This relativity to white women also risks reinscribing whites as the standard of well-being. Threadcraft writes that whites have “hoarded opportunities to avoid having their emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety,” while blacks are prone to such blight (157–59). This parallels Nussbaum in Women and Human Development: “When people are respected as equals, and free from intimidation, and able to learn about the world, and secure against desperate want, their judgments . . . are likely to be more reliable.” 1 But taking seriously the affective formation of the dominated also means reckoning with dominators’ affective investments. What of judgments formed under conditions in which equality of some is predicated on the degradation, intimidation, and want of others, and the apparent naturalness of this domination blights dominators’ own emotional development? Insofar as Nussbaum’s capacities approach affirms white affluent status quo notions of the good life as the standard—however ill-gotten—to be reached, it is hard to see how this approach can catalyze political will for US whites to even begin to ask what the polity owes to black women, let alone countenance the answer.
Finally, where is reproductive justice in relation to intimate justice? Reproductive justice, a framework for theory, praxis, and movement building originally formulated by black reproductive activists, centers the experiences and organizing of women of color, and black and woman of color feminism. This framework posits as human rights (1) to have a child, (2) not to have a child, and (3) to parent children in healthy and safe environments; it also emphasizes gender freedom and sexual autonomy. 2 Given its significant overlap with intimate justice, it is puzzling that reproductive justice is never mentioned in the main text (it appears twice, undiscussed, in notes). Yet it in some ways seems to better fit Threadcraft’s diagnoses and aims than Nussbaum’s approach. A reproductive justice frame in no way posits white women’s intimate lives as a standard, emphasizing that—while vastly outscaled by anti-black and colonial reproductive violence—young, poor, queer, trans/nonbinary, and disabled whites have been constant targets of reproductive oppression; and that even affluent, norm-compliant whites are subject to neo-eugenic pronatalism and tightly constrained, hyper-commoditized reproductive and dependent care options. Circling back to the question of political will, rather than the Nussbaumian appeal for positive supports for the intimately injured, reproductive justice emphasizes both white supremacy’s reproductive crimes and the skin, so to speak, that whites have in the game.
These concerns notwithstanding, Intimate Justice is a game-changing contribution to contemporary political thought. The questions that it raises and theorizations that it develops will only become more crucial in our classrooms, our scholarship, and in organizing for transformative racial justice that spans body, kin, community, and polity.