Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

During the 1960s to 1970s, feminists opened up new contexts for having conversations about women and politics by breaking down the perceived line between private and public. Breaking down this boundary allowed them to point out that treating reproduction, sex and sexuality, and threats to women’s survival such as domestic violence as private concerns protected the status quo and prevented women from organizing together to confront these issues. They further argued that these experiences—how women experience them, how we talk about them, and what policies we are willing to use to address them—are socially constructed, meaning that politics is a perfectly legitimate means of changing how we apprehend and respond to these experiences. Kendall uses personal and community experiences to bolster her case for an intersectional feminist politics.

Time and again, Kendall opens her essays with personal anecdotes and family history. These personal anecdotes are almost always a means of conveying her experience as a Black woman with working-class roots as the basis for her perspective on issues that White feminism typically ignore. In her Introduction, for example, she opens with the history of her grandmother, from whom she learned the importance of prioritizing family and community. Kendall relies on her personal history—learning “feminism outside the academy first” (xvi), learning to be unafraid of the perception that she was mean or harsh if it meant her survival—to begin sketching out what it means to be a hood feminist.

Citing this personal history shows that there is a longstanding tradition of feminist values that may not be recognized as such by White, mainstream feminism or even named as such by the women practicing hood feminism. This personal history is also an essential credential for a self-proclaimed intersectional feminist whose major goal in the collection is to de-center White feminism and counter the erasure of women of color.

Kendall’s personal disclosures are not just designed to shore up her arguments and authority, however. Some of these disclosures are painful, self-critical ones. Kendall describes in detail how her partner abused her, that her caretaker molested her, when she realized she had an eating disorder, nearly getting shot as she walked outside of a store, a near-kidnapping, and the struggle to parent her children. These disclosures have the impact of making her relatable because many women have had these experiences. Kendall talks herself (and the reader) through how she eventually came to understand these experiences as a part of a larger story of multiple oppressions marginalized women face. This talking through allows the reader to see what intersectional feminism looks like in practice.

Kendall’s self-critical disclosures are also ones that show the evolution of her thinking about her own identity and the larger story of women. Kendall grapples with difficult topics within the Black community, including Black patriarchy, colorism/texturism that she herself internalized, and her need to do better on the issue of being a good ally for LGBQTIA women and youth. She also counters the myth of the self-made Black success story by consistently pointing out the stops and starts on that journey and the many people who helped her along the way.

By including these moments, Kendall is acknowledging that the actual practice of feminism is messy but worth the struggle. For White feminists, privileged women, or people within marginalized communities who nevertheless have embraced patriarchal ideas about women, these moments reveal the way to forward and get past defensiveness.