Black Feminism In The Academy Summary

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My group decided to do our second group project on Rina Arya article “Black Feminism in the Academy”, focusing on our discussion question “Does Postmodern Feminism appropriately include Black Feminism”? Arya gave great insight into how Second wave feminism was many focused on middle class white women’s problems. This largely excluded minority women and their experiences from the topics and issues covered by the women’s movement. Arya praises Third wave feminism for being more inclusive, intersectional, and “pluralizing identities”. Arya is an art history professor and recognized the need for minority feminists in the workplace and in academia. She explains that black feminist work still isn’t seen as respected literary work. Therefore they …show more content…

Arya found it beneficial to use postmodern feminism to help her students talk about feminism with having to identify as one of the polarized terms that feminism has made for itself. Throughout our presentation we wanted to focus on how postmodern feminism and Black feminism are taking place in today’s society. After introducing ourselves, and our discussion question that we focused on we gave a brief over view of the author, Rina Arya. Following our introduction we define a few key terms such as second wave, third wave, postmodern, and black feminism are. Then Alyse found a political cartoon that we felt spoke to how Arya had described black feminists feelings at the time. The cartoon was a black girl and a white girl speaking to each other. The black girl asking angrily “Do you even hear the words I say?” and the white girl responding with, “The ones I like”. We felt this spoke more to the second wave ideas that focused manly on the white women’s issues, but we also felt as though it spoke to the marginalization of black feminists in our society. Alyse came up with two discussion questions to get the classes thoughts and feelings about the

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