INTERSECTIONAL BLACK, QUEER FEMINISM AS MOVEMENT PRAXIS
by Shanelle Matthews
Read this in the FEMINIST ZINE
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is organizing to amass significant political power to influence national and local agendas in the direction of our shared Vision for Black Lives policy platform—a comprehensive framework for a society that values Black lives, repairs past harms, and invests in Black communities.
In our lives and work, we aspire to a Black queer feminist framework—organizing in communities nationwide to not only abolish state-sanctioned and patriarchal violence but to guarantee that our movements are intersectional, inclusive, and rooted in what Charlene Carruthers has named as the “Black feminist and LGTBQ traditions and knowledge, through which people and groups see to bring their full selves into the process of dismantling systems.”
Radical Black feminist frameworks, politics, and a commitment to abolitionist practices guide our daily praxis.
For example, we practice intersectional feminism by building narrative power and permeance for feminist values. Rashad Robinson says, “narrative power is the ability to change the norms and rules our society lives by.” M4BL’s communications team builds narrative power for the feminist values outlined in our Vision for Black Lives by taking advantage of political opportunities and disrupting hegemonic thinking. By doing so, we expand collective perceptions of what is socially, economically, and politically possible.
We know anti-Black narratives are gendered, meaning they target Black women, men, and gender-nonconforming people differently. To build narrative power for Black, queer, and feminist values, we expose the underlying networks of intersectional, systemic narratives, stereotypes, and myths that result in the dehumanization of Black people in life and death. At the same time, proliferating liberatory and intersectional counternarratives toward a society that celebrates and defends Black life.
Building on the legacies of movement workers who came before us, we guide our work with a narrative power framework, which originates in Black feminist frameworks that insist on the simultaneous eradication of racism, sexism, classism, and more. Frameworks provide guidelines and roots that align our work and outputs with our values. Without a framework to interrogate the mechanics of your strategy, it can quickly become a trap— especially in today’s rapidly changing information ecosystem. The past, present, and future are interconnected, and as technology, communication, and power continue to change shape, we can use Black feminist-inspired frameworks to meet the moment.
We practice intersectional feminism by making the invisible visible and striving to abolish patriarchal violence. In the summer of 2020, on the heels of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by police, millions of people mobilized to form the largest mass movement against police violence and racial injustice in U.S. history. Some M4BL Members asked, “what is the relationship between this kind of spectacular viral violence circulated in videos and hashtags and the everyday harms of hidden intimate partner and sexual violence?” Because there can be no liberation for all Black people without abolishing patriarchal violence.
To interrogate this question, we erected the Abolishing Patriarchal Violence table (APV), a multi-year effort to abolish patriarchal violence in Black U.S. communities, informed by community assessment and collective visioning. The table uses six workgroups tasked with addressing different dimensions of harm:
Experiments and solutions
Research and data
Healing and harm
Black survivor centered leadership development
Interventions with men and masculinities
Culture shift
By the end of 2025, the six workgroups will collectively produce an anthology that provides a multiscalar vision for gender justice within Black communities and continues the legacy of amplifying effective practices of everyday feminist abolition.
Black feminist traditions are foundational to M4BL’s revolutionary spirit. Our formations are shaped by the lives and legacies of Black, queer, feminist revolutionaries who came before us, and their lessons of love and liberation guide us.