Asserting the Political Self

Community Activism Among Black Women Who Relocate to the Rural South

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2276948
AutoresChristopher Mele (University at Buffalo, State University of New York, autor de correspondencia)
Año2000
Volumen41
Número1
Páginas63-84
Fecha de publicación2000-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSociological Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0038-0253 • E-ISSN: 1533-8525
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1533-8525.2000.tb02366.x
OpenAlexW1986011956
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas29

In this article, I address the collective process of politicization in a group of urban working-class black women who have departed from large cities in the northeast United States and resettled in small towns and scattered, isolated rural communities in the Southeast. The study examines how newcomes became politically involved in their new environment and particularly, how social constraints and opportunities embedded within local political culture influenced their experiences of becoming activists. I employ a critical feminist approach in which an understanding of political agency is grounded in culturally and geographically specific social relations. I argue that activist politics of returnees are framed and formed by unequal gender, race, and class relations resonant in the political culture of the rural South. Localized social conventions define and normalize allowable political roles, discourses, and actions for working-class black women. As newcomers and outsiders, women activists and their actions become politicized in the process of encountering, questioning, and ultimately, subverting these conventions. As the women returnees engaged local political culture, their practices were interpreted as a violation of established paternalist norms of community activism by both white power holders and local working-class black women. This transgression influenced the formation of their identities as political agents and may potentially disrupt the power relations in the surrounding community as well. The study's findings demonstrate the importance of situating race, class, and gender relations in the analysis of activist politics in general and among black working-class women in particular. The study is based on participant observation and interviews with working-class black women activists in three counties in southeastern North Carolina

Agency (philosophy) · Participant observation · Paternalism · Political activism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Social science · Sociology · Working class · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Race, History, and American Society · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies