Shatema Threadcraft
Biographic Data
| ID | 632408 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shatema Threadcraft |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shatema |
| FAMILY NAME | Threadcraft |
| SIGNATURE | THREADCRAFT S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5612-6225 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy
Western democracies are haunted. Michael Hanchard suggests that the specter of race is what haunts our democracies, but it may be more accurate to suggest that they are haunted by their own racialized death machines—by racialized premature death. If this haunting is not adequately attended to, democracies cannot fulfill their function. Even W. E. B. Du Bois, whose lynching-as-crucifixion stories are important among the stories of Black peoplehood…
Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy
Necropolitics and Vision
This chapter outlines the phenomenon of “Black femicide,” in both its active and passive forms. It discusses the impact of the racialized gendered division of labor on Black women’s exposure to premature death, as well as the impact of unpunished housing crimes committed against Black women, the housing discrimination they face and their overall housing insecurity on their disproportionate premature deaths. Closely related to this systemic econom…
Anti-Black Violence and Toni Morrison's Democratic Storytelling
More people are mobilized in response to the deaths of Black men than those of Black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw understands this asymmetry as being rooted in Black women's lack of "narrative capital" and has called on women to "share their stories" of violence to occasion greater mobilization. In this essay, I argue that the work of Toni Morrison, and specifically her conception of truant democracy, provides a blueprint for how and with whom Black …
Making Black Femicide Visible: Intersectional, Abolitionist People-Building Against Epistemic Oppression
Black women struggle to make the violence they experience visible for at least four reasons: the violence occurs in private, not in public; it is associated with sex, sexuality and intimacy; the violence is not amplified within the public and counterpublic spheres; and, finally and importantly, activists have not been as successful in constructing resonate narratives regarding the violence. Contemporary violence against black men, for example, is…
The politics of care
The “Agonistic Turn: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics in New Contexts
Black women, victimization, and the limitations of the liberal state
This article challenges contemporary understandings of the US carceral state by confronting the realities of exceptionally high rates of homicide victimization among Black women and considering the implications for equality and understandings of the carceral state. We propose that neither the US state nor the US penal order can be fully understood without taking account of the exceptionally high rates of violence to which Black women are exposed.…
North American Necropolitics and Gender: On #BlackLivesMatter and Black Femicide
Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics as a corrective to Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics to account for "those figures of sovereignty whose central project is ... the material destruction of human bodies and populations" most evident on the plantation and in the colony. Melissa Wright has added that the politics of gender is central to the politics of death. She highlights state officials' efforts to assign meaning to the bodies o…
Dying Fast and Dying Slow in Black Space: Stop and Frisk’s Public Health Threat and a Comprehensive Necropolitics
Aggressive policing strategies have come under scrutiny for stark racial and ethnic inequities. New York City, home to the United States' largest police force, was subject to a federal class action lawsuit that culminated in its "Stop, Question and Frisk" policies being ruled unconstitutional. In this paper we argue that Stop and Frisk not only violates constitutional rights, but also constitutes a public health problem. Operating as one process …
Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic
Intimate Justice charts the long and still incomplete struggle for freedom and equality for the embodied black female subject, the struggle to use the powers and capacities of the black female body freely and equally. This struggle has been marked by infanticides, widespread and systematic sexual violence as a weapon of racial terror, coerced sterilizations, and other racially targeted techniques of population control, as well as racially biased …
Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic
In 1973, the year the women's movement won an important symbolic victory with Roe v. Wade, reports surfaced that twelve-year-old Minnie Lee Relf and her fourteen-year-old sister Mary Alice, the daughters of black Alabama farm hands, had been sterilized without their or their parents' knowledge or consent. Just as women's ability to control reproduction moved to the forefront of the feminist movement, the Relf sisters' plight stood as a reminder o…
Bodies in Politics
Movement’ justice and the capabilities approach: Resources, social environments and social attitudes in black urban space
The capability approach described by Amartya Sen illustrates the multiple aspects of injustice in such fields as racially motivated sexual harassment or segregation in urban space. In response to Sen’s pointing out that we should focus not simply on institutions but also on the social realizations they engender, the article illustrates the function of the natural and social environments for racial groups in affecting the distribution of resources…
Perceiving the Black Female Body: Race and Gender in Police Constructions of Body Weight
Intimate Injustice, Political Obligation, and the Dark Ghetto
In “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto,” Tommie Shelby argues that blacks in urban centers do not have the same set of civic obligations that bind people within the wider society. That argument is based on his claim that meaningful citizenship—defined as equal political power relative to members of the wider society, equal access to employment-oriented skill acquisition and to employment itself, equal treatment within the criminal justice sys…
The politics of care
Dying Fast and Dying Slow in Black Space: Stop and Frisk’s Public Health Threat and a Comprehensive Necropolitics
Aggressive policing strategies have come under scrutiny for stark racial and ethnic inequities. New York City, home to the United States' largest police force, was subject to a federal class action lawsuit that culminated in its "Stop, Question and Frisk" policies being ruled unconstitutional. In this paper we argue that Stop and Frisk not only violates constitutional rights, but also constitutes a public health problem. Operating as one process …
North American Necropolitics and Gender: On #BlackLivesMatter and Black Femicide
Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics as a corrective to Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics to account for "those figures of sovereignty whose central project is ... the material destruction of human bodies and populations" most evident on the plantation and in the colony. Melissa Wright has added that the politics of gender is central to the politics of death. She highlights state officials' efforts to assign meaning to the bodies o…
Perceiving the Black Female Body: Race and Gender in Police Constructions of Body Weight
Black women, victimization, and the limitations of the liberal state
This article challenges contemporary understandings of the US carceral state by confronting the realities of exceptionally high rates of homicide victimization among Black women and considering the implications for equality and understandings of the carceral state. We propose that neither the US state nor the US penal order can be fully understood without taking account of the exceptionally high rates of violence to which Black women are exposed.…
The “Agonistic Turn: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics in New Contexts
Anti-Black Violence and Toni Morrison's Democratic Storytelling
More people are mobilized in response to the deaths of Black men than those of Black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw understands this asymmetry as being rooted in Black women's lack of "narrative capital" and has called on women to "share their stories" of violence to occasion greater mobilization. In this essay, I argue that the work of Toni Morrison, and specifically her conception of truant democracy, provides a blueprint for how and with whom Black …
Bodies in Politics
Intimate Injustice, Political Obligation, and the Dark Ghetto
In “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto,” Tommie Shelby argues that blacks in urban centers do not have the same set of civic obligations that bind people within the wider society. That argument is based on his claim that meaningful citizenship—defined as equal political power relative to members of the wider society, equal access to employment-oriented skill acquisition and to employment itself, equal treatment within the criminal justice sys…
Movement’ justice and the capabilities approach: Resources, social environments and social attitudes in black urban space
The capability approach described by Amartya Sen illustrates the multiple aspects of injustice in such fields as racially motivated sexual harassment or segregation in urban space. In response to Sen’s pointing out that we should focus not simply on institutions but also on the social realizations they engender, the article illustrates the function of the natural and social environments for racial groups in affecting the distribution of resources…
Perceiving the Black Female Body: Race and Gender in Police Constructions of Body Weight
Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic
Intimate Justice charts the long and still incomplete struggle for freedom and equality for the embodied black female subject, the struggle to use the powers and capacities of the black female body freely and equally. This struggle has been marked by infanticides, widespread and systematic sexual violence as a weapon of racial terror, coerced sterilizations, and other racially targeted techniques of population control, as well as racially biased …
Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic
In 1973, the year the women's movement won an important symbolic victory with Roe v. Wade, reports surfaced that twelve-year-old Minnie Lee Relf and her fourteen-year-old sister Mary Alice, the daughters of black Alabama farm hands, had been sterilized without their or their parents' knowledge or consent. Just as women's ability to control reproduction moved to the forefront of the feminist movement, the Relf sisters' plight stood as a reminder o…
Bodies in Politics
Black women, victimization, and the limitations of the liberal state
This article challenges contemporary understandings of the US carceral state by confronting the realities of exceptionally high rates of homicide victimization among Black women and considering the implications for equality and understandings of the carceral state. We propose that neither the US state nor the US penal order can be fully understood without taking account of the exceptionally high rates of violence to which Black women are exposed.…
North American Necropolitics and Gender: On #BlackLivesMatter and Black Femicide
Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics as a corrective to Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics to account for "those figures of sovereignty whose central project is ... the material destruction of human bodies and populations" most evident on the plantation and in the colony. Melissa Wright has added that the politics of gender is central to the politics of death. She highlights state officials' efforts to assign meaning to the bodies o…
Dying Fast and Dying Slow in Black Space: Stop and Frisk’s Public Health Threat and a Comprehensive Necropolitics
Aggressive policing strategies have come under scrutiny for stark racial and ethnic inequities. New York City, home to the United States' largest police force, was subject to a federal class action lawsuit that culminated in its "Stop, Question and Frisk" policies being ruled unconstitutional. In this paper we argue that Stop and Frisk not only violates constitutional rights, but also constitutes a public health problem. Operating as one process …
The “Agonistic Turn: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics in New Contexts
Making Black Femicide Visible: Intersectional, Abolitionist People-Building Against Epistemic Oppression
Black women struggle to make the violence they experience visible for at least four reasons: the violence occurs in private, not in public; it is associated with sex, sexuality and intimacy; the violence is not amplified within the public and counterpublic spheres; and, finally and importantly, activists have not been as successful in constructing resonate narratives regarding the violence. Contemporary violence against black men, for example, is…
The politics of care
The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy
Western democracies are haunted. Michael Hanchard suggests that the specter of race is what haunts our democracies, but it may be more accurate to suggest that they are haunted by their own racialized death machines—by racialized premature death. If this haunting is not adequately attended to, democracies cannot fulfill their function. Even W. E. B. Du Bois, whose lynching-as-crucifixion stories are important among the stories of Black peoplehood…
Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy
Necropolitics and Vision
This chapter outlines the phenomenon of “Black femicide,” in both its active and passive forms. It discusses the impact of the racialized gendered division of labor on Black women’s exposure to premature death, as well as the impact of unpunished housing crimes committed against Black women, the housing discrimination they face and their overall housing insecurity on their disproportionate premature deaths. Closely related to this systemic econom…
Anti-Black Violence and Toni Morrison's Democratic Storytelling
More people are mobilized in response to the deaths of Black men than those of Black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw understands this asymmetry as being rooted in Black women's lack of "narrative capital" and has called on women to "share their stories" of violence to occasion greater mobilization. In this essay, I argue that the work of Toni Morrison, and specifically her conception of truant democracy, provides a blueprint for how and with whom Black …
Law (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Criminology (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Race, History, and American Society (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Economic Justice (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works)