Subject's Wife
The Racialized Gender Logics of Anticommunism and State Surveillance
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2229405 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Morgan E Barry (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 943-967 |
| Publication date | 2023-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/724246 |
| OpenAlex | W4381487583 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
This essay examines how gender shaped Black communist and communist-affiliated women’s experiences with political repression in early Cold War Chicago. While recent scholarship on Black women leftists in the mid-twentieth century has emphasized early Cold War anticommunism as a moment of rupture, I find that the experiences of Black women organizers in Chicago complicates such conclusions. Using police archives, personal papers, oral histories, and more, I contend that sexist-racist cultural discourses rendered Black women activists’ leadership and agency less visible to the state and that anticommunist state officials, as a result, tended to treat Chicago’s Black communist and communist-affiliated women as peripheral rather than central threats. Thus, Black communist and communist-affiliated women were more capable than their male counterparts of surviving early Cold War anticommunism and sustaining the class-conscious radical Black politics they had developed in Chicago. This essay not only identifies how raced gender discourses affected Chicago activists’ experiences with political repression, it also adds to recent scholarship by exploring the measure of opportunity Black communist and communist-affiliated women accessed in this early Cold War context, despite the straitened circumstances
Agency (philosophy) · Communism · Context (archaeology) · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Wife · American History and Culture · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
Body and Soul
Remaking Black Power
The Injustice Never Leaves You
Rank and File
They Were Her Property
Radicalism at the Crossroads
Race Woman
Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs
The Strange Career of Annie Lee Moss
The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past
The Age of Surveillance
The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism
Protectors of Privilege
Left of Karl Marx
At the Dark End of the Street
African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |