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Jennifer Christine Nash

Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Distinguished Professor
Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies

Selected Publications


Black Feminist Self-Help: Or, Notes on the Genres of Contemporary Black Feminist Political Life

Journal Article Signs · March 1, 2024 This article turns attention to the contemporary Black feminist trade book, which I argue introduces a new, highly visible, and highly profitable genre: Black feminist self-help. This article thinks critically about Black feminist self-help, tracking the e ... Full text Cite

How We Write Now Living with Black Feminist Theory

Book · 2024 "Jennifer C. Nash's How We Write Now offers a conceptual framework for thinking about contemporary Black feminist writing's commitment to sitting with and at the scene of loss through beautiful writing. ... Cite

Object Lessons at 10: a conversation

Journal Article Feminist Theory · April 1, 2023 This conversation returns to Robyn Wiegman's field-defining Object Lessons, reflecting on the book's travels, resonances, and continued importance a decade after its publication. ... Full text Cite

On the beginning of the world: dominance feminism, afropessimism and the meanings of gender

Journal Article Feminist Theory · December 1, 2022 Dominance feminism and afropessimist theory, despite their critical appearances three decades apart, are undergirded by similar rhetorical strategies, political commitments and argumentative moves. This is the case even as afropessimism’s citational trajec ... Full text Cite

The Promise of Repair: VBACs and Contemporary Feminist Political Desire

Journal Article Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies · 2022 Full text Cite

S K. Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History.

Journal Article The American Historical Review · November 9, 2021 Full text Cite

Birthing Black Mothers

Book · August 13, 2021 Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the "Black mother" has become a powerful political category synonymous with crisis, showing how they are often rendered into one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism and the ground zero of Black ... ... Cite

Home is Where the Birth Is: Race, Risk, and Labor During COVID-19

Journal Article Yale Journal of Law and Feminism · 2021 Cite

Citational Desires: On Black Feminism's Institutional Longings

Journal Article Diacritics: a review of contemporary criticism · 2021 Cite

Intersectionality

Chapter · 2021 Cite

Strange Intimacies

Journal Article Public Culture · September 1, 2020 This paper sits with the understudied subgenre of the contemporary black maternal memoir in the Black Lives Matter era. We read Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin’s Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin and Lezley McSpadden’s Tell the Tru ... Full text Cite

Slow Loss: Black Feminism and Endurance

Journal Article Social Text · June 1, 2020 Full text Cite

Writing Black Beauty

Journal Article Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society · September 2019 Full text Cite

Black Feminist Self-Help: Or, Notes on the Genres of Contemporary Black Feminist Political Life

Journal Article Signs · March 1, 2024 This article turns attention to the contemporary Black feminist trade book, which I argue introduces a new, highly visible, and highly profitable genre: Black feminist self-help. This article thinks critically about Black feminist self-help, tracking the e ... Full text Cite

How We Write Now Living with Black Feminist Theory

Book · 2024 "Jennifer C. Nash's How We Write Now offers a conceptual framework for thinking about contemporary Black feminist writing's commitment to sitting with and at the scene of loss through beautiful writing. ... Cite

Object Lessons at 10: a conversation

Journal Article Feminist Theory · April 1, 2023 This conversation returns to Robyn Wiegman's field-defining Object Lessons, reflecting on the book's travels, resonances, and continued importance a decade after its publication. ... Full text Cite

On the beginning of the world: dominance feminism, afropessimism and the meanings of gender

Journal Article Feminist Theory · December 1, 2022 Dominance feminism and afropessimist theory, despite their critical appearances three decades apart, are undergirded by similar rhetorical strategies, political commitments and argumentative moves. This is the case even as afropessimism’s citational trajec ... Full text Cite

The Promise of Repair: VBACs and Contemporary Feminist Political Desire

Journal Article Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies · 2022 Full text Cite

S K. Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History.

Journal Article The American Historical Review · November 9, 2021 Full text Cite

Birthing Black Mothers

Book · August 13, 2021 Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the "Black mother" has become a powerful political category synonymous with crisis, showing how they are often rendered into one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism and the ground zero of Black ... ... Cite

Home is Where the Birth Is: Race, Risk, and Labor During COVID-19

Journal Article Yale Journal of Law and Feminism · 2021 Cite

Citational Desires: On Black Feminism's Institutional Longings

Journal Article Diacritics: a review of contemporary criticism · 2021 Cite

Intersectionality

Chapter · 2021 Cite

Strange Intimacies

Journal Article Public Culture · September 1, 2020 This paper sits with the understudied subgenre of the contemporary black maternal memoir in the Black Lives Matter era. We read Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin’s Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin and Lezley McSpadden’s Tell the Tru ... Full text Cite

Slow Loss: Black Feminism and Endurance

Journal Article Social Text · June 1, 2020 Full text Cite

Writing Black Beauty

Journal Article Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society · September 2019 Full text Cite

Pedagogies of Desire

Journal Article differences · May 1, 2019 Full text Cite

Black Feminism Reimagined After Intersectionality

Book · December 6, 2018 In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. ... Cite

Intersectionality and Its Discontents

Journal Article American Quarterly · 2017 Full text Cite

Gender Love

Book · 2017 This book focuses on love and its relation to gender, mapping out feminist and queer critical engagement with love's many meanings, paying particular attention to love's gendered and sexualized elements, and offering resources for further ... ... Cite

Pleasurable Blackness

Chapter · November 9, 2016 These rich and multidisciplinary essays are written by renowned critical sexualities studies experts and rising stars in this area and grouped under four main areas: Global Assemblages of Sexuality Education Sexualities Education in Schools ... ... Cite

Unwidowing: Rachel Jeantel, Black Death, and the “Problem” of Black Intimacy

Journal Article Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society · June 2016 Full text Cite

Feminist originalism: Intersectionality and the politics of reading

Journal Article Feminist Theory · April 2016 This article examines the growing body of commemorative feminist work on intersectionality – the myriad journals and books that have marked intersectionality’s twentieth anniversary and celebrated the analytic’s field-defining status and cross-dis ... Full text Cite

Theorizing Race, Theorizing Racism: New Directions in Interdisciplinary Scholarship

Chapter · April 1, 2016 As demonstrated in this collection, this has resulted in a feminist legal theory which, while remaining attentive to national jurisdictional concerns, also looks beyond these horizons to a complex terrain of multiple, intersecting political dynamics&nbs ... Cite

Desiring Desiree

Chapter · 2016 This volume places pornography at the heart of the 1970s American experience, exploring lesser-known forms of pornography from the decade, such as a new, vibrant gay porn genre; transsexual/female impersonator magazines; and pornography for ... ... Cite

Black Anality

Journal Article GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies · October 1, 2014 “Black Anality” argues that “black” and “anal” are rendered ideologically, discursively, and representationally synonymous, and that black female flesh becomes the material space on which this convergence occurs. Drawing on an archive of online, wi ... Full text Cite

The Black Body in Ecstasy Reading Race, Reading Pornography

Book · March 31, 2014 In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. ... Cite

Institutionalizing the Margins

Journal Article Social Text · 2014 Full text Cite

Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality

Journal Article Meridians · March 1, 2013 AbstractThis article examines the consolidation of love into a black feminist politics during second-wave feminism. By reading love-politics as both a practice of the self and a nonidentitarian strategy for ... Full text Cite

Strange Bedfellows

Journal Article Social Text · 2008 Full text Cite

Comadre

Internet Publication Link to item Cite

Black Maternal Aesthetics

Journal Article Theory and Event: an online journal of political theory Link to item Cite

“Teaching the Feminist ‘Classics’ Now"

Journal Article Feminist Formations Cite