"Unbought and Unbossed": On Being Black, Woman, and Transgressive in the Fight for Justice

• In Event: Surviving and Countering Patriarchal Whitelash: Public Education and Resistance Research by "Nasty Women"

Abstract

Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman (1968) and black person to campaign for the presidency of the United States (1972), embodied a particularly important transgressive subjectivity that should be examined in relation to today’s political climate. Chisholm’s transgressive subjectivity was marked by her political disposition, ideologies, and commitments to/for humanity, on the one hand, and by her raced and gendered identities, on the other hand, within what Melancon (2014) refers to as “an almost exclusively white and male-dominated political terrain” (p. 1). It was a political terrain and an electoral arena that afforded little to no seats to women and people of color, and that upheld a status quo steeped in “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 2001), misogyny, violence, and erasure. Yet Chisholm remained relentless in her pursuit for equality, knowing the urgency of “breaking with tradition” in order to confront the “sanctions that society will immediately impose upon us” (qtd. in PageWise, 2002).
Chisholm’s (1973) relentlessness and, hence, her transgressive subjectivity, were visible in her decision to run for US President “despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo” (n.a.). She continued, “The next time a woman runs, or a black, or a Jew or anyone from a group that the country is ‘not ready’ to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously...I ran because somebody had to do it first. In this country, everybody is supposed to be able to run for President, but that has never really been true” (n.a.). Specifically, her relentlessness and transgressive subjectivity are indicative of an inherent refusal to be encumbered, to be contained, to embody an apologetic form of resistance to difference, and to operate within racial and masculinist/gendered domination that has long (mis)characterized the role of women in relations involving politics, policies, and power.
Considering the never-ending confrontations with “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 2001, p. 72) experienced by Chisholm and endured by other women still today, I examine how being Black, woman, and transgressive in the fight for public justice (see Fannie Lou Hamer, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Assata Shakur, Alice Walker, etc.) requires us to move toward an “unbought and unbossed” discourse of/for human rights that center specific situated (and often highly contested) needs for identity politics/identity rights. I consider questions involving the following: (1) How educational research and researchers can better account for transgressive subjectivities in theory, praxis, and politics; (2) Which methodologies support transgressive subjectivities through orientations that are humanizing and justice-specific; and (3) How being relentless and transgressive (in the spirit of Shirley Chisholm) can produce tangible solutions for surviving our current political reality of the ‘it should be Hillary and the nasty women, but we are stuck in a Trump era.’ With these considerations, I offer a necessary stance toward being “unbought and unbossed” in the push to transgressively re-secure human rights in the fight for public justice.

Author

• Valerie Kinloch, University of Pittsburgh