Academic Articles by Amanda Mixon
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2019
Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-) and Mab Segrest (1949-) are white
middle-class lesbians that both came... more Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-) and Mab Segrest (1949-) are white
middle-class lesbians that both came of age during the classical
phase of the Civil Rights Movement in rural Alabama.
Today, they are considered influential figures in feminist and
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) literary
movements and recognized as important activists in late
twentieth-century feminist, LGBTQ, and anti-racist political
struggles. Examining Pratt’s Rebellion: Essays, 1980-1991 (1991)
and Segrest’s Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994), I argue that
both texts deconstruct the sociopolitical dynamics and ideologies
that inform the inculcation of white middle-class southern
womanhood specifically and hegemonic white southern culture
generally through performing a form of anti-racist praxis
that I call geospatial critique. This term addresses how Pratt
and Segrest mine spaces that they occupy for histories of
struggle, paying specific attention to how white settler-colonialism
and chattel slavery produced particular epistemologies
of race, class, gender, and sexuality that continue to influence
social identities and practices in the present. Initially developed
during Pratt and Segrest’s collaboration on Feminary, a
lesbian-feminist journal located in Durham, North Carolina,
between 1978 and 1982, geospatial critique, I suggest, is a direct
response to or a way of undoing the racial training that
was part of the production of whiteness in the south from the
turn to the first half of the twentieth century.
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Academic Articles by Amanda Mixon
middle-class lesbians that both came of age during the classical
phase of the Civil Rights Movement in rural Alabama.
Today, they are considered influential figures in feminist and
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) literary
movements and recognized as important activists in late
twentieth-century feminist, LGBTQ, and anti-racist political
struggles. Examining Pratt’s Rebellion: Essays, 1980-1991 (1991)
and Segrest’s Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994), I argue that
both texts deconstruct the sociopolitical dynamics and ideologies
that inform the inculcation of white middle-class southern
womanhood specifically and hegemonic white southern culture
generally through performing a form of anti-racist praxis
that I call geospatial critique. This term addresses how Pratt
and Segrest mine spaces that they occupy for histories of
struggle, paying specific attention to how white settler-colonialism
and chattel slavery produced particular epistemologies
of race, class, gender, and sexuality that continue to influence
social identities and practices in the present. Initially developed
during Pratt and Segrest’s collaboration on Feminary, a
lesbian-feminist journal located in Durham, North Carolina,
between 1978 and 1982, geospatial critique, I suggest, is a direct
response to or a way of undoing the racial training that
was part of the production of whiteness in the south from the
turn to the first half of the twentieth century.
middle-class lesbians that both came of age during the classical
phase of the Civil Rights Movement in rural Alabama.
Today, they are considered influential figures in feminist and
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) literary
movements and recognized as important activists in late
twentieth-century feminist, LGBTQ, and anti-racist political
struggles. Examining Pratt’s Rebellion: Essays, 1980-1991 (1991)
and Segrest’s Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994), I argue that
both texts deconstruct the sociopolitical dynamics and ideologies
that inform the inculcation of white middle-class southern
womanhood specifically and hegemonic white southern culture
generally through performing a form of anti-racist praxis
that I call geospatial critique. This term addresses how Pratt
and Segrest mine spaces that they occupy for histories of
struggle, paying specific attention to how white settler-colonialism
and chattel slavery produced particular epistemologies
of race, class, gender, and sexuality that continue to influence
social identities and practices in the present. Initially developed
during Pratt and Segrest’s collaboration on Feminary, a
lesbian-feminist journal located in Durham, North Carolina,
between 1978 and 1982, geospatial critique, I suggest, is a direct
response to or a way of undoing the racial training that
was part of the production of whiteness in the south from the
turn to the first half of the twentieth century.