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 of the ways in which the movement's accomplishments had diverged sharply along racial lines. Thousands of forced sterilizations were performed on black women during this period, convincing activists in the Black Power, civil rights and women's movements that they needed to address, pointedly, the racial injustices surrounding equal access to reproductive labor and intimate life in America. As horrific as the Relf tragedy was, it fit easily within a set of critical events within black women's sexual and reproductive history in America, which black feminists argue began with coerced reproduction and enforced child neglect in the period of enslavement. While reproductive rights activists and organizations, historians and legal scholars have all begun to grapple with this history and its meaning, political theorists have yet to do so. Intimate Justice charts the long and still incomplete path to black female intimate freedom and equality--a path marked by infanticides, sexual terrorism, race riots, coerced sterilizations and racially biased child removal policies. In order to challenge prevailing understandings of freedom and equality, Shatema Threadcraft considers the troubled status of black female intimate life during four moments: antebellum slavery, Reconstruction, the nadir, and the civil rights and women's movement eras. Taking up important and often overlooked aspects of the necessary conditions for justice, Threadcraft's book is a compelling challenge to the meaning of equality in American race and gender relations.

About the Author
Shatema Threadcraft is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and a member of the Graduate faculty of Womens and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis and the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity.

Reviews
It's been a bad decade for politics, but a great decade for political theory. Three standouts for me were Shatema Threadcraft's Intimate Justice, Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire, and Kathi Weeks's The Problem With Work. * Amia Srinivasan, The Chronicle of Higher Education *
With theoretical sophistication and admirable moral charity, Intimate Justice reframes what corrective racial justice should entail by taking the deprivation of black womens intimate capacities as its starting point. Threadcraft makes a compelling case that the debate about racial justice has focused almost exclusively on the civic harms suffered by blacks in the public sphere, thereby overlooking the thwarting of black womens intimate capacities in the private sphere. She brilliantly spells out what a fuller account of racial justice would entail. * Juliet Hooker, Associate Professor of Government and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin *
Establishing meaningful intimate justice is every bit as important as economic and political justice. Shatema Threadcrafts Intimate Justice powerfully demonstrates the wisdom of that claim and the urgency of developing a theory of freedom that locates the historical and contemporary experiences of African American women and girls at its center. This is a foundational text for all political theorists. * Lawrie Balfour, author of Democracys Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W.E.B Du Bois *
"As a result of the legacy of the violation of Black women, Threadcraft suggests the creation of local, Black-female led offices that act as service centers for victims and also provide cultural and representational support for Black women. Such spaces could help change the meaning of Black womanhood by uplifting the art and creative contributions of Black women, allowing them to define themselves." - Melissa Brown, University of Maryland



Book Information
ISBN 9780190251635
Author Shatema Threadcraft
Format Hardback
Page Count 224
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 366g
Dimensions(mm) 221mm * 147mm * 21mm