Shatema Threadcraft
“The Me Too movement was started by a black woman named Tarana Burke, and Black Lives Matter became a movement because of the work of three black queer women. And yet, press coverage of the movement centered the experiences of white women and black men respectively, with regards to Me Too, and Black Lives Matter. Black women's experiences of sexism will be different from white women's. This form of oppression intersects with racism and classism to create distinct harm.”
“Black women are 10 percent of the US female population yet they are 59% of women murdered. But their deaths occur in private when most Black political mobilization centers around spectacular deaths. Profiling the resurrective political work of Ida B. Wells, Barbara Smith, Toni Morrison and others, Threadcraft builds on her award-winning scholarship on Black women’s access to intimate life and democratic freedom to consider how Black activists navigate the politics of premature Black death.”
“Threadcraft’s Intimate Justice is remarkably confident, sophisticated, and engrossing. This fresh, ambitious work successfully brings feminist political theory together with Black feminist thought, richly exploring ways to think about and achieve justice within the sphere of intimate relations.”
“Establishing meaningful intimate justice is every bit as important as economic and political justice.’ Shatema Threadcraft’s 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.”
Shatema Threadcraft is the author of The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy and Morrisonian Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2025) and Intimate Justice: the Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford University Press, 2016). The Labors of Resurrection examines the phenomenon of Black femicide and chronicles the resurrective political labor of Ida B. Wells, Mamie Till Bradley, Clementine Barfield, Barbara Smith, Margaret Prescod and Toni Morrison in the service of Black, sexual and reproductive freedom. Intimate Justice won the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2017 Sara A. Whaley Award for the best book on women and labor, the 2017 W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2017 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association's Race, Ethnicity and Politics Organized Section (Best Book in Race and Political Theory). Her article, “Intimate Justice, Political Obligation and the Dark Ghetto” (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 39, no. 3, 2014) was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2015 Okin-Young Award, which recognizes the best paper on feminist political theory published in an English language academic journal in 2014. She co-convenes the Black Politics/Theory/History Workshop with Juliet Hooker, Minkah Makalani and Deva Woodly.
Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, The Du Bois Review, Signs, Politics & Gender, Race and Social Problems, Philosophical Topics, Theoretical Criminology and The Washington Post.
She’s an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University, and lives in Nashville.
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