The Question that Silences Women: An Interview with Gina Clayton, Founder and Executive Director of the Essie Justice Group

Abstract

In this “short takes” interview with Gina Clayton, the founder and executive director of Essie Justice Group, Clayton discusses how and where the politics of respectability emerges in her organizing work with women with incarcerated loved ones. Essie Justice Group harnesses the power of women with incarcerated loved ones in the service of ending mass incarceration. Clayton articulates how the burdens of isolation and alienation experienced by these women are often exacerbated by the politics of respectability. Grounded in a feminist politics itself rooted in collective action, Essie Justice Group is working to counter the silencing and oppression of women.

Keywords::

• empowerment
• intersectionality
• interview
• mass incarceration
• organizing
• politics of respectability
• silence
• women

Notes

For more on the ways that the politics of respectability can silence the voices of black women see, Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (July 1, 1992): 738–55; Wahneema Lubiano, “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means,” in Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, edited by Toni Morrison, 1st edition (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 323–63; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, New Ed edition (New York; London: Routledge, 2005); Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” in Feminism Meets Queer Theory, edited by Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 136–56.

Both Hazel Carby and Evelynn Hammonds write about the policing of black women in the early twentieth century. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body”; Hammonds, “Black (W)holes.”

For more on the ways in which black women have been historically excluded from the category of woman, see Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Collins, Black Sexual Politics; bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1st edition (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992); Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brittany Farr

Brittany Farr received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the ways the U.S. state has disciplined and managed black reproduction, particularly the black maternal body. She is currently pursuing a J.D. at Yale Law School.