Publication: “Phobic Pessimism, Philic Feminism” by Patrick Teed

Research fellow Patrick Michael Teed has a new essay out in Diacritics, offering a close reading of Iyko Day's "Afro-Feminism Before Afropessimism" to reexamine the presumed antagonism between Afropessimism and Black feminism. Below is an excerpt from the piece.

This essay provides an immanent critique of the Afropessimist-Black feminist impasse through a close reading of Iyko Day's "Afro-Feminism Before Afropessimism." Delineating how the assumption of an antagonism between Afropessimism and Black feminism necessarily flattens both while relationally constructing the two in a spectacularized field of enmity, this essay reads the demand for their non-coincidence as a staged violence refracting antiblack gendered fantasies. Through this antagonism, both Afropessimism and Black feminism are deployed from without to extend the interlocutory projects of civil society's antiblack discourse. And so, this essay argues, the inability to reckon with the conjuncture of Black feminist Afropessimism reveals how Black thought is scaled through the academy precisely by way of its disappearance in a gendered schema that both forecloses and fixes, indeed forecloses by way of fixing, the Black female imago.

Read the full piece in Diacritics 53.2, pp. 64–91.