The Crunk Feminist Collection

October 10, 2016
The brilliant founders of the Crunk Feminist Collective bring together some of their website’s most popular and thought-provoking essays on race, sisterhood, sex, and pop culture. As “hip-hop-generation feminists of color,” the authors describe their politics as a “remix” incorporating the best of multiple movements, offering a truly diverse, intersectional series of viewpoints. They subvert paradigms—maligning stereotypes such as the “angry black woman” and the “side chick,” while also supplying useful neologisms such as blackgirl and disrespectability politics. They take on black masculinity, “infighting” liberals, and misogyny in rap lyrics, and more personal subjects, including infertility, child abuse, and depression. Cooper’s perspective as a born-again Christian is particularly nuanced, as she discusses the church’s “harmful gender ideology,” homophobia, and insularity. Cooper also penned a heartbreaking plea for justice after the death of Trayvon Martin and a brilliant defense of ratchet culture as the antithesis of the “pathology of... respectability.” Another highlight contributor, writing under the pseudonym Crunkista, relates an infuriating incidence of racial profiling by mall security. Beyoncé is given ample space, as is Nicki Minaj and prolific showrunner Shonda Rhimes. These essays are extremely relevant, educational, and a genuine pleasure to wrestle with. The range of subject matter and myriad voices is representative of a new wave of vibrant and multifaceted feminism, at home in the academy and the beauty parlor.

January 1, 2017
A collection of feminist essays on sex, gender, pop culture, politics, and friendship.Originally founded in 2004 by three like-minded graduate students at Emory University, the Crunk Feminist Collective was revived in 2010 as a blog and outlet for the members' opinions, cultural analyses, and personal stories in the age of digital feminism. Bringing together their most popular posts from 2010 to 2015, the book is a diverse assemblage of essays, missives, rants, and confessions. Though the pieces range in style and subject matter, they all mix a deeply passionate and intellectual backbone with informal, accessible language that addresses feminist issues of gender, politics, and race and racism. Before delving into these topics, the collection includes a mission statement, manifesto, and an introduction to getting crunk, which proclaim the group's mission to "create a space of support and camaraderie for hip hop generation feminists of color, queer and straight, [with]in the academy and without," and define crunkness as "our commitment to feminist principles and politics." Their "mode of resistance" is to rail against patriarchal power structures, defend and humanize Black Lives Matter, and dissect African-American representation in the media. (There are several essays on Beyonce.) The group also tackles sensitive personal subjects for communities of color, such as coming out, reproductive rights, and mental health. The writers of the collective exhibit an extraordinary breadth of intellectual range, but their critiques often favor anecdotal evidence rather than a more substantive argument. Nonetheless, there is plenty to provoke thought, and the collection serves as a call to action for enlightenment-seekers. The editors also include a "Crunk Glossary" to define relevant terms, including "genderqueer" and "misogynoir," which "refers to the unique hatred that Black women and girls experience in American visual and popular culture." A valuable record of the collective's contributions to a growing cultural awareness of feminist issues and criticism, particularly for women of color.

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January 1, 2017
The Crunk Feminist Collective's blog, established in 2010, was on the front lines of intersectional feminist online discourse, existing in the heyday of black Twitter and hashtag activism. Crunk is a mash-up of crazy (or chronic) and drunk, and it implies extreme intoxication. For the collective, crunk recalls awareness to the point of inebriation, formed in the era of Queen Latifah and Lauryn Hilla time in hip-hop and neo-soul where female artists relayed their truth openly, creating the language for young women of color to speak of their oppression and advocate for their rights. The works in this collection cover a wide swath, from #Blackgirlmagic, to heady dissections of policy and reform, to critique and analysis of black thought leadersincluding bell hooks. Though the essays exist in witty, digestible passagesmany are adapted from blog postsit's clear most of the authors are academics. That said, the writings, though unmistakably political, speak to the personal with familiarity, honesty, and focus.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)