Eloquent rage book review8/15/2023 I personally will be handing it out as stocking stuffers at my next gender studies conference. While the chapter will not be new information for feminist race scholars, it is a handy and accessible catchall for a consensus of ideas that women of color have espoused about the Women’s March and other current moments. Bush’s racist campaign scare tactics as evidence that the vast majority of white women’s political interests have been overwhelmingly race-loyal, and not really women’s interests at all. Wells’s Red Record, Iggy Azalea’s laughable attempt at hip hop, and George H.W. Cooper threads, among many other items, Ida B. Her chapter on “White Girl Tears” is where she shines best by doing what she does best: using both biography and scholarly lens to cook up popular culture, gender theory, and historical analysis into a biting indictment of white women’s anti-intersectionality-in this case the particular failings of white feminists to “gather” white women in the 2016 elections. She layers personal narratives around complicated childhood friendships, homegirl interventions, romantic loneliness, abusive fathering, and a violent murder attempt on her mother. Cooper is unapologetically reclaiming this right to rage. Cooper opens with a thoughtful mea culpa about her own rage-an emotion that has been denied African American women and weaponized against them to violent ends. Recent waves of popular feminist writings, however, increasingly emphasize the obvious inverse of that equation, and Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage is a deeply personal confessional where lived experiences deliver her to the doorstep of her feminist awareness. In Davis’s equation, our emotions aren’t an aside to macropolitical spheres rather, our desires, insecurities, and self-awareness are manifestations of it. I made audible affirmations when Angela Davis wrote that our interior lives-our emotions, our hearts, the places that masculinist movements deemed beyond the reach of the political discourse-are all highly informed by ideologies. I can check off all my contradictory feminist snags that were laid open in Manifesta, and Bad Feminist. I fucking love spa days, and Rihanna’s line of perfectly matched liquid foundations changed my yellow-undertoned life. One can now form a feminist politics out of spa day Groupons and $400 Rihanna tour tickets. Yet the phrase has been misused in a vast array of neoliberal me-ologies that border on self-indulgence, first-worldness, and the seductions of consumerist capitalism.
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