Book Talk: Fighting Feelings

Join the WGSI for a book talk with Dr. Gulzar R. Charania in conversation with Dr. R. Cassandra Lord and Dr. Sheila Batacharya discussing Dr. Charania’s book Fighting Feelings: Lessons in Gendered Racism and Queer Life 

Racialized women and girls often feel racial injustice before they have the words to name it. Sometimes they fight these feelings, and sometimes they use these feelings to fight. In this important and revealing book, Gulzar R. Charania puts the experiences of women of colour at the centre of her investigation, sharing how they endure everyday racism, as well as its lasting impacts and exacting costs in their lives and educational trajectories.

Fighting Feelings highlights how the elasticity of white supremacy invites people of colour to be its accomplices, how interlocking forms of oppression force racialized queer women to calibrate the risk of expressing their sexuality, and how schools and the nation inform the development of racial literacy. Charania traces the complex convergences, and inseparability, of race, class, gender, and sexuality in women’s lives, and the divergent political horizons that racism fosters.

Told through a clear analytic lens, Fighting Feelings articulates racism as a structure, and explores the myriad ways it shapes the lives and political formation of women of colour. Charania’s analysis of the complexity of racism makes this book a critical and necessary contribution to our understanding of how white supremacy operates.