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 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 demonstrates the divergent political horizons that racism fosters.

Gulzar R. Charania is an associate professor at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa.