In-Person Event: Feelin by Bettina Judd

Join us for an in-person event celebrating Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought by Bettina Judd. For this event, Bettina will be in conversation with Kemi Alabi.

Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

About the book

How creativity makes its way through feeling—and what we can know and feel through the artistic work of Black women

Feeling is not feelin. As the poet, artist, and scholar Bettina Judd argues, feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women—from poet Lucille Clifton and musician Avery*Sunshine to visual artists Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, and Deana Lawson.

Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought makes a bold and vital intervention in critical theory’s trend toward disembodying feeling as knowledge. Instead, Judd revitalizes current debates in Black studies about the concept of the human and about Black life by considering how discourses on emotion as they are explored by Black women artists offer alternatives to the concept of the human. Judd expands the notions of Black women’s pleasure politics in Black feminist studies that include the erotic, the sexual, the painful, the joyful, the shameful, and the sensations and emotions that yet have no name. In its richly multidisciplinary approach, Feelin calls for the development of research methods that acknowledge creative and emotionally rigorous work as productive by incorporating visual art, narrative, and poetry.

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BETTINA JUDD is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and writer whose creative research centers Black feminist thought. She is the author of patient., winner of the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press, and an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.

Kemi Alabi is the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, and coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021). Their poems appear in the Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Head of Creativity & Impact at the gender-justice organization Forward Together, Alabi creates cultural power projects with artists and movement builders. Born in Wisconsin on a Sunday in July, they now live in Chicago, IL.

Image Description: A light burgundy colored banner with a faint pattern of open books. The banner features a small cover image for Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought to the left of a large photo of the author, Bettina Judd. The text reads: "Women & Children First presents an in-person event with Bettina Judd, Thursday, February 2 at 7 p.m. Masks and proof of vaccination required.

Accessibility: Email wcfbooks@gmail.com with questions or to request accommodations.