Black Feminism

by Julieta Garcia, Archivist, International Guitar Research Archives - February 17, 2026

Happy Black History Month! In honor of Black History Month, we are highlighting some works by Black feminist authors that are housed in Special Collections & Archives. 

Feminism is the advocacy and inclusion of women’s rights, and works toward equality within political, personal, and social spaces. Black feminists felt, and continue to feel, oppressed in feminist circles because of their status and race, and so their work adds to feminist ideas and strives for equality within the additional areas of race, class, and capitalistic structures. Historically, women of the African diaspora are oppressed by systemic structures set in place by colonial and patriarchal ideas and thought. Black feminist writers write about and discuss these structures in poetry, stories, and interviews.

BLK, “The National Black Lesbian and Gay Newsmagazine”, was a magazine where the Black LGBTQ+ community discussed various events, politics, interviews, and more. It ran from 1988 until 1994, and includes many articles, advertisements, cartoons, and statistics about AIDS. BLK featured feminist authors such as Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Barbara Smith, to name a few.  

Black Lace, a magazine published by the BLK Publishing Company, is dedicated to the experience of Black women who love other women. In this magazine, Black women could express their desires wholeheartedly, through prose, poetry, photography, and interviews in whatever manner they chose. This space allowed Black women to express themselves without criticism or judgement. In issue no. 4 from 1994, the editor writes “I want to begin really challenging the limits of pornography, to engage you with a conversation about what we’re doing here, to get us all involved in questioning such things as voyeurism, objectification, commodified desire, the production of sex-hunger.”

Special Collections & Archives also holds additional works by some of the Black feminists featured in BLK. These include Child of Myself by Pat Parker, Cables to Rage by Audre Lorde, and Toward a Black Feminist Criticism by Barbara Smith. These Black feminists wrote to uncover and challenge the representation of women of the African diaspora when discussing views on sex, class, and race, writing honestly about their experiences as Black women and feminists on topics ranging from love to death in poetry, essays, and more.

In Toward a Black Feminist Criticism, for example, Smith writes about the criticism, discrimination, and blatant racism Black women authors face. She argues that Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye “poses both lesbian and feminist questions about Black women’s autonomy and their impact upon each other’s lives," and points out that Morrison’s work depicts “the necessary bonding that has always taken place between Black women for the sake of barest survival.” This in itself is Black feminism, fighting and advocating for survival as a Black woman in a constantly oppressive society.

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Post tagged as: special collections, rare books, publications, united states