Bettina Judd: On Writing About Black Feminist Thought and Art

Bettina Judd is the author of patient. poems, winner of the 2014 Hudson Book Prize, and Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought. Her poems and essays are widely published in anthologies and journals such as Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Torch, Mythium, and Meridians. She is currently Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

In this post, Bettina discusses how grief founds its way into her new work of nonfiction, Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought, and more!

Name: Bettina Judd
Book title: Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Release date: December 15, 2022
Genre/category: Nonfiction
Previous titles: patient. poems (Black Lawrence Press, 2014)
Elevator pitch for the book: Feelin urges us to take the work of Black women artists seriously by considering the emotional depth of the poetry, music, and visual art they create. It is a multi-genre and multi-media inquiry into how Black feminist thought is produced by Black women artists.

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I was curious about how Black feminist thought could be created by Black women artists—a claim a few scholars have made. I was interested in the processes by which Black feminist thinking could be described and how Black women artists were doing that thinking. Most of all, I wanted to understand my own compulsion toward engaging both of these things: Black feminist thought and art.

This project truly spans decades and early into my graduate career. The question was really: How do I make sense of my leanings toward Black feminist thinking and activism and my driving impulse to write poetry, sing, and create other forms of art? How this question would be asked has changed over time and I think that is reflected in the variations of tone and topic in each chapter of the book.

Truly, by the end of writing the book I was ready for a new way of writing and a new way of thinking. This shift resulted in the first chapter of the book which is a series of poems and a 25-minute short film on grief. That grief emerged in my life during the process of finishing this book and I could not ignore its impact on my thinking about how Black studies, and Black feminist studies in particular, has marked my interior world.

By thinking of grief in this way, how Black studies has marked my grief, I could ask the next question which was: How has Black studies been marked by grief? It is precisely the kind of question that this project needed to engage, as it reveals an emotional undertow of the field.

I am very grateful to the team at Northwestern for being open to my ideas for the publication of this book, including the use of QR codes to navigate readers to the multimedia components of the book. I think I was so nervous about finding a way to have this component in the book that anything else, I was willing to roll with.

I think that might have been the best lesson. Is that working with a team that really understands the project on a multidisciplinary level with great experience in publishing fantastic and innovative books of poetry is really the way to go for having a smooth publishing process while creating interactive work.

I think the topics themselves were surprises. They happened so long ago I am not sure I have an origin story for them, but I will say that the first draft chapter on anger was written by hand in a dark café/bar in one night.

I am not sure that anger itself fueled it, but I was very much tapped into the feelings of frustration about how the trope of angry Black womanhood has affected my own life and the lives of others. That chapter has developed a lot since that evening, and I never expected to engage with anger until I was writing about it. And how could I not?

I was writing a book about emotion and Black feminist thought—the trope of the angry Black woman is due a more complex discussion. What came of that first draft was a kind of declaration about how knowledge is suppressed by the trope, and doubles back on itself as a reflection of misogynoirist hatred. I’m sure I didn’t know that when I first sat down to write about anger.

I hope readers will find use in the work as a way to luxuriate in what they experience and enjoy about the work of Black women artists. I hope, if folks are not familiar with the artists I discuss, they seek them out. I hope people will take heed to the words of Nina Simone, “Stop and think, and feel again,” especially in this political and social moment.

Find the ritual that works for you and use that. Keep finding the ritual that works for you. It may change from project to project. Make experimenting as well as reading a part of this ritual.

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