Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Mikki Kendall was born in 1976 in Chicago and grew up in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood, which she identifies as “the hood.” She later attended the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and DePaul University and is a US Army veteran. An author, activist, and cultural critic, Kendall has been published in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Time, and elsewhere and has appeared on programs including Good Morning America, The Daily Show, and BBC’s Woman’s Hour. Kendall is a prominent member of Black Twitter, and this book is inspired in part by a hashtag she created, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, which points out the racism in the feminist movement.

Although Hood Feminism is primarily a cultural and political critique of contemporary feminism, the framework that grounds Kendall’s feminism is deeply rooted in Kendall’s life experiences as a Black woman. Her growth from child to teen to woman is central to her articulation of hood feminism. Over the course of the book, Kendall makes it clear that her formative experiences as a Black woman and a feminist occurred in the midst of life, rather than in a formal, academic setting. She describes her early struggles with respectable gender norms imposed on her by her grandmother, surviving molestation by a caregiver, getting into trouble at school, and moving among a host of family members who stepped in as her parents were not able to rear her. These early experiences are significant because they center working-class Black girlhood as the crucible that shaped her as a feminist long before she would have applied that term to herself. Centering this frequently erased voice is in keeping with her desire to focus on the most vulnerable members of her community.

Kendall spends some time discussing her adolescence and early adulthood years, with the primary focus being on her growing awareness of the way gendered norms, especially those associated with beauty culture inside and outside of her community, damaged her. Coming of age for Kendall involved rejecting these norms to embrace a loud, disruptive young woman who nevertheless struggled as a result of her frequent relationships with partners who explicitly abused her.

The contemporary Kendall who emerges throughout the book is one who is, as promised, “not nice” because productive anger is what is called for to more closely approximate a “good accomplice” in the fight to ensure survival for marginalized people. She directs harsh criticism at White feminism and elements in her community that endorse patriarchy that harms everyone, especially Black women and girls. Alongside these frequent denunciations, Kendall includes self-critical moments in which she discusses how being “middle-class adjacent” and having attained a degree of success as a writer have distanced her from some of the struggles she sees at work in communities of color (248). Ultimately, her arc as a woman and as a feminist drives home the point that feminism can be a vibrant and useful tool in the lives of women like her.