4 - “¡Qué su voz se escuche!”

Summary

Chapter 4 introduces the concept of a Black feminist toolkit to show that at the microlevel, Black women succeed at growing movement participation and solidarity by utilizing transnational Black feminist politics to convert experiences of pain into purpose. Here, I examine the processes through which affective and emotional bonds serve as political devices for mobilization in race-based social movements, utilizing and expanding the concept of collective emotional energy levels. Furthermore, I engage with Vilma Piedade’s concept of dororidade, a combination of the Portuguese words for pain, solidarity, and sisterhood, to illuminate why and how affective processes of mobilization are critical to Black women’s participation in Argentina’s feminist and Black social movements. I argue that Black women activists and artist-activists equip their constituency with what I name a Black feminist toolkit, which gives them a collectivized knowledge, language, and confidence to process the otherwise crippling forms of quotidian and institutional racism that they experience.