DeFacto Feminism

Judy Juanita views activism and feminism as it plays out in her political, artistic and spiritual life. A distinguished semifinalist for OSU's 2016 Non/Fiction Collection Prize, De Facto… blends essays, poems, graphics by the late Rini Templeton and literary criticism. An act of self-definition with the feel of memoir, these essays follow a long line of thinkers, including Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Michelle Wallace, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Paula Giddings, Michelle Alexander, Roxane Gay, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. In her semi-autobiographical novel, Virgin Soul, the central character joins the Black Panther Party and calls herself a female foot soldier in the black revolution of the sixties. The feminist foot soldier in De Facto... processes major shifts in American society through her own development. The essays are set chronologically, beginning with a picture of the author's Tuskegee Airman father, and an account of a not altogether idyllic childhood in Oakland. The concept of freedom here is a freedom from complication, from an awaiting black consciousness.

Introduction: The Path to Womanhood; My California Childhood - a freedom childhood; White Out; Five Comrades in The Black Panther Party, 1967-1970; Black Womanhood #1; Tough Luck; Cleaning Other People's Houses; A playwright-in-progress; Putting the Funny in the Novel; The N-word: Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater; Bruno was from Brazil; The Gun as Ultimate Performance Poem; All the Women in My Family Read Terry McMillan; Whatever Happened to Carolyn M. Rodgers?; De Facto Feminism; Report from The Front, i.e. Berkeley, CA; Acknowledge Me: a true ghost story/epistolary essay/ postmodern spiritual narrative.