The fall of the family: reading family rejection in Frances Beal's ‘Double Jeopardy’

Historically, it has been difficult for Black feminists to part with the family. The unit is often imagined as the primary configuration for resisting state violence, reproducing Black life, and crafting radical politics. Less acknowledged is a strand of Black feminism that marks the family as a structural impediment to Black women's political, social, and erotic freedoms. This article engages the family question through a reading of Frances Beal's 1970 ‘Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.’ While Beal's theorisation of double jeopardy has primarily been read as calling attention to the ‘double burden of race and gender,’ I read it here as a theorisation of the violence inflicted on Black women in both the world of waged work and the so-called private sphere of family life.