Intersectionality and the Marginalization of Black Womanhood

Criticism has tended to read Sapphire’s Push, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, and Natasha Brown’s Assembly within separate traditions: the literacy narrative, the passing novel, and Black British fiction of corporate life. Reading them together, this article asks how White patriarchal norms of femininity travel across institutions and across the Atlantic to constrain Black women, and how the protagonists push back against those norms. Through comparative close reading grounded in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought, the article puts each novel in dialogue with research from other fields: sociolinguistics for Push; passing scholarship and sociological work on cumulative advantage for The Vanishing Half; and narratology, the medical humanities, and public-health research on “weathering” for Assembly. These norms work through open violence, prejudice, and the ways institutions read Black women. In Push, a teaching approach that treats the vernacular as a resource turns Precious from a bureaucratic “case” into a co-author of her own story. In The Vanishing Half, Whiteness appears as a performed but revocable credential whose advantages build up across generations. In Assembly, the narrator’s refusal of cancer treatment takes her out of an assimilation bargain that promises belonging but never delivers it, in a Britain that has not come to terms with its colonial past. Together, the novels reject a single, uniform image of Black womanhood. Resistance takes the form of shared authorship, costly self-invention, and refusal, and each is shaped and limited by the overlapping structures it opposes.