Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Tamura Lomax

December 14th, 2012 by Andrea

By Andrea Plaid

Tamura Lomax. Photo: courtesy of the interviewee.

You may have seen the R’s cross-postings from The Feminist Wire (TFW), that brilliant collective of mostly writers of color doing their intersectional thang on topics like World AIDS Day 2012 and an interview with one of the R’s staffers. (I’m telling you–it’s a treat of a lifetime to be interviewed by one of your heroes.)

So, mutual admiration is fair play.

I got to interview the great brain behind TFW, Tamura Lomax. Her bona fides: she’s the Assistant Chair and an assistant professor of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been featured at, among other spaces, Religion Dispatches. She’s working on a co-authored book about the Black feminist/womanist reponses to Tyler Perry’s work and a book on Black feminism and Black cultural production. And she’s just hella fun to clown around with online, which, of course, has led to some hush-hush plans for a future academic conference.

I’ve said too much already about the event. Here’s Tamura…

The Feminist Wire is a heck of a collective of some of the best minds thinking about the intersections of race, gender. sexuality, bodies, politics, etc. How did you gather such a great group of people and, more interestingly, why and how did you start the blog?   The Feminist Wire began as a concept in 2010.  Hortense Spillers and I were working on my dissertation and we thought it would be neat to write something together—two black feminists working across generations.  At this time, she even referred to me as a younger version of herself.  We were definitely similar in terms complexion and hairstyles and–as we learned later–personalities.  Her work and writing style definitely informs my own.  Our initial idea was to write some sort of peer-review essay for academia.  However, when the Shirley Sherrod incident occurred, we knew it was our time to put pen to paper–or, in my case, fingers to keyboard.

We wrote the essay, “Shirley Sherrod: Open Letters Between Two Frustrated Feminists, Hortense Spillers and Tamura Lomax,” which was a critical call-and-response about Sherrod, of course, but also black women and media.  We shopped the essay, hoping to get it published at theroot.com.  However, no one responded.  Frustrated, we decided to “create our own damn site” so that we could publish what we wanted when we wanted.  Due to timing, we published the essay on my now defunct webpage, tamuralomax.com, and began charting our path toward The Feminist Wire.

Hortense thought of the name “Feminist Wires.”  However, “Feminist Wire” (sans the “s”) already existed as a blog at Ms. Magazine.  I added the article, “The,” removed the “s” and commenced to working with a web designer to build our site.  I had a previous site, “The Call and Response,” made up of Black Ph.D. candidates from Vanderbilt University, so I had plenty of experience with building a site and working with a collective of writers.  Everything really grew from there.  We began reaching out to our contacts and people whose writings we admired and developed the Editorial Collective.

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Posted in Racialicious Crush Of The Week, academia, activism, african-american, black, community, mental health, stereotypes, violence against women, violence against women of colour & indigenous women | Comments Off

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