Patrice D. Douglass

Assistant Professor in Gender and Women's Studies
Office: 632 Social Sciences Building
Research AreasBioPublications
Research Areas
  • Black Feminist Theory
  • Afro-pessimism
  • Gender and Sexual Violence
  • Political Philosophy
Bio

Patrice D. Douglass is an Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She holds a PhD and MA in Culture and Theory from the University of California, Irvine, a MA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Riverside, and a BA in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Her first book project, tentatively titled, "Engendering Blackness: The Ontology of Sexual Violence" , examines the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. By interrogating the sexual status of the slave, "Engendering Blackness" contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence—such as those espoused by feminist philosophy and feminist legal theory—that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, power, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to "be" Human.

Publications
Articles in Peer Reviewed Journals

“Unnatural Causes: Racial Taxonomies, Pandemic, and Social Contagion,” PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, (Forthcoming Spring 2021)

“Assata is Here: (Dis)locating Gender in Black Studies,” Souls, (Forthcoming Winter 2020)

“On (Being) Fear: Utah v. Strieff and the Ontology of Affect,” Journal of Visual Culture 17, no. 3, (2018): 332-342.

“Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying,” Theory and Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 106-123

“The Claim of Right to Property: Social Violence and Political Right,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture (ZAA) 65, no. 2 (2017): 145-159

Co-Authored with Frank B. Wilderson, III. “The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened World.” The Black Scholar 43, no. 4 (2013): 117-23

Chapters in Edited Books

“At the Intersections of Assemblages: Fanon, Capecia, and the Unmaking of the Genre Subject.” In Conceptual Aphasia: Displacing Racial Formation Theory, edited by P. Khalil Saucer and Tryon P. Woods, 103-25. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016.

Encyclopedia Articles

“Rape.” In Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, (forthcoming).

Co-Authored with Salemawit Terrefe, and Frank B. Wilderson, III. “Afropessimism.” In Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Book Reviews

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheavals by Saidiya V. Hartman in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 8.2, 2019.

Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation by Calvin L. Warren in The Comparatist 43, 2019.