‘I felt the hand of the government in my womb': Black Women, Intimacy, and the Transnational Struggle for Life in Brazil and Colombia takes an ethnographic, community-engaged approach to studying state violence against Afro-descendant women in Brazil and Colombia. This dissertation examines how Black women are creating networks of support and autonomous organizing, and leading movements that resist systems responsible for the violence against themselves, their care networks, and their communities. The questions guiding this research include: How does identity and affect alter the fields, domains, and spheres of politics Black women pursue? If intimacy is the lens through which these politics are conceived, then, how does an articulation of “the intimate” complicate our understanding of, and resistance to, violations of human rights and global anti- blackness? How do these politics destabilize existing legal advancements, structures, and norms regarding equality, human rights, and justice? In centering the leadership of Black women in Brazil and Colombia, I argue Black women are using a framework of intimacy to describe, frame, and respond to their experiences of state violence, injustice, and human rights violations. I build on this claim by underscoring how language, lived- experiences, and territories of intimacy are shaping the content, demands, and actions of Black women’s grassroots organizing. In particular, I analyze the ways in which intimacy and activism intersect—through emotions of joy, pain and belonging; the construction of ‘home’ as domestic and community spaces; and the politicization of motherhood and care. 

Biography:

Alysia Mann Carey is a PhD candidate in Political Science specializing in comparative politics and political theory. Her dissertation takes an ethnographic and community- engaged approach to the study of state violence against black women and communities in Brazil and Colombia. Centering the grassroots leadership of Black women, her project examines how Black women organize and resist the myriad forms of oppression that intersect and interact in their everyday lives. She uses a framework of intimacy as a way to understand Black women’s political thinking and action by articulating how intimacy and activism intersect, through emotions, grief, homes as organizing sites, and the politicization of motherhood and care. Born and raised on the south-side of Madison, WI, Alysia is the oldest of five. She earned a BA in Spanish Languages and Literature, Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies, and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was also a Ronald E. McNair Scholar and a PEOPLE Program scholar. She then received an MA in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin with a certificate in Women and Gender's Studies.