This presentation/conversation will explore how Black feminisms provide a foundation from which it becomes more possible to speak and write of interconnection – spirited life, soul, natural mystics blowing through the air – and of our engagement with all of this in therapeutic practice. Foluke Taylor will draw from her book Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room (W.W. Norton February 2023) to offer examples of this and to explore possibilities for practitioners interested in Black feminist infused practice. The book, as an ensemble of Black feminist texts and artifacts woven through with genealogies of becoming a therapist, invites conversation. For this event, Foluke will be in conversation with psychoanalytic psychotherapist Gail Lewis, and together, they will discuss and expand upon some key ideas and principles of a Black feminist ethic.

Questions to be addressed include:

What do we miss when we try to fix, settle, and keep ourselves in order?
In what ways is unruly an essential mode for therapeutic projects seeking to survive and remake an anti-black world?
How are we, as practitioners engaged in therapeutic work, making more living room – space for the emergent and the what is not yet but must be – and why is this important for therapeutic practice?

Respondent: 

Gail Lewis is an author, academic and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. She was a member of the Brixton Black Women's Group and one of the founder members of the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent, Britain’s first national organization for black and other women of color. She organizes her thinking through the category ‘experience’ which she conceives as a vector of both the felt senses in conjunction with social, structural and cultural processes, and an analytic in the production of meaning and knowing otherwise. She is currently writing a book on Black feminism in Britain and has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and citizenship, psychoanalysis and Black feminism, and the psychosocial dynamics of racialized-gendered experience.