About
Kate Boyd currently teaches for the English department; Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies; the Interdisciplinary Honors Program; and the Comparative History of Ideas Department at the University of Washington. She recently completed her dissertation ‘Thoughts that Burn’: Re-Imagining the Political within Literatures of Feminist Activism. For almost two decades, Kate has been involved in a variety of anti-racist community based cultural organizing projects, and is committed to critically expanding how we imagine what counts as activism and who is considered a "good activist" in our NGOized present.
Current Work:
Kate is currently conducting research for a new chapter for her manuscript that focuses on suffrage, eugenics, and early 20th Century birth control activism. She is particularly interested in the greatly under-theorized role Ku Klux Klan women played in dismantling the (fragile) cross-racial solidarities created in the suffrage movement while simultaneously chartering nearly half a million white nationalist women, with political sensibilities that did not understand "white power" and "feminism" as a contradiction, in highly organized, professionalized WKKK chapters across the U.S.
Research Area(s):
- Genealogy of Anti-Racist Feminist Activist Subjects
- Black Feminist Cultural Production
- NGOization and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
- Neoliberal Activism
