At the Crossroads of Race, Gender, and Class

Intersectionality and Black Womanhood in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing

Abstract

Black women in American literature carry what critics have long separated — race, gender, class — as though these were distinct wounds. They are not. this paper examines Jesmyn Ward's sing, unburied, sing (2017) through Kimberlé Crenshaw's Intersectionality and Bell Hooks's politics of domination, arguing that Ward's Leonie is the woman both feminist and racial criticism keep missing — a black mother ground down not by one system of oppression but by several, working together, all at once. Ward's Mississippi is not merely a setting; it is a structure of violence that refuses to pass. The novel's ghosts make this literal. Haunting here is not atmosphere — it is argument. Drawing on Hooks's understanding of domination as simultaneously racial, gendered, and economic, this paper contends that Leonie's destruction is neither personal failure nor racial allegory alone, but the lived consequence of intersecting oppressions that American culture persistently misreads as separate. Ward's fiction insists otherwise. In 1962, Malcolm x observed that the black woman is the most disrespected, most unprotected, and most neglected person in America. Ward's novel proves this remains unfinished business — and that literature, at its most uncompromising, can make visible what criticism has long preferred to keep apart.