Later this week, hundreds of Black feminists from across the country will head to New Orleans for Get Free: A Black Feminist Reunion, the largest Black feminist gathering in the United States. Hosted by Black Feminist Future, the three-day event will take place June 5–7 at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans and promises restoration and reckoning for attendees.
The lineup includes a keynote by the iconic Angela Y. Davis, alongside movement leaders such as Ericka Huggins, Brittney Cooper, Charlene Carruthers, and Malkia Cyril. Programming spans the Scenes of Solidarity Film Festival, Irresistible Revolution Art Gallery, hands-on Liberation Learning Labs, and the celebratory North Star Gala.
“As fascism and oppression grow, Black feminist organizing offers a path forward rooted in care, power, and freedom,” said Paris Hatcher, founder of Black Feminist Future, whom MadameNoire‘s Tiffany Smith recently interviewed during a MadameNoire Live segment.
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Centering The Bad Fat Black Girl
For many, Get Free represents a reunion of thinkers, organizers, artists, and everyday Black feminists reclaiming space in movement work. Sesali Bowen will be among the featured speakers, bringing her signature “trap feminist,” lens to the mainstage. Coined by Bowen, trap feminism bridges the gap between Black feminist theory and the lived experiences of Black women and queer individuals navigating spaces often dismissed by mainstream feminism. Analyzing the narratives within trap music—a genre frequently criticized for its misogyny—Bowen highlights how Black women and femmes assert agency, express sexuality, and claim power in environments that have historically marginalized us. Her work challenges respectability politics and centers the voices of those who have been systematically excluded from traditional feminist discourse.
Speaking to MadameNoire while packing for a speaking engagement in Cleveland before heading straight to New Orleans, Sesali’s voice was grounded, her words steady and reflective of lived experience.
“First of all, I am a student of Black feminism. All of my work literally has roots in a Black feminist foundation. I am a gender studies major. I have my master’s and my bachelor’s in gender and sexuality studies. So it’s just my bag, first of all. But when I finished my master’s, I didn’t continue the route. A lot of gender studies frameworks and ideologies are very siloed in the ivory towers of academia. I am really excited to bring another point of reference and another entry point to the conversation—as a Black feminist who is also not a scholar, because so many Black feminists aren’t in academia.”
In this current moment, where social media spreads language faster than context, Bowen points to present hurdles.
“When we think about a lot of the attacks that we have seen on education recently in the country, the departments that have been hit are our African American studies departments, our gender studies departments. When we think about just even college itself becoming harder to afford, harder to access—I think that it is also about a suppression of the liberal arts, of the theorizing and imagining and discourse and world-building and making sense of the world that is happening from [oppressed people]. I think that the powers that be would like to rewrite that history. They would like to erase that history and assert that patriarchy, for example, is just some natural way, some natural order of the world in a way that it should be. That is not true.”
She also acknowledges a generational shift in how we name the same systems:
“A lot of the discourse that I’m seeing online reveals that lack of a baseline understanding of even patriarchy. What I’m noticing is that younger people have new words for things that already exist and that have a very deep framework that have been rooted in scholarly studies. I saw someone on TikTok talking about the halo effect. I was like, ‘oh, are you just talking about like the beauty standards that are put on women? Are you talking about how beauty is a social capital that dictates how you are treated and how people view you, and how people are more likely to trust you and think of you in a good character versus have a negative character of you?’ Those are things that have been studied. Remember the doll test, when they used to put the Black doll with the white doll? These are things that have been studied, and now it’s just like a new word for it.”
“Even though they’re coming up with new words for it, they are still interested in the phenomenon itself. Even if they feel like they’re just coming up with this on their own, I am happy to see that people are still recognizing the patterns and the problems with patriarchy—and wanting to talk about why they are problems.”
