Black Feminisms in the Consulting Room

Women On The Couch

Black Feminisms in the Consulting Room

This is a conversation between psychotherapists Foluke Taylor and Gail Lewis, both of whom try to live their lives through the ethical guidance of Black feminism. Taking Black feminisms, in the plural, to combine descriptions and theorisations of the racist, mysogynist, heteronormative structures of power that condition the lived realities of black and other people racialized as minority; but to also offer directions in living in, through and beyond the strictures of these structures of power. In this, and rooted in a privileging of the emotional as a site of knowing, Black feminisms are seen as offering poetic languages and structures from which alternative forms of ‘personhood’ can be generated and lived.

From this starting point, and with reference to a small number of quotations from what could be a vast array of authors (e.g. essayists, poets, musicians, psychotherapists), Foluke and Gail converse with each other about why and how Black feminisms have much to offer the ‘consulting room’ and why it should be taken up as gift full of resources by psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic communities of practice.

*Please contribute your comments, thoughts and views below*

THE SPEAKER

Gail Lewis

Gail Lewis is Reader Emerita in Psychosocial Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. She trained as a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist and a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. 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 Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, Britain’s first national organisation for black and other women of colour. She is currently writing a book on black feminism in Britain and has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state, and racialised-gendered experience.

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Foluke Taylor

Foluke Taylor is a psychotherapist, writer and teacher. She has been in practice for over 25 years, drawing on Black feminist, relational psychoanalytic, and narrative approaches, as well as on knowledge gathered in nonconventional study spaces. Along with her partner and their five children, she spent 10 remarkable and formative years living and working in The Gambia. Now based in London, she works in private practice, and as a school counsellor, and as creator and facilitator of various group writing spaces.

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