"Not in my name": the anti-racist praxis of Mab Segrest & Minnie Bruce Pratt

Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-) and Mab Segrest (1949-) are white middle-class lesbians that both came of age during the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement in rural Alabama. Today, they are considered influential figures in feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) literary movements and recognized as important activists in late twentieth-century feminist, LGBTQ, and anti-racist political struggles. Examining Pratt's Rebellion: Essays, 1980-1991 (1991) and Segrest's Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994), I argue that both texts deconstruct the sociopolitical dynamics and ideologies that inform the inculcation of white middle-class southern womanhood specifically and hegemonic white southern culture generally through performing a form of anti-racist praxis that I call geospatial critique. This term addresses how Pratt and Segrest mine spaces that they occupy for histories of struggle, paying specific attention to how white settler-colonialism and chattel slavery produced particular epistemologies of race, class, gender, and sexuality that continue to influence social identities and practices in the present. Initially developed during Pratt and Segrest's collaboration on Feminary, a lesbian-feminist journal located in Durham, North Carolina, between 1978 and 1982, geospatial critique, I suggest, is a direct response to or a way of undoing the racial training that was part of the production of whiteness in the south from the turn to the first half of the twentieth century.