A Qualitative Study of the Evolution and Erasure of Black Feminism in Historic and Contemporary Sociopolitical Movements, And Black Men’s Resistance To Black Feminism

Although Black Feminism can be traced to the period of American slavery, what may be considered the most prevalent emergence of “Black Feminism” came about in the mid-1970s, when it proved apparent that the second wave of the Women’s Movement, overwhelmingly white, was discriminatory towards “Black, other Third World, and working women” (Smith, Smith, & Frazier, 2014), who often faced multiple forms of oppression (Simien, 2004). Contemporary Black feminists have followed the activism of earlier Black feminists, leading to a disruption of racial, gender, and sexual norms both in general society, and in the Black community itself. From a Black and intersectional feminist perspective, this research will analyze (1) the history of Black women engaging in feminist movements, (2) the evolution and erasure of Black Feminism, and (3) Beyonce’s visual album, Lemonade, as a product of historic and living Black feminism

When life gives you lemons, get in formation: A Black feminist analysis of Beyonce\u27s visual album, Lemonade

Beyonce\u27s visual album, Lemonade, has been considered a Black feminist piece of work because of the ways in which it centralizes the experiences of Black women, including their love relationships with Black men, their relationships with their mothers and daughters, and their relationships with other Black women. The album shows consistent themes of motherhood, the love and trouble tradition, and Afrocentrism. Because of its hint of Afrocentrism, however, Lemonade can be argued as an anti Black feminist work because Afrocentrism holds many sexist beliefs of Black women. This essay will discuss the ways in which Lemonade\u27s inextricable influences of Black feminism and Afrocentrism, along with other anti Black feminist notions, can be used as a consciousness-raising tool

Search for gravitational-lensing signatures in the full third observing run of the LIGO-Virgo network

Gravitational lensing by massive objects along the line of sight to the source causes distortions of gravitational wave-signals; such distortions may reveal information about fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics. In this work, we have extended the search for lensing signatures to all binary black hole events from the third observing run of the LIGO--Virgo network. We search for repeated signals from strong lensing by 1) performing targeted searches for subthreshold signals, 2) calculating the degree of overlap amongst the intrinsic parameters and sky location of pairs of signals, 3) comparing the similarities of the spectrograms amongst pairs of signals, and 4) performing dual-signal Bayesian analysis that takes into account selection effects and astrophysical knowledge. We also search for distortions to the gravitational waveform caused by 1) frequency-independent phase shifts in strongly lensed images, and 2) frequency-dependent modulation of the amplitude and phase due to point masses. None of these searches yields significant evidence for lensing. Finally, we use the non-detection of gravitational-wave lensing to constrain the lensing rate based on the latest merger-rate estimates and the fraction of dark matter composed of compact objects

Search for eccentric black hole coalescences during the third observing run of LIGO and Virgo

Despite the growing number of confident binary black hole coalescences observed through gravitational waves so far, the astrophysical origin of these binaries remains uncertain. Orbital eccentricity is one of the clearest tracers of binary formation channels. Identifying binary eccentricity, however, remains challenging due to the limited availability of gravitational waveforms that include effects of eccentricity. Here, we present observational results for a waveform-independent search sensitive to eccentric black hole coalescences, covering the third observing run (O3) of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We identified no new high-significance candidates beyond those that were already identified with searches focusing on quasi-circular binaries. We determine the sensitivity of our search to high-mass (total mass M>70 M⊙) binaries covering eccentricities up to 0.3 at 15 Hz orbital frequency, and use this to compare model predictions to search results. Assuming all detections are indeed quasi-circular, for our fiducial population model, we place an upper limit for the merger rate density of high-mass binaries with eccentricities 0<e≤0.3 at 0.33 Gpc−3 yr−1 at 90\% confidence level

Ultralight vector dark matter search using data from the KAGRA O3GK run

Among the various candidates for dark matter (DM), ultralight vector DM can be probed by laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors through the measurement of oscillating length changes in the arm cavities. In this context, KAGRA has a unique feature due to differing compositions of its mirrors, enhancing the signal of vector DM in the length change in the auxiliary channels. Here we present the result of a search for U(1)B−L gauge boson DM using the KAGRA data from auxiliary length channels during the first joint observation run together with GEO600. By applying our search pipeline, which takes into account the stochastic nature of ultralight DM, upper bounds on the coupling strength between the U(1)B−L gauge boson and ordinary matter are obtained for a range of DM masses. While our constraints are less stringent than those derived from previous experiments, this study demonstrates the applicability of our method to the lower-mass vector DM search, which is made difficult in this measurement by the short observation time compared to the auto-correlation time scale of DM