FIRE
DREAMS
Laura McTighe,
with Women With A Vision
FOREWORD BY DEON HAYWOOD
MAKING BLACK FEMINIST LIBERATION IN THE SOUTH
© Carla Jay Harris. Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
ABOUT WWAV
For thirty-five years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV) has fought for the liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers' rights.
In 2012, shortly after one of WWAV's biggest organizing victories, arsonists firebombed and destroyed their headquarters.
Fire Dreams is an innovative collaboration between WWAV and Laura McTighe, who work in community to build a social movement ethnography of the organization’s post-arson rebirth.
ROOTING WWAV IN THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE SOUTH AND THE LIVING HISTORY OF GENERATIONS OF BLACK FEMINIST THNKERS…
McTighe and WWAV weave together stories from their founders’ pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and their groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—with other movements for liberation as accomplices.
Reviews
“Providing an urgent and layered account of Black feminist abolitionist organizing, this book is a model of nuanced, accessible, and theoretically deft scholar-activist work.Laura McTighe and Women With A Vision demonstrate that Black feminism mobilized with persistence is a worldmaking politics and practice. Fire Dreams is a gorgeous work of care, radical planning, and theory that will inspire and enlighten readers.”
— Sarah Haley | author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
“When fighting the amassed forces of injustice, our oppressors must remember that fire burns and fire also replenishes. The inspiring story of Deon Haywood and Women With A Vision recounts how nothing can quench the determination of people demanding freedom, and nothing can quell the passion of those who have committed their lives to justice and human rights. This is essential reading for those of us learning to be fearless in the service of our people.”
— Loretta J. Ross | activist, author, and MacArthur fellow
“In the tradition of Callie House, Queen Mother Moore, and other foremothers, Women With A Vision organizes with the belief that caring for the people is inseparable from speaking truth to power. That is why this grassroots New Orleans group of Black women has won policy fights that others thought impossible. This book shows us how the history of Black women’s resistance continues to birth new movements for structural change.”
— Mary Frances Berry | Geraldine Segal Professor of American Social Thought, History and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania
"Beyond its scholarly contributions, the book ignites a fire within the reader—a call to engage in the collective endeavour of shaping more just and liveable futures. . . . Fire Dreams is a testament to the power of community in resisting oppression."
— Muneeb Ul Lateef Banday, Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics
"A refreshing, realistic approach that shows how hope isn’t abstract: it’s built in the relationships and care that sustain organizing through its hardest moments. WWAV’s story feels like a blueprint for how movements survive and thrive, rooted in the legacy of southern Black women’s community leadership and the worlds they keep creating, even in the ashes."
— Daven McQueen, Inquest