queenhood

plural queenhoods

1. uncountableusuallyThe state, rank, or status of a queen.

   Near-synonym: queenliness

   1 more example

   I—who have 'gone the gamut' from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new black sun—am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of the new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress.

   1972, Gwendolyn Brooks, “Report from Part One”, in Report from Part One, page 86

   Synonyms: queenship, queendom, queenliness

2. uncountableusuallyRacially charged pedestalization of Black women, often as an extension of Afrocentric idealization, that is in fact damaging to gender equality; a particular type of "benevolent" sexism.

   1 more example

   This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

   1977, The Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement" (better known as the Combahee River Collective Statement), in Zillah R. Eisenstein, editor, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, published 1979

3. rareuncountableusuallyAn apex or pinnacle.

   "[…] They say my House loves beauty—they did and they do—and there's a kind of beauty in dying beautifully … in wasting away … half-alive, half-dead, with the very queenhood of your power."

   2024, Tamsyn Muir, chapter 26, in The Locked Tomb Series: Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, Nona the Ninth