Chapter 3 - Trapped in the Political Real: Imagining Black Motherhood Beyond Pathology and Protest

Summary

As the global Movement for Black Life continues its demands to end state violence in the USA and abroad, black feminists have cast motherhood as a radical site of political resistance. This chapter historicises popular and scholarly rhetorics of black mothering by returning to earlier black feminist voices from the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, this chapter points to the theoretical contours and elisions undergirding canonical and contemporary black feminist treatments of motherhood and family. Through close reading of personal reflections by black mothers and writers Martha Southgate and Alice Walker, the author argues for theorists to reassess motherhood’s celebrated status in black feminist discursive landscapes and begin rethinking motherhood as a burdensome site of gendered labour and psychic antagonism in the intimate spheres of black women’s lives.