"We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": A Dialogically Produced Audience and Black Feminist Publishing 1979 to the "Present"

While the U.S. state enacted domestic and foreign policies that required, allowed and endorsed violence against the bodies of black woman and early death for black children, black feminists audaciously centered an entire literary movement around the invocation of this criminal act of black maternity...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Gender forum 2008-07 (22), p.N_A
Main Author:	Gumbs, Alexis Pauline
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Audiences Black culture Children Civil rights Competition Drug policy Families & family life Family planning Feminism Gates, Henry Louis Ideology Jordan, June (1936-2002) Lorde, Audre Market economies Neoliberalism Politics Publishing industry Race relations Racial differences Sexual behavior Smith, Barbara Women
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	While the U.S. state enacted domestic and foreign policies that required, allowed and endorsed violence against the bodies of black woman and early death for black children, black feminists audaciously centered an entire literary movement around the invocation of this criminal act of black maternity, demanding not only the rights of black women to reproductive autonomy in the biological sense, but also the imperative to create narratives, theories, contexts, collectives, publications, political ideology and more. To insist on an black motherhood despite black cultural nationalist claims to own black women's wombs and white feminist attempts to use the maternal labor of black women as domestic servants to buy their own freedom (and to implicitly support the use of black women as guinea pigs in their fight to perfect the privilege of sterilization) is an almost illegible thing, an outlawed practice, a queer thing. 5 During the period between 1970 and 1990 the pathologization of black women's bodies occurred directly alongside a post-Civil Rights project of disciplinary inclusion in which both the black power movement and the mainstream white feminist movement were complicit.
ISSN:	1613-1878