Black Women's Writing Revisited

11      Another generative site for "queer" is June Jordan's 1992 essay "A New Politics of Sexuality" in which she uses bisexuality as an intervention into predictive sexuality to create a space for freedom. This critical use of bisexuality prefigures the use of the word "queer" to describe a politics of sexuality that is not based on a specific sexual practice, but rather a critical relationship to existing sexual and social norms. Jordan uses a proclamation of her own bisexuality as a hinge to articulate her own contradictory multiplicity: "I am Black and I am female and I am a mother and I am bisexual and I am a nationalist and I am an antinationalist." (132) Here bisexuality, not as an identity but as an intervention , a refusal of a particular choice, connects Jordan's anti-imperialist politics which cause her to fight for the national sovereignty of Nicaragua while challenging the norms of nationalism itself with her identification with the impossible subjectivity of black motherhood in the United States. Through her articulation of bisexuality, Jordan answers both the queer dystopians and the gay and lesbian assimilationists writing 15 years after the publication of her essay. For Jordan, bisexuality requires a particular definition of survival: "But a struggle to survive cannot lead to suicide: suicide is the opposite of survival. And so we must not conceal/assimilate/integrate into the would-be dominant culture and political system that despises us. Our survival requires that we alter our environment so we can live..." (135) Jordan's definition of a sexual politics of survival seeks to generate a future that does not reproduce the present. Accordingly I will use the term queer (here) to signal a similar call for critical difference that disrupts narratives of heteropatriarchal family and capitalist development and as a modifier that causes the terms that follow to exceed what they have named. For example, a "queer black maternity" would not only invoke the additive complexity of multiple interpolation, it would also place the procreative inheritance of blackness and patriarchally defined motherhood under investigation.

Black

12      Black feminism in the seventies and eighties emerged within and co-produced a broader "third world women's movement." Often this complicated mix of subject positions was called forth at once, for example, when "black and other third world women" would create "special issues" of otherwise white feminist periodicals. This overlap between "black" and "third world" women's production was complicated by at least two historical dynamics. First, non-white feminists in the United States were in almost constant communication with "Black feminists" in Britain who were using the term "Black" to claim solidarity between women of Asian and African descent who had shared experiences of colonialism at "home" and racism in England. "Black feminists" in Britain and the US reviewed each other's special issues and anthologies and wrote letters of support to each other's editorial collectives. Even still, "black" and "third world" were never commensurate terms on either side of the Atlantic. Indeed "blackness" itself was incommensurable even in the Americas, signifying differently in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, but the term was used to facilitate translation of different black experiences across national contexts. "Third World" a term used to describe women who would most likely be called "women of color" from today's vantage point was an intentional term used by non-white women in the United States in order to enable solidarity between groups experiencing different manifestations of racism AND to link US liberation movements to a wider set of decolonization struggles in which women were responding to the encroachment of economic empire. In "Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other," a special issue of the New York based feminist art journal Heresies, a special editorial collective of self-identified U.S. based Third World Women explains the salience of the term "Third World" as it's an invocation of an "other" way to be created by those "other" than the dominant white male ruling class.[8]The Politics of Being Other: Third World Women. Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Vol. 2 No. 4, 1979, 1. While many contemporary transnational feminist activists argue that the term "Third World" erases women who are actually living in developing countries when it is claimed by U.S. women of color, Chandra Mohanty insists that to invoke "third world" as a particular way of being feminist is to remember the spirit of the Bandung conference of non-aligned countries which insisted that another world could be created.[9]Chandra Mohanty, Conference Presentation "Transnational Feminisms" at Mellon-Mays Summer Conference, June 14th 2006. The specific iteration of "black feminism" that we are concerned with here could only have emerged within and alongside this discourse of "third world" feminism which was both anti-capitalist and internationalist.

13      However, while the production I will characterize here is firmly grounded in what was called the 'Third World Women's Movement" in the United States (conversely called the "First World Women's Movement" in English-speaking Canada), I will be focusing on the work of feminists who explicitly identified as "black." While attacks on the bodies of women of color and their potential to create are widespread, the narratives applied by colonialist, racist, orientalist enactors of sexual violence and reproductive injustices have been historically specific and deserve in-depth attention. My focus on the term "black" here signals my emphasis on the queer feminist possibility of transforming the maternal trace of slavery into a mode of co-production that responds to the persistent commodification of flesh. I am not arguing that the narratives of pathologization to be intervened in here are specific to "people of African descent," nor am I seeking to reserve the term black for the descendents of enslaved people to the exclusion of black people in Africa and other parts of the non-Atlantic world. Rather I am interested in a narrative through which blackness has come to stand in for expendability and non-humanity and the modes of poetic practice through which radical black feminist literary practice threatened this perceived truth.

Mothering

14      In her groundbreaking text "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: A New American Grammar Book," Hortense Spillers emphasizes the difference between "motherhood" which is reproduced as the role of white women through the violent exclusion of the bodies of black women from the definition of the human and the reproduction of "mothering" which is the labor that black women have still been compelled to perform despite their exclusion from the domain of proper "motherhood." This was a crucial intervention for Spillers to make in 1987 when both black nationalist invocations of black motherhood as a subservient role for the reproduction of a patriarchal black nation and white feminist reifications of domestic labor made black women's sexuality and subjectivity unspeakable. In her 1989 essay "But What Do We Think We're Doing: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of a Little Bit of History," Barbara Christian describes the resistance she encountered when she attempted to publish her monograph Black Women Novelists thusly:

"[...] practically all academic presses as well as trade presses commented that my subject was not important-that people were not interested in black women writers. Couldn't I write a book on the social problems of black women? Affected by the rhetoric a la Moynihan, most of these presses could hardly believe black women were artists."

Christian's dilemma points to the discursive moment during which black feminist criticism struggled to emerge. The intersection of narrow social movement priorities and a dominant rhetoric of black maternal pathologies made it difficult to argue that black women were capable of literary production or creative expression; the name 'black woman' had become synonymous with 'social problems', in state policy, academic discourses, and progressive social movements. In order to produce subjectivities in which black women could be imagined to create, black feminist critics generated a critical use of maternity that they distinguished from patriarchal and capitalist definitions of motherhood and appropriations of "mothering."

15      Spillers explains that both the state of motherhood and the labor of mothering are reproduced through ideological and legal acts of naming that dehumanize black women and transform their bodies into flesh and their offspring into slaves. Fred Moten builds on Spiller's analysis by emphasizing the shared root mater in the words "maternity" and "materiality" explaining that the trace through which we understand black people as material objects is a maternal trace. In a 2006 discussion of "Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe," Spillers elaborates that her intention in the essay was to create a new vocabulary wherein the history of black subjection in the United States could seriously destabilize functions of gender and family. This creation of a new vocabulary, and indeed a new grammar, required the radical reassessment of the terms mother and mothering. I will invoke the term "mothering" modified by queer and black to describe the material intervention through what I understand to be a queer appropriation of the production of difference wherein difference, instead of becoming a dehumanizing mark, enables the co-production of a radically different future.