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Mothering and Mother(work) in the Times of Black Lives Matter is an edited collection that sprouted alongside the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter movement but seeks to root itself in the historic and ongoing fight against anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence. Utilizing research, personal narratives, poetry and art, this book explores the experience of mothering and "motherwork" alongside these movements and efforts to protect and value Black life. Centering the voices of Black mothers, Black other mothers and Black birthing people, the collection also seeks to explore the just world that Black mothers hope to create for their futures and the futures of their families and communities.
Sisterhood is oft elusive, if not a misunderstood concept. Despite all the factors that could impede the development, elevation, and maintenance of sistering relationships, Black women continue to acknowledge the value of sisterhoods. Sistering offers a lifeline of support and validation. Holding membership in an empowering woman-centered relationship is a special kind of privilege. The authors in this volume contest any assumption that sisterhood is limited to blood relationships and physical proximity. In this volume, we consider sisterhood simultaneously as paradigm and praxis. We approach Sisterhood as Paradigm and attempt to parse out the nature of Sisterhood as it is understood in Blac...
The second edition of this pathbreaking, widely taught book offers six new chapters, on breastfeeding and Black infant health; Black birthing during COVID; Black doulas rethinking birthing practices; the recent buildup of a US national movement; childbirth in Zanzibar; and expanding the global movement for sexual and reproductive well-being. Other chapters are updated throughout. Birthing Justice puts Black women’s voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternal care system. It foregrounds Black women’s agency in the birth justice movement. First published in 2016, Birthing Justice is a seminal text for those interested in maternal healthcare, reproductive justice, health equity, and intersectional racial justice, especially in courses on gender studies, Black studies, public health, and training programs for midwives and OB/GYNs. Additional resources and a reading group guide are available at www.blackwomenbirthingjustice.com.
Fatal Denial argues that over the past 150 years, US health authorities’ explanations of and interventions into Black infant mortality have been characterized by the "biopolitics of racial innocence," a term describing the institutionalized mechanisms in health care and policy that have at once obscured, enabled, and perpetuated systemic infanticide by blaming Black mothers and communities themselves. Following Black feminist scholarship demonstrating that the commodification and theft of Black women’s reproductive bodies, labors, and care is foundational to US racial capitalism, Annie Menzel posits that the polity has made Black infants vulnerable to preventable death. Drawing on key Black political thought and praxis around infant mortality—from W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell to Black midwives and birth workers—this work also tracks continued refusals to acknowledge this routinized reproductive violence, illuminating both a rich history of care and the possibility of more transformative futures.
Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. This volume, which includes a curated selection of images, addresses the complicated relationship between Blackness and photography and, in particular, its gendered dimension, its relationship to health, sexuality, and digital culture – primarily in the context of racialized heteronormativity. With over forty contributors, this volume draws on scholarly inquiry ranging from academic essays, interviews, poetry, to documentary practic...
There is a global crisis in maternal health care for black women. In the United States, black women are over three times more likely to perish from pregnancy-related complications than white women; their babies are half as likely to survive the first year. Many black women experience policing, coercion, and disempowerment during pregnancy and childbirth and are disconnected from alternative birthing traditions. This book places black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternity system and foregrounds black women's agency in the emerging birth justice movement. Mixing scholarly, activist, and personal perspectives, the book shows readers how they too can change lives, one birth at a time.
1Add to cartPrice: $39.95Page Count: 280Publication Date: November 2023ISBN: 978-1-77258-467-7The COVID-19 pandemic has made transparent the insidiousness of institutional anti-Black racism and its impact on Black people globally. Research and statistics suggest that COVID-19 disproportionately affects African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) people. This collection provides critical discussions on the complexities of resilience in Black communities. Specifically, it highlights the resilience of ACB people, aged 12 to 85 years from Nigeria, South Africa, Jamaica, England, Canada, and the United States, by showcasing their strengths, determination, courage, contribution, leadership, innovation, cr...
There has been little public discussion on the devastating impact of Covid-19 on mothers, or a public acknowledgement that mothering is frontline work in this pandemic. This collection of 45 chapters and with 70 contributors is the first to explore the impact of the pandemic on mothers' care and wage labour in the context of employment, schooling, communities, families, and the relationships of parents and children. With a global perspective and from the standpoint of single, partnered, queer, racialized, Indigenous, economically disadvantaged, disabled, and birthing mothers, the volume examines the increasing complexity and demands of childcare, domestic labour, elder care, and home schooli...
Matricentric feminism seeks to make motherhood the business of feminism by positioning mothers' needs and concerns as the starting point for a theory and politic on and for the empowerment of women as mothers. Based on the conviction that mothering is a verb, it understands that becoming and being a mother is not limited to biological mothers or cisgender women but rather to anyone who does the work of mothering as a central part of their life. The Mother Wave, the first-ever book on the topic, compellingly explores how mothers need a matricentric mode of feminism organized from and for their particular identity and work as mothers, and because mothers remain disempowered despite sixty years...
In Birthing Black Mothers Black feminist theorist Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the “Black mother” has become a powerful political category. “Mothering while Black” has become synonymous with crisis as well as a site of cultural interest, empathy, fascination, and support. Cast as suffering and traumatized by their proximity to Black death—especially through medical racism and state-sanctioned police violence—Black mothers are often rendered as one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism. In contrast, Nash examines Black mothers’ self-representations and public performances of motherhood—including Black doulas and breastfeeding advocates alongside celebrities such as Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Michelle Obama—that are not rooted in loss. Through cultural critique and in-depth interviews, Nash acknowledges the complexities of Black motherhood outside its use as political currency. Throughout, Nash imagines a Black feminist project that refuses the lure of locating the precarity of Black life in women and instead invites readers to theorize, organize, and dream into being new modes of Black motherhood.