carrying: Black Women, Misogynoir & The Mandate of Mothering

This dissertation, “carrying: Black Women, Misogynoir & The Mandate of Mothering,” examines the way Black women’s experiences with violence work to highlight the "co-constitutive racialized and sexist” frames that make Black women legible within dominant and intracommunal social structures. Specifically, I look at how Black women’s roles as mothers move beyond their biological reproduction and become integral to social reproduction and maintenance within the Black community. In particular, I look at the ways that dominant patriarchal and political structures are adapted within Black social life and how that works to reproduce harmful narratives of Black women. In analyzing these detrimental narratives that attach themselves to Black women, I pay special attention to how the mother figure and mothering work to shape the legibility of Black women through the frames of reproduction and carework. In doing so, I introduce a conceptual framework that I name “Mandate of Mothering” to discuss the ways Black mothers are expected to perform selfless carework that is often at their own expense, and that is intimately tied to their longer histories as object/subject. My approach to these discussions takes up Black women’s experiences of violence as a necessary site of analysis to understand the ways in which the expectations of the Mandate of Mothering are proliferated by the Black community and how they come to be understood by Black women. In the current cultural landscape that focuses discourses on anti-Black violence around Black men and their experiences, often posing them as an endangered species, this project seeks to discuss what this hyperfocus does to impact Black women’s experiences, arguing that as Black men continue to be posed as an endangered species, Black women are tasked with keeping them from this extinction.