The Mad Black Mama: Korryn Gaines, rhetorics of pathology, and the performance of deviant Black mothering

In this essay, I use the self-recordings of Korryn Gaines, a Black woman killed in 2016 by officers of the Baltimore County Police Department (BCPD), to argue that Gaines appropriates the persona of the Mad Black Mama to circumvent the officers’ attempts to restrict her agency and, in so doing, reveals the radical potential of what I call deviant Black mothering. To demonstrate this claim, I suture rhetorical studies of motherhood to Black madness studies and Black feminist and queer theories of deviance to uncover the architecture of Gaines’s performance as the Mad Black Mama, which includes rhetorical frustration, maternal defiance, and motherly reframing as key strategies that refuse and disidentify with hegemonic norms of motherhood. Reading Gaines’s interactions through the lens of deviant Black mothering, I contend, can challenge her reductive scripting as a crazy woman and mother, allow a more sympathetic and critical treatment of her encounters with and subsequent death at the hands of BCPD officers, and nuance our understandings of mothering at the margins.