EP07: Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe

Cora is with us again to talk about black cultural studies, motherhood, and gender. You can check out Cora’s multi-media work at https://polychora.org/.

Topics Touched:

Hortense Spillers, foundational work in black studies, cultural archetypes of black womanhood, the Moynihan Report, gender and race in the American imagination, construction of black motherhood, erasure of black fatherhood, intersectionality and what happens when terms from cultural theory hit the discourse without context (it’s fine), Harold Bloom and the anxiety of influence (he is wack though), productive misreading (but performativity still doesn’t mean what you think it does)

Works Cited:

• Hortense J. Spillers – Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book


• Patricia Hill Collins – Controlling Images and Black Women’s Oppression


• Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw – Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color


• Judith Butler – Gender Trouble