1. After choice, after justice?: race, reproduction, and the uncertain futures of feminist political desire.
- Author
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Pinto, Samantha
- Subjects
- *
BLACK feminism , *POLITICAL science , *BLACK feminists , *REPRODUCTIVE rights , *MASS incarceration , *FEMINISM - Abstract
This essay engages contemporary narratives of black maternal ambivalence to unsettle residual attachments to choice within the frame of reproductive justice. The contemporary fiction of Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Tayari Jones's An American Marriage, as well as Black feminist work on Assisted Reproductive Technologies, reconsider the difficult ways that race and 'choice' have been in tension with each other in political and medical discourse around reproductive rights. Feminist choice debates have been intentionally reframed away from 'rights' and toward 'justice' as an attempt to account for the hyper-control of Black reproduction across a modern history that includes enslavement, mass incarceration, and myths of hyper-reproduction. Complex narrative accounts of thwarted or uncertain Black reproduction built from the embodied experiences of blackness can consider both choice and justice without romanticising motherhood or autonomy. This article troubles the weight on black feminism to conceive and carry children – symbolic and material – into and through precarious life chances into secure (political) futures. Through thick descriptions of the reproductive that run through desire, uncertainty, debt, and vulnerability, black feminist thought and expressive culture can displace autonomy as the underpinning and endgame of feminist reproductive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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