Analyzing Hortense Spillers “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.

But as Hortense Spillers explicates in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” the black woman’s peculiar relationship to the United States of America depends on a tenuous relationship to biological modes of kinship, but that relationship must not determine her claim to national belonging. As lady in brown instructs.

I chose foundational authors, pioneers in their proposals such as Hortense Spillers to think about blackness and gender; Chela Sandoval to understand the tactical oppositional consciousness of US third world feminist; and Donna Haraway to reflect on gender (or the abdication of it) in a context of global capitalism. First stop. Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987).

The nuclear “family,” which, as the feminist literary scholar Hortense Spillers famously argued in her groundbreaking 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” is a discursive and ideological institution deeply implicated by histories of white supremacy and racist violence, has also and as a result been a.

In her essay entitled “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers uses a similar approach to unpack the complex position of African American women in American ideology. Spillers opens her argument by refuting the notion that gender identities and gender dominance are inherent. She points to the Moynihan.

View Essay - Arnell Calderon - American Soul - Paper 1.docx from LITERARY STUDIES LLSL 2406 at The New School. Calderon 1 Arnell Calderon Professor Simone White American Soul 24 March.

The critical position Best elaborates could sound like aesthetic difficulty. 6 It might also sound like an extension of postmodernist constructivism. It is, in fact, opposed to both. None Like Us resists the ways that modernist difficulty has tended to produce insiders and outsiders, and so avoids precisely the kinds of subjectivities (intellectual, knowing, critical, self-conscious.

The Breeding Ground 3 are the same. One means of avoiding this harmful slippage is to take a historical approach in the analysis of motherhood, so that mother-ing may be placed within the context of the numerous events and issues that effect how and why one mothers or does not mother. However, object relations theorist Nancy Chodorow appears to.

In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), Spillers reminds us that slavery doesn’t only take violent and murderous forms, but also has more symbolic manifestations, such as the more or less general reduction of black being to a corpus defined as flesh as value.

This essay explores notions of maternal desire within feminist psychoanalysis with an interest in challenging heteronormative frameworks of analysis. Providing close critical readings of texts by Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Kaja Silverman and Hortense Spillers, I trace conceptual openings through which to interpret maternal sexuality as a.

In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers elaborates on white patriarchy’s power to fray Black fatherhood “only and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African-American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father’s name.

AbstractThe controversy surrounding the announcement by the US Treasury, in April 2016, that the portraits of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson will “share” the twenty-dollar bill-which the latter has embodied for almost a century-highlights a glaring incongruity: A formerly enslaved black woman and abolitionist leader is being placed in iconic proximity with an exemplary historical.

At this point, I’m reminded of Hortense Spillers’ landmark essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), specifically a portion of the exact quote that Campt opens her own first chapter with. In her assessment of black female subjectivity, Spillers posits.