The Black Feminine Domestic: A Counter-Heuristic Exercise in Falling Apart
Symbiosis 13.2
Author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
25 Pages
Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ essay, "The Black Feminine Domestic: A Counter-Heuristic Exercise in Falling Apart," published in Symbiosis, examines the often overlooked contributions of black working-class women within the framework of the Black Atlantic. Gumbs critiques the gender-neutral concept of the Black Atlantic and explores the intersections of gender, labor, and diaspora, offering a compelling narrative that centers on the labor and lives of black women, challenging established notions of cultural production and modernity.
Symbiosis 13.2
Author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
25 Pages
Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ essay, "The Black Feminine Domestic: A Counter-Heuristic Exercise in Falling Apart," published in Symbiosis, examines the often overlooked contributions of black working-class women within the framework of the Black Atlantic. Gumbs critiques the gender-neutral concept of the Black Atlantic and explores the intersections of gender, labor, and diaspora, offering a compelling narrative that centers on the labor and lives of black women, challenging established notions of cultural production and modernity.
Symbiosis 13.2
Author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
25 Pages
Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ essay, "The Black Feminine Domestic: A Counter-Heuristic Exercise in Falling Apart," published in Symbiosis, examines the often overlooked contributions of black working-class women within the framework of the Black Atlantic. Gumbs critiques the gender-neutral concept of the Black Atlantic and explores the intersections of gender, labor, and diaspora, offering a compelling narrative that centers on the labor and lives of black women, challenging established notions of cultural production and modernity.
 This essay was originally published in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Volume 13.2 (October 2009) In place of the ‘Black Atlantic’, the ‘Black Feminine Domestic’ requires a mapping that reveals and refuses the global economic mode of rape, the capitalist practice of using people’s bodies against their will by claiming a prior and self-reproducing consent. However I would not argue that ‘the Black Feminine Domestic’ should become the new organizing logic for black diaspora studies. In fact the reason I deploy the name ‘Black Feminine Domestic’ is to emphasize the fact that (though it almost rhymes with ‘Black Atlantic’) it is not an organizing logic but rather a subject position that is excluded from ‘The Black Atlantic’ and that gap demands an alternative mode of dialogic diaspora in which the promise of ‘home’ is both deferred and articulated as a poetics of relation. Affiliation: Duke University "Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches" by Audre Lorde - This collection of essays and speeches by the renowned poet and activist offers profound insights into the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. |
