ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author seeks to address what he regard as an instructive omission by situating Spillers as a foundational contributor to and, at once, an important critic of intersectional thinking. “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe” opens with a call to readers to recognize what Spillers labels the “American grammar” that disavows, as it advances, the process of ungendering in the Atlantic world. To underscore the salient point, for Spillers gender is neither a universal referent nor something that can be presumed as given and available for the taking by all comers. For Black women descended from the captive female who was forced to reproduce her own kinlessness and her dispossession as mother, Spillers suggests that the radical gesture that is required in and for a more liberated future is related but distinct. In an uncanny convergence, the aforementioned foremother of the movement for reproductive justice, Loretta Ross, suggests that parallel moves ought to be made in its pursuit.
