American author Willa C. Richards’s short story ‘Failure to Thrive’ (2019) thematizes physical, mental and emotional health by centring a young and presumably White American couple and their newborn. The couple have trouble communicating with each other, and crucial
pieces of information are withheld from the reader as well. At the same time, numerous references to different types of violence emerge as markers of the maternal throughout the story to such an extent that the maternal body becomes the site not only of difference and unknowability but of
violence as well. I anchor my analysis in motherhood studies and argue that motherhood is the discursive lens through which interlocking issues of embodiment, dehumanizing medical practices and diverse types of violence are exposed in ‘Failure to Thrive’. While attending to the
narrative design of the story, I demonstrate how the ailing mother becomes a figure on whom the tropes of violence and incommunicability as well as the wide-reaching implications of ill health are mapped out.
The paper explores the short story “Harvest” (2010) by African American writer Danielle Evans and traces the figurations of the racialized aspects of gender in “Harvest” within the theoretical frameworks of Black and Chicana feminisms, motherhood studies, and intersectionality. After situating the Black and Chicana characters’ anxieties around egg donation in the historical context of reproductive rights, economics, and the politicization of Black and Chicana women’s bodies, I discuss how the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and class impact the racialized gender identity of especially the Black protagonist and to a smaller extent that of her Chicana and white friends as well. I argue that the current practices of egg donation depicted in the story are imbricated in the wider system of racial capitalism that values women’s childbearing capacities differentially in terms of their race.
The paper reads the novel Dessa Rose (1986) by African American author Sherley Anne Williams, and focuses on the duality of motherhood as compounding and healing trauma at the same time.After placing the novel is its socio-cultural and literary context, I argue, relying on Black feminist and Afro-pessimistic theory, that the subversive potential of Williams's novel lies in its claim that enslaved Black women are capable of healing through (re-)appropriating what is meant to dehumanize them: their stories, their bodies, their children, and their communities.
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