Still, Nothing

Mammy and Black Asexual Possibility

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3947185
AutoresIanna Hawkins Owens, Ianna Hawkins Owen (Williams College, autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen120
Número1
Páginas70-84
Fecha de publicación2018-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/s41305-018-0140-9
OpenAlexW2903503112
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas17
Referencias citadas25

Although many iterations of the mammy in the last two centuries have received analytical attention, the construction of this figure as asexual or undesiring and undesirable remains to be interrogated. This essay attends to this under-theorised dimension of her image. Resisting a reading of the mammy as fixed in silence, I assert that she might instead 'say nothing', and bring into focus a black asexual agency that I call a declarative silence. This strategy of 'saying nothing' is then explored in a reading of the withholdings of the character of Mama in Gayl Jones's neo-slave narrative, Corregidora (1975

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Art · Character (mathematics) · Epistemology · Feminism · Focus (optics) · Literature · Narrative · Nothing · Political science · Reading (process) · Silence · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society