This talk turns attention to the Black womb as both an embodied space of historical trauma and a generative site of feminist political imagination. What can we learn from juxtaposing the essence of white objectification with the decolonial context of “othering” imposed upon the Black trans birthing person?

I ask: How might a transnational feminist politics represent the multiple demands on the Black womb through rather than against the tensions of individual and collective rights? When these rights are transgressed through abiding structural inequities, does this not demand vigorous resistance and adjudicational action by authoritative constituencies?

How might we turn toward African, Caribbean, and US-based Black feminist expressive culture for models of engagement with the reproductive that center vulnerability, ambivalence, uncertainty, disutility, and temporariness, all of which challenge ideals of autonomy and community? What responsibility do recipients of such expressive cultural artifacts have to internalize the implied engagement models to help them atone for the inherent privilege they carry and the inexorable oppression they inflict?

Diasporic Black feminisms have long carried the reproductive — symbolic, social, and material — into and through generations, disciplines, geographies, and discourses. In this seminar you will learn to abort false symbolic ontogenies just as the lived experience of the Black womb so often aborts its unwelcome contents.

Your challenge, dear reader is as follows:

Half the sentences in this word salad were actually included in a promotional flyer advertising an invited talk by Professor Samantha Pinto from UT Austin held at the University of Virginia on February 6th. The other half are nonsense sentences pulled out of the Beaver’s keister.

Are you astute enough to tell which is which?

Story suggested by James Bacon