Disciplining the disobedient Black maternal subject: the assimilatory pedagogies of public suffering and punishment

Abstract

Drawing feminist analyses of the affective work of shame, compassion and pain into dialogue with Black political theory's critique of the ‘ordinary’ spectacle of Black suffering and death, this article theoretically examines the disciplining of Black maternal subjects who behave badly in Nordic public space. Considering media coverage of two separate instances from 2019 where Black mothers are either threatened by the risk of death or succumb to death, this article analyses how the racial logics of national assimilation locate these women as deviantly unassimilable subjects who are swiftly made culpable for the conditions of their own suffering.