Abstract
AbstractThe 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.
Highlights
The short story “Harvest” (2010) by African American writer Danielle Evans is set in an ostensibly post-racial society: an environment in which one’s racial background is thought to be immaterial in terms of social equality
This paper traces the figurations of the racialized aspects of gender in “Harvest” within the theoretical frameworks of Black and Chicana feminisms, motherhood studies, and intersectionality
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
Summary
The short story “Harvest” (2010) by African American writer Danielle Evans is set in an ostensibly post-racial society: an environment in which one’s (perceived) racial background is thought to be immaterial in terms of social equality. The title of Evans’s collection in which “Harvest” was published, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2010), already foreshadows the volume’s thematic preoccupation with gender and race It is a line from Black feminist poet Kate Rushin’s “The bridge poem” (1981), the prefatory piece to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a seminal feminist anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Reviewers praised its fresh female voice and perspective (Dreilinger, 2010) and its unflinching thematic focus on the liminality of early adulthood (Peelle, 2010) They have commented on Evans’s subtle treatment of racism: “the blackness of her characters is always there and fraught, both ancillary and totally central to understanding the main conflict [since] her characters are always in danger, and it is Evans’s considerable achievement that though this danger cannot be reduced to skin color, it is inextricable from it” Angel is shocked to realize she is pregnant; after contemplating abortion, she decides to keep the baby
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