To Put Afoot a New Black Woman: On Hortense Spillers and the Possibilities of Gender

Abstract

Abstract This essay maps Hortense Spillers's figurations of the black woman across three essays published in the 1980s—“Interstices,” “An Order of Constancy,” and “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe”—to illustrate the myriad ways in which Spillers imagines black women as vital symbolic and material forces in the (re)production of New World spaces. Situating the US 1980s as a critical geo- and sociopolitical context for Black feminist, specifically Spillersian, knowledge production, this essay puts afoot a new Spillers, demonstrating how her critical value is not exclusively tied to her interventions into symbolic and material formations of Man but rather might also be measured through her theoretical efforts on behalf of, and insights into, diverse and polymorphous communities of (Black) feminists and women. By close-reading Spillers's visionary considerations of the perils and possibilities of gender, and with attention to critical innovations in Black (trans)feminist and queer studies, this essay (re)claims the Black woman—and, by extension, Black women—as the critical and material loci of Black feminisms.