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<p>"We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996
addresses the questions of mothering and survival from a queer, diasporic literary
perspective, arguing that the literary practices of Black feminists Audre Lorde, June
Jordan, Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith enable a counternarrative to a neoliberal
logic that criminalizes Black mothering and the survival of Black people outside and
after their utility to capital. Treating Audre Lorde and June Jordan as primary theorists
of mothering and survival, and Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith as key literary historical
figures in the queer manifestation of Black feminist modes of literary production,
this dissertation uses previously unavailable archival material, and queer of color
critique and critical Black diasporic theoretical approaches to create an intergenerative
reading practice. An intergenerative reading practice interrupts the social reproduction
of meaning and value across time, and places untimely literary moments and products
in poetic relationship to each other in order to reveal the possibility of another
meaning of life. Ultimately this dissertation functions as a sample narrative towards
the alternate meaning of life that the poetic breaks of Black feminist literary production
in the queer spaces of counter-cultural markets, classrooms, autonomous publishing
collectives make possible, concluding that mothering is indeed a reflexive and queer
way of reading the present in the service of a substantively different future in which
our outlawed love survives.</p>
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