Discursive Bodies: Black Women, Healing, and the Poetics of Care

Abstract

“Discursive Bodies” explores how creative and critical thought in the humanities can enrich our understanding of and discussions surrounding Black women’s health. The discipline of English and the health humanities field have yet to thoroughly reckon with the Black woman’s body and its representations. I rectify this by showing how Black women’s cultural productions are crucial to examining and addressing issues regarding their wellness. I employ a Black feminist lens and methods from literary studies to analyze African American and African Diasporic literature and visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. The works of writers, artists, and scholars function as sites where Black women interrogate their relationships with institutions of medicine and conceptualize the meanings of health and wellness. I argue that Black women provide models for alternative modes of care through their poetry, novels, and visual art in the face of hegemonic systems committed to propagating Black women’s unwellness. Often, discussions regarding health prioritize and fetishize the objectivity of biomedicine. However, racial and gender discrimination impedes Black women’s access to care and their overall health outcomes. Therefore, a thoughtful discussion about the state of Black women’s health and potential remedies must engage with the underlying systemic, emotional, and rhetorical politics at play. In “Discursive Bodies,” I demonstrate how Black women construct care practices in their art that confront the legacy of Black women’s subjugation and center their embodied knowledge. For instance, Black women poets and novelists, such as Bettina Judd and Toni Cade Bambara, respectively, use non-linearity and spirituality to honor the complexity of bodily and emotional healing. Critical theory is often applied to products of expressive culture to derive deeper meaning. While I use Black feminist criticism as a lens to examine these objects of expressive culture, I also show that these creative works produce theory. These mediations in art can offer strategies to ameliorate conditions for Black women’s health. “Discursive Bodies” invites a deeper, holistic understanding of health that demarginalizes Black women’s experiential knowledge through the rigorous engagement of their cultural expression.