Ungendering Flesh

In recent years Hortense Spillers’s watershed 1987 essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” has found renewed uptake. In decolonial, Marxist, and Black (feminist) studies, it is engaged in examinations of the lasting impress of African enslavement (both material and ideological) on contemporary politics, social policy, and culture, and in scholarly treatments of the psychic impact of the Middle Passage and enslavement on the experiences of the Black diaspora. Whereas an earlier generation of readers gravitated towards Spillers’s titular concepts – “American grammar” and “pornotroping” (Pinto 2017), both of which lend themselves to questions of representation and the symbolic order – more recent scholars (me included) home in on concept metaphors that widen and nuance discussion of the body, sexuality, and racialized gender formation. In such scholarship “ungendering” and “flesh” (which Spillers distinguishes from “body”) are especially resonant.

For some scholars ungendering is useful to the study of Black embodiment and bodily dispossession, and in exploration of relationships among queerness, transness, and Blackness in past and present (Snorton 2017; Morgan 2021). For others, flesh has been claimed as a fungible resource – one that figures abjection and portends radical possibility (Bliss 2015; King 2018; Musser 2015). Still other thinkers have mobilized these concept metaphors to create new footholds in the study of women in slavery and the twinned processes of dehumanization and racialization that have together subtended women’s reproductive and sexual bondage (Morgan 2021; Weinbaum 2019; Morgan and Weinbaum 2024). In my preferred reading – one that draws on and departs from other contributions to scholarship on “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” – both ungendering and flesh ought to be recognized as simultaneously materialist and ideological. Moreover, they ought to be regarded as unique theoretical gifts to both feminist and decolonial politics insofar as ungendering and flesh are at once critically descriptive and charged with radical political potential.

In this preferred reading, ungendering is a Black feminist shorthand, a quick and powerful description of violent processes that Spillers first locates on slave ships used to transport valuable cargo across the Atlantic. Ungendering describes the objectification of gendered bodies of African captives in Middle Passage – that is, it describes what happens when human beings are transformed into living commodities that can be stowed in a ship’s hold alongside other goods bound for “New World” markets. The transformation of gendered human beings into ungendered quantities of cargo involves a mathematical and spatial calculation that transforms gendered bodies into quantities of what Spillers denotes as flesh (Weinbaum 2024).

In this sense, flesh can also be viewed as a Black feminist shorthand, a quick and powerful description of the dehumanized occupant of space in the hold of a slave ship – space saturated by capital that must be optimized to yield a profit. In putting forth this argument about calculation, I build on contributions by historians of slavery such as Jennifer Morgan, Stephanie Smallwood, and Walter Johnson among others. Their historical work details the material conditions of enslavement and the precise conceptual mechanism through which human beings were reduced to things in accord with the capitalist logic of exchange that powered the slave trade. Insofar as Spillers’s formulations in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” presage this historical work about the dehumanizing calculations that made slavery go, they ought to be acknowledged as robustly materialist contributions to the history of slavery and its afterlife. For along with historians and other Black radical theorists, Spillers clearly theorises Atlantic slavery as a form of racial capitalism even though she does not expressly use the language of racial capitalism (Morgan and Weinbaum 2024).

The transformation of the body into ungendered flesh is for Spillers a two-pronged process that first takes place on the slave ship and is repeated elsewhere. Indeed, although this doubled dimension of Spillers’s argument is seldom acknowledged, ungendering of the enslaved facilitates forced reproductive labor or the so-called breeding of chattel on plantations situated throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. As I argue elsewhere, ungendering of captive females begun on slave ships is repeated in and through the instrumentalization of the enslaved commodity as a breeding machine, a source of new commodities (Weinbaum 2024). In forcing the enslaved to (re)produce, enslavers stripped the enslaved not only of kinship but also of their gendered identity as “mothers” to those to whom they gave birth.

While destruction of kinship among the enslaved is widely acknowledged in discussions that build on Orlando Patterson’s ideas about “natal alienation,” the ungendering of the enslaved “mother” has not been discussed thus far, save by Spillers. And this is so despite Spillers’s repeated insistence that “mother” was an identity exclusively racialized (as white) and gendered (as female) in the world in which the enslaved reproducer laboured. Indeed, Spillers suggests that conceptualisation of the “captive female” as an ungendered quantity of flesh is not only the conceptualization that ideologically powered the slave trade, ungendering of Black women has been and continues to be forwarded in time as is evident when we realise that within dominant ideology blackness and motherhood continue to be cast as incompatible. This instance of mutual exclusion shapes the afterlife of slavery, and thus the experiences of Black collectivities (biological families as well as chosen kin groups) and individuals situated in the Black diaspora.

Although the process of creating ungendered flesh subtended the (re)production of living commodities and the accumulation of immense profits for planters and colonists, it is also a process that can be (and, by some accounts, already have been) appropriated for decolonial feminist and queer ends. As scholars such as C. Riley Snorton, Tiffany Lethabo King, Samantha Pinto, James Bliss, and Shoniqua Roach argue “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” portends shifting conceptualizations of gendered and racialised embodiment and opens new relationalities and alternative forms of kin making. Indeed, Spillers points the way toward the wayward kinship(s) that today exist among queerness, transness, and Blackness.

As I elaborate elsewhere (Weinbaum 2024), the possibility that others have found to inhere in ungendered flesh may also be realised in the pursuit of a robust form of Reproductive Justice (RJ). RJ is a name that is frequently used for political and activist projects that refuse to narrow the horizon of reproductive rights to the question of access to contraception and/or abortion by instead proffering a more encompassing materialist vision of reproductive freedom. RJ thus includes both the right to have and not have a child, and the right to the necessary material resources that make it possible to parent (Ross and Solinger 2017). In short, RJ offers a radically inclusive idea of reproduction as a human right that ideally extends to all human beings no matter how they elect to exercise reproductive autonomy, create kin, and/or raise children.

While the appeal to human rights can tend to push RJ into liberal terrain and thus toward preoccupation with UN conferences, platforms, accords, and resolutions to the exclusion of all else, I remain hopeful that RJ possesses the power to move reproductive cultures and politics into a radical future. To put this in a different way, I remain hopeful that contemporary struggles over access to reproductive health care, childcare, living wages, and basic income will mobilize Black feminist concept metaphors such as flesh and ungendering, as well as a robust materialist critique of the reproduction’s commodification in slavery and beyond.