Society of One: Single-Mothering as Survivance and Agency in Predominantly White Institutions

• In Event: 25.085 - Sheraton Roundtable One - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 25.085-4 - Mothering and Daughtering as Methodological Framing: Black and Transnational Feminist Interrogations of Curricular Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose
Patricia Hill Collins (2005) critiques “white male scholars and their representatives” who frame Black motherhood as the cause of societal ills in the United States. Single Black mothers are especially used as discursive and materialized targets for deficit narratives about women and children from multiply-marginalized communities. In response to calls for Black feminist analyses of Black motherhood, I enact a critical Black feminist autoethnographic exploration of my single-motherhood experiences to illuminate resistant, agentic, and sustainable possibilities of single-mothering in the academy. I situate my analysis of single-mothering within a Predominately White Institution (PWI) in the US. Autoethnographically focusing on single-mothering as a methodological framing, I explore the implications of being a Black woman, qualitative researcher, and a special education teacher educator, in hostile spaces, shaping and being shaped by teacher education curricular relations and practices.

Perspectives
Grounded in critical Black feminism (hooks, 1994) and endarkened feminist epistemologies (Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2011) I explore counternarratives as a Black single mother tenured at a PWI. White supremacist patriarchal imagination constructs Black women and women of color, who are single mothers, through deficit narratives, falsely assuming that Black women and women of color are isolated without community. Perhaps this is a projection of white individualism, but Black women have always understood the value of individual and communal existence for their survivance. Resisting such oppressive imagination of whiteness, I offer counternarratives to demonstrate how whiteness-centered curricular narratives and academic practices create distrusting relationships, silence/distort voice, and expect a performativity from minoritized scholars that is complicit with their own oppression.

Methods
Okpalaoka and Dillard note that, “endarkened feminist dialogues held by African ascendant women” (p. 67) yield wisdom. Being in dialogue with a Black sister-scholar at another PWI allowed me to realize how single-motherhood and relationship with my Black community were sustainable forces for me, through which I gained strength and focus. My professional milestones coincided with my daughter’s development: I completed a Master’s degree and educator certification before she turned two, a PhD by the time she was seven, and became the first Black faculty member tenured in my academic unit when she was 13 years old. Thus, in this paper, I employ critical autoethnography (Boylorn, 2012) to theorize how single-mothering facilitates my persistence and survivance in an academic “society of one” (i.e. the single Black faculty member in an academic unit of approximately 30). I explore how single-mothering informs my research, pedagogy, and mentoring to (re)shape and be shaped by teacher education curriculum.

Significance
Focusing on survivance, this paper demonstrates that Black women’s single-motherhood need not be narratives of deficiency. I have been able to transmute a stigmatized, maligned status, as a source of strength, through which I have thrived multiply-intersected hostile non-democratic, whiteness-centered curricular practices and spaces. Arguing for cultivating strength in maligned statuses allows self-determination, agency, and ways of authoring oneself into social and historical discourses. Without such authoring, deficit narratives pervade and perpetuate distrust and toxicity in curricular relations and practices.

Author

• Erica D. McCray, University of Florida