Black Femme Ecologies--A Tidal Wave of Black Mutual Assistance

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

Black women centered family wellness, a waterway headed towards world-wide women centered holistic care. The lived experience of African people shows the need for women centered family wellness. For a sustainable Earth women centered care is an ecological necessity. Women and children of the global majority often suffer during childbirth. Too many experience birth trauma and infant violence. Routinely silenced by physicians who “don't listen to them.” By reclaiming the human right to wellness during the perinatal period, reinvigorating traditions threatened to vanish during the period of enslavement and its aftermath, Black women utilizing, “mutual aid,” help revive lived experiences of families in community, and relational ethics. Birth outside hospital settings attended by women has been forced underground in many places throughout the world. Midwives and conscious physicians respect and listen to their patients as co-creators in their wellness, yet they remain fugitives escaping the enslavement of standardized medicine with inequality marked relationships. When Black women’s health especially during the perinatal period becomes a priority, family wellness can be optimal, ordinary and every day. This panel aims to explore Black women centered family wellness, women’s sexual wellness, and reproductive justice in Baltimore Maryland, and the DMV region, a tidal wave of Black mutual assistance.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Efia Dalili, BB-Penda, Inc

Individual Presentations

• “She told me to try guida”: Black Perinatal Wellness in Cuba - Efia Dalili, BB-Penda, Inc

• Injera Epistemology: Lessons from Indigenous Women of Tigray, Za Gualay - Micknai Arefaine

• Frankly, Sex Talks: Radical Reconfiguring of Self and Other - Senabou Ayana Penda Dalili, BB-Penda, Inc.