“After Birth: A Visual Anal/ysis of Black Women’s Refusal”

• In Event: What We Do With What Remains: The Politics of Reimagining the Past and Resignifying the Present

Abstract

As the United States occupies its own state of “transition,” moving towards what many theorize as its
“end,” one might think of those already well familiar with the “afterlife,” of those whose controlled
deaths under slavery provided the vital material upon which the nation founded itself. Black American
women/femmes in particular have constantly stood between the realms of life and death, refusing their
often liminal, marginalized positions within American history, literature, and film to theorize their own
understandings of self as embodied subjects and precarious citizens. In my paper, “After Birth: A Visual
Anal/ysis of Black Women’s Refusal,” I track black feminist theorizations on refusal, reading into the
“obvious and implied” meanings of the term (in a diegetic/extradiegetic gesture) to bridge them to a more
literal study of “refuse” or waste sites as the appear in black women’s visual and literary art, imagining
them as sites of resistance and thinking through the creationary potential of “wasteful” affects. I look at,
amongst other visual sites, the music videos from the rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s latest album MEGAN.
Reading her engagement of bell hooks’ “oppositional gaze,” I speculate upon bodily ways of “knowing”
and sensing as informed by black feminine embodiment to think about black women’s visual practices of
resistance onscreen. This meditation offers a way of thinking about black women and femme’s series of
choices constantly encountering death in a world organized by Western processes of destruction,
processes practiced and perfected against black feminine flesh. It is also a way of thinking about black
women creator’s intimate intertextualities between visual art, film, and music as they are recorded upon
and remembered by the body. Going further, my work queries as to the full implications of the term
“end,” heeding wisdom from the leagues of black, feminist, and postcolonial studies labor that has
preceded it to remember that the colonial scar remains indefinitely. Through my work, I seek to consider
the scar, theorize the remains, and contemplate the U.S. as something that “happened” to the earth,
thinking through the ensuing aftershocks of trauma that will reverberate thereafter as consequence.

Author

• McKenzie Clarke