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The Womanist Reader
Oct 6, 2026
UnDaughtering Annotation
UnDaughtering Annotation
00:00
12:32
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Transcript
0:02
A while ago, I wrote a paper, an academic paper on SSRN called Undaughtering: Toward a Theory of Black Daughterhood as a Permanent Social Location. And I am very proud of it,
0:20
and I think that the information that I wrote in that paper needs to be more accessible to other folks. And,
0:32
and Shaa Amunjo, who is the founder of Critical Thinking Labs, and she started this project where she provides audio accompaniments to her essays, and I love that idea.
0:49
It really democratizes information. And I thought that I could do sort of the same thing, um, and I'm gonna be doing that with this paper. This paper is an academic paper, which means that it is long.
1:03
It is thirty-five pages single-spaced, okay? So we are not going to be able to do everything in one go.
1:14
But I'm gonna start with the abstract today, give you a little bit of context for the paper, and then we will go from there. I am considering this to be sort of a go-at-your-own-pace reading salon.
1:31
If this goes well, I will dissect more papers, more books in this podcast format. Okay.
1:39
So I'm gonna read you the abstract to Undaughtering: Towards a Theory of Black Daughterhood as a Permanent Social Location, and then we are going to talk about it, operationalize it, define our terms.
1:51
[gentle music] This paper argues that Black daughterhood should be theorized as a permanent social location rather than a developmental stage.
2:10
Drawing on Hortense Spillers' distinction between body and flesh, Orlando Patterson's concept of natal alienation, and Judith Butler's account of grievability, this paper defines three conditions that constitute daughterhood as a structural fact: particularity, holding, and accountability.
2:26
It argues that American chattel slavery's legal apparatus, partus sequitur ventrem foremost among its instruments, never allowed or intended Black women to occupy this position and that the failure persists as reflex in the institutions, encounters, and family structures that replaced them.
2:45
The paper then turns to psychoanalysis to ask what this foreclosure does inside a life.
2:51
Reading Winnicott, Bion, and Fairbairn against the strong Black woman schema, it argues that this schema is a false self built to metabolize the state's failure to hold as personal virtue rather than external injury.
3:05
The paper then extends this argument to Alice Walker's foundational definition of womanist, arguing that the definition's own grammar, which locates seriousness and audacity only in womanhood and leaves girlhood defined by pure lack, performs the same age compression it should have refused.
3:22
The paper closes by proposing subversive tenderness, a reorientation of Black feminist and womanist practice around a woman's permanent, non-negotiable claim to be held rather than her demonstrated capacity to survive without holding.
3:37
[sirens wailing] Now, that's a lot of words, right? We just said a lot in a little bit of space. But what does all of this actually mean, and how and why did we end up writing this paper? Okay. I...
3:56
The core claim of this paper is that daughterhood is a permanent social location and not a developmental stage, right? So let's talk about what that means.
4:07
I was sitting in my house one day, and I don't even remember what the viral internet conversation was, but I was thinking about Black women and Black girls, and I realized that every Black woman
4:25
is a Black daughter, but not every Black woman has a Black mother or will become a Black mother herself. And my instant next thought after realizing that
4:43
is that we don't-- I've never read any scholarship that centers the Black daughter, right? There's plenty out there that is about Black womanhood, about Black motherhood, that is about, um, Black girlhood,
5:01
but you are still a daughter when you are a grown-up lady, okay? You are still a daughter when your mother dies. You're still a daughter when you die. When people refer to you, yous will not stop
5:14
having been someone's daughter just because you no longer are alive. [sirens wailing] My grandmother is, God rest her soul, no longer alive, but she is still the daughter of George and Lessie.
5:34
It just is what it is. And so I went to go and do some research to see what there was about Black daughterhood, right?
5:47
About what it is to be a Black daughter across the entire expanse of your life, and I genuinely couldn't find anything. I genuinely couldn't find anything, not through all my Boolean searches. And there's a lot of um,
6:04
Black girlhood studies that we definitely get into more granularly throughout the piece. But I looked up and I realized that we only think about daughters as mothers in training.
6:18
We only think about daughters as little girls. And I think that is because white supremacy culture pretends that we are a family.
6:36
And I'm actually going to have to write an entire another paper on this, but
6:43
white supremacy and America is a very, uh, the mythology of America, the story of America and its origins and its mythos and its, its culture and its creed is pastoral in nature.
6:59
It's a patriarchal society. And we pretend that we are one big family that is run by our, uh, benevolent patriarch, the government.
7:11
There was literally a law that was codified into law, um, called Parents Patriæ, which basically said that the government was acting like a benevolent patriarch. And we, the citizens of this country,
7:30
are supposed to be the children of this family. And it, this law is supposed to ensure that the government, you know, takes care of us, protects and provides for us. That's supposed to be the model.
7:45
But the problem is that Black people have never been even the redheaded stepchild of this dysfunctional family.
7:53
We remain, we came into the family and we remain to this day in the eyes of the law, in the eyes of white supremacist culture, we remain the slaves of the family. And this has been codified into law.
8:06
And even though it has been stricken from law, it is still codified into our culture.
8:12
We have been steeped in the culture of white supremacy and chattel slavery, and it actually factually permeates every single thing that we do. And so as we think about
8:27
Black women, Black girls, Black mages, Black people of marginalized genders, we realize that they have been forcefully undaughtered. They have been removed from the role of daughter.
8:45
Okay. And so what we do first in the paper is define daughterhood. We talk about what
8:57
our overarching society has said in practice and in word about what it means to be a daughter. What do you get? What, what role does the daughter play in this dysfunctional family?
9:13
And according to, in an ideal setting and my research, I am postulating that the answer to that question is particularity, holding and accountability. And each of these words have very specific meanings.
9:27
We're not just talking about like holding specifically is a childhood development term. And I don't mean holding like physically cradling someone.
9:36
I mean the ability to hold their emotions and thoughts and things of that nature. And so the point of this paper, Undaughtering, is to prove
9:50
what it takes to be a daughter, to prove that that has been systematically, all of those things have been systematically denied to Black female presenting people from the womb to the tomb and beyond.
10:06
Grieveability is about the idea that nobody cares when you die, that they don't treat you well, even as you leave this earth. And that's that on the victim at LSU and the, the Dr. Karina Fairfax.
10:23
That's that on all of the nameless Black trans women who we don't know anything about who die every day. That is Tajah Fortune, who was hung in Mississippi.
10:42
It is the vile and vitriolic way we came for Nicole Hannah-Jones upon writing that article. She got a white mama, but that's a Black daughter. Najah, Najah,
10:58
Hannah-Jones's daughter is also a Black daughter. And what we owe them is subversive tenderness. What we owe the Black daughter is to treat her like a child of God, a child of somebody,
11:16
somebody's baby. And that next paper that I am going to write is basically going to outline the dysfunctional white supremacist family. Um, because
11:28
I am a labor scholar who focuses on Black people of marginalized genders with a special emphasis on Black women. But this affects Black men too. This affects Black men too. This affects all of us.
11:42
So we've gone through the abstract. Next time I will dive a little bit deeper in. We will start in the introduction and I will do a deep dive into each of the sections. You can find the paper at the link below
11:59
on ssrn.com. And I am your host and your homegirl, Bethany Nicole. If you like this, please comment below and let me know. Um, and I'll do more.
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