Black Feminist Poiesis: Locating “The Uses of the Erotic” Within Black Domesticity
type: CreativeWork
description: What does being human mean for women who were artists denied the ability to live life on their own standards? What did it mean to live a creative life when your body was captured and held within a system that surveilled and penalized you for things like writing, reading, or the idea of creating was impossible? In Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” she asks us to consider what it meant to be a Black woman artist when you are considered “the mule of the world,” and are stuck toiling away—as a launderer, a maid, a cook, a nanny—and your soul cried out with creativity? Particularly moved by Walker’s inquiry, this research turns to Lorde’s concept of the erotic to think through these women’s humanity and understand Black women’s creativity by reading the labor they did in excess of the labor they were forced to do. I am particularly animated by the ways they made and re-made their respective worlds through labor spinning fiber, weaving, and creating quilts: What inspired them and drove them to continue to labor after a full day of laboring; was it an act of love, of pleasure, of necessity, or all three? To arrive at a response, I engage with former enslaved people’s narratives within the WPA archives, as well as my own family’s archival records to discern what these women did, what they said they did, and what other people said they did. Were they creating art, or just working out of necessity? Within the WPA archives, I focused on narratives concerning spinning, weaving, dyeing, and sewing/making clothes, and within modern narratives I turn to quilters within agrarian cultures utilizing traditions handed down from one generation to another. While encountering the wounding silence of early archives, I instinctively turned to my own creative labor—I grow cotton, spin, weave, quilt, and write poems, realizing that my way forward—the way to begin to mend the archives is by filling in the silences with my own creative practice. Leaning on my grandmother’s st…
abstract: What does being human mean for women who were artists denied the ability to live life on their own standards? What did it mean to live a creative life when your body was captured and held within a system that surveilled and penalized you for things like writing, reading, or the idea of creating was impossible? In Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” she asks us to consider what it meant to be a Black woman artist when you are considered “the mule of the world,” and are stuck toiling away—as a launderer, a maid, a cook, a nanny—and your soul cried out with creativity? Particularly moved by Walker’s inquiry, this research turns to Lorde’s concept of the erotic to think through these women’s humanity and understand Black women’s creativity by reading the labor they did in excess of the labor they were forced to do. I am particularly animated by the ways they made and re-made their respective worlds through labor spinning fiber, weaving, and creating quilts: What inspired them and drove them to continue to labor after a full day of laboring; was it an act of love, of pleasure, of necessity, or all three? To arrive at a response, I engage with former enslaved people’s narratives within the WPA archives, as well as my own family’s archival records to discern what these women did, what they said they did, and what other people said they did. Were they creating art, or just working out of necessity? Within the WPA archives, I focused on narratives concerning spinning, weaving, dyeing, and sewing/making clothes, and within modern narratives I turn to quilters within agrarian cultures utilizing traditions handed down from one generation to another. While encountering the wounding silence of early archives, I instinctively turned to my own creative labor—I grow cotton, spin, weave, quilt, and write poems, realizing that my way forward—the way to begin to mend the archives is by filling in the silences with my own creative practice. Leaning on my grandmother’s st…
author: Jimenez, Kiandra S.
keywords: African American quiltmakers, Black domestic workers, Black feminism, Cultural geography, Sharecropping, Slave narratives, African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Fiber, Textile, and Weaving Arts
date published: 2023-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:40:22Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University