Today we will discuss the introduction to Hortense Spillers' article "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book". Spillers created this 1987 text to critique current day academic discourse. She proposes that we need new language to describe the experiences of black females, like herself, because words like "womanhood" and "mother" historically do not apply. She argues that since black women do not have access to the privilege of heteronormative notions of womanhood and motherhood, there needs to be new discourse created.

This is a difficult text that we are still ruminating on. But, it is an extremely important part of the black feminist Archive and worth the difficulty. 

Questions to consider: How do we subscribe to heteronormative structures in our school and classroom? How can we break this structure and offer up new ways of living? How does this layer with race and ethnicity?

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