Everybody's Maybes: Reproducing Feminism's Bad Objects

Abstract

In this introduction, we reconsider how we can tell the stories of Black feminist thought and institutional feminist study through uncertainty and incommensurability rather than clear reproducibility of good and bad objects. We then consider the speculative place of reproductive history, metaphor, and technology vis-à-vis intersectionality as a foundational object of worry for and in feminist thought. Taking seriously the sustained focus on white women and white feminism as the quintessential bad objects and actors in the present of US feminism, we engage how the reproductive in Black feminism has been both an occluding and elucidating genre to refract Black women as subjects of a “white” field of feminism and the academy at large. We pay particular attention to the social reproduction of race in analyses of gestation, birth, and motherhood and the opportunities these sites represent for disorienting intersectional analysis rather than shoring up its contours. By challenging feminism's critical attachments to self-evidently ethical objects, this introduction, and this issue, offer a way forward in feminist study that imagines uncertainty as a core method and value of feminist inquiry.