FOCUS
Black Maternal Sovereignty is a Womanist theoretical framework and my arts praxis I developed for my MFA Thesis in Interdisciplinary Arts — Performance Concentration (MFA Thesis: Unfragmented Woman 2020’) to explore Black Motherhood and Black Maternal Life (BML), as an embodied, relational and generative form of agency.
This pillar centers Black Motherhood as agency—a site of intelligence, beauty, and cultural continuity. Not only because I am a wife of two decades and mother of five children but my interest in Motherhood, especially Black Motherhood is an intriguing, sometimes charged and complex site of inquiry I’m unpacking. Black Motherhood is joyful and visionary, resisting and challenging White Supremacy narratives that name it as deficient, disposable, dismissible, destroyable or non-existent.
Black Motherhood as a research pillar in my work is affirmed in its inherent worth, humanity, wholeness, dignity, fortitude, integrity and cultural weight today, yesterday and tomorrow.
Individual roles of the husband, father, wife, mother and child (boy and girl) are also deeply explored.
Approach
Through my writing, choreography and performance, my dance works explore beautiful complexities of Black Motherhood – womanhood, marriage, family systems — care, tenderness, devotion, rupture, desire, labor, joy, and power. I use embodied practice as research methodology— choreographic inquiry, dance ethnography, reflective writing, and movement analysis frameworks and scholarship to examine and illuminate Black Maternal Sovereignty.
I bridge embodied theory and public work; I make dances and choreographic installations, write theory, and build a language for what is often misread or left unnamed—especially the internal drive and strength Black Mothers live with while being externally tested, doubted, disrespected, yet are not deterred and neither are her children.
My approach is grounded in Womanist theory, embodied artistic research, and choreographic practice shaped by lived maternal experience. Drawing from the intellectual lineage of Audre Lorde’s conception of the Erotic as power Drawing on Black Womanist thought and Audre Lorde’s framing of the Erotic (MFA Thesis: Unfragmented Woman 2020’), Angela Davis’s work on Radical Self Care and Liberation, Josephine Baker’s self-determined artistry, and Katherine Dunham’s integration of scholarship, performance, cultural research and embodiment, I articulate Motherhood as a site of knowledge production.
My Language System
- Black Maternal Life — The lived, embodied, and relational experience of Black motherhood as a site of cultural continuity, aesthetic intelligence, emotional labor, and world-making power across domestic, communal, and public spheres.
- Black Family Life — A generative relational system through which partnership, kinship, protection, lineage, and creativity are enacted.
- Technosomatics — I define this a creative process framework for creating a multimodal experience in my work.
Drawing from Pre-Exisiting Concepts
- Black Feminist Care Theory – Patricia Hill Collins (1990)
- Womanist Ethics – Alice Walker (1983), Katie G. Cannon (1988), Emilie M. Townes (2006)
- Maternal Subjectivity – Adrienne Rich (1976), Sara Ruddick (1989)
- Black Motherhood Studies – Patricia Hill Collins (1990), Dorothy Roberts (1997)
- Reproductive Justice – SisterSong (definition page; movement founded in the 1990s), Loretta J. Ross & Rickie Solinger (2017)
Impact
Black Maternal Sovereignty creates a rigorous framework for praxis – both art and scholarship. Through my framework, I explore how sovereignty is threatened (stereotypes, institutions, medicine, workplaces, and public narratives) and how it is practiced (through kinship, refusal, migration, care strategies, and cultural transmission). As a public-facing contribution, this pillar produces outcomes that matter beyond the arts and scholarship supporting culturally grounded pedagogy, strengthening advocacy around maternal health and institutional accountability, offering audiences and scholars a new way to understand Black Motherhood and Black Family Life (BFL) as a site of brilliance and world-making.
My pillar expands dance scholarship and cultural theory by:
- Positioning motherhood as epistemology and method
- Challenging deficit-based narratives without re-centering them
- Offering a framework for artists, educators, and scholars to understand maternal life as cultural intelligence in the context of Black Women.
Black Maternal Sovereignty reframes motherhood as a source of power that challenges dominant logics—not through opposition alone, but through beauty, presence, and continuity.
Selected Works / Case Studies
- (2025 – Current) The House Remembers – Choreographic works developed through Technosomatics
- (2020-2022) Vaseline America Reborn with Regina King Campaign, #HealthEquity
- (2020) Society’s Cage
- (2020) MFA Thesis – Unfragmented Woman
- (2019) Eloquent Labor
