Hortense Spillers and the Ungendering of (Re)productive Racial Capitalism

Abstract This article theorizes the reproductive dimensions of racial capitalism. It begins by bringing into conversation Black Marxist theories of racial capitalism and Marxist feminist theories of social and biological reproduction proffered by Cedric Robinson and Silvia Federici respectively. It demonstrates that since its inception, racial capitalism has depended on processes of racialized (re)productive accumulation that are ongoing but not yet fully theorized. At the center of the essay is a close reading of Hortense Spillers’s 1987 contribution “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Though Spillers is not generally regarded as either a Black Marxist or a Marxist feminist, the essay argues that she ought to be recognized as a theorist of racialized (re)productive accumulation—a process that begins aboard the slave ship, persists on the plantation, and endures into the present. Racialized (re)productive accumulation exploited she whom Spillers often denotes as “the captive female,” and, also, paradoxically, ungendered her. Ultimately, through examination of the process of ungendering in Atlantic slavery, the essay suggests that Spillers opens up new ways to think about the history of racial capitalism, (re)productive dispossession, and the possibility of its refusal. The article concludes by considering how Spillers’s complex insights about the process of ungendering might yet be mobilized to secure truly substantive forms of reproductive justice.