The witch of the womb: historicizing the midwife of colour in the medical imaginary

Midwifery practices have historically been conflated with witchcraft in colonial and medico-patriarchal imaginaries. Considering the figure of the midwife in relation to a modern, rational, masculinized reproductive medicine, this paper mobilizes the 'witch-hunt' as a lens to trace the historical persecution and racialization of midwives to the present. Though there is extensive literature on gender, midwives, and witches in early modern Europe, colonial markers used to suppress the 'midwife-witch' had unique implications for midwives of colour, whose African and Indigenous knowledges have persisted as a problem for Western Christianity and medical modernity. Mobilizing an interdisciplinary method to account for the force of Europe and imaginaries of Africa within historiographies of witch-hunts and histories of medicine, the research frames midwives' knowledges of plants in Haiti and the U.S. South as an understudied site of relationality. Such a lens illuminates the subversive potential of subordinated epistemologies in settler slave colonies with implications for contemporary feminist questions of racial, reproductive, and ecological justice.