Managing E-Motion and Motherhood Among Enslaved Women in East Africa

Drawing on the scholarships of ‘intimate mobilities’ and ‘action as proxy for voice’, this article explores how enslaved and emancipated girls and women in Eastern Africa demonstrated the resonance of their emotional lives through their movements. E-motions are defined by Pelckmans and Rodet in the introduction to this special issue as: ‘the gendered mobilities of girls and women who moved and continue to move […] in order to establish, consolidate or move out of emotional ties in intimate, affective and private spheres’. By analysing the choice of movement by recently freed women, this article examines the representations of emotional familial commitments through the actions of women, especially regarding motherhood.