Disability Politics and Reproductive Critique in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora
Main Article Content
Abstract
This essay takes a reproductive justice lens, together with the analytical and liberatory insights of intersectional literary and cultural disability studies, to unearth an archive of medical eugenics exercised via non-consensual sterilization in Gayl Jones’s 1975 novel, Corregidora. My analysis also accounts for the ways in which the intimate family unit or couple can serve as a site where historical/state violence is reproduced and perpetuated, troubling the notion of a private sphere, particularly when it comes to Black Americans. Finally, I consider the stakes of such a reading of Jones’s novel for feminist health humanities and the contemporary conversation about reproductive rights and justice in the United States.
Article Details
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Journal of TCI is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence, unless otherwise stated. Please read our Policies page for more information.
References
Abdur-Rahman, A. I. (2012). Against the closet: Black political longing and the erotics of Race. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822391883
Briggs, L. (2000). “The race of hysteria: ‘Overcivilization’ and the ‘savage’ woman in late nineteenth-century obstetrics and gyneclogy.” American Quarterly, 52(2), 246-273. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2000.0013
Brown, P. (1995). “Naming and framing: The Social Construction of Diagnosis and Illness.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 35, 34. https://doi.org/10.2307/2626956
Conrad, P. (2007). The medicalization of society: On the transformation of human conditions into treatable disorders. https://doi.org/10.56021/9780801885846
Ferguson, R. (2003). Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203720776-13
Geary, A. (2014). Antiblack Racism and the AIDS Epidemic: State Intimacies. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438034
Glymph, T. (2008). Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511812491
Hogarth, R. A. (2017). Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469632872/medicalizing-blackness/
Horwitz, A. V. (2007). “Distinguishing distress from disorder as psychological outcomes of stressful social arrangements.” Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 11(3), 273–289. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459307077541
Irigaray, L. (1993). An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801422256/an-ethics-of-sexual-difference
Jones, G. (1975). Corregidora.
Jutel, A. M. G. (2011). Putting a name to it: Diagnosis in contemporary society. https://doi.org/10.1353/book.1850
Khanmalek, T. (2019). “Making Generations: Gender, Reproduction, and the Afterlife of Slavery in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 40(2), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2019.a747114
Kim, J. B. (2021). “Cripping the Welfare Queen: The Radical Potential of Disability Politics.” Social Text 39 (3 (148)): 79–101. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9034390
Melamed, J. (2015). “Racial Capitalism.” Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(1), 76-85. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.1.0076
Metzl, J., & Hansen, H. (2014). “Structural Competency: Theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality.” Social Science & Medicine, 103, 26-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.06.032
Mingus, M. (2009). Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/about-2/
Oxford English Dictionary Online. “sic, adv. (and n.)”. OED Online. June 2014. Oxford University Press.
Rankin, L. (2024) “Alabama IVF Ruling Is About Controlling Who Can Reproduce the Citizenry.” truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/alabama-ivf-ruling-is-about-controlling-who-can-reproduce-the-citizenry/
Roberts, D. (1998). Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.
Ross, L., & Solinger, R. (2017). Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520963207
Ross, L., Roberts, L., Derkas, E., Peoples, W., & Toure, P. B. Eds. (2017). Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique.
Setka, S. (2014). “Haunted by the Past: Traumatic Rememory and Black Feminism in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, 47(1), 129-144. https://doi.org/10.1353/mos.2014.0001
Spillers, H. (1987). “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 17(2), 64-81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747
Washington, H. A. (2006). Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present.