Feminist to Know: Hortense Spillers
Hortense Spillers is a leading Black feminist literary scholar and cultural critic whose work has profoundly shaped academic disciplines such as Black studies, feminist theory, and literary criticism. Her scholarship examines how slavery and anti-Blackness have shaped Black identity and attends to the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, language, and power.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1942, Spillers grew up in the segregated South. During her undergrad at the University of Memphis, she was a DJ for America's first Black radio station WDIA. Spillers earned her Ph.D. in English from Brandeis University and went on to become a professor at several major colleges and universities.
Spillers is best known for her 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” a foundational text in Black feminist thought and Afro-pessimism. The essay puts forth the concept of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” to describe disjunctures caused by historic violence and captivity, both physical and political. Spillers’ primary intervention is to theorize that enslavement provided a sort of “ungendering” of Black flesh, denying a legible gender to Black bodies. She argues that this has left an essential mark on the discourse of Black womanhood that exists today. At the time, this essay spoke directly to the 1965 Moynihan Report, which informed American federal policy for decades after its publishing, and theorist Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, providing a Black feminist counter to prevailing theories within Gender Studies.
Spillers’ scholarship spans literature, psychoanalysis, and critical theory and has influenced the way we think about gender, language, and the body. She is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor in the English department at Vanderbilt University, and her theoretical interventions continue to shape critical thought. Spillers’ current research projects focus on “the idea of black culture and women and early Republican formations.”