Reproducing violence, racism, and erasure in research

ABSTRACT

In 2019, we received a Top Paper Award for a paper presented at a national communication conference, despite our erasure of Black women from the history of midwifery in Alabama. We recognize and acknowledge the logics of white supremacy that informed our initial thinking and offer this essay as reparative work. We begin by describing our original research project. Then, we outline the reflexive, intellectual, and methodological practices that informed our critique. We conclude by questioning what scholarship is valued in the academy and what can be done to prevent similar scholarship from being written and rewarded.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflexivity
• reparative writing
• midwives
• critical research
• intersectionality
• communication studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Midwifery Board, Established to License and Regulate the Practice of Midwifery, H.B. 315, Act No. 2017-383 (A.L., 2017).

2 “Comparison of Certified Nurse-Midwives, Certified Midwives, Certified Professional Midwives Clarifying the Distinctions Among Professional Midwifery Credentials in the U.S.,” American College of Nurse-Midwives, 2017, https://www.midwife.org/acnm/files/ccLibraryFiles/FILENAME/000000006807/FINAL-ComparisonChart-Oct2017.pdf.

3 Jenny M. Luke, Delivered by Midwives: African American Midwifery in the Twentieth-Century South (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2018); Margaret Charles Smith and Linda Janet Holmes, Listen to Me Good: The Story of an Alabama Midwife (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996); Gertrude Jacinta Fraser, African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Molly Ladd-Taylor, “‘Grannies’ and ‘Spinsters’: Midwife Education under the Sheppard-Towner Act,” Journal of Social History 22, no. 2 (Winter 1988); Onnie Lee Logan and Kathryn Clark, Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife’s Story (New York City: Dutton Books, 1989); Sharon A. Robinson, “A Historical Development of Midwifery in the Black Community: 1600–1940,” Journal of Nurse-Midwifery 29, no. 4 (July/August 1984)

4 We recognize that we hardly do the stories of Black midwives justice in this piece. This brief history does not make amends for the erasure we enacted in our first iteration of the project. Cristiana continues to write about Black lay midwives in the American South and envisions their stories becoming a part of her dissertation. Stay tuned!

5 Luke, Delivered by Midwives; Grace Abbott, “Federal aid for the protection of maternity and infancy,” American Journal of Public Health 12, no. 9 (1922): 739.

6 Luke, Delivered by Midwives, 46.

7 Luke, Delivered by Midwives.

8 Linda J. Holmes, “Medical History: Alabama Granny Midwife,” Journal of the Medical Society of New Jersey 81, no. 5 (1984); Linda J Holmes. “African American Midwives of the South,” in The American Way of Birth, ed. Pamela Eakins (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

9 Stacy A. Tovino, “American midwifery litigation and state legislative preferences for physician-controlled childbirth.” Cardozo’s Women’s Law Journal 11, no. 61 (2004); Holmes, Delivered by Midwives; Holmes, “Medical History.”

10 Jasmine R. Linabary, Danielle J. Corple, Cheryl Cooky, “Of Wine and Whiteboards: Enacting Feminist Reflexivity in Collaborative Research,” Qualitative Research 21, no. 5 (2021).

11 Jasmine R. Linabary et al. “Envisioning More Equitable and Just Futures: Feminist Organizational Communication in Theory and Praxis,” Management Communication Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2020).

12 Bernadette Marie Calafell, Shinsuke Eguchi, and Shadee Abdi, “Introduction” in De-Whitening Intersectionality: Race, Intercultural Communication, and Politics, ed. By Shinsuke Eguchi, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Shadee Abdi, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020), xxi.

13 Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).

14 Dreama G. Moon and Michelle A. Holling, “‘White Supremacy in Heels’: (White) Feminism, White Supremacy and Discursive Violence,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020).

15 Sirma Bilge, “Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10, no. 02 (2013).

16 Calafell, Eguchi, and Abdi, “Introduction,” xx.

17 NAISDC. “What is intersectionality?”, 2018.

18 Gust A. Yep et al., “Intersectionality,” in The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication, ed. Young Yun Kim (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017): 3.

19 Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” 17.

20 Yep, “Toward thick(er) intersectionalities.”

21 Moon and Holling, “White Feminism in Heels.”

22 Moon and Holling, “White Feminism in Heels,” 254.

23 Michelle A. Holling, “Rhetorical Contours of Violent Frames and the Production of Discursive Violence,” Critical Studies in Media Production 36, no. 3 (2019): 251.

24 Mary Douglas Vavrus, Postfeminist News: Political Women in Media Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 2.

25 Tasha Dubriwny, The Vulnerable Empowered Woman: Feminism, Postfeminism, and Women’s Health (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013).

26 Dubriwny, The Vulnerable, Empowered Woman.

27 Eric King Watts, “Postracial fantasies, blackness, and zombies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 318; Squires, Catherine, Eric King Watts, Mary Douglas Vavrus, Kent A. Ono, Kathleen Feyh, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Daniel C. Brouwer. “What Is This ‘Post-’ in Postracial, Postfeminist … (Fill in the Blank)?” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 3 (July 2010): 210–53.

28 Ralina L. Joseph, “‘Tyra Banks is Fat’: Reading (Post-)Racism and (Post-)Feminism in the New Millennium,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 3 (August 2009).

29 Joseph, “Tyra Banks is Fat,” 240.

30 Squires et al., “What is this ‘Post-’,” 222.

31 Anna Claire Vollers, “Midwifery is now legal in Alabama. When can midwives start delivering babies?”, AL.com, May 25, 2017.

32 Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

33 McKittrick, Dear Science, 28.

34 Mirya R. Holman, “Mirya Holman’s Pre-Submission Checklist,” (2021), https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JwwmOgRhd2p-Bl_RFEMnp04P0I2nNhOHW7JHdaLcyGs/edit.

35 Mahuya Pal, Heewon Kim, Kate L. Harris, et. al. “Decolonizing organizational communication.” Management Communication Quarterly 35, no. 3(2022): 547–77.