Bending Bodies, Signing Words: Reshaping a Father and a Feminist Practice

Abstract

This essay is about the author’s father, a man magnanimous in his relations to others and damage-doing to himself. This essay is also about the author and her father, and his influence on her becoming. Among the familiar discursive noise of black men as damaged and black masculinity as destructive, this essay is about tracing the faint marks of another narrative line—one that offers a potentially more nuanced language of reciprocity about men as|and fathers.

Keywords:

• black men
• fathers
• writing
• feminism

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Professor Sally Ann Murray for her intelligent inputs and affirmation—the encouragement to keep working on this piece. Thanks for the belief that there are means to bring the theoretical and the creative alongside one another in interesting ways. Thanks also to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose funding for a multi-institutional project allowed me the writing time to complete this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Page, “Vulnerable Writing,” 28.

2 Phillips et al., “Trying On,” 1458.

3 Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, qtd. in Phillips et al., “Trying On,” 1471.

4 Page, “Vulnerable Writing,” 28, 24.

5 Ratele, “Currents against Gender Transformation,” 30; Mac an Ghaill and Haywood, “Understanding Boys,” 483.

6 Shefer, Stevens and Clowes. “Men in Africa,” 512. See also Padi et al., “Defining.”

7 Ratele, “Currents against Gender Transformation,” 38–39.

8 Hamner, “Commentary.”

9 Hamner, “Commentary.”

10 See, for instance, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Mary Kolawole, Obioma Nnaemeka, and Abena Busia.

11 Ogunyemi, “Womanism,” 63.

12 Gqola, “A Love Letter,” 201–207.

13 Swartz, Able-Bodied; Jennings, Travels with My Father.

14 Swartz, Able-Bodied, 1, 43.

15 Clowes, “The Limits of Discourse.”

16 Ratele, Liberating Masculinities, 43.

17 Ratele, Liberating Masculinities, 15.

18 See “Students.”