Hortense Spillers

Hortense J. Spillers (born 1942) is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University.

The report states that "nearly a quarter of Urban Negro Marriages are Dissolved," and that the proportion of non-white women with husbands continued to decline between 1950 and 1960.

This did not happen in white families to the same degree.

It states that almost 25% of black births are illegitimate and that the number of illegitimate black births are increasing.

Almost 25% of black families are led by females, in contrast with the typical patriarchal, nuclear structure.

Moynihan links all of these 'deficiencies' in relation to typical conceptions of the American family with the breakdown of the black race, leading to an "increase in welfare dependency".

The Moynihan report concludes that black families are impoverished due to the manner in which they dissolve the typical white family structure.

Spillers received her B.A. degree from University of Memphis in 1964, M.A. in 1966, and her Ph.D. in English at Brandeis University in 1974.

While at the University of Memphis, she was a disc jockey for the all-black radio station WDIA.

She has held positions at Haverford College, Wellesley College, Emory University, and Cornell University.

Her work has been recognized with awards from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.

Some of these were inspired by the 1982 Barnard Center Conference, called "Sex Conference" Spillers attended this conference and was struck by the lack of representation of black women's sexuality, and how the dominance of whiteness in feminist spaces was leading to hierarchies within feminism and sexuality.

Thus a prominent chapter in Spillers's book, entitled "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words," re-examines the harmful characterization of black women in literature and in society at large.

She approaches these topics through a grammarly lens, and reappropriates the term "Interstices" from a computer science phrase to a description of the flaws in our modern language that allow some things to metaphorically 'slip through the cracks'.

She notes problems with words such 'feminism' and 'woman' and emphasizes the power that comes with the ability to speak.

Spillers argues that black women's sexuality is poorly described in speech because of institutions of white supremacy, which in turn objectifies and silences them.

Further, Spillers claims that black women are uniquely positioned between black men and white women, often forced to choose their respective identities and cannot act satisfactorily on neither their gender nor their sex.

Spillers problematizes the compounded adversity black women face with the following quote: "Black women are the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, unseen, not doing, awaiting their verb. Their sexual experiences are depicted, but not often by them, and if and by the subject herself, often in the guise of vocal music, often in the self-contained accent and sheer romance of the blues."

Despite historically being equal in the eyes of the hegemonic and patriarchal white environment, Spillers argues that black men and women are indeed different because black men are still given the agency to act upon their sex whereas women are subjected to "the paradox of nonbeing".

This paradox describes how black women's sexualities are never validated to begin with, ergo they cannot sympathize with white women on the basis of sex.

Spiller's paradox is a response to Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and its portrayal of the black woman's vagina, but the sentiment holds for gender construction and sexuality as a whole.

She was in part writing in response to All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982).

Spillers was writing to a moment in history where the importance of black women in critical theory was being denied.

She wrote with a sense of urgency in order to create a theoretical taxonomy for black women to be studied in the academy.

The Moynihan Report states that the perceived cause of the deterioration of the black society was the black family's deterioration.

The report proceeds to say that "the family is the basic social unit of American life: it is the basic socializing unit".

Adult behavior is learned from what is taught as a child by the family institution.

Mass media portrays the American family as one that is standardized to a nuclear family structure.

This report asserts that families with stronger bonds "characteristically progress more rapidly than others".

It goes on to argue that "there is one truly great discontinuity in family structure in the United States at the present time: that between the white world in general and that of the Negro American".

Spillers is best known for her 1987 scholarly essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book", one of the most cited essays in African-American literary studies.

The essay is considered to be especially important to the field of Afro-pessimism, as many of the field's most prominent theorists—Frank Wilderson III, Saidiya Hartman, and Calvin L. Warren—draw on Spillers' ideas throughout their works.

Despite this, Spillers does not identify as an Afro-pessimist.

The essay brings together Spillers' investments in African-American studies, feminist theory, semiotics, and cultural studies to articulate a theory of African-American female gender construction.

A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature, collected in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, a collection edited by Spillers published by Routledge in 1991.

In 2003, she published the book Black, White, and in Color, a collection of essays published over the course of her career.

In a 2006 interview entitled "Whatcha Gonna Do?—Revisiting Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book", Spillers was interviewed by Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Jennifer L. Morgan, and Shelly Eversley.

In that interview Spillers shares insight into her writing process, and her interviewers collectively elucidate the seismic impact of the essay on the conceptual vocabulary available to subsequent generations of Black Feminist scholars.

She states that she wrote "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" with a sense of hopelessness.

In 2013, she was the founding editor of the scholarly journal The A-Line Journal, A Journal of Progressive Commentary.