Shana Klein

"Spoiled Milk: The Politics of Race and Motherhood in American Art" by Shana Klein

Abstract:

“Spoiled Milk: The Politics of Race and Motherhood in U.S. Art” explores how pictures of motherhood prompted larger questions about race and citizenship. Depictions of Native-, African- and immigrant motherhood were especially fraught and reflect how motherhood was a construct used to police certain communities. Representations of Native American mothers and the use of medicine men for navigating childbirth, for instance, were used to disparage Native culture as a primitive society that needed modernizing by white, male doctors.  Black midwives were also being forcibly replaced by white male doctors and the professionalization of obstetrics came at the expense of many enslaved Black women who were cruelly experimented upon to gain knowledge about the reproductive system.  Immigrant wet nurses suffered racial discrimination as well and were thought by some to pollute the next generation of white-American babies with their "contaminated" milk.  In short, this project investigates the racism that underlined images about motherhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also the ways in which image-makers resisted white supremacy and used motherhood to wield more political power for people of color in society.