Drawing feminist analyses of the affective work of shame, compassion, and pain into dialogue with an Afro-pessimist critique of the ‘ordinary’ spectacle of Black suffering and death, this lecture theoretically examines how the ‘bad feelings’ that stick to Black women’s disobedient bodies are used to uphold the whiteness of public space. Considering mainstream news media and social media coverage of two separate instances from 2019 where Black mothers were subjected to public violation or public scorn — in accordance with racial-sexual logics that define the Black female body as recalcitrant, ungovernable, and disposable — I argue that the fleeting shame or sustained apathy of a looking public reveals how the theatre of Black distress renews the racial fraternities of the white city-nation. Situating this analysis within the intellectual tradition of Black feminist thought and praxis this lecture further interrogates the ways women refuse these capitalisations through mutinous affects that illicitly reproduce Black life or embrace death.

About the Speaker

Jan-Therese Mendes holds a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University, Canada. Mendes is currently a postdoctoral fellow in studies of gender and race with the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Stavanger and a 2020-2021 visiting scholar with the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality. Mendes has previously held visiting scholar positions at Uppsala University’s ‘Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism’ (2018) and in performance studies at Stockholm University (2017), where Mendes has also extensively guest lectured. Invoking frames of analyses from Black feminist theory, Afro-pessimism, and affect theory Mendes’ research uses critical media analyses and arts-based methods to examine Northern welfare states’ penal fixation on the Black womb, Black mournability, pedagogies of assimilation and humiliation, and the possibilities of willful strangeness in Black visual and performance art. Mendes’ recent or forthcoming works are published with Souls, Hypatia, Periskop, and the Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminisms in Contemporary Performance. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic Mendes founded the international collective ‘Black Feminist Fridays: Nordic and Beyond’ which brings together scholars, artists, and activists from across Scandinavia for bi-weekly online dialogues on the everyday pain, love, and imagination of living Black feminist lives.