“I See it as a Feminist Statement”: Camille Billops and the Art of Liberation

Sherie Randolph (Associate Professor of History, Georgia Institute of Technology)

with a response by Laura Mauldin

Wednesday, April 20, 2022, 4:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4-209

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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Given the socioeconomic structures and cultural constraints that limited Black women’s options both within and outside of the Black community, Black mothers had little space to determine their own lives, protect their bodily autonomy, and pursue their individual passions. How do we understand “bad” Black mothers who rejected contemporary forms of mothering and placed a greater value on their own creative and political work during the long 1960s? Sherie Randolph’s talk looks specifically at the Black feminist artist Camille Billops (1933–2019) and explores how she understood her contribution to Black arts as more valuable than her role as a Black mother. She learned to view her own happiness as freedom from parenting. In short, Billops’s life choices are in line with current research that suggests that if a woman wants to be content, it is best to remain childless. This talk places Billops’s artwork alongside interviews, her personal papers, and other archival sources to examine how she defied the boundaries of heteronormative motherhood in the postwar United States and went on to become an award-winning artist, filmmaker and archivist. In doing so, Billops enlarged Black feminist understandings of the possibility of Black liberation.

Sherie M. Randolph is an associate professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the founder of the Black Feminist Think Tank. Formerly an associate professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Randolph’s book Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical, published by the University of North Carolina Press (October 2015), examines the connections between the Black Power, civil rights, New Left, and feminist movements. The former Associate Director of the Women’s Research & Resource Center at Spelman College, she has received several grants and fellowships for her work, most recently being awarded fellowships from the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute and Brown University’s Howard Foundation. Randolph is currently writing her second book “Bad” Black Mothers: A History of Transgression.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Surfacing (and Countering) Our Anti-Body Politic

Laura Mauldin (Associate Professor, Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies & Human Development and Family Sciences, UConn)

with a response by Sherie Randolph (History, Georgia Institute of Technology)

Wednesday, February 2, 2022, 4:00pm.

Live • Online • Registration required

In this talk, I outline what I see as our society’s “anti-body politic.” An anti-body politic means that we all inhabit unreliable bodies, but we don’t want to talk about it or attend to that fact. We shy away from doing so because we live in a culture that worships at the altar of autonomy and independence, where needing care symbolizes everything we don’t want to be. Accordingly, our care infrastructure, an expression of our collective anti-body politic, is woefully insufficient. This means millions of disabled people and caregivers across the United States are left to try to survive without social safety nets, despite rising rates of disability and chronic illness and more complex care needs. After describing these ideas in more detail, I experiment with how we might begin to counter our anti-body politic.

Laura Mauldin is associate professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Connecticut. She is currently writing a book about caregiving in the US that tells the intimate stories of spousal caregivers and their disabled partners’ lives to reveal how ableism shapes the US care crisis, but also how people create and build accessible worlds to survive. You can follow her on Twitter @mauldin_laura.

Sherie M. Randolph is an associate professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the founder of the Black Feminist Think Tank. Randolph’s first book Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (University of North Carolina Press) examines the connections between the Black Power, civil rights, New Left, and feminist movements. Randolph is currently writing her second book, “Bad” Black Mothers: A History of Transgression. This project explores Black mothers who fashioned lives driven by a commitment to artistic, political, and intellectual work—but mothering their children was not a priority. A history of Black women who rejected culturally acceptable modes of parenting reveals both the constraints of Black mothering and the radical transgressions some Black mothers chose in hopes of creating purposeful lives.

Access note

This event will be presented with automated captioning, ASL interpretation, and computer-assisted real time transcription. If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.