Feminist Studies

Abstract:

In the immediate aftermath of the Haitian earthquake on January 12, 2010, the representative victim-survivor in multiple media sites appeared to the world in the face of the Haitian child-cum-orphan. This poignant image of loss and suffering lent urgency to a range of altruistic responses—or rather, paternalistic interventions—by white families in the U.S. I argue that in both narrative and practice, dominant constructions of normative (white) motherhood were exaggerated and made hypervisible, which propelled the actual lived experience of Haitian mothers further into oblivion. In this article, I examine the discursive formations that produce Haitian women as “deviant black mothers” in transnational contexts. In similar ways, “the beggar mother” construct in the Dominican national media engenders powerful ideas about maternal neglect that link up with constructions of migrant illegality, criminality, and poverty. Drawing upon black and transnational feminist empirical analysis, I demonstrate how such discursive formations affectively circulate within transnational imaginaries and quotidian racial intimacies to effect forms of surveillance, objectification, and regulation of Haitian women and, by extension, their children who face an ever-greater risk of “statelessness.”