(Re)Claiming Body and Mind: Maternal Discourses and Black Female Sexuality in Gayl Jones's Corregidora

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15810580

Abstract

Black women's corporeal, psychological, and sexual dimensions constitute critical sites where heteronormativity, class stratification, racial subjugation, and patriarchal structures converge in mutually reinforcing configurations. The recuperation of bodily autonomy and sexual self-determination necessitates dismantling what Patricia Hill Collins theorizes as the "matrix of domination." Consequently, Black women's sexuality emerges as a contested terrain of resistance, functioning as a strategic site for counter-hegemonic discourse and transformative agency.

Contemporary Black feminist literary production interrogates the multifaceted significations embedded within intersectional identities of "woman," "Black," and "American" across distinct historical conjunctures. Drawing upon African American feminist theoretical paradigms—particularly intersectionality frameworks developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Black feminist thought articulated by bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins—this investigation examines the dialectical relationship between historical trauma narratives and intergenerational maternal discourse in constructing Black female sexual subjectivity within Gayl Jones' Corregidora.

Through rigorous textual analysis, this study argues that protagonist Ursa Corregidora engages in complex ideological deconstruction and reconstructive praxis, systematically dismantling inherited maternal narratives and traumatic historical discourses that circumscribe Black women's sexual agency. Ursa's emergent sexual identity crystallizes within a triadic conceptual framework encompassing the maternal womb as a generational trauma transmission site, the haunting persistence of historical violence and its psychosexual ramifications, and the Blues tradition as both a cultural repository and a vehicle for artistic resistance. This triangulated analysis reveals how individual sexual identity formation becomes inextricably linked to collective healing, cultural preservation, and the radical reimagining of Black women's erotic autonomy within racialized and gendered oppression systems.