“By attending to their gestural, sartorial, and material elements, the article theorizes Simpson’s reproductive roleplay as black ungendered maternity, a history of embodied fracture and kinship that is conceptually matrilineal. Black ungendered maternity illustrates how black artists mobilize unique modes of togetherness for strategic visibility.” Holman said.
Holman is a scholar of African American literature and visual culture. Her research turns to the fields of Black feminisms, Black poetics, and performance studies to raise questions about Black relationality, gender, and experimentalism. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript tentatively titled Duets, a poetics of black relating, which explores form as an ideological trope of and expressive potential for Black kinship in 20th-and 21st-century Black poetry and performance art.
Posted September 29, 2026
