Reproductive Racism in Danielle Evans’s “Harvest:” Black, Chicana, and White Motherhoods in the Context of Reproductive Rights Discourses

The paper explores the short story “Harvest” (2010) by African American writer Danielle Evans and traces the figurations of the racialized aspects of gender in “Harvest” within the theoretical frameworks of Black and Chicana feminisms, motherhood studies, and intersectionality. After situating the Black and Chicana characters’ anxieties around egg donation in the historical context of reproductive rights, economics, and the politicization of Black and Chicana women’s bodies, I discuss how the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and class impact the racialized gender identity of especially the Black protagonist and to a smaller extent that of her Chicana and white friends as well. I argue that the current practices of egg donation depicted in the story are imbricated in the wider system of racial capitalism that values women’s childbearing capacities differentially in terms of their race.

Remembering and Revisiting Pedagogies of the Home

Almost two decades after Delgado Bernal’s theorization of pedagogies of the home, this article examines pedagogies of the home of four Chicana/o college-educated families to understand the role of parent engagement not only in the college choice processes but also in college completion and graduate school enrollment. Using Chicana feminisms to inform educational oral histories, four Chicana/o parent-child dyads were interviewed. The findings suggest that among Chicana/o college-educated families the (re)making of home, (re)covering tensions, and (re)claiming and (re)learning of cultural knowledge were the pedagogies of the home that were embraced by two successive generations of college completers. Complexities, contradictions, and nuances among Chicana/o college-educated families add to the theorization of pedagogies of the home.

The Power of Testimonio Pedagogy: Teaching Chicana Lesbian Fiction in a Chicana Feminisms Course at a Predominantly White Institution in the Midwest

In this essay I extend Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogies to demonstrate using testimonio pedagogy to teach Chicana lesbian fiction: Gulf Dreams and What Night Brings opened up dialogical spaces for students as pensadores to critically examine the impact of racialized gender and sexual normativity within Chicano culture. Exploring the significance of students as pensadores using testimonio pedagogy cultivates pathways of epistemic disobedience that should be understood as responses to institutional power. I suggest testimonio pedagogy mediates marginalization by breaking down the false dichotomy between students and teachers, cultivates feminist consciousness-raising, and refuses hegemonic conceptualizations of schooling.

A Call for Onto-Epistemological Diversity in Early Childhood Education and Care: Centering Global South Conceptualizations of Childhood/s

In this chapter, we call for onto-epistemological diversity in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC). Specifically, we discuss the need to center the brilliance of children and communities of color, which we argue, can be facilitated by foregrounding global south perspectives, such as Black and Chicana feminisms. Mainstream perspectives in ECEC, however, have been dominantly constructed from global north perspectives, producing a normalized White, male, middle-class, heterosexual version of childhood, where minoritized children are viewed as deficit. Although there have been important challenges to the discourse of a normalized, deficit child, we argue much of this work has remained grounded in global north positionings, which separate theory from the lived realities of children of color. As such, we introduce Black and Chicana feminisms as global south visions to transform approaches to research and pedagogy in ECEC and, in turn, disrupt inequities.