Abstract:
The focus of this essay is a memoir of first-time biological motherhood, Baby Love, by Third Wave feminist writer and cultural critic Rebecca Walker (2007). This essay enlists a black and Third Wave feminist intersectional theoretic to argue that Walker, a famous second-generation black and Third Wave feminist daughter and mother, forwards a child-and-parent-centric model of motherhood that privileges biological bonds over chosen bonds (e.g., step, adoptive, othermothers) with one’s children. A self-identified bisexual woman, Walker centralizes in Baby Love a heterosexual nuclear family model that is informed by feminist ideology and takes shape in a twenty-first-century material reality transformed by feminism. Second to this, and in the context of her relationship with her famous African American mother, Walker characterizes the biological (black feminist) mother-daughter relationship as controlled by the mother and infantilizing most especially for childless daughters who therefore function as muted and acted-upon subjects in the (black feminist) mother-daughter dyad.