Education
University of Memphis.
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Hortense Spillers
Edit Profileliterary critic professor feminist scholar
Career
A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003 and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, published by Routledge in 1991. Spillers received her Bachelor of Arts from University of Memphis in 1964, Master of Arts in 1966, and her Doctor of Philosophy in English at Brandeis University in 1974. While at the University of Memphis, she was a disc jockey for the all-black radio station WDIA. She has held positions at Haverford College, Wellesley College, Emory University, and Cornell University.
Spillers is best known for her 1987 scholarly article "Mama"s Baby, Papa"s Maybe: An American Grammar Book", one of the most cited essays in African-American literary studies.
The essay brings together Spillers" investments in African-American studies, feminist theory, semiotics, and cultural studies to articulate a theory of African-American female gender construction. In the essay, Spillers defines the "symbolic integrity" of "male" and "female," as two subject positions that lose validity and differentiation within captivity (ie through dispossession).
According to Spillers, ethnicity "de-genders" people by trapping them within a timeless mode of thought, characterizing them always in terms of their ethnic background irrespective of personal identity types of gender, since the "female" within an ethnicity isn’t the same as the "feminine sphere," instead, the female body has been deprived of the feminine.
