Date of Award

5-2024

Author's School

College of Arts & Sciences

Author's Program

African and African American Studies

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (A.B.)

Restricted/Unrestricted

Unrestricted

Abstract

The enforcement of the child welfare system through policies, funding practices, and ideologies is a national investment in the nuclear family as a critical social institution to the United States (US); this investment communicates to the broader population that conforming to this heteropatriarchal, white supremacist conception of family provides protection from state intervention to those who conform. My project interrogates child welfare’s enforcement of normative families, and the resistance from Black family formations and kinship based on their social position and its relation to power. Focusing on the period between 1980 and the present, I examine the ways Black family formations articulate different forms of resistance. Using interdisciplinary methods of digital analysis, archival research, film analysis, and abolitionist dreamwork, I outline abolitionist orientations to family through a term I call, “Black/Latinx queer ecosystems of care,” which asserts that care for Black/Latinx queer people rejects singularity or an isolated family through communal care.

Mentor

Michelle A Purdy

Additional Advisors

Jonathan Fenderson, Marlon Bailey

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