Everyone Survived but Nobody Survived: A Black Feminist Ethnography on Motherhood and Mass Incarceration

Critiques of mass incarceration and its far-reaching effects have become a growing field of study in academia, drawing attention to the inequities and injustices created by prisons and the systems of white supremacy and patriarchy underlying the carceral logics of the prison. Prisons, as a form of social control, are not only to police and regulate individual bodies and spirits, but entire communities. While people of color are locked into systems of incarceration, their families (spouses, partners, parents, and children) are also caught up with the financial and emotional burdens of incarceration. This dissertation focuses on a population I call Mainline Mamas: Black women with relationship to prisons—through visitation or incarceration—while engaging with family, children, partners, and other women. Drawing on autoethnography and interviews with seven women who have navigated prisons as visitors, and some as incarcerated persons, this dissertation, therefore, interrogates how Black women are forced into a relationship with prisons, through incarceration and/or visitation, define, practice, and experience mothering. Our stories show how Mainline Mamas form communities as they navigate the entrenched hierarchies of the prison industrial complex. Mainline Mama, as a population, practice, and theory, is therefore a reimagining of possibility from the margins; a particular form of precarity that also searches for joy, family, and connection in the midst of a carceral state violence.