Gratuitous violence: radical black theory and obstetric violence against black women in South Africa

Abstract

This research project provides a critical reading of South African obstetric violence literature. Using radical Black theory, it analyses the frameworks that leading South African and locally based non-South African scholars use to theorise obstetric violence against Black women in the country’s reproductive healthcare settings. I argue that applying radical Black Theory to this literature reveals a gap in the frameworks used by these influential, highly cited, scholars’ – these frameworks fail to capture and account for the gratuitous nature of the violence that Black women are exposed to in these settings. These scholars established that in South Africa, Black women are disproportionately vulnerable to obstetric violence as compared to women from other racial groups. However, they position gender as the primary conceptual category in their theorisations of this vulnerability, modifying it through secondary considerations of race. By adopting the integrative literature review as research methodology and by employing key concepts from radical Black Theory – i.e. social death, gratuitous violence, and natal alienation – in this thesis, I demonstrate how this gendered approach misrecognises obstetric violence as contingent rather than gratuitous. This prevents these scholars’ frameworks from being able to recognise that anti-Black violence is foundational to and constitutive of modern obstetric care institutions. Demonstrating the structural continuity of the historical appropriation of Black women’s reproductive capacities in contemporary obstetric violence, this project proposes that radical Black Theory offers an alternative framework that captures the gratuitous nature of obstetric violence against Black women.