Black Matrescence Writing Together

Feminist Healing Counterspaces in Academia

Abstract

This paper is rooted in my participation in a Black mama’s writing group and foregrounds what becomes possible when we write together, rather than alone, within institutions that are structured through racialized and ableist norms. Drawing on practice-based reflections, I argue that Black mothers’ writing groups function as feminist healing counterspaces within Canadian higher education. These groups are spaces that contest colonial institutional logics while cultivating care, joy, and survival. I situate Black matrescence as a radical reorganization of self, identity, and time that comes into direct conflict with academic norms of neoliberal productivity. Drawing on counterspace theory and anti-Black sanism, I show how writing groups enable Black mothers to collectively reframe distress as structurally produced rather than individually pathological. I argue that in these spaces, writing becomes relational, embodied, and a site of refusal where counter-narratives are generated, epistemic authority is reclaimed, and collective strategies for navigating institutional harm are developed. Black maternal writing groups are not supplemental supports but critical intellectual, emotional, and relational infrastructures that can sustain Black women’s scholarship while making room for different ways of knowing and being that exceed and refuse the limits of the academy.