Senga Nengudi: The Black Maternal & The Limits of Feminist Critique

In 1976, Senga Nengudi began an ongoing series of nylon stocking sculptures collectively entitled R.S.V.P. The series engaged the historical legacy of “used bodies” of Black wet nurses through abstraction. Although produced in the late 1970s, the historical significance of Nengudi’s practice exceeds the circumscribed temporal parameters of artistic movements. This paper argues we must historicize Nengudi rather for how her practice simultaneously registered and problematized the continued legacy of Black female domestic laborers since the non-event of emancipation. R.S.V.P radically recalled and refused to reproduce proper chronological narratives or neat moralistic frameworks onto the legacy of the Mammy, as well as conventional symbolic understandings of gender and sexuality through the politics of abstraction. In doing so, her practice asks what abstraction does to our understanding of the “impossible maternity” that is Blackness for Fred Moten and its potential to rewrite “a radically different text for female empowerment,” one which frustrates rather than sediments feminist thought. It emphasizes how the problem of the enslaved, black female subject’s gender and sexuality that R.S.V.P posed in 1976 was—and must remain—a perpetual problem for feminist thought and art historical scholarship in order to refuse the temptation to binary understandings of Afro-pessimism or optimism.