Inside the Body of Black Feminism
Science, Race, Culture

Samantha Pinto (Author)

9781478038801

Paperback / softback, published 10 June 2026

226 pages, 23 illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.445 kg

“In asking what the truth of the interior parts of a Black ‘self’ might reveal, Samantha Pinto contests assumptions about proper objects, investigates the boundary of metaphor and its constraints, and pushes us to reevaluate what’s at stake in a particular kind of Black Feminist critique.”—Sharon Patricia Holland, author of an other: black feminist consideration of animal life

“With a deep commitment to material and metaphor, Pinto takes us through the thoroughly racialized history of the black body—organ by organ. Weaving and reweaving the grammar and narrative of flesh and bones, this is an interdisciplinary tour-de-force! A must read for our times.”—Banu Subramaniam, author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism

Inside the Body of Black Feminism connects historical studies of medical racism with Black feminist theories of the body to reimagine the material and metaphoric possibilities for political subjectivity across race, gender, and culture.

Inside the Body of Black Feminism charts a cultural genealogy of antiracist and feminist engagement with some of the most objectified internal “parts” of racist medical and scientific inquiry: bones and blood, brains and hearts, guts and wombs. In a move counterintuitive to Black feminism’s emphasis on externalized representations of the body, Samantha Pinto reinterprets the relationship between embodiment, health, and race through cultural archives that reimagine the inside of the Black body. Working through materials such as medical textbooks, memoirs, data visualizations, museum displays, speculative fiction, and horror films, Pinto explores how a visually inaccessible corporeal interior becomes discernible and racialized in the public sphere. Inside the Body of Black Feminism engages expressive cultural work to ask how we might know the inside of the Black body differently through Black feminist theory and how scientific and medical inquiry might enable us to understand political subjectivity anew.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Material and Metaphor 1
Part I. Bones and Blood: Black Feminist Thought and the Interior Infrastructures of History
1. Bones: Collecting Black Feminisms and the Metaphor of History 25
2. Blood: Apprehending Your Mother’
s Hematology 47
Part II. Brains and Hearts: Reimagining the Pedagogies of Dissent
3. Brains: Thinking Reparation and the Antiracist Cure 77
4. Hearts: Reading Racial Feeling and the Politics of Circulation 95
Part III. Guts and Wombs: Black Feminism after Autonomy
5. Guts: Metabolizing Racial Violence, Making the Black Feminist Self 119
6. Wombs: Reproducing Black Feminism and the Knot of Autonomy 145
Conclusion. Tender: On Black Feminist Method 169
Notes 173
Bibliography 185
Index 211