Sister-Mother, Community-Mothers, and Female-Father

Abstract

The colonially imposed, exploitive, narrow meanings of gendered nurturing have limited how we as Indigenous Ubuntu discourse and dialogue about our contextually diverse, dynamic, and sometimes contradictory meanings about our experiences of being other-mothered and other-fathered (Mucina, 2018; Wane, 2000). In an effort to theorize these Ubuntu experiences of educational leadership beyond my own limited masculine understandings, I center an African intersectional feminist perspective. This theorizing perspective helps me to understand more fulsomely the political leadership women continue to offer in our Ubuntu nations, communities, and families. In this chapter, I want to share three stories about being mothered by my sister-cousin, being community-mothered across ethic identities, and how I am currently being fathered by my father's sister. I want to contend as fraught as it may be that the oratures (stories) I share convey and communicate our understanding of nurturing beyond procreation, which is an important aspect of Ubuntu educational leadership. For example, the orature (story) that I will share about female-fathering offers evidence, which challenges the binary of fathering as a set gendered activity. I also view the telling of these Indigenous Ubuntu stories as an act of creating what Shiv Visvanathan (2016) identified as making space for “cognitive justice.” For me, this means moving our Ubuntu knowledges from the colonially created margins to the shared center of diverse multiple knowledges.

Citation

Mucina, D.D. (2022), "Sister-Mother, Community-Mothers, and Female-Father", Wane, N.N., Todd, K.L., Chau, C. and Watts, H. (Ed.) Decolonizing and Indigenizing Visions of Educational Leadership (Studies in Educational Administration), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 213-234. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-468-520221013