Mom Voice/Moms’ Voice: Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley, the comic voice, and refiguring black maternity

Abstract

Abstract In this article, I discuss the iconic African-American mid-twentieth century stand-up comic Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley. Specifically, I theorize the ways in which Moms’ voice, vocal technique, and formalist relationship to language performs a queer and Black maternity in excess of the trappings of the ‘mammy’ figure of the US minstrel tradition. I call this performance the ‘mom voice.’ With this term, I consider how Moms’ voice works to deconstruct language as a system of signification in a way that provides a glimpse into the interiority of Black maternity as a cultural and subjective formation. I think about her voice and the grain of it, her raspy breath and speed, the quickly-moving timbric rhetoric. In these ways, Moms’ maternity exceeds the normative scripts for Black maternity in dominant US mid-century popular performance culture. In short, Moms’ voice necessarily engages the Mammy caricatures, critiques, and exceeds it. I argue that Moms’ work on record exemplifies how the commingling of sound and as a performative, commingling, is at once an essential element of stand-up comedy as a form and a crucial method for her alternative performance of Black motherhood.