Jane Caputi's "Call Your "Mutha'""

Jane Caputi is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. She is the author of The Age of Sex Crime; Gossips, Gorgons and Crones; and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture. She has also made two educational documentaries: The Pornography of Everyday Life and Feed the Green: Feminist Voices for the Earth.

Caputi applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Call Your "Mutha'": A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, and reported the following:

The page 99 test works only in part for Call Your “Mutha’” as the book’s structure is not linear. Rather it progresses one way and then flips the script. The book begins by naming the paradigmatic motherfucking (expressed in genocide, femicide, and ecocide) that is the basis of the new geological age, the Anthropocene (Age of Man), and then turns to an avowal of respect and devotion for the Earth, the ultimate “Mutha’” (always placed within quotes to acknowledge my debt to the genius of Black English). The Black oral tradition reports that motherfucker was invented by enslaved children to name the White slavemaster who raped and impregnated their mothers. His abuse, exploitation and commodification of the enslaved women’s productive and reproductive powers is mirrored in the master class’ aim to dominate and exploit Mother Earth (a complex scientific and spiritual concept, particularly in Indigenous traditions). The Anthropocene is the Age of the Motherfucker, with motherfucking understood as “forced sexualized entry into, harm, domination, possession, spirit-breaking, exploitation, extraction, and wasting of another for reasons of power, pleasure, plunder, and profit.”

The page 99 test does work for the first half. There, I discuss the ecological need for limits and quote Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Good is knowing when to stop.” I contrast this with an “eco-modernist” demand for environmentalists to be more “positive,” to stress prosperity, and no longer rely on verbs like “’stop.” I disagree, concluding that: “words like ‘stop’ and ‘constrain’” are required “to address standard frontier violation, extraction, theft, occupation, trashing and dumping. Respect for the word stop is so necessary because the environmentally abusive culture is at root a rapist one.”

That page does not, though, indicate the theme of the second half of the book, focusing on the intelligence and autonomy of Nature-Earth as the “Mutha’”. As the word motherfucker evolved it developed an alternate meaning of a formidable and indomitable force. I identify a narrative characterizing Africana and Indigenous philosophies, art, popular culture, activist discourse, Afrofuturism and world myth warning that the environmental catastrophes now unfolding are evidence not only of Man’s spectacular destructiveness, but also that the “Mutha’” is turning away no longer sustaining the patterns that allow human existence. Hence, the imperative to call, to invoke, the “Mutha’”.

Learn more about Call Your "Mutha'" at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue