ANNA LAQUAWN HINTON
ABOUT ME
Dr. Anna LaQuawn Hinton is an Independent Scholar of Disability Studies and Black Literature & Culture. She received her PhD in 2018 from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, was selected as a Cheryl A. Wall African American Literature postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, and worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas, making excellent headway toward tenure, before she was targeted for her teaching and resigned in 2025.
Her monograph, Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women's Writing, which approaches themes in Black feminist literary studies such as aesthetics, spirituality, representation, community, sexuality, motherhood, and futurity through a Black feminist disability frame, is now available through the University Press of Mississippi. She has also published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) and CLA Journal, as well as contributed to The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body, The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature, and The Palgrave Handbook on Reproductive Justice and Literature, among other collections.
Dr. Hinton is a disabled-queer-momma Black feminist, who “Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk.(and striving to) Loves herself. Regardless.”*
*Alice Walker
Now Available!
In Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing, author Anna LaQuawn Hinton examines how contemporary Black women writers present becoming disabled as a traumatic and violent experience of Black womanhood. Nevertheless, Black women embrace disabled Black womanhood by turning to Africanist spiritual understandings of wholeness, which view debilitating injury and illness as not only physical but also spiritual, not just an individual problem but a symptom of discord in the community. Black women use these belief systems to reimagine healing in ways that make space for a variety of bodymindspirits. Hinton maintains that this is not only a major theme in contemporary Black women’s writing but that it also shapes the formal elements characteristic of the Black women’s literary tradition.
Refusing to Be Made Whole analyzes texts published after the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, focusing particularly on the late 1970s onward when Black women’s writing flourished. Through the lens of writings by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Sapphire, and Sarah E. Wright, Hinton addresses prominent critical discourses within Black feminist literary studies. Hinton approaches the intersections of Africanist spirituality, race, gender, class, and disability, conversations about representation, community, motherhood, and sexuality through a Black feminist disability studies framework. Refusing to Be Made Whole embraces the complex and multifaceted nature of Black women’s writing, arguing that through this collision of race, gender, and spirituality, Black women writers speak healing and wellness into their readers’ lives and their own.
SCHOLARLY WORK
Articles, Books and Chapters
“AND SO I BUST BACK: VIOLENCE, RACE, AND DISABILITY IN HIP HOP”
What do we miss when we focus on Black death and deathly violence when considering Black masculinity? Disability. In this piece, I argue that hip-hop artists express bodily and psychic vulnerability in ways that society often misses, often because as soon as this vulnerability is evoked it is masked by fantasies of violence.
“MAKING DO WITH WHAT YOU DON’T HAVE: DISABLED BLACK MOTHERHOOD IN OCTAVIA
BUTLER’S PARABLE OF THE SOWER AND PARABLE OF THE TALENTS”
What knowledge is gleaned from motherwork performed by Black disabled other/mothers? This article turns to Octavia E. Butler's Parable duology to argue though society constructs Black mothers as "bad" by birthing disabled children, Butler casts disabled Black motherwork as a key to survival and community building.
The medical community and the police are in cahoots against Black bodies...at least in Assata Shakur's memoir. In this article, I reveal that Shakur's memoir about her political awakening and time incarcerated is as much about her experience as a patient as it is political prisoner. Her Blackness makes her perceived as dangerous when in fact she is incredibly vulnerable. Her disabled and ill body bears witness to this vulnerability and her innocence.
