In the winter months bracketing 2019 two Black mothers were the objects of short-lived media frenzies in the Northern welfare states of Sweden and Norway. One woman, heavily pregnant, is arrested by a brutally apprehending authority that nearly terminates the fetus; while the other has allegedly chosen to end her life and that of her children in the frigid Nordic Sea. By interrogating the affects surrounding either Nordic happening, Dr. Jan-Therese Mendes examine’s how the injury endured by the gestating body and the uncertainty that surrounds the watery death remains ever secondary to the injury the unruly Black migrant mother inflicts on the decorum of white public space and the demands of national assimilation.
