The Florida Doula

Florida is a doula for the rest of the world. The etymology of doula—rooted in the Greek term for “female slave”— embodies the colonial haunting attached to Black women's reproduction while simultaneously propagating an alternative relationship to our bodies that reimagines reproduction beyond capitalist and colonial frameworks of value. This dissertation positions doulas as Black feminist practitioners of care who reject prescriptive diagnoses and instead cultivate ways of living with one another and nature that can endure and transcend the violence that defines our time.  Central to this project is Black ecofeminist surrender, understood not as resignation, but as a collective ethic of release, replenishment, and return that sustains reproductive and ecological networks under conditions of ongoing violence. Although doulas are typically associated with childbirth, this project departs from that narrow definition, extending care to bodies and ecologies historically rendered unproductive.  Through ethnographic and archival research inspired by Florida anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and oral history, I examine the practices of two Florida-based doulas—a Menstrual Doula and a Sea Doula—to interrogate how Black reproductive and ecological traditions in the peninsula offer new grammars of care, healing, and ecological relation amidst an apocalypse that is already here.