Matrifocality

Matrifocality is a descriptor of an anthropological term, matrifocal, and literally means “mother focused.” The term most often describes a kinship system that is matriarchal or female-headed in nature, e.g., the matrifocal family. Matrifocal families are characteristic of several cultures, including the Javanese, the Igbo of West Africa, and the Mescalero Apaches. Still, its most mainstream Western use is in describing the families of African Americans and other cultures of the African diaspora, most especially those from lower socioeconomic classes. It has a noted history of being used to describe the so-called social pathologies of these specific communities.

Matrifocality emerges as a topic of debate because its very nature openly challenges the Western normality of the nuclear family. Though it has a pejorative history because of this very characteristic, contemporary scholars have continued a campaign to reclaim matrifocality from a Western bias that demands the universality of the nuclear family. These scholars do not characterize matrifocality as the absence of men or a necessity due to an inherent weakness in male counterparts, but as a site of power and independence for women in these family units. To this end, scholar Nancy Tanner expands the definition of matrifocality beyond the household that is mother headed or based upon the mother-child unit to something much broader. Tanner contends that matrifocality also contains a specific cultural significance that includes the structural importance of the mother's central role within the family.

Matrifocality is characteristic of a cultural cosmology that radically differs from the exaltation of the nuclear family as the most central building block of a society. Cultures that allow for matrifocality tend to be much more communal in nature and view childrearing as a communal effort, rather than the primary occupation of the individual family unit.

Matrifocality is a descriptor that proves to be quite expansive. Many African Americanist scholars are exploring matrifocality in their specific fields of research. Black feminists describe their literary lineage as matrifocal in nature, terming it black matrilineage. Even literary theorist Hortense J. Spillers calls for a reexamination of black language that is matrifocal in nature in her work, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe.”