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Marks of the fetish: twenty-first century (mis)performances of the black female body

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MARKS OF THE FETISH:

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (MIS)PERFORMANCES OF THE

BLACK FEMALE BODY

by

Terrion L. Williamson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2011

Copyright 2011 Terrion L. Williamson
ii
EPIGRAPH

What you are is part of what you do and vice versa. And if you’re lucky, you find out
who you are before you decide what you’re going to become.

—Ruby Dee
iii
DEDICATION

To the women who taught me both who I am and what it means to “become”

My mother

KIM DENISE CRUSHSHON NELSON

and

Her mother

BERNICE LEE TURNER

(September 19, 1931 – August 29, 2007)

a.k.a. “Grammy”

iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Somehow it doesn’t seem sufficient to simply “acknowledge” all the folks who
have sustained, supported, embraced, challenged, encouraged, and loved me through this
process but, well, here’s to the thought counting more than the deed! First, thank you to
the institutions that have provided generous (and much needed!) financial support: the
Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC; the USC Graduate School for a
Provost Graduate Fellowship, two EDGE travel grants, and a Graduate Professionalism
Initiative Grant; the USC Center for Law, History and Culture for fellowship support two
years in a row; and the National Research Council for the Ford Foundation Diversity
Dissertation Fellowship that was instrumental in my completing the dissertation in a
timely fashion.
If there is anything I have done unmistakably right during my tenure as a graduate
student, it is compiling a kick ass group of faculty members to serve as my dissertation
committee. It has certainly been a challenge at times with all of the coming and going,
but the guidance of my committee has been absolutely invaluable to this journey. Kara
Keeling, thank you so much for stepping in right on time to help a sista out! I feel so
fortunate to have been the first graduate student you have seen to completion, and your
willingness to be just what I needed just when I needed it has made all the difference.
Thank you J. Jack Halberstam for always being there to give sound advice and an
encouraging word. Your brilliance is overwhelming! Ange-Marie Hancock, though our
time was limited, thanks so much for all of your support and responsiveness to my
project. Herman Gray, I can’t tell you how appreciative I am of the commitment you
v
have made to me and to my work over the past few years. You fooled around and told me
once that I could count on you whenever I needed you, and I have certainly tested you,
and you have certainly passed the test with flying colors! Thank you! Fred Moten—my
mentor, my friend, my kin. You are the one who has been there from the very beginning,
you’ve weathered the storm that is Terrion, and not only is my project so much better for
it, but I as a person am so much better for it. Thank you for always being there to help me
get “back to living again.”
Special thanks also to the members of my qualifying exam committee: Dorinne
Kondo, Daria Roithmayr and, especially, Judith Jackson Fossett whose guidance and
support has made such a monumental impact on my growth as a scholar. Special thanks
also to my friend and “unofficial” committee member Lanita Jacobs—know that every
pep talk, kind word, deep reading and dinner date made a major difference. Thank you as
well to those faculty members at USC and beyond who were never part of my committee,
but supported and encouraged me along the way nevertheless: Dwight A. McBride
(without whom I never would have made it to USC in the first place), Roberto Lint
Sagarena, Jane Iwamura, John Carlos Rowe, George Sanchez, Laura Pulido, Viet
Nguyen, Macarena Gómez Barris, Francille Rusan Wilson, Shana Redmond, Jayna
Brown, Margareth Etienne and last, but certainly not least, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and
Robin D.G. Kelley—two amazing people who model not just the type of scholar I aspire
to become, but the type of person as well.
A great big, huge, thanks to the folks who really make stuff happen at USC—the
staff! Sandra Hopwood, Jujuana Preston, Kitty Lai, and Sonia Rodriguez, over the years
vi
you all have been my life savers more times than I even want to try to remember. Thank
you for you unending kindness and generosity with your time and talent. A big shout-out
to my amazing cohort (both official and “adopted”): Tanachai Mark “MFA” Padoongpatt,
Gretel Vera Rosas, Sharon Luk, Abigail Rosas, Crisshonna Grant Nivea, Laura
Fugikawa, Todd Honma, Jacob Peters, and Margaret Salazar-Porzio—it’s been such a
gift to have been able to go through this process with all of you. And another big shout-
out to the other ASErs, past and present, who are fighting the good fight: Kiana Green,
Analena Hassberg, Anthony Rodriguez, Emily Hobson, Tasneem Siddiqui, Orlando
Serrano, Nisha Kunte, Maytha Alhassen, Thang Dao, Laura Harjo, Wendy Chang,
Carolyn Dunn, Perla Guerrero, Nicole Hodges Persley, Araceli Esparza, Anthony Sparks,
and Anton Smith.
To my sistafriends in the struggle: Michelle Commander, Imani Kai Johnson,
Aisha Finch, Crizella Wallace, Sionne Neely—I love you mugs so much! It has been
having you to share my laughter, tears, and frustrations with that has gotten me through
and gotten me over. I just would not, would not, have made it out whole had it not been
for you. Now let’s go tear it up—we got work to do! And to my sistafriends from home,
my BFFs forever and ever: you inspire, encourage, and motivate me more than you can
know. Constance Dortch, Timony Criss-Kirkwood, Jeanine Williams, and Clarice Jones,
thank you for putting up with me and loving me without restraint.
Thank you also to my other friends and loved ones who have been there along the
way: my dear friend Kowan “Q” Paul who departed this Earth while I was in the midst of
completing this project and whose spirit lingers with me still, as well as Marjorie
vii
Holmes-Cross, Crystal Bolden, Kevin Gordon, Brian Sleet, Tamura Lomax, William
Cooper, Ayana McNair, Frank Leon Roberts, and Deon Wright. A very special thank you
and I love you also goes out to my spiritual mentor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, who
helped me through an especially rough rough patch. A special thank you also goes out to
Carmea Ervin and family and Pam Adams for your courage, bravery and selflessness in
helping me research and write the Peoria chapter.
My family. I am so tremendously blessed to have not one, but four parents who
love and support me absolutely unconditionally. Perrion and Mary Ann Williamson and
Rufus and Kim Nelson, I can only hope to be as selfless, loving, and giving as you when
I become a parent. Thank you so much for your endless love and encouragement—it is
the biggest blessing of my life. Thank you as well to my grandmother Owen Nelson, my
superfine big little brother Rufus Nelson Jr., and my big sisters Teresa Allen, Bridgette
Byrd, Tina Nelson Jackson, Angela Morris and Carolyn Beans and your families for your
love and support. Ya’ll know I have way too much family to name for real, but I’d be
remiss if I didn’t also thank my Uncle Geno and my Aunt Rosie who were my L.A.
Angels. And, to my super-fabulous Aunt Casandra “Sweet” Williamson and little cousins
Aftyn Branch and Alyssa Branch, thank you so much for opening your home and your
hearts to me when I needed you most. Those prayers, long talks in the living rooms, game
nights, and trips to the movies had as much to do with me getting through my writing
year as did the (almost) free room and board! I love you to pieces, and you know I got a
couch and a Snuggie for you anytime you need it! A big thank-you-and-I-love-you to my
“adopted” families and family members as well: The Frazier Family, who made those
viii
first couple of L.A. Thanksgivings feel like Home, Marion “Me Me” Christian and Nina
Bolden, and Modestine Williams and my “other” sister and brothers, Crystal Scott,
Michael Scott, Reggie Hale, and Ben Scott.
And, finally, to my godchildren Ailijah Hunter, Jaliyiah Lyles, Lauryn Ross,
Marion Armstrong, Elijah Lee, Elliott Williams, and Ellanna Dortch, know you are the
reason why I do the work I do. You inspire me to be more and do more. T.T. loves you.

ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph ii

Dedication iii

Acknowledgements iv

Abstract x

Introduction: Racial Fetishism and the Politics of Black Female 1
Hypervisibility
Introduction Endnotes 14

Chapter One: Angry Black Women and Reality Television: Toward a 16
Black Feminist Performance Theory
Chapter One Endnotes 51

Chapter Two: What It Means to Be a Problem: Of Nappy-Headed Hos and 56
the Serial Murder of Black Prostitute Women
Chapter Two Endnotes 88

Chapter Three: (Mis)Performing Morality: Sacred Sexuality and the Making 97
of a Good Christian Girl
Chapter Three Endnotes 135

Chapter Four: “Not Gon’ Cry”: Black Feminist Corporeality and the Strong 140
Black Woman Narrative Tradition
Photo: “Nina” 154
Chapter Four Endnotes 174

Chapter Five: Baby Mama’s Drama 179
Chapter Five Endnotes 213

Epilogue 215

Bibliography 219
x
ABSTRACT
Marks of the Fetish: Twenty-First Century (Mis)Performances of the Black
Female Body considers the discursive formulations and cultural histories of contemporary
narratives of black women that coalesce within popular media texts under the following
five typologies: the “angry black woman,” the “nappy-headed ho,” the “good Christian
girl,” the “strong black woman,” and the “baby mama.” I contend that each of these
typologies is a particularized ideation of the black female body that is invested with, to
invoke Hortense Spillers, semiological and ideological values whose origins are
concealed by the image itself. That is, these typologies mark a fetish object—the black
female body—whose history has been transformed into pathology via the very same
productive logics that serve to make it articulable within the cultural marketplace.
Marks of the Fetish departs from foregoing conversations about “stereotypes,” or
what I refer to as “stereotype discourse,” that seek to locate pathology in certain material
bodies and/or attempt to position black female iconography along a continuum of
negative or positive representations. Instead, I suggest that the typologies I name are not
embodied by any particular person or person, but are overlapping narratives for which
particular persons stand in. As such, the operative questions I want to engage concern not
whether these ideations of black female identity are “good” or “bad,” but rather, how the
originary impulses that produce them continue to deceptively foreclose alternative forms
of black sociality.

xi
Using theories of performative raciality in conjunction with feminist work on the
performativity of the gendered body as a starting point, I propose a theoretical
methodology for analyzing the constitutive contingencies of race and gender that has the
potential to profoundly affect traditional understandings of the representative black body.
Ultimately, I argue that the racialized gender performances, and attendant
misperformances (that is, performances that deviate from hegemonic norms), of black
women within public culture, including within film, television, music, the blogsphere,
public and legal policies, and political and social commentary, evidence the fraught
terrain of black subjectivity while simultaneously revealing the radical potentialities of
difference.
My first chapter, “Angry Black Women and Reality Television: Toward a Black
Feminist Performance Theory,” analyzes the trope of anger as neither the product of
television executives nor the artifact of the acts of individual black women, but as a
vexed consequence of the coupling of race and gender. Chapter two, “What It Means to
Be a Problem: Of Nappy-Headed Hos and the Serial Murder of Black Prostitute
Women,” re-visits the 2007 Don Imus controversy to reveal how the discourse around the
term “nappy-headed hos” (re)produces the zone of death occupied by women living in
precarious social economies. The third chapter, “(Mis)Performing Morality: Sacred
Sexuality and the Making of a Good Christian Girl,” discusses how investments in
religious morality function to constrict black sexualities. Chapter four, “‘Not Gon’ Cry’:
Black Feminist Corporeality and the Strong Black Woman Narrative Tradition,” uses
R&B musicianship to explore the implications of black women’s affective bodily
xii
displays. Finally, Marks of the Fetish concludes with “Baby Mama’s Drama,” a chapter
that situates the life of a state-assisted single black mother in relationship to legal and
extralegal policies that purport to govern aberrant motherhood.
1
INTRODUCTION

Racial Fetishism and the Politics of Black Female Hypervisibility

2002: Tennis phenom Serena Williams hijacks the U.S. Open. She garners media
attention not so much because she wins the tournament only after narrowly
defeating the defending champion, who happens to be her older sister, but because
of her choice of outfit: an all-black, figure-hugging cat-suit that reportedly
“required more bravery than fabric” and proudly displays Williams’s muscular
body, particularly her well-endowed derriere.
1

2004: In about half a second, pop R&B artist Janet Jackson single-handedly alters the
course of broadcast television (well, that’s if you do not count the single hand of
her ready accomplice, Justin Timberlake, which it seems many people do not).
During a live performance at Super Bowl XXXVIII, Timberlake exposes
Jackson’s nipple-shielded breast in what gets referred to as a “wardrobe
malfunction.” The ensuing fallout results in heavy fines being levied against CBS
and tightened control over television content.
2

2008: As Barack Obama rises to prominence during the presidential campaign, his wife
Michelle Obama begins gaining some political and cultural clout of her own.
Once candidate Obama becomes President Obama, the First Lady morphs into a
style and fashion icon, with an inordinate amount of attention being paid to her
physical presence, particularly her toned arms, which she confidently displays via
her often-sleeveless wardrobe.
3

2009: In November, the Lee Daniels directed film Precious is released in the U.S. The
film stars newcomer Gabourey Sidibe who is widely acclaimed for her portrayal
of the film’s title character—an obese, illiterate, teenage mother who has been
physically and sexually assaulted repeatedly by both her mother and father.
Following her debut, Sidibe’s physical appearance becomes media fodder,
particularly after radio personality Howard Stern declares she will never work in
Hollywood again on account of her weight.

2010: After the release of a series of highly successful underground mixtapes, Nicki
Minaj emerges in the mainstream as rap music’s most prominent “it” girl since
the turn of the century. As her celebrity gains momentum, so do the rumors that
she has undergone a number of surgical procedures to alter her physical
appearance. The most notable charge, which she fiercely denies, is that her ample
behind is “fake”—that she either wears butt pads or has had butt augmentation—
to the point where blog sites begin circulating “then and now” pictures of Minaj
as “evidence” of their allegations.

2
2010: “Neo soul” artist Erykah Badu causes a media frenzy with the release of the video
for “Window Seat,” the lead single from her fifth studio album, New Amerykah
Part Two: Return of the Ankh. The video, which was filmed guerrilla-style in one
take in early March, features Badu slowly stripping out of her clothing as she
walks the streets of downtown Dallas. The video ends with a completely nude
Badu being hypothetically assassinated at Dealey Plaza, the site of President John
F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
4

The cultural cataclysms produced by black women during the inaugural years of
the twenty-first century, of which the foregoing are but a few, are indicative of the
shifting modes of representation and political struggle that characterize the post-civil
rights, post-soul, post-911, post-Katrina and, as some would have it, post-racial and
postfeminist moment in which we find ourselves. This queer moment, in which many of
the political strategies, movements, and intellectual trajectories marginalized people have
often used to anchor their demands for social justice seem to have (or are rumored to
have) either passed or be in the process of passing us by, is characterized both by a
collective nostalgia for the (often idealized) communal spirit and artistic endeavor that
shared oppression tends to engender, as well as wide-spread anxiety over just what all
those “posts” actually portend. It is further characterized by a changing American
landscape in which hostility toward the very mechanisms that helped us arrive here—a
moment when black men can hold the offices of both President of the United States and
U.S. Attorney General and women can rule within the White House, the Supreme Court,
and the Cabinet simultaneously—is fortified by Tea Party politicking, anti-poor rhetoric,
middle-class elitism, anti-immigrant legislation, and the continued growth of the police
state.
3
The contemporary disruptions caused by the black female body thus emerge
within the context of a cultural climate that is hypervigilant about policing the terms of
race and racism, gender and sexism, and sex and sexuality, but is still unsure what to do
about the individuals for whom those terms overlap and congeal into particular signifiers
of being. In the late 1980s and 1990s, a black feminist grammar around sexuality began
to develop in which terms like “culture of dissemblance,” “eating the other,” “politics of
silence,” “politics of respectability,” “the occult of true black womanhood” and “black
w(holes)” came to signal the historical bifurcation of black female sexuality, especially
within the realm of the public.
5
Scholars like Darlene Clark Hine, bell hooks, Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham, Ann duCille and Evelynn Hammonds helped map the terrain of
black women’s experience wherein their sexuality was perpetually defined in terms of
dangerous excess or latent asexuality—which, in the final equation, meant that black
female sexuality came to reference nothing other than lack. As literary theorist Hortense
Spillers put it:
From the point of view of the dominant mythology, it seems that sexual
experience among black people (or sex between black and any other) is so
boundlessly imagined that it loses meaning and becomes, quite simply, a
medium in which the individual is suspended. From this angle, the act of
sex has no occasional moments of inauguration, transition, and
termination; it does not belong to human and social process, embedded in
time, pledged to time and to notions of morality. It is, on the contrary, a
state, of vicious, routinized entanglement, whose passions are pure, direct,
and untrammeled by consciousness. Under these conditions of seeing, we
lose all nuance, subjects are divested of their names, and, oddly enough,
the female has so much sexual potential that she has none at all that
anybody is ready and able to recognize at the level of culture. Thus, the
unsexed black female and the supersexed black female embody the very
same vice, cast the very same shadow, since both are an exaggeration of
the uses to which sex might be put.
6

4
In Marks of the Fetish I mean to contemplate how the alliance between gender,
blackness and class, along with the corresponding themes of patriarchy, heterosexism,
racism, and classism, structure contemporary analyses of black female sexuality and
subjectivity, and the performative black body more generally. While I take the historical
negation of black female sexuality espoused by Spillers and her contemporaries as a
starting point and trace that negation across a range of twenty-first century cultural
productions, my work is ultimately sutured to the ambitious hope of discovering a space
where fully recognizable, fully functioning, fully embodied, black female social
subjects—that is, black women—live, love, and thrive.
This space is altogether different, I think, than that imagined by sociologist
Shayne Lee wherein “erotic revolutionaries,” who he affectionately describes as women
who “effectively wage war against the politics of respectability and challenge traditional
scripts that offer men greater space to indulge in a fuller range of sexual expressivities,”
are defined almost solely in terms of their relationships to (the act of) sex.
7
In an attempt
to counteract what he sees as a dearth of “academic works on black sexual politics [that]
produce a discourse on sex and sexuality that celebrates the erotic theatricality of the
sexual female body,” Lee seemingly locates black female sexual agency in every booty
shake, rap song, sexually explicit book, raunchy joke, or near-naked shimmy produced by
a black woman in the past decade.
8
It is my contention, however, that the work of
locating black female sexuality is about more than simply identifying black women who
have sex and are willing to talk about it. As discussed here, black female sexuality refers
to the historically contingent, context specific processes of erotic pleasure and bodily
5
integrity that ground black female subjectivity. I am particularly interested in
interrogating the work of black women produced within popular media texts and public
spaces because the consumption of, and hysteria around, black female bodies in the
cultural marketplace is implicated in the production of black female subjectivities across
space and time. While this means that I, like Lee, want to explore the contours of black
female (hyper)visibility, I also want to be careful to attend to the problematics of
visibility as outlined by Evelynn Hammonds:
But in overturning the “politics of silence,” the goal cannot be merely to
be seen. As I have argued, visibility, in and of itself, does not erase a
history of silence nor does it challenge the structure of power and
domination—symbolic and material—that determines what can and
cannot be seen. The goal should be to develop a “politics of articulation”
that would build on the interrogation of what makes it possible for black
women to speak and act.
9

This project is structured around analyses of the discursive formulations and
cultural histories of contemporary narratives of black women that coalesce under the
following five typologies: the “angry black woman,” the “nappy-headed ho,” the “good
Christian girl,” the “strong black woman,” and the “baby mama.” My principle argument
is that the ranges of black female sexuality can be approached by way of these figures
and that each is a particularized ideation of the black female body that is invested with, to
invoke Spillers once more, “semiological and ideological values whose origins are
concealed by the image itself.”
10
The “mystical attribution” Spillers suggests is
characteristic of the black female image/icon resonates with the theories of commodity
fetishism and sexual/psychoanalytic fetishism espoused by Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud respectively, and which I use here to help guide my analyses. Though they operate
6
on different registers, the Marxian and Freudian theories of the fetish are, as Emily Apter
puts it, “curiously compatible,” and both ultimately refer to “an ever-shifting form of
specular mimeses, an ambiguous state that demystifies and falsifies at the same time, or
that reveals its own techniques of masquerade while putting into doubt any fixed
referent.”
11
The following passages, the first two from Marx and Freud, the third from
scholar William Pietz, who has adeptly outlined the etymological origins of the fetish,
help contextualize Apter’s statement:
In order, therefore to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty
realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as
autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into
relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the
world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the
fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are
produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production
of commodities.
12

The substitute for the sexual object is a body part (foot, hair) which is
generally unsuited to sexual purposes, or an inanimate object
demonstrably connected to the sexual person, or best of all with that
person’s sexuality (items of clothing, white linen). It is not without some
justification that this substitution is compared with the fetish in which
primitive man sees his god embodied.
13

My argument, then, is that the fetish could originate only in conjunction
with the emergent articulation of the ideology of the commodity form that
defined itself within and against the social values and religious ideologies
of two radically different types of noncapitalist society, as they
encountered each other in an ongoing cross-cultural situation.
14

Taken together, these passages reveal the overlap between what are, in some
ways, wildly divergent theoretical traditions, and it is this overlap I am concerned with.
In the series of pieces he published in Res between 1985 and 1988, Pietz locates the
origins of fetishism in discussions of West African fetish worship during the sixteenth
7
and seventeenth centuries, the general idea being that the material objects Africans often
used in spiritual practice and attributed life-sustaining value to, including amulets, stones,
and feathers, were indicative of a superstitious religiosity that prevented Africans from
establishing healthy economies and moral social orders.
15
Fetish worship thus became
“the essence and explanatory principle of African society” and the belief in “a form of
superstition that falsely attributed various sorts of values and powers to inanimate
material objects, above all powers over material life: both natural abundance and
individual human lives.”
16
This socioreligious history is traced upon the Marxian and
Freudian theories of the fetish which both suggest a pathological impulse toward false
consciousness. In both instances, the fetish object stands in as substitution for a process
that is made visible by the object itself.
Given the foregoing, I want to suggest that the fetish signals something more than
perverse sexuality, as is the typical reading in common discourse. Here, the fetish
functions as a mode of subjectification in which the black female body is revealed as the
source of its own pathology, but where the process of “revelation” is always incomplete
and ongoing. The typologies of black women that I analyze over the course of this
project—the marks of the fetish—variously reveal black female sexuality while still
maintaining the logics of deviance and disorder that always already condition the
emergence of the same. In other words, the typologies I name serve as markers of
gendered, racialized difference while simultaneously disavowing the alternative
socialities that get marked by those differences. Yet, despite its relationship to the
pathological, I do not mean to suggest that the fetish function of the black female body
8
should always be understood in the negative. Instead, I am interested in interrogating a
series of questions that respond to that functionality, including: What are the limits and
possibilities of the fetishization of the black female body? How does racial fetishism
manifest itself? How are black as well as non-black people similarly or differently
implicated in that fetishization? And, finally, how might a consideration of class and
economic disparity affect all of the above?
My interest in addressing the polarities (and in-between places) of racial fetishism
is inspired by Kobena Mercer’s reading/re-reading of Robert Mapplethorpe’s
controversial black male nudes, a series of photographs the artist produced in the early-
to-mid 1980s. In an essay first published in 1986, Mercer argues that in his preoccupation
with the black male body Mapplethorpe “engineers a fantasy of absolute authority over
the image of the black male body by appropriating the function of the stereotype to
stabilize the erotic objectification of racial otherness and thereby affirm his own identity
as the sovereign I/eye empowered with mastery over the abject thinghood of the Other.”
17

However, in a piece written a few years later, Mercer revises his arguments as a result of
his closer consideration of the “homoerotic specificity of the work.”
18
He suggests that a
fuller accounting of Mapplethorpe’s work must attend to the particularities of the artist,
as well as those of the artist’s audience. It is not enough to claim that simply because he
was a white man Mapplethorpe was engaged in a racist othering practice, because the fact
that Mapplethorpe was a gay artist had important consequences for the movement and
reception of his work within the context of an urban gay male culture. Therefore, Mercer
argues, “it becomes necessary to reverse the reading of racial fetishism not as a repetition
9
of racist fantasies but as a deconstructive strategy which begins to lay bare the psychic
and social relations of ambivalence at play in cultural representations of race and
sexuality.”
19
This “deconstructive strategy” allows for a reading of Mapplethorpe’s black
nudes that recognizes their transgressive potential and leaves as a question whether they
actually work to reinforce or undermine racial stereotypes. Therefore, in his re-reading
Mercer is not as invested in determining once and for all whether black men are being
celebrated or demonized by Mapplethorpe’s work as he is in clearing space for variant
readings that take into consideration the effectivity, contextuality, and historical
specificity of the work and recognizing that “to call something ‘fetishistic’ does not
imply an affirmative judgment of taste or critical appraisal.”
20

While I do take hard stances against some of the cultural productions and
producers I analyze here, I do so not out of a need to determine whether the ideations of
black female identity exposed by the typologies I name are “good” or “bad,”—as if I
alone have the authority or capacity to complete such an onerous task—but, rather, out of
a concern with addressing how the originary impulses that produce these typologies
deceptively foreclose alternative forms of black sociality. What I am ultimately engaged
in, then, is an inquiry into the representatiblity of the black female body, where
representability refers to the tightly sutured discursive strategies and performative
enactments that regulate, or attempt to regulate, black female subjectivity. In referring to
these “performative enactments” I am activating a theory of racialized gender
performativity that is simultaneously culled from the work of John Jackson, who argues
that “notions of racial performativity are about using practices to shore up social
10
identity,” and Joseph Roach, who contends that “the process of trying out various
candidates in different situations—the doomed search for originals by continuously
auditioning stand-ins—is the most important of the many meanings that users intend
when they say the word performance.”
21
I am also referencing the important work of
Judith Butler who has claimed that gender is not so much a biological reality as it is the
outcome of a historically contingent series of sustained social performances that get their
durability from the repetition of hegemonic norms. These theories of performance,
collectively considered, help to contextualize the lives and work of black female cultural
producers who are situated within a twenty-first century cultural milieu in which they are
often highly visible, but rarely seen.
One of the strategies I use throughout Marks of the Fetish to cover the ground
between being visible and being seen is a return to a place I call Home. Home, for me, is
that sacred space where black women, and the people who love them completely, gather
periodically to laugh without restraint, cry without fear of vulnerability, vent their
frustrations openly, and freely express the wholeness of their lives without first arming
themselves for anticipated retaliation. Home is not, however, disconnected from its own
conditions of possibility, and I am therefore as interested in exploring the potentialities of
Home as I am in excavating the threats to its existence. As such, I engage personal
narratives that are at times biographical, at times autobiographical—and always
connected to Home in some sort of way—in order to explore the chasm between visibility
and seen-ness that beleaguers most discussions of blackness and representation. While I
am admittedly engaging a reading position that is often jettisoned in the service of a
11
certain kind of academic protocol, I hope this strategy will help bring into relief the lives
of women who are often referenced by the narratives of black women that get written and
discussed in dominant culture, but who are too rarely made part of the larger conversation
about what those narratives actually mean.
In the first chapter, “Angry Black Women and Reality Television: Toward a
Black Feminist Performance Theory,” I ground my analysis in what is perhaps the most
angst producing site of cultural production for black people at the contemporary moment.
I analyze reality television and the ever-present trope of (black female) anger as neither
the product of television executives nor an artifact of the acts of individual women, but as
a vexed consequence of the coupling of race and gender. In particular, I discuss what I
see as the limitations of “stereotype discourse”—conversations about racial stereotypes
that seek to locate pathology in certain material bodies and/or position black female
iconography along a continuum of negative or positive representations. In addition to
outlining a theory of racialized gender performance that is informed by black feminism, I
look to the work of Homi Bhabaha on the role of the stereotype in colonialist discourse to
buttress my argument about the need to read typologies of black women in terms of
fetishism.
Chapter two, “What It Means to be a Problem: Of Nappy-Headed Hos and the
Serial Murder of Black Prostitute Women,” re-visits the 2007 Don Imus controversy to
reveal how the discourse around the term “nappy-headed ho” aids in (re)producing the
zone of death occupied by women living in precarious social economies. I recount the
story of eight black prostitute women who were murdered between 2003 and 2004 in the
12
small Midwestern city of Peoria, Illinois—my hometown—in order to tell a larger story
about the vagaries of black death and dying and their connection to a form of social life
that is severed from normative ideas about inclusion within the civic body.
The third chapter, “(Mis)Performing Morality: Sacred Sexuality and the Making
of a Good Christian Girl,” discusses how investments in religious morality function to
constrict black sexualities. The chapter begins with the story of Tonéx, a male gospel
artist whose mainstream music career was effectively ended when he outed himself on a
Christian talk show, and ends with a consideration of the thematic of black female
morality that structures the work of Christian playwright and filmmaker Tyler Perry. In
between, I discuss the ministry of popular televangelist Juanita Bynum whose rags-to-
riches, slut-to-saint narrative embodies much of what is at issue in the controversy around
Tonéx and the films of Tyler Perry. Though men are central to the analysis here, the
intention is to discuss how the discursive and regulatory work of the examples I site are
implicated in the intersection between race, gender, heterosexism, and patriarchy that
often dominates black religious institutions.
Chapter four, “‘Not Gon’ Cry’: Black Feminist Corporeality and the Strong Black
Woman Narrative Tradition,” uses R&B musicianship to explore the implications of
black women’s affective bodily displays. I use the work of black female music artists
active in the late 1990s and 2000s as an entry-point into a discussion about the strength
concept and its connection to the laboring black female body. Further, I situate my
reading of the strong black woman in the context of a longer history of black feminist
concern about the tensions of supposed black female super-ability and its effect on black
13
women’s lives. Finally, I conclude with “Baby Mama’s Drama,” a chapter that begins
with a critique of the monster-mother figure that dominates the 2009 Lee Daniels film
Precious and then uses that reading to situate the life of a state-assisted single black
woman in relationship to legal and extralegal polices that purport to govern aberrant
motherhood. I end the project here because it is this woman, a Christian, high school-
educated, single black mother of three on public assistance, who I think best embodies
the place called Home that motivates, energizes, and sustains this work.
14
INTRODUCTION ENDNOTES

1
Jaime Schultz, “Reading the Catsuit: Serena Williams and the Production of Blackness
at the 2002 U.S. Open,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 29, no.3 (2005): 345-46.

2
For a discussion of how the media assigned blame to Jackson following the incident, see
Shannon L. Holland, “The ‘Offending’ Breast of Janet Jackson: Public Discourse
Surrounding the Jackson/Timberlake Performance at Super Bowl XXXVIII,” Women’s
Studies in Communication 32, no. 2 (2009): 129-50.

3
For an example of the rhetoric surrounding Michelle Obama’s arms, see Vanessa Jones,
“Michelle Obama’s Right to Bare Arms,” The Boston Globe, March 19, 2009.

4
David Flick and Hunter Hauk, “Badu Chooses JFK Site to Bare Body, Soul,” Dallas
Morning News, March 30, 2010; Brad Wete, “Erykah Badu Pays Fine, Gets Probation for
Charges Related to ‘Window Seat’ Video,” Entertainment Weekly, August 17, 2010.

5
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West:
Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14.4 (1989): 915-20; bell
hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of
Race,” Signs 17.2 (1992): 915-20; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent:
The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1993); Ann duCille, “The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and
Black Feminist Studies,” Signs 19.3 (1994): 591-621; Evelynn Hammonds, “Black
(W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” Differences 6.2+3 (1994): 126-
44.

6
Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Black, White and in
Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 164.

7
Shayne Lee, Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture
(Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2010), xiii.

8
Ibid., xi.

9
Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The
Problematic of Silence,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic
Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997),
180.

10
Spillers, “Interstices,” 174.
15

11
Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-
of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 1, 14.

12
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes
(Strand, London: Penguin Books, 1990), 165. Originally published in 1867.

13
Sigmund Freud, The Psychology of Love, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Strand, London:
Penguin Books, 2006), 131.

14
William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res 9 (1985): 7.

15
William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the
Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism,” Res 16 (1988): 105-24. See also, William Pietz,
“The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res 13 (1987): 23-45.

16
Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa,” 111, 116.

17
Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert
Mapplethorpe,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 177.

18
Ibid., 191.

19
Ibid., 199.

20
Ibid., 190.

21
John L. Jackson, Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 187; Joseph Roach, Cities of the
Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3.

16
CHAPTER ONE

Angry Black Women and Reality Television:
Toward a Black Feminist Performance Theory

I can remember as a child sitting upstairs in my bedroom and hearing my mother shout at
the top of her voice that someone “colored…colored!” was on TV and that we had all
better come downstairs at once. And, without fail, we did, sitting in front of our TV,
nervous, full of expectation and dread, praying that our home girl or boy would not let the
race down.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
1

The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given
reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that,
in denying the play of difference (which the negation through the Other permits),
constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and
social relations.
—Homi K. Bhabha
2

In the spring of 2003, America’s Next Top Model, the reality competition show
helmed by former supermodel Tyra Banks, debuted on the now-defunct television
network, UPN. Among the contestants on that first cycle were Robin Manning, a “plus-
size” southern belle from Memphis, Tennessee and Ebony Haith, a thick-skinned and
comfortably out lesbian from New York. While I would concede that these
designators—“plus-size,” “southern belle,” “thick-skinned,” “out lesbian”—are of a type
often used by television executives to satisfy the programmatic demands of the reality
genre, when coupled with the fact of Robin and Ebony’s blackness they also signal
intersections of race, class, gender, physicality, region and sexuality that have significant
implications for understanding the multiplicity of black female experiences in public at
the contemporary moment.
17
That Robin and Ebony’s experiences were being watched is of no small
consequence. Ebony, an early front-runner, was eliminated from the show during the
fourth episode after being critiqued by the judges and other contestants for, in addition to
having “bad skin texture,” being “difficult,” “angry,” and having a “chip on her
shoulder.” After her refusal to take part in a simulated nude photo shoot during the final
weeks of the show, Robin, who was characterized by other contestants as “bitchy,”
“psychotic,” and a “diva” who did not portray the Christian values she always touted, was
eliminated as well. The drama surrounding Ebony and Robin was therefore instrumental
in making ANTM one of UPN’s highest rated shows of that season and, I would argue,
helped to further solidify the angry black woman narrative on reality television in
subsequent years.
About the same time that Robin and Ebony were wreaking havoc on ANTM, I was
completing my first year as a law student at an institution where another black woman
was wreaking some small-scale havoc of her own. She was a beautiful deep brown
woman with a French name, kinky hair, and discernibly African features. Soft-spoken
though she was, when she stood in front of our classroom the young Yale-trained
professor commanded attention. But therein seemed to lie the primary problem. She
took no prisoners. If you were wrong, she let you know it. If you were right, you didn’t
get a cookie or a special pat on the back—that was what was expected. She utilized a
rigorous Socratic method that could easily weed out those students who were not
prepared for class. But, in this, she was not unlike many of her colleagues, particularly
those who taught notoriously demanding first year law classes. So, I would find myself
18
perplexed when I would sometimes hear other students discuss how cold, unnecessarily
mean, and viciously rigorous she (allegedly) was. What? Didn’t they catch that joke she
cracked in class the other day? Where were they at the beginning of every class when she
greeted us with a pleasant good morning? No, she certainly isn’t Miss Molly Sunshine,
but this isn’t kindergarten is it? And, sure, she demands a lot of us, but isn’t that what we
expect, especially since we are so enamored with ourselves for being at a “top-tier” law
school? What am I missing here?
Throughout the remainder of my law school tenure I developed a relationship
with that black female law professor (the only one on the faculty) whom I had grown to
admire for her intelligence and grace. As a consequence, I began to see what it was I had
been under-appreciating in the blush of my own black girl pride at seeing a black woman
at the podium. Through my conversations with my professor I came to realize that the
brisk classroom persona she had developed was precisely that—a development. And a
persona. She was very much aware that her black female body meant something entirely
different in front of a class full of (mostly white) law students than did the body of her
white (male and female) colleagues. She did not have the liberty of presenting her
lectures from perched atop the nearest table; she could not simply assume an easy
familiarity with her students; she could not have an “off day,” less she risk having it
define her entire teaching career; and she had always to be braced for the next attack
upon her credibility, dual Yale degrees be damned.
I thought of my professor often as my preoccupation with reality television grew.
By the time I graduated from law school in the spring of 2005, the nation had been
19
introduced to über-villain Omarosa Manigualt-Stallworth (now Manigualt) via Donald
Trump’s vehicle, The Apprentice, as well as Making the Band contestants Sara Stokes
and Lynese “Babs” Wiley, who had literally fought it out to become members of the
now-defunct hip hop group Da Band, and Coral Smith, the self-proclaimed “bitch” of her
season of MTV’s The Real World and contentious veteran of its spin-off show Real
World/Road Rules Challenge. Not to be outdone, ANTM had continued to feature its own
controversial black female contestants. The second cycle introduced Camille McDonald
who at one point every other contestant identified as the person she wanted to see leave
the competition. Camille was chastised, and ultimately eliminated, for her “bad attitude”
and for not being willing to take direction. By the time the third cycle rolled around,
Tyra, in all of her former Black Supermodel Extraordinaireness, had apparently had it.
When Eva “The Diva” Pigford (now Marcille), the eventual winner of cycle three,
stomped into an early judging panel and made it known that she thought many of the
other contestants, most of whom had already voiced their complaints about her
“abrasive” behavior, were “ultra sensitive,” Tyra insisted she did not “want to cast
another black bitch.” But it was Eva’s “bitchiness,” as well as the “bitchiness” of her
black female predecessors, that helped to make the show a ratings success and, without
fail, every subsequent iteration of ANTM, which is currently in its sixteenth cycle, has
featured at least one contestant who could conceivably be said to embody the narrative of
the angry black woman.
So, if these abrupt, aggressive, callous, angry women were supposed to represent
“real” contemporary black women—that is, there are no make-believe mammies or
20
fictional floozies here—what implications did this have for women like my professor?
Had she cultivated her classroom personae as a reaction to representations like these? Or,
were these television women and my professor evidencing, on different registers, a
particular response to the myriad other distasteful representations black women have
historically been assaulted with? Did my professor’s colleagues and students see these
media images and automatically associate them with her, perhaps thinking they were
some (slightly?) bastardized version of the truth of all, or at least most, black women?
And, most critically, was it that fear of association that made me cringe inwardly
whenever I saw another black woman on television going into a finger flying, head
swiveling, hand-on-hip neck rolling rage?
While I have now completed law school and long since left behind my youthful
fantasy about becoming a real-life Clair Huxtable (and all of the problematic
consequences such a fantasy infers), my fixation with media images of black women has
continued on unabated. However, I am now less interested in attempting to find a one-to-
one relationship between media representations and real-life black women (a premise I
will return to later), than in my own response, as well as the responses of other black
people, to the real or imagined potential of such a relationship. Put another way, I want
to explore the affective reactions to mad black women that get evidenced by the cringe, a
term I use here to refer to the antagonistic responses made spontaneously by many black
Americans, both privately and publicly, to particular expressions of black female
difference.
21
It is, perhaps, this tendency toward the cringe Henry Louis Gates references in the
epigraph that begins this chapter. While black people are certainly beyond the historical
moment when we might clamor to the television to get a rare glimpse of a black face on
the small screen, we are largely not beyond our concern with policing the boundaries of
acceptable behavior by black people in the media. Our political and social commentary,
be it on television, in academic and commercial publications, on the radio, or in the
blogsphere, suggests that in the twenty-first century many of us are still just as concerned
that black people in the public sphere might “let the race down” as were Gates and his
family several decades ago. Yet there is still an important difference to note. For Gates,
coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, the cringe was related to the absence of black
people on television and, ostensibly, the hope that the appropriate public representations
of black people would do a certain amount of cultural work that was sorely needed in a
still legally segregated and openly racist country.
Today, the cringe still clearly has some relationship to racial politics, but it also
seems to be more intimately bound up with the compulsion to watch. For as much as
black commentators ballyhoo many of the representations of black people on television,
particularly reality television, the shows that have spawned the most controversial
characters, including Flavor of Love (2006-2008), I Love New York (2007-2008), College
Hill (2004-2009), Bad Girls Club (2006-present) and The Real Housewives of Atlanta
(2008-present) have clearly succeeded due in no small part to strong black viewerships.
And, in my view, it is not enough to suggest black viewers have somehow been duped or
do not have the ability to critically analyze these shows. Even I, with my advanced
22
degrees and string of letters behind my name, regularly engage with my other
scholastically endowed friends about the latest exploits of “NeNe and them.”
3
And these
conversations go very similarly to the conversations I have with my friends and family
members who are not so academically inclined. For all of us, there is often an underlying
sense that we are somehow complicit in the so-called setting back of the black race that
occurs every time black folks “act a damn fool” on reality television. Yet, it is that very
“foolishness” that drives us to tune in week after week.
Consequently, my goal here is not to indict any person or groups of persons for
the proliferation of reality television, or for the character typologies that emerge from, or
are sustained by, the genre. Actually, throughout the course of this project I aim to
develop an argument that is ultimately at odds with my own tendency toward the cringe
and attempts to move away from the ideology of respectability that often undergirds
stereotype discourse and which pushes against prevailing notions of representation that
would have us point fingers at certain cultural actors for the continued “disparagement”
of black people, and black women in particular, in popular media texts. As it is, plenty of
ink has already been spilled in denouncing television executives, directors, and
producers, as well as black women themselves, for the maintenance of the angry black
woman narrative within reality television because it purportedly promotes a damaging
“stereotype” of black women that has detrimental effects on black women and the black
community at-large. For instance, psychologist Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, author of Stolen
Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives, suggests the media is largely
responsible for perpetuating the idea of the angry black woman, which she sees as a
23
negative portrayal that “limits our ability to understand black women’s context.”
4

Similarly, in an article about the SWA—“Sista With an Attitude”—cultural critic Todd
Boyd argues that reality television shows are “edited and manipulated to create images
that look real and sort of exist in real time…[b]ut [that] what we really have is a
construction….The whole enterprise of reality television relies on stereotypes. It relies on
common stock, easily identifiable images.”
5
Boyd’s arguments are supported by claims
made by The Apprentice’s Omarosa and ANTM’s Camille who have both said they were
misrepresented as a consequence of editing choices made by the shows’ producers.
6

Spelman College historian Jelani Cobb seemingly agrees with both Wyatt and Boyd,
contending that the hit Bravo show The Real Housewives of Atlanta “plays into the
stereotypes of black women: the cattiness, the neck rolling.”
7
In her article on “Divas,
Evil Black Bitches and Bitter Black Women,” Kimberly Springer argues that the angry
black woman is a modern alteration of earlier stereotypes such as sapphire and jezebel,
and that the persistence of such iconography is testament to “the notable failure of
societal transformation in eradicating these images.”
8
Journalists Denene Millner;
Angela Burt-Murray, the current editor-in-chief of Essence Magazine; and Mitzi Miller
have devoted an entire book to, purportedly, debunking the myths around the
“stereotypical, neck-wiggling” black woman by proudly proclaiming themselves angry
black women of a different order, that is, black women who claim and embrace the term
because they are angry for a reason.
9

The foregoing are just a few of the numerous scholars and journalists who have
suggested the angry black woman is but another in a long line of repugnant media-
24
produced archetypes of black women. And many black bloggers and lay commentators
agree. Join any blog or online discussion about depictions of angry black women in the
media, and you are bound to see comments similar to these:
“This is a shame. This isn’t funny at all. That’s why people think black
women have attitudes. Shows like this do nothing but reinforce the
stereotype.”
10

“Even worse, the media hammers this ‘angry black man/woman’ deeper
and deeper in our subconsciousness, so deep, we even start to believe in it
ourselves. Now that’s some serious indoctrination to be sure.”
11

“Black people of all socioeconomic backgrounds should have a shared
interest in overcoming all the negative stereotypes that persist in the
media…one would hope that a channel like BET would have the best
interests of black people in mind and avoid showing this kind of garbage.
It is bad for both black people in general, and black women in
particular.”
12

This concern by black people over “negative” representations of other black
people is, of course, nothing new. Black female scholars have been particularly attentive
to how the lives and bodies of black women have historically been maligned, neglected,
and abused within the public realm, including within the music industry, film, theatre,
news broadcasts, commercial publications, political arenas, art houses, and courtrooms,
as well as on television. One of the most referenced of these scholars is sociologist
Patricia Hill Collins who, in her first book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, outlines a handful of what she terms
“controlling images” of black womanhood that include mammy, the Black matriarch, the
welfare mother, the Black lady, and jezebel. These images, she argues, are “designed to
make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural,
25
normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life,” and “help[] justify U.S. Black women’s
oppression.”
13
She goes on to argue that controlling images are used by “elite White male
interests” to define black women’s sexuality and fertility and that, because of their
hegemonic power, controlling images ultimately become impossible to escape.
14
In a
subsequent book, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New
Racism, which was published fifteen years after the first edition of Black Feminist
Thought, Hill Collins suggests the changing parameters of social class and racism in the
desegregated, purportedly colorblind, post-civil rights era have generated updated and
class-specific controlling images of black women. She names the bitch/Bitch and the Bad
Black Mother (BBM) as examples of problematic images of working-class black women,
and the modern mammy, the Black lady, and the educated Black bitch as distorted
representations of middle class black women.
15
Taken together, she argues, these mass
media generated images “help justify and shape the new racism of desegregated,
colorblind America” and potentially foster “internalized oppression.”
16
Her suggested
remedy to these corresponding oppressions is for black people to engage a more
progressive black sexual politics that supports “new conceptions of Black femininity and
Black masculinity that reject sexism and heterosexism and that are sensitive to economic,
political, and social contours of the new racism.”
17

Another popular black feminist critic writing contemporaneously with Hill
Collins, bell hooks, makes similar claims, though her focus is more pointedly on
“decolonizing” the minds of those black people who she feels have too often uncritically
consumed and internalized negative imagery of black people, black women in particular.
26
In one of her earliest and most influential works, Black Looks: Race and Representation,
hooks analyzes representations of black people within a range of popular media forms
including advertising, music, television and, principally, film. She argues, “most black
folks do not want to think critically about why they can sit in the darkness of theaters and
find pleasure in images that cruelly mock and ridicule blackness.”
18
For hooks,
individuals such as Tina Turner and Vanessa L. Williams (and, apparently, those women
who support their work) are complicit in accepting racist and sexist stereotypes of black
women “which make the assertion of black female sexuality and prostitution
synonymous.”
19
Turner’s wild stage persona, which she appropriated from her violent
husband, Ike Turner, in conjunction with what hooks reads as Turner’s disavowal of the
abuse she suffered at the hands of Ike, and Williams’s turn to racy film roles after her
very public de-crowning as Miss America in 1984, exemplify how black female cultural
producers continue to buy into the myth of black women’s sexual degeneracy. She thus
calls for black women to liberate themselves from the confines of “colonized desire” and
“explore issues of black female sexuality in ways that intervene and disrupt conventional
representations.”
20
Included within hooks’s on-going liberation project is a heavy
emphasis on the actualization of love, particularly self-love, and the eradication of “black
self-hatred.”
21
She is therefore invested in the oft-repeated notion that many black people
have tended to internalize negative imagery and ideas about black people, such that they
act out in ways that do physical, psychological, and emotional violence to themselves, as
well as other individual black people and black communities.
27
Much of the work on black female public imagery that has been published since
the early nineties has taken its cue from the work of Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks
and/or uses a similar line of argumentation in analyzing popular cultural representations
of black women in the modern era.
22
In Shaded Lives: African American Women and
Television, Beretta E. Smith-Shomade assesses the roles of black women in television
from 1980 through the turn of the century by focusing on situation comedies starring
black casts, the music videos of rap and R&B artists, national news programming and
talk shows, specifically The Oprah Winfrey Show. She ultimately concludes that most of
the contemporary images of black women on television are re-workings of historically
specific stereotypes of black women (with Winfrey being a notable exception), claiming
that sitcoms “provided ample examples of Negroes grinnin’ and smiling,’ shuckin’ and
jivin’ for Black folks and, by extension, Whites” and that “although African-American
women appeared within various television formats, they served predominately as
narrative foil and cultural cliché.”
23
Smith-Shomade concludes her text by suggesting one
corrective to these problematic images is to teach media literacy and advocacy in the
academy and beyond. This includes making people aware that they should push for
broader representations of black women so as to “decenter systems of power” and
encouraging them to refuse to watch shows that objectify black women.
24

In 2003, journalist Charisse Jones and psychologist Kumea Shorter-Gooden
teamed up to publish Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America. Like
Collins, hooks, and Smith-Shomade before them, the authors argue that stereotypes such
as sapphire, mammy, and jezebel have morphed into twenty-first century versions of their
28
original selves. As a consequence of the pervasiveness of such stereotypes, black women
are negatively affected, to the point that they often begin “shifting,” that is, they “are
relentlessly pushed to serve and satisfy others and made to hide their true selves to
placate White colleagues, Black men, and other segments of the community.”
25
Shifting
occurs in a range of situations, the authors contend, including when black women play
down their aggressiveness so as not to alienate their white bosses, when they keep silent
in the face of sexual harassment for fear they won’t be believed, and when they exchange
their dreadlocks for straightened hair. Jones and Shorter-Gooden support their arguments
by referencing the African American Women’s Voices Project, a study they conducted of
over three hundred African American women in which they asked the women to discuss
their experiences with racism and sexism, including the ways in which they felt
stereotypes of black women impacted their personal lives. From these discussions the
authors conclude that shifting is also an internal phenomenon. It is the emotional turmoil
black women go through because of the biases made against them due to their race and
gender,
26
biases that are essentially located in five primary sets of myths about black
women which they name as the myth of inferiority, the myth of unshakability, the myth
of nonfemininity, the myth of criminality, and the myth of promiscuity.
27
In the view of
Jones and Shorter-Gooden, these myths go a long way toward explaining the material
oppression and psychological damage many black women sustain and they also help
explain why the achievements of black women are underappreciated. Consequently, the
myths must be debunked in order for black women to live more fulfilling and meaningful
lives.
29
Several years later, Lisa B. Thompson published Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality
and the New African American Middle Class (2009) which looks specifically at how
sexualized representations of black women in literature and popular culture affect middle
class black women. Thompson makes the disconcerting claim that it is crucial to examine
the lives of middle class black women because “society’s preoccupation with scrutinizing
poor and underclass black women often renders the middle class and their experiences
invisible despite their economic and professional successes.”
28
She further maintains that
what she calls the “performance of middle-class black womanhood” developed as a
response to images such as mammy, jezebel and sapphire.
29
Thompson is therefore
concerned with exploring how the remnants of perverse historical archetypes of black
women function in the contemporary moment to restrict the bodies of middle class black
women who she argues are now unfairly charged with exemplifying black propriety.
Consequently, she locates a number of sites where she believes middle class black
women disrupt the normative construction of the black lady, a figure who she argues is
characterized by the hyperconcealment of sexuality and the body, and who foregrounds
morality, civility and intelligence in order to combat negative stereotypes.
30
The sites
Thompson names include Anita Hill’s 1991 senate testimony against Clarence Thomas,
the theatrical work of Judith Alexa Jackson in WOMBman WARS (1994), the films
Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Eve’s Bayou (1997) by Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmon
respectively, and the novel Sarah Phillips (1985) by Andrea Lee. Ultimately, Thompson
optimistically cites these texts as examples of cultural performances wherein black
30
middle class women “challenge traditional beliefs [and] rebuke racist and sexual
stereotypes.”
31

The Limitations of Stereotype Discourse
Though I recognize and am indebted to the work that has previously been done by
black feminist scholars in revealing the particularized oppressions black women face as it
relates to issues of representation and media culture, I want to suggest that stereotype
discourse of the type I have discussed here is flawed for several reasons. The first reason
has to do with what, in a different context, Fred Moten calls “a refusal of recitation that
reproduces what it refuses.”
32
That is, the continued compulsion by many critics to place
black female cultural actors into particular categories—to define them as this stereotype
or that stereotype—limits the imaginative potentiality we might recognize in alternative
cultural producers and furthers the proliferation of those same stereotypes. The point here
is not that we cannot or should not recognize or comment upon the stock representations
of black people that proliferate in the media. Indeed, this project is a manifestation of that
very same impulse. What I do mean to suggest is that it is not enough to accuse black
cultural producers of settling into particular stereotypes because they do not exhibit
behavior we believe progressive black people ought to exhibit, and then dismiss them out
of hand; that even if there is some “stereotypical” behavior being displayed, there may
still be something, or someone, worth salvaging, and, that when we label something or
someone a stereotype without considering the conditions of possibility for the cultural
production in question to exist, we risk doing the same flattening out that we accuse the
31
stereotype of doing in the first place. I am therefore interested in moving past simplistic
arguments about stereotypes in order to better attend to an important, and still relevant,
set of questions posed by Wahneema Lubiano more than a decade ago:
Is there anything we can say about the form that doesn’t depend upon the
correctness of the content? If not, then we really can’t think about popular
culture apart from criticizing or applauding its “correct” or “incorrect”
content. And further, can consumption of even “incorrect” content have a
progressive political effect at some level, under some circumstances, to
some end?
33

Let me offer this example by way of a further illustration of the point I am
attempting to make. In 2009 I attended an academic conference where I sat in on a panel
about representations of black women in popular culture. One panelist had written a
paper about her conceptualization of the sapphire image in contemporary media texts and
toward the end of the panel she was asked the question most of us who do work on black
women in popular culture have learned to prepare ourselves to answer every time we
present or discuss our work. That is, she was asked her views about Oprah Winfrey. What
followed was a discussion about whether Winfrey is actually a sapphire or a mammy,
which then devolved into a prolonged back-and-forth between the audience members
about which television and film characters and actors are sapphires, which are mammies,
and which are better conceived of as jezebels. Now, I certainly have my own critiques of
Winfrey as cultural phenomenon, but none of those critiques is served by determining
once and for all whether Oprah is “rightly” considered a sapphire or a mammy, though I
might recognize that some of the traits of sapphire or mammy might be identified with
her at particular moments in her career. Further, any critique of Winfrey that relies on
32
casting her as “just” a sapphire, or “just” a mammy, or even as an amalgamation of the
two, risks compressing Winfrey’s life and work into a fixed and oversimplified one-
dimensional character, i.e., a stereotype.
The second limitation of stereotype discourse, hinted at earlier, is that it is often
undergirded by a bourgeois middle class uplift ideology that denies the cultural value of
the lifeways of poor and working class black people, as well as the lives of other black
people with non-normative or alternative sexualities, lifestyles, and family structures.
This becomes apparent even in the ways some critics go about defending themselves and
others against the alleged effects of stereotyping. In Shifting the authors recount the
experience of Lucinda, a black woman who moved into a “luxurious high-rise building”
in San Francisco in order to be closer to her job at a downtown brokerage firm. A couple
of months after moving in, Lucinda was “devastated” when, while waxing her Honda
Accord behind the building, she was afforded the ultimate insult by her white neighbor.
That is, she was mistaken for a housekeeper.
34
While the desire to be recognized for
one’s accomplishments is understandable, and while there may have been a
discriminatory presupposition being made by her white neighbor, lurking beneath
Lucinda’s story is yet another discriminatory presupposition: Lucinda felt her
accomplishments should have shielded her from any affiliation with the multitudes of
black women who have used and continue to use domestic work as a means of economic
survival. This, and numerous stories like it that circulate within stereotype discourse,
speak to the aversion many black people have to certain segments of the black
population, an aversion that is most succinctly encapsulated by one word—ghetto.
33
The standard Oxford definition of “ghetto” refers to a section of a city usually
populated by minority groups as the result of economic or social pressures.
35
But, I
believe one of my other favorite go-to dictionaries, the collaborative web-based Urban
Dictionary, does the best job of capturing what black people usually mean by the term.
The hundred-plus definitional entries of “ghetto” include: “a condition, an association
with people, objects, and behavior not considered ‘acceptable,’ or ‘proper’ by mainstream
society”
36
; “When someone is to be described as ‘ghetto’—it is used to describe that
person’s state of mind”
37
; and “how one presents themselves in how they dress, act, and
speak that acquires itself from the poor conditionings of a ‘ghetto’ up-bringing.”
38

Examples of “ghetto” cited in the Dictionary include: “You might be ghetto if your car
has rims which cost more than the car itself”
39
; “Yelling at your boo in the middle of the
street”
40
; “Replacing a broken window with a trash bag and duct tape”
41
; and, my
personal favorite, “Jane hid her head in embarrassment as her mom shamelessly
committed the ghetto act of stuffing the restaurant’s bread rolls, sugar packets, and
silverware in her purse.”
42

Funny though they often intentionally are, the Urban Dictionary definitions and
examples of “ghetto” evidence a very real reckoning with class on the behalf of the
contributors. They also reveal the contours of a cultural ethic that is often implicated in
the eschewal of stereotypes by black critics and commentators. Ghetto black people—
who I prefer to refer to here as “the folk”—are socially and economically depressed and,
as a consequence, dress and speak in ways that buck mainstream notions of acceptability,
often mismanage their finances, act out in public, and are sometimes compelled to
34
supplement their livelihood through minor looting and the jury-rigging of possessions
they cannot afford to replace or fix appropriately. The folk often become blights on the
race for those black people (of all socioeconomic positions) who are concerned with
proving that black people are just as capable of being as civilized, economically and
professionally successful, and socially responsible as white people. The folk can also be
unsettling for those black people who are heavily invested in maintaining or attaining the
trappings of a mainstream middle class existence and do not want their ascent to the good
life being sullied or potentially derailed by less “successful” family members, friends,
neighbors, or neighborhoods. The ghetto thus becomes, as Robin Kelley suggests, “the
Achilles’ heel in American society, the repository of bad values and economic failure.”
43

When he argues that “the focus on putative ghetto cultures of failure” by
contemporary social critics such as Bill Cosby, Bob Herbert, Orlando Patterson and Juan
Williams “hides serious economic setbacks and political divisions recently surfacing in
Black communities,” David Wellman echoes Kelley’s concern.
44
He argues that the
discourse of black cultural illness that left-leaning public intellectuals are increasingly
invested in advocating substitutes mythology and stigmatizing stereotypes of the folk for
the social science that is directly at odds with their claims. By highlighting empirical
work to the contrary, Wellman convincingly outlines the flaws in the arguments
advanced by Cosby et al. that self-assuredly proclaim the black “underclass” are
responsible for their own oppression due to the deterioration of their personal, familial,
and communal relations. When we stop focusing on individualized behaviors and
anecdotal conjecture, and stop just talking about the folk and begin talking to them,
35
Wellman argues, we begin to get a fuller picture of the folk that appreciates their cultural
mores and value systems—which are not, as it turns out, fundamentally different than
those of the “mainstream,” though they might be articulated differently. And, such a shift
requires us to turn our focus more pointedly to the systemic and structural impediments
that continue to prevent full inclusion within the mainstream civic body (assuming such
“inclusion” is something to be desired, and there is a question that looms quite large
about whether or not it is).
This brings me to the third limitation of stereotype discourse, densely connected
to the second, which is that such discourse often fails to consider the imaginative
possibilities of certain folk-ways, instead chalking every non-normative practice, or every
practice that does not live up to “enlightened” notions of black social consciousness, up
to defeatism. As previously noted, stereotype discourse is replete with discussions about
how black people have internalized negative imagery and, as a consequence, hate
themselves or engage in self-destructive behaviors. Cornel West’s arguments about black
nihilism and bell hooks’s suggestion that black people need to “decolonize” their minds
are typical of this trajectory of thought that often gets taken up in the discourse. But, as
Wellman notes, “when one looks closely at American inner cities, there is little evidence
of the ‘self-abasing pity,’ nihilism, or ‘depressing cultural illness’” that West, hooks, and
others find so troubling.
45
He points to studies conducted by social scientists such as
Terry Williams and William Kornblum (1985), Jay MacLeod (1987) and Sudhir
Venkatesh (2006) which indicate that young people and women living in inner cities are
no more fatalistic or self-loathing than their more affluent counterparts, that they are
36
often motivated and positive in spite of their difficult economic situations, and, that to the
extent they become self-depreciating or negative, it typically comes as a response to
declining social structures that evaporate their sense of optimism.
46

Similarly, Gwen Bergner has shown that the doll tests conducted by Kenneth and
Mamie Clark in the 1930s and 40s, and the cottage industry of racial preference tests they
produced and that continue to help shape pathology discourse within African American
communities, is not as indicative of the purported link between racism and low self-
esteem as some scholars and cultural commentators would have us believe. She notes
that, in part because of the methodological flaws of the Clark tests, the correlation
between racial preference and self-esteem these and similar tests espouse is shaky at best,
particularly given that later tests have found that black youth have equal to or greater
levels of self-esteem than white youth. Finally, Bergner argues that the reliance upon
measures that suture self-esteem to essentialized notions of racial self-identity (e.g., a
black child with healthy self-esteem must prefer a black doll) “might just weaken the
claim for more resources and fuel specious but resilient arguments of blacks’ inherent
inferiority such as those propagated by the infamous ‘bell curve’ or the ‘culture of
poverty’ paradigm associated with the Moynihan Report.”
47
Bergner’s intervention is
important because it is from widely circulated logics that are based upon the assumed
authority of the Clark doll tests and their progeny that discourses around black self-hate
and nihilism tend to emerge.
Apart from the social sciences, Robin Kelley and British cultural critic Kobena
Mercer have also taken issue with the discourse of self-hate. In the introduction to Race
37
Rebels, Kelley describes in detail the mundane intimacies of the McDonald’s where he
worked as a teenager—a place where poor and working class African American and
Chicanos invented new ways of rebelling as they labored together. Rather than chalk the
signifying, brash talk, deliberate acts of carelessness, petty pilfering, and uniform altering
he and his fellow workers engaged in up to immaturity and “false consciousness,” Kelley
suggests they were engaged in unique forms of resistance, both organized and
unorganized, that have significant implications for understanding the history of black
social movements and struggles against oppression.
48
Mercer makes a similar argument
in regard to black hair styling practices. Writing in the late 1980s, he “take[s] issue with
the widespread argument that, because it involves straightening, the curly-perm hairstyle
represents either a wretched imitation of white people’s hair or, what amounts to the
same thing, a diseased state of black consciousness.”
49
Mercer insists that black
hairstyling is a “specifically cultural activity and practice” that must be understood within
its historical context and is indicative, not of self-loathing, but the full range of black
aesthetic expressivity.
50
Ultimately, what Mercer, Kelley, Bergner, and Wellman
effectively argue is that in their rush to blame someone for the depressed conditions and
“moral decline” of black people, contemporary social critics (following along a long path
paved by individuals like Booker T. Washington, E. Franklin Frazier, and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan) who would blame saggy jeans, music video culture, poor self-esteem, and
even the “bad” behavior of black folks on reality television and elsewhere for the
continued inequality of black people, mistake the effect for the cause and individual
behavior for community norms.
38
Toward a Black Feminist Performance Theory
In the late 1980s, Stuart Hall outlined what he discussed as a shift in black cultural
politics over the terms of representation. In noting the shift from “a struggle over the
relations of representation to a politics of representation itself” he marked “the end of the
innocent notion of the essential black subject” which failed to take into account the
diversity of experiences and subject positionalities that congeal under the signifier
“black.” In enunciating this point, he claimed:
Films are not necessarily good because black people make them. They are
not necessarily ‘right on’ by virtue of the fact that they deal with the black
experience. Once you enter the politics of the end of the essential black
subject you are plunged headlong into the maelstrom of a continuously
contingent, unguaranteed, political argument and debate: a critical politics,
a politics of criticism. You can no longer conduct black politics through
the strategy of a simple set of reversals, putting in the place of the bad old
essential white subject, the new essentially good black subject.
51

According to the “critical politics” Hall was concerned with naming, not only could the
“bad” white subject not be replaced with the “good” black subject, neither could the
“bad” black subject. Following Hall, many scholars have argued the need to avoid
canonical cultural categories that attempt to determine what constitute “good” and “bad”
representations because they flatten out difference and do not do enough to acknowledge
the historically contingent nature of race. Beyond that, arguments that attempt to posit
cultural representations as negative or positive always beg the question of who actually
gets to name them as such and, further, the replacement of “negative” representations
with “positive” ones does nothing to dislodge the logics upon which so-called negative
representations are founded. Moreover, Isaac Julian and Kobena Mercer argue that the
39
negative/positive binary holds the marginalization of people of color at an impasse, while
bell hooks argues that we must move beyond the binary because “often what is thought to
be good is merely a reaction against representations created by white people that were
blatantly stereotypical.”
52

The theorist since Hall who has perhaps best articulated the need to move beyond
the essentialist categorization of the subject is Homi Bhabha, who argues that the
stereotype is an inherently ambivalent discursive strategy that is both a fixed construction
of otherness and something that must be continuously repeated—a form that, while
rooted to certain logics of pathology that need not be proven, must be rehearsed again and
again as if to prove that supposedly unmitigated pathology. He further contends:
My reading of colonial discourse suggests that the point of intervention
should shift from the ready recognition of images as positive or negative,
to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and
plausible) through stereotypical discourse. To judge the stereotyped image
on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss it, not to displace
it, which is only possible by engaging with its effectivity; with the
repertoire of positions of power and resistance, domination and
dependence that constructs colonial identification subject (both colonizer
and colonized).
53

Activating a decidedly Freudian notion of the fetish, Bhabha then suggests both
structural and functional justifications for reading the racial stereotype in terms of
fetishism. Structurally, the “repetitious scene around the problem of castration” produces
the fetish as something that disavows the recognition of sexual difference by fixating on
an object that masks that difference and restores an original presence (that was never
really there to begin with). Functionally, the tropes of fetishism, which Bhabha names as
metaphor and metonymy—the former masks absence and difference, while the latter
40
registers that masked lack—“gives access to an ‘identity’ which is predicated as much on
mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and
contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it.”
54
The stereotype
thus functions as fetish by impeding race from signifying anything other than racism.
Still, Bhabha goes on to comment upon the features that distinguish Freud’s sexual fetish
from the stereotype as fetish within racist discourse. He notes, first, that the stereotype is
not a “secret” in the way the sexual fetish is because skin is “the key signifier of cultural
racial difference in the stereotype.”
55
Second, he notes that the stereotype has a greater
range than the sexual fetish object. While the stereotype, like the sexual fetish object,
facilitates certain relations, the object of the stereotype—the racialized person, or, in
Bhabha’s words, the “colonized”—is most often an object of hate, while the sexual fetish
typically makes the whole object that it is associated with desirable. He accounts for this
aspect of the stereotype by explicating a four-term strategy of racial discourse that
associates each of the tropes of fetishism with a form of identification available to the
Lacanian schema of the Imaginary. The metaphor or masking function of the fetish is
related to narcissistic object-choice, and the metonymic figuring of lack is associated
with the aggressive phase.
56

Bhabha’s explication of the stereotype is helpful because it outlines a rationale for
reassessing stereotype discourse that has implications for the course of this project. But,
before I explicitly address the particular theoretical intervention I am moving toward,
there are two additional points Bhabha makes I want to address that are critical to that
intervention. The first has to do with the concept of spectatorship. Bhabha argues, “the
41
drive that represents the pleasure in ‘seeing,’ which has the look as its object of desire, is
related both to the myth of origins, the primal scene, and to the problematic of fetishism
and locates the surveyed object within the ‘imaginary’ relation.”
57
This visual aspect of
fetishism helps explain the tendency toward the cringe discussed earlier. The
ambivalence inherent to the fetish, the way that it makes something known or visible
while simultaneously disavowing or masking it, has ramifications for the response some
black people have to the angry black woman. That many of us are constantly drawn to
watch something we know will make us cringe suggests the fetishistic nature of the black
female body—for black as well as non-black men and women. The second point involves
Bhabha’s claim, noted in the epigraph that begins this chapter, that the problem with the
stereotype is not, as it often gets discussed, a false representation of a given reality, but it
is a construct that creates a problem for the very terms of representation. Thus it is in this
context that I want to consider a move away from a method of addressing representations
of black women in public and popular culture that involves either making preliminary
claims about which images and cultural producers are good and which are bad, or that
would simply attempt to add additional narratives to a space that is already always
fraught. Instead, I would suggest a move toward a consideration of the representability of
the black female body in popular and public culture that attends to the tightly sutured
discursive strategies and performative enactments that regulate black female behavior and
constitute the modalities through which black women come to be idealized in dominant
culture.

42
In order to outline a theoretical model for analyzing black women’s cultural
productions that effectively avoids the pitfalls of stereotype discourse, I believe it is
important to attend to the way scholars have considered the performance of the body. To
that end I turn to the work of philosopher and critical theorist Judith Butler who in the
late 1980s and early 1990s began developing a poststructuralist critique of identity
categories that fundamentally called into question traditional understandings of gender,
sex, sexuality, and the body. In the text for which she is probably best known, Gender
Trouble, Butler argued that it was “time to entertain a radical critique that seeks to free
feminist theory from the necessity of having to construct a single or abiding ground
which is invariably contested by those identity positions or anti-identity positions that it
invariably excludes.”
58
Butler was concerned that the uncritical reliance by feminist
scholars upon gender as a unifying category of analysis ultimately served to undermine
the feminist project. That is, if it failed to adequately take into account those subjects
who, either by compulsion or by choice, challenged the idea of “woman” as
hegemonically articulated—as well as the genealogical foundations upon which those
articulations are formulated—feminism risked complicity in the continued oppression of
those same subjects.
Accordingly, in Gender Trouble (1990) and more concretely in Bodies that
Matter (1993),
59
Butler develops an analysis of social construction that diverges from the
constructivist theories that were central to feminism during the 1970s and 1980s.
Forgoing accounts of the social construction of gender made a distinction between sex
and gender that was based on the notion of a prediscursive sexed body. “Sex” thus stood
43
in for the material, biological female body and “gender” was understood as being what
happened to that body as a consequence of its interactions with the historically contingent
social phenomena created and institutionalized by human beings. Alas, we have the
normative construction of the woman as the weaker, less dominant, less important of the
two sexes. Additionally, the meanings human beings have assigned to those two sexes
produce heterosexuality—and the attendant problem of homophobia. Butler argues,
however, that heterosexuality is not produced by sex and gender in this way but,
conversely, that “compulsory heterosexuality” actually produces our ideas about sex and
gender. She thereby rejects any conceptualization of gender in which femininity and
masculinity are considered the socially constructed outcomes of a biological sex.
60
Butler
contends that the concept of a material female body that preexists sociality must
ultimately be discarded because even that assumed materiality is discursively constituted.
Her point is not that bodies are immaterial or that materiality does not matter, but that the
heretofore undisputed notion of the irreducibility of materiality should itself be
questioned. She asks: “How is that the materiality of sex is understood as that which only
bears cultural constructions and therefore cannot be a construction?”
61
Her aim is to
disrupt traditional understandings of the body and materiality so as “to displace them
from the contexts in which they have been deployed as instruments of oppressive
power,”
62
and to promote a move away from thinking about the gendered body as
socially constructed in the traditional sense and more as the result of a process of
materialization, where materialization is the discursive production of the sexed and
gendered body. This move toward thinking about materialization is important because it
44
helps explain the oppression of queer people. Since in Butler’s formulation there is no
“pure” subject that precedes discourse, both biological sex and gender are considered
consequences of compulsory heterosexuality—“compulsory” because “acting out of line
with heterosexual norms brings with it ostracism, punishment, and violence, not to
mention the transgressive pleasures produced by those very prohibitions”
63
—and
phallogocentrism. In other words, heterosexuality is a “regulatory fiction” that
normatively renders sex as binary and gender as a function of those binary sexes in order
to prevent queer subversions.
The materialization of the sexed and gendered body occurs by way of what Butler
refers to as the “peformative construction of gender.” Though it is sometimes (mis)taken
to mean that gender can be arbitrarily changed at will, Butler’s theory of gender
performativity is not meant to refer to the idea of performance solely in the theatrical
sense. Instead, she argues that her theory is at once theatrical and linguistic;
64
that “what
we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of
acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.”
65
Gender is performative
precisely because it discursively produces the same identity it purportedly represents via
its corporeal enactments. Further, gender is a “social temporality” and a “style of the
flesh” that is “never fully self-styled, for styles have a history, and those histories
condition and limit the possibilities.”
66
Thus gender performance is flexible and
contestable, but those contestations are always historically contingent and mediated. In
Bodies that Matter, Butler further develops her theory of performativity to include a
sustained consideration of the potentiality of contestation, or agency, by way of the
45
Derridean notions of “citationality” and “iterability.” The concept of citationality rests on
the premise that every mark, or sign, can be cited, and iterability suggests that
citationality need not be mechanical because there is always the potential for an alteration
of the citation.
67
Taken together, these concepts suggest gender performances are a
function of the citation and iteration of the regulatory norms of sex. In sum: the
materialization of the body is an outcome of the performance of gender which is, in turn,
the stylized repetitions of the regulatory norms of sex that are produced through
compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism. These norms are not totalizing,
however, because there is always the potential for agency via the subversive repetitions
of the norms.
I gave the foregoing brief synopsis of Butler’s theory of performativity because it
is pivotal to the theory of racialized gender performance that animates this entire project.
In short, I want to consider how the mechanisms of gender performativity are affected by
the specifically black body. Because race clearly does not have the same organizing
principles as gender this is not a matter of simply transposing Butler’s theory onto race,
68

but a practice in thinking about how the particularities of black female experience are
traced upon gender performances. However, the definition of race I am mobilizing here is
motivated by Butler’s argument that gender is not founded upon some sort of biological
essence but is a discursively situated political category. Consequently, I do not
understand race to be simply the function of social conditionings upon phenotypically
different people as if there ever could have been an undefiled moment in which all people
really were created equal. Instead, race here is understood to be the outcome of a politics
46
that hierarchically situates social subjects based on pathological logics of difference. My
contention, then, is that it is important to analyze popular typologies of black women in a
way that moves beyond the limited realm of stereotype discourse because those
typologies mark the fetishized black body in ways that get cited by black women’s
performative enactments of race and gender. Those performances have the potential to be
read in any number of ways, and it is the potential for acting against the norms, i.e.,
misperforming, and our ability to read those misperformances, that enables a radical
(re)conceptualization of black women’s agency and embrace of black female difference.
Important to keep in mind also are the class markers that inflect black women’s
(mis)performances. When he argues that “racial and class distinctions in black America
are a function of behavioral criteria in folk ideologies about identity,” anthropologist
John Jackson is offering up a theory of performance that both attends to the performance
of identity suggested by Butler and recognizes the functionality of race as lived
experience.
69
He suggests that the people at the center of his study—working class black
people in Harlem—use racial performativity as a mechanism for shoring up social
identity. He takes specific issue with the notion that the charge of “acting white” by black
people toward other black people is simply a by-product of anti-intellectualism. Instead,
he argues that the accusation that one is “acting white” is part of a rigorous set of
practices that include the way one walks, talks, dresses and identifies and that “far from
being indexes of a racial essence that precedes them, everyday behaviors associated with
race are what give the racial order its meaning, power, and symbolic significance.”
70
The
jockeying for racial “realness” by working class black folks can thus be understood to be
47
as much a critique of black elitism and the shunning of black folkways that gain their
meaning from the masses of poor and working class black people as anything else.
Keeping this and Butler’s theory about the materialization of the gendered body in mind,
I now return to a consideration of reality television.

“Real”…But Compared to What?
There are seven traits that generally tend to characterize the angry black woman, and
the first is the most obvious. She is angry. Or, she is “mean,” or “bitchy,” or she “has a
bad attitude,” or she is “difficult to work with,” or some version of all of the above. Most
significantly, the anger the angry black woman exhibits is in excess; it goes beyond the
bounds of what “reasonable” people would exhibit in the given situation. Second,
particularly on competition-based shows, the angry black woman makes it clear that “she
didn’t come to make friends.” She is highly motivated to win, whether the prize in
question is a job, money, or a man (and it is almost always gendered in this way), and she
does not plan to let petty things like friendships get in the way of the win under any
circumstances. Third, she is extremely confident. She is convinced beyond a shadow of a
doubt that she is the best at what she does and/or that she has the necessary skills to come
out on top of her other competitors. Fourth, she is outspoken about her opinions. She is
fearless about letting others around her know how she feels about given people or
situations, regardless of whether or not she has been asked to express those opinions.
Fifth, the angry black woman exhibits a clear bodily stylization: the neck swivel, the eye
roll, the finger point, the hand-on-hip, the raised voice, and the tendency to get “all up in”
48
her antagonist’s face. Sixth, the angry black woman often has a hardship story. At some
point during the series the audience usually finds out that part of the justification for the
angry black woman’s anger, insensitivity, or hardness is a particularly difficult childhood,
situation or series of events she has gone through. Finally, the angry black woman often
ends up becoming among the most popular and/or infamous contestants or housemates on
her show, a popularity/infamy she sometimes uses to catapult herself into other media
opportunities once the show has concluded.
I have chosen reality television as a site of analysis of black female performativity
precisely because of its claim to represent “the real.” This reliance may be problematic
for those concerned about how “the real” can and does get manipulated by reality show
producers who are often white, often male, and often middle class. This, however, is not
my primary concern. While I do recognize that television executives have an economic
stake in exploiting the angry black woman narrative, and that they do exploit it, I also
recognize that television executives have an economic stake in exploiting all types of
narratives. Stock characters are the stuff of television generally, but reality television in
particular. In addition to the angry black woman we might discuss the angry black man,
the spicy Latina, the dumb blond, the arrogant jock, the effeminate gay man, the small-
town girl or guy who is “uncomfortable” with the effeminate gay man, the drunk, the
party girl (who is often also the drunk), and so on.
The response to the foregoing observation by some critics is that the angry black
woman is different because it is largely the only image of black women on reality
television. As the argument goes, white people are not in the predicament of having to be
49
concerned with representation at all and do not have to worry about being defined by any
one image, so therefore television executives need to be called to account for, or
altogether made to stop the proliferation of, the angry black woman, or they should be
about the business of adding other, more complex, narratives of black women. Though it
is well taken, this criticism illustrates my point about the limitations of stereotype
discourse. Following the line of argumentation laid out by Hall and Bhabha, I would
question the efficacy of any strategy that would simply dismiss the angry black woman
narrative or attempt to eradicate it without considering the conditions of possibility for
the narrative to exist in the first place, as well as the implications of those conditions.
Further, that the angry black woman is far-and-away the most prolific image of black
women on reality television suggests it preexists reality television, which in turn suggests
it will outlive reality television.
Consequently, my concern is not with eradicating the angry black woman on
reality television as if that will actually solve some problem. Mine is actually a more
deeply abiding concern, which is: Why the angry black woman at all? Of all the heinous
narratives that have ever been grafted on to the black female body, why does a genre that
purports to represent the realities of people’s lives choose to exploit anger as the primary
articulate of black women’s identities? And why does anger never seem to go away for
black women? Why is it the subtext for almost every typology of black women that we
might name from mammy, to sapphire, to the black lady, to the baby mama, to the
golddigger, to the strong black woman? I would like to suggest as at least a preliminary
answer that the angry black woman is neither the product of television executives nor the
50
artifact of the acts of individual black women, but one consequence of the coupling of
race and gender. While we can assuredly name any number of norms that govern the
performance of gender, blackness troubles those norms, alters the performance, creating
an abnormal normality. The black woman is thus conceived in deviance, and anger
becomes the mark of the deviant black female body. This is not meant to suggest that
anger, anymore than any other norm, e.g., heterosexuality, is per se “bad,” but only that it
serves to situate black women as outside of the normative conceptualization of “woman.”
Essentially the angry black woman is but one way that the fetishized black body gets
consumed in public. And, to reiterate a point made earlier, the potential for enlarging the
terrain of acceptability lies not in a blanket condemnation of all angry black women but
in recognizing how black women’s performances of the angry black woman narrative
respond to that fetishization.

51
CHAPTER ONE ENDNOTES

1
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “TV’s Black World Turns—But Stays Unreal,” New York Times,
November 12, 1989.

2
Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse
of Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 75 (emphasis in
original).

3
Linnethia “NeNe” Leakes is the lead character of the hit Bravo show, The Real
Housewives of Atlanta.

4
Vanessa E. Jones, “The Angry Black Woman: Tart-Tongued or Driven and No-
Nonsense, She is a Stereotype that Amuses Some and Offends Others,” The Boston
Globe, April 20, 2004.

5
Teresa Wiltz, “The Evil Sista of Reality Television; Shows Trot Out Old Stereotypes to
Spice Up Stagnant Story Lines,” Washington Post, February 25, 2004.

6
Ibid.; Adika Butler, “Camille McDonald Dispels Rumors and Sets the Record Straight,”
Where Itz At: The Pulse of the Caribbean People, www.whereitzatlive.com, n.d.

7
Chandra R. Thomas, “Are ‘Housewives’ Best Ambassadors for Atlanta?; People
Disagree if Show is Good for City; ‘It’s Entertaining,’ One Says. ‘That’s not My
Atlanta,’ Another Says,” Atlanta-Journal Constitution, September 6, 2009.

8
Kimberly Springer, “Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women: African
American Women in Postfeminist and Post-Civil-Rights Popular Culture,” in
Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, ed. Yvonne
Tasker and Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 267.

9
Denene Millner, Angela Burt-Murray, and Mitzi Miller, The Angry Black Woman’s
Guide to Life (New York: Plume, 2004), 1-5.

10
“Moonstruckbliss,” comment on a YouTube clip of The Real Housewives of Atlanta,
N.d., http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=vHGiOeMbDRI
(accessed January 6, 2010).

11
“Idontgetit,” comment on “Deconstructing ‘The Angry Black Woman,’” Clutch
Magazine Online, comment posted July 20, 2009,
http://clutchmagonline.com/lifeculture/feature/deconstructing-the-angry-black-woman/
(accessed January 6, 2010).
52

12
“scott1234,” comment on “Confessions of a ‘Tiny & Toya’ Addict,” The Root.com,
comment posted August 25, 2009, http://www.theroot.com/views/confessions-tiny-toya-
addict?page=1 (accessed January 6, 2010).

13
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (1990; New York: Routledge, 2000), 69.

14
Ibid., 84, 90.

15
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New
Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005), 119-48.

16
Ibid., 147, 184.

17
Ibid., 174.

18
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 5-
6.

19
Ibid,. 69.

20
Ibid., 75.

21
For examples of this language, see bell hooks, “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” in
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994), 289-98; and
bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

22
For other work with a significant focus on cultural images of black women published
before or contemporaneously with Black Looks and the first edition of Black Feminist
Thought, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-
American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Deborah Gray
White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (1985; New
York: W. W. Norton, 1999); K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond
(London: Routledge, 1993); and Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical
Assault on Afro-American Women (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1991).

23
Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television
(New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2002), 178-79.

24
Ibid., 187.

25
Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-Gooden, Shifting: The Double Lives of Black
Women in America (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 7.
53

26
Ibid., 4-10.

27
Ibid., 11-36.

28
Lisa B. Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American
Middle Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 11.

29
Ibid., 3.

30
Ibid., 2-3.

31
Ibid., 17.

32
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 2003), 5.

33
Andrew Ross and others, “A Symposium on Popular Culture and Political
Correctness,” Social Text 36 (1993): 14.

34
Jones and Shorter-Gooden, Shifting, 12-13.

35
Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://dictionary.oed.com (accessed January 7,
2010).

36
Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com (accessed January 6, 2010), entry
8.

37
Ibid., entry 28 (emphasis in original).

38
Ibid.

39
Ibid., entry 29.

40
Ibid., entry 13.

41
Ibid., entry 7.

42
Ibid., entry 1.

43
Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s DisFUNKtional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban
America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 9.
54

44
David Wellman, “Reconfiguring the Color Line: Racializing Inner-City Youth and
Rearticulating Class Hierarchy in Black America,” Transforming Anthropology 17
(2009): 132.

45
Ibid., 138.

46
Ibid.

47
Gwen Bergner, “Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests,
and the Politics of Self-Esteem,” American Quarterly 61 (2009): 325.

48
Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New
York: The Free Press).

49
Kobena Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions
in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 97. Originally published in New
Formations 3 (1987).

50
Ibid., 99.

51
Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies,
ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 443-44. Originally
published in 1989.

52
Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, “De Margin and De Centre,” in Stuart Hall: Critical
Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London:
Routledge, 1996), 456; hooks, Black Looks, 4.

53
Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 67 (emphasis in original).

54
Ibid., 75.

55
Ibid., 78.

56
Ibid., 78-79.

57
Ibid., 76.

58
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990; New York: Routledge Classics, 2006), 7. Citations are to the Routledge
Classics edition.

55

59
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993).

60
Gill Jagger, Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the
Performative (London: Routledge, 2008), 1.

61
Butler, Bodies that Matter, 28 (emphasis in original).

62
Ibid., 17.

63
Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian
Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 24.

64
Butler, Gender Trouble, xxvii.

65
Ibid., xv.

66
Ibid., 190-91.

67
Jagger, Judith Butler, 67.

68
Indeed, Butler argues against such attempts herself, suggesting that “race and gender
ought not to be treated as simple analogies.” Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.

69
John L. Jackson, Jr., Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 188.

70
Ibid., 187-88.
56

CHAPTER TWO

What it Means to be a Problem:
Of Nappy-Headed Hos and the Serial Murder of Black Prostitute Women

[K]nowledge of our own death determines not only the shape of our lives but also the
culture we live in. Even though knowledge of death fuels all cultural activity, social and
cultural customs prohibit us from conversing about death, dying, or the dead in the course
of living…such a discussion is long overdue and absolutely necessary to an
understanding of how some subjects, in particular black subjects, function in the culture.
—Sharon Holland
1

How can we fathom a social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-
toward-death, and which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly
beautiful vitality?
—Fred Moten
2

Carmea Langford’s voice resonates with the trace of a “terribly beautiful vitality”
when she speaks of her mother. The pride when she reminisces about her mother’s
strength and vivaciousness, the tremor when she recalls learning that her mother had been
found on a rural road, strangled to death at the age of forty-one, the anger when she
remembers her thwarted attempts to memorialize her mother on the day her murderer
publicly confirmed his guilt—all portend the story of a life worth living. And it is that—
Carmea’s refusal of both a physical and discursive erasure—that animates this chapter.
Ultimately that undeterred unwillingness of Carmea to sacrifice her mother’s memory to
the vulgarities of “social death,” despite the scene of deathly terror upon which it is
founded, reveals a Motenian formulation of social life not contingent upon inclusion
within a bourgeois ideation of “the citizen.”
Brenda Erving, Carmea’s mother, was raised during the 1960s and 1970s in an
economically depressed, predominately black, neighborhood of the small Midwestern
57

city of Peoria, Illinois—the same “South Side” neighborhood where she later raised her
own three children. She gave birth to Carmea, her first child, as a teenager and after
completing high school she held a string of low-wage jobs at eateries that catered
primarily to Peoria’s black residents. Though she does not know how or why it began,
Carmea remembers her mother being involved with drugs even when she was a child
(Brenda’s drug-of-choice was crack cocaine), but it seemed to her that Brenda’s drug use
was simply a casual pastime she engaged in with friends. Significantly, it was despite her
involvement with drugs that Brenda, who loved to cook for her friends and family,
eventually opened Chicken, Ribs and More, her own short-lived restaurant. Though it
was eventually closed, the restaurant’s opening, which would have been a miraculous
achievement for any black women, was particularly impressive for a woman of Brenda’s
socioeconomic position. However, during the final years of her life Brenda’s drug use
began to escalate to the point where she was occasionally engaging in sex-for-cash
transactions in order to fund her habit.
3
The growing concerns Carmea had about her
mother’s increasingly dangerous addiction were traumatically realized when, in October
2004, Brenda’s body was discovered, naked and strangled to death, in a rural area at the
outskirts of Peoria. She was but the latest in a series of women who had been murdered
at the hands of a killer who preyed on those who, like Brenda, were black drug-addicted
prostitute women. But while Carmea and her two younger sisters still remember Brenda
as a mother, and as a woman of whom they were never ashamed or embarrassed, who
loved, provided for, and embraced her children and grandchildren, and who never
58

hesitated to let people know she was there, her public memorial consists of little more
than a mugshot and a name on a list of black women gone too soon.
It is my sincere hope that this chapter will, at least in some small way, work
toward memorializing Brenda and the seven other Peoria women who were murdered
between 2003 and 2004, and will effectively respond to Sharon Holland’s call for a
discussion about the functionality of black death and dying. For as much as their lives
were deemed unworthy of being told, the Peoria women, and other women similarly
situated, have a profound story to tell about the radical potentialities of a black sociality
severed from the binds of religious respectability, morality discourse, liberalist
normativity, and idealized notions of inclusion within the civic body.

In the Life
Before moving on, I want to say something about my deliberate and specific use
of the term “prostitute women,” as opposed to the more academically popular term “sex
workers,” or, more simply, “prostitutes,” to identify the women I discuss here. I am not
opposed to the term “sex worker” per se, nevertheless, I believe that correctly used “sex
work” is an umbrella term that encompasses a range of paid sexual laborers, including
call girls, peep show dancers, strippers, escorts, and so forth. “Sex work” is ultimately “a
generic term for commercial and sexual services, performances, or products given in
exchange for material compensation,” and “sex worker” is not meant to replace the
particular terms that many people involved in this work choose to use or identify
themselves with.
4
Consequently, the language of “prostitution” and “prostitutes” conjures
59

up, in this case, quite accurate images of women who work and live out a significant
portion of their lives within a perilous street economy (as opposed to the relatively
privileged positions of women who work in places like legalized brothels, for instance).
“Prostitute/prostitution” is also the language that was most often used within the local
media to describe the Peoria women in the coverage of their deaths, suggesting its
usefulness as a type of sociolinguistic currency. I use the modified term “prostitute
women,” however, to signal my discomfort with the use of “prostitute” as a noun.
Instead, “prostitute women” is used here to allow for an understanding of black women
who engage in paid sexual transactions on the street that is not wholly defined by what it
is they sometimes do.
5
A related term, “prostituted women” has historically been used by
activists and organizers concerned with emphasizing the victimization of women
involved in prostitution. Though I want to be careful to evidence my belief that street
prostitution is a form of sexual bondage that disproportionately affects women of color, I
also want to be careful not to suggest the totalization of that victimization. This is not to
dismiss the horrors of street prostitution or to engage in some wretched form of victim
blaming, but is meant to leave room for a consideration of just what it means to be “in the
life”—a term often used by prostitute women who rarely use either “sex worker” or
“prostitute” (or their derivatives) to define themselves or their work, but who tend instead
to use the vernacular of the trade in which the relevant self-descriptors are “girls,”
“hookers,” “pros,” or “hos.”
6

Making this semantic distinction is not simply an academic formality. Indeed, it is
meant to get at the question that lies at the heart of this project. That is, what does it mean
60

to refer to work that is bound in on every side by the threat of death as a way of “life”?
Or, put another way, how can we conceive of an existence that is conditioned by (its
supposed) nonexistence as living? The answer must bear some relationship to what Fred
Moten describes as the propensity of some people to “relish being a problem.”
7
And it
certainly bears some paradoxical relationship to traditional social death theory. The
groundbreaking claim Orlando Patterson made over two decades ago that “the slave had
no socially recognized existence outside of his master, he became a social nonperson,”
continues to resonate in discussions about the linkages between blackness and death
wherein some iteration of Patterson’s formulation in regards to U.S. chattel slavery is
often extended beyond the antebellum period to the contemporary moment.
8
Following
from Michael Taussig, Sharon Holland discusses this extension as the “space of death,”
the interstitial space between life and death where “some subjects never achieve, in the
eyes of others, the status of the ‘living’…these subjects merely haunt the periphery of the
encountering person’s vision, remaining, like the past and the ancestors who inhabit it, at
one with the dead.”
9
For Holland, the “always already ‘dead’ position of African
Americans in the United States” is a consequence of the dialects of power that
conditioned the master-slave relationship and this continued positionality overwhelms
any discussion of black subjectivity.
10

Abdul JanMohamed attends to this problematic by proposing a set of questions
that guide his analysis of the use of death and violence in the texts of Richard Wright. He
asks: “What happens to the ‘life’ of a subject who grows up under the threat of death, a
threat that is constant yet unpredictable? How does that threat permeate the subject’s life?
61

How far and how finely does that threat permeate into the innermost reaches of
subjectivity…? And, finally, once death has percolated into the innermost reaches of
subjectivity, what kinds of effects does it have, and how does it manifest itself eventually
in the comportment, attitudes, and actions of the death-bound-subject?”
11
JanMohamed’s
“death-bound-subject” is one who “is formed from infancy on by the imminent and
ubiquitous threat of death.”
12
He thus argues that Wright’s death-bound-subjects,
including Big Boy (Uncle Tom’s Children, 1938), Bigger Thomas (Native Son, 1940),
and Richard (Black Boy, 1945), articulate, via their violence and commitments to actual-
death, a refusal to accept social death. While accepting Patterson’s assertion that to be
socially dead is to be without a socio-political presence in dominant (i.e., the master’s)
society, JanMohamed ostensibly extends Patterson’s analysis in order to better
acknowledge the “intrasubjective positions” of those people who continue to inhabit the
space of death even more than a century after the dissolution of slavery. Ultimately,
JanMohamed suggests the rapes, beatings, murders, and overall anarchy caused by
Wright’s characters reveal how some death-bound-subjects might go about unbinding
themselves. That is, they use social rebellion as a mechanism to manifest their selfhood,
their control over their own bodies, and their refusal to accept the legal and extralegal
laws that attempt to regulate them. And, by either seeking actual-death or accepting that
their actions put them at increased risk of actual-death, they abrogate the effects of social
death because it is ultimately the fear of actual-death that conditions social death.
13

Though they do important work in expanding the spectre of death and violence to
include reconsidered notions of black subjectivity, what the formulations of Holland and
62

JanMohamed and other social death theorists tend to obscure is the always already
present social life that must precede any such thing as social death—for to make an
argument about social death is to presuppose the existence of a social life that is not
worth living. Moten gets at this predilection by way of a discussion of Franz Fanon that
pivots on a distinction between a death-driven nonbeing and a social subject more akin to
a Heideggerian being-toward-death. He lingers on the mistranslated title of the fifth
chapter of Black Skins, White Masks—what would more literally read as “the lived
experience of the black” gets translated as “the fact of blackness”—to explore the terrain
of meaning that inheres in the break between “blackness” and “the black,” and which gets
underscored by Fanon’s claim that the black (man) is an ontological impossibility, that is,
one who can only ever exist in relation to the white (man). Accordingly, what is
conceded by Fanon’s formulation is that there can be no black social life when blackness
is only ever a response to whiteness and is consequently always already pathologized,
vacant, or dead, as a result of that correspondence.
What eventually comes into view for Moten, then, is a black social life that
emerges from the lived experience of the black but which is simultaneously denied by its
own supposed impossibility. Ultimately, he argues that “the notion that there is no black
social life is part of a set of variations on a theme that include assertions of the irreducible
pathology of black social life and the implication that (non-pathological) social life is
what emerges by way of the exclusion of the black, or, more precisely, of blackness.”
14

The problem of blackness—the formulation of a sociality, a lived experience, that is
sustained by its own impossibility—is thus glimpsed via a deeply felt desire to claim that
63

which can only be understood, and negatively embraced, through a process of disavowal.
Yet this is not to dismiss Fanon’s ambivalence out-of-hand, but to contemplate what is
held by that ambivalence, for Fanon’s “almost general refusal to look at the way the
colonized look at themselves” is completely bound up with his impulse to reject any
notion of an essential, unpoliticized, criminality constitutive of the black.
15

In what follows, I want to suggest that it is something like this Fanonian
ambivalence Moten demarcates that is traced upon black women “in the life”—women
who might have been said to relish being a problem. I want to think about how the
“refusal to look” is imposed upon those who embody a refusal of their own, who enact, or
perform, a social existence that disrupts social death, even when it simultaneously
embodies a tendency toward actual death. Toward this end, I use the occurrence of Don
Imus’s regrettable, but freakishly apropos, comments about the Rutgers women’s
basketball team in 2007 to consider how some black women are predisposed not just to
physical death, but also to a terrifying discursive erasure (for, as Hortense Spillers tells
us, “sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us”
16
) that
is indicative of this mode of (perhaps, minor) social life.

Of Nappy-Headed Hos

In April 2007, the Don Imus incident exploded in the media. Imus, a long-time
radio “shock jock” made the unfortunate misstep of referring, on-air, to the Rutgers
University women’s basketball team—comprised primarily of black women—as “nappy-
headed hos” the day after they lost the NCAA national championship game to Tennessee.
After being lambasted in the media, enduring public scoldings by activists, losing crucial
64

advertising dollars, and initially being suspended for two weeks, Imus eventually had his
nationally broadcast radio show “Imus in the Morning” dropped by both MSNBC and
CBS, although he ultimately returned to New York airwaves less than a year later.
At least two issues important for the current project emerged as a result of the
discourse surrounding the Imus incident. The first issue surfaced during the news
conference held by the Rutgers women’s basketball team a few days after the incident.
During the press questioning period, one of the reporters asked the women whether they
were more offended by Imus’s remarks “as blacks or as women”—the assumption being
that the Rutgers women could be concerned about either at any given time but not both at
the same time—at least not equally. This assumption was also apparent in the suggestion
by at least one prominent black commentator that Imus’s remarks were primarily sexist.
17

In assuming the Rutgers women were targeted either because of their femaleness or
because of their blackness, the fact that Imus’s animus was directed neither toward
women at-large, nor toward black people at-large, but toward black women as a
distinctive group goes unacknowledged.
However, the foregoing does not mean Imus’s comments were directed toward
black women at-large either. The Rutgers women were targeted not just because they are
black women, but because they appeared to be a certain “type” of black women. In the
full exchange between Imus and the show’s producer, Bernard McGuirk, and its sports
announcer, Sid Rosenberg, the men referred to the game between Rutgers and Tennessee
as a match between the “jigaboos” and the “wannabes”
18
—a reference to the Spike Lee
satirical film School Daze (1988) in which black women at an all-black college split
65

themselves between the darker-skinned, kinkier-haired “jigaboos” and the lighter-
skinned, straighter-haired “wannabees.” While the rosters of both the Rutgers team and
the Tennessee team consisted primarily of black players, the Tennessee team was
described as being “cute,” and the women of Rutgers were, in the words of the Imus
clique, “rough” and looked “exactly like the Toronto Raptors.” The significance of the
Rutgers women being compared to the Toronto Raptors as opposed to, say, the Los
Angeles Lakers or the New York Knicks, should not be missed. By suggesting the
tattoos, “nappy” hair, and physically aggressive playing style, i.e., performance, of the
Rutgers women’s basketball team made them somehow less attractive and therefore more
worthy of derision, and essentially likening them to carnivorous beasts, Imus and
company were not only engaged in classic dominant-group patriarchal, racist mud-
slinging, but were also working to reinscribe the colorism and black intraracial conflicts
Lee was attempting to critique in School Daze.
19
What’s more, they were making a not-
so-coded reference to the idea that many, if not most, female ball-players are gay/lesbian.
Whether or not it is actually true that certain sports attract a disproportionate number of
gay/lesbian women players (and this is a still open question that is peculiar, anyway, in
its asking), the problem inheres in the reality that such a belief makes female athletes,
regardless of race, targets for Imus-like attacks.
The second and most pressing issue raised by the Imus incident concerns the
particular way the Rutgers women were defended. During the aforementioned press
conference, the Rutgers basketball coach, C. Vivian Stringer, proudly proclaimed the
members of the women’s basketball team were “valedictorians, future doctors, musical
66

prodigies, even Girl Scouts . . . they are young ladies of class and distinction, articulate,
gifted.”
20
The consistent rallying-cry on behalf of the Rutgers women held that because
they were so academically and athletically accomplished, kept their noses clean, and
(supposedly) did not engage in promiscuous activity, they did not deserve to be the
targets of Imus’s insults.
The underlying assumption was that if the Rutgers women were not so
accomplished and/or were known to be sexually promiscuous they would then somehow
be deserving of Imus’s name-calling. When the controversy inevitably began to focus in
on the frequently misogynistic lyrics of rap music, some rap artists and their supporters
were quick to make the assumption more explicit. In the words of Snoop Dogg, rap
artists were “talking about hos that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing shit, that’s trying to get
a nigga for his money. These are two separate things . . . we ain’t no old-ass white men
that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls.”
21
In calling for Imus to be removed
from radio, Snoop derided those commentators who sought to compare his message to
Imus’s—claiming the culturally significant experiences of rappers qualify them to make
distinctions between “hos that’s in the ‘hood” and “collegiate basketball girls who have
made it to the next level in education and sports.” Putting aside for the moment that I, and
any person even nominally familiar with rap music, can think of countless songs that
refer to black women generally, without Snoop’s supposed qualifiers, in derogatory
terms, the relevant point here is the marked difference in the treatment of black women of
varying socioeconomic positions.
67

For approximately two weeks the nation was in an uproar over the Imus incident.
Countless articles appeared, activists and talking heads flocked to their posts, and hour-
upon-hour of news coverage were dedicated to covering the story of a wealthy white
celebrity and his friends who hurled insults at eight black college women.
22
This
overwhelming media attention to instances of racial injustice committed against
particular segments of the black community is nothing new, though it often centers
around black men—note the intense upheavals surrounding the Rodney King verdict, the
outrage over the shooting deaths of Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and Oscar Grant at the
hands of police officers, and the protests against the treatment of the Jena 6.
When black women are at the center of struggles for racial justice there is often
some extenuating or socially significant circumstance that effectively prompts media and
activist involvement. For example, Anita Hill and Robin Givens were media-worthy
because they made claims against powerful black men; Crystal Mangum, the woman at
the center of the Duke controversy, garnered attention because of the elite white
community implicated in the charges; and Lani Guinier’s story was compelling because
of her status as a leading civil rights scholar and attorney. As important as the
aforementioned incidents and the ensuing mobilizations of community activism may have
been in the fight for black equality, they mask a frightening truth about contemporary
movements for social justice in black communities. The truth is, at a moment when
Cosbyesque rhetoric about the degeneracy and pathology of poor and working-class
black people and Obama-era mythologies about the advent of “post-blackness” are
becoming more mainstream, only certain black folks truly “matter,” and those folks are
68

largely middle-class, formally educated, and/or male. But, while people were acting out
against the abuse of Rodney King, black women were disappearing. As media-hounds
debated Lani Guinier’s failed nomination for assistant attorney general, black women
were being murdered. And, as attention focused on Imus’s inane banter and subsequent
re-entry to radio, poor black women throughout the country were, and continue to be,
terrorized, abused, and mutilated at an alarming rate.
For instance, in 1992 Benjamin Tony Atkins confessed to sexually assaulting and
strangling to death eleven black women in Detroit, Michigan, for which he was
eventually sentenced to eleven consecutive life terms in prison—and anointed the fastest
serial killer in U.S. history.
23
Five years later, Henry Louis Wallace was sentenced to
death for killing nine black women in Charlotte, North Carolina between 1992 and
1994
24
; he later confessed to killing approximately twenty women in total.
25
Shelly
Andre Brooks, a man charged with murdering seven black women in Detroit, Michigan
between 1999 and 2005, was convicted of two of the women’s deaths in March 2007.
26

In May 2007, Chester DeWayne Turner was convicted and subsequently sentenced to
death in the murders of ten black women he slaughtered in Los Angeles, California over
an eleven-year period.
27
Ivan J. Hill, also known as the “60 Freeway Killer,” was
sentenced to death in 2007 for murdering six black women in the San Gabriel Valley area
of California between 1993 and 1994.
28
Paul Durousseau, who was originally charged
with killing six black women in Jacksonville, Florida and one in Columbus, Georgia from
1997 to 2003, was convicted of the death of one of his alleged victims and sentenced to
death in September 2007.
29
Andre Crawford, who in 2000 confessed to killing eleven
69

black women in the Englewood and New City areas of Chicago between 1993 and 1999,
was sentenced to life in prison in late 2009,
30
and Walter Ellis, a Milwaukee man who in
September 2009 was charged with the deaths of seven black women that occurred
between 1986 and 2007, is currently awaiting trial.
31
Finally, in the summer of 2010
Lonnie David Franklin, the so-called “Grim Sleeper,” was charged with the murders of
ten black women that occurred between 1985 and 2007 in Los Angeles, and he is
suspected in the deaths of several more.
32
Furthermore, numerous serial killings of black
women remain unsolved in cities such as Boston, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Rocky
Mount, North Carolina.
33

All of the men mentioned above are black, yet many individuals still falsely
believe only white men are serial killers.
34
This myth continues to hold currency not
because there have been no known black serial killers, but because serial killers tend to
target poor, socially negligible women—most of the women involved in the previously
mentioned cases were drug-addicted and/or prostitute women; many were also single
mothers.
35
Their lives just do not garner much attention in the popular press where, at
least in missing persons cases, the lives of pretty, middle-class white women are deemed
most important;
36
on black activist agendas, which have historically circulated around the
protection of black men and black masculinity; or within local police stations, where
officials often equate black indigence with criminality.
Accordingly, what all of these murdered women had in common was their
existence within a social pecking order that places poor women of color at the very
bottom. Scores of black women have gone missing and/or been found murdered in this
70

country and no major media outlet does an exposé. Our “leaders” do not come running.
Press conferences are never scheduled. The reason for this discriminatory treatment is
evidenced in the Imus incident. These are the women against whom the Rutgers women
were implicitly juxtaposed. As the most literal configurations of the black-woman-as-
whore narrative, black prostitute women and impoverished single mothers represent the
true nappy-headed hos.

Setting the Scene: How It Plays in Peoria
37

Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-
differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected
political geographies.
—Ruth Wilson Gilmore
38

I worked my way through college as a cashier at a mega shoe store on the west
side of Chicago. World Foot Locker was to other Foot Lockers what Chicago is to my
hometown of Peoria, Illinois. While much of the merchandise and all of the price points
were similar, World Foot Locker’s square footage, annual revenue, number of
employees, and overhead was two to three times that of the smaller franchises. I know
because I worked at one of those smaller stores in Peoria as a high school student—and
my Chicago-area co-workers never let me forget my “humble” beginnings. Though most
of them had never visited my hometown (many of them had never even been west of
Chicago), on sluggish sales-days they often entertained themselves with fictitious
accounts of my adventures in cow-tipping and rock-skipping (Because, really, what else
could there be to do in such a place?), and unsolicited descriptions of the “fake gangsters”
and pseudo-criminals who populated the “town” (Because, of course, such a place could
71

certainly have none of the “authentic” criminal element found within the sprawling
metropolis of Chicago.).
In reality, Peoria is a mid-size city of approximately 112,000 that is, in many
ways, a microcosm of Chicago.
39
Located on the Illinois River about halfway between St.
Louis and Chicago, Peoria, like its larger neighbors, is highly residentially segregated.
The bulk of its 31,000
40
black residents are concentrated on the “South Side” of the city
where housing values are significantly lower, the crime rate is highest,
41
and several of
the public schools are currently in School Improvement Status under the mandate of the
No Child Left Behind Act because of failure to meet federal and state educational
guidelines.
42

Furthermore, while the median family income in Peoria is $46,882 and 18% of all
Peorians live below the poverty line ($54,322 and 10% for white Peorians), the median
family income for black Peorians is significantly lower at $21,563 and 38% of the black
population lives below the poverty line, although black Peorians have a higher average
household size. Beyond that, while 8% of Peoria-area homes are owned by black
residents (12% of the black population), 51% are owed by white residents (29% of the
white population). Within the total population, 83% of Peorians have graduated from
high school and 28% have post-secondary degrees, while within the black population
only 68% have graduated from high school and just 10% have post-secondary degrees.
43

Peoria’s racial and economic stratification has led to a number of conflicts
between the black community and the city’s leadership. For example, charges of racial
discrimination were leveled at school board members when the city’s first woman and
72

first black superintendent, Kay Royster, was placed on paid administrative leave in 2004
for undisclosed reasons just two years after her highly touted arrival.
44
More recently,
city officials were accused of granting 4 a.m. liquor licenses preferentially to downtown
bars and clubs that cater to a majority-white clientele and enforce dress codes excluding
“hip-hop clothing.”
45
In October 2007, black community members protested at police
headquarters after twenty-two students at Manual, a South Side high school in an area
notorious for its lack of adequate sidewalks, were all given $100 jaywalking tickets in
one fell swoop.
46
Discrimination was implicated again when, less than a month after the
“Manual 22” protest, a twelve-year-old black girl was suspended from school after
arriving with her hair in microbraids, a swath of which were maroon, because the
principal deemed them “inappropriate” and “distracting.”
47
Yet, racial tensions arguably
hit their zenith between 2003 and 2004 when police were charged with being slow to
respond after black women began disappearing and turning up dead in remote areas
surrounding the city.
48

Contrary to my former co-workers’ beliefs, Peoria, like its windy city counterpart,
has had its share of felonious activity, not the least of which is serial murder. In fact,
Peoria has had three serial murderers stalk its residents within the past two decades. The
first, Joseph Miller, was convicted of murdering four Peoria-area women beginning in
1993 and the second, Arlie Ray Davis, was convicted of the murder of a woman in
Kewanee, Illinois (a small town about forty miles northwest of Peoria) but was suspected
in the deaths of at least five Peoria-area women.
49
However, the most recent and most
prolific of the three was Larry Bright, a white man who in May 2006 was sentenced to
73

life in prison after pleading guilty to seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of
drug-induced homicide in the deaths of Shirley Ann Carpenter, Laura Lollar, Linda Neal,
Sabrina Payne, Shaconda Thomas, Tamara Walls, Barbara Williams, and the
aforementioned Brenda Erving—all black prostitute women between the ages of 29 and
45 with histories of drug use and addiction.

A Deadly Menace
Larry Dean Bright was born July 8, 1966 to Garry and Shirley Bright.
50
Six years
later, Shirley separated from her husband due to his intense drug and alcohol use, and in
1981 she filed for divorce, sighting “extreme and repeated mental cruelty.”
51
Following
in his father’s nefarious footsteps, by the time he was seventeen, Larry was serving a
three-year sentence for residential and vehicular burglary. As Larry neared adulthood,
Garry began to take a more active role in his son’s life because, Shirley claims, he was
looking for a “buddy.” But, by 1998 Garry was dead of cancer and Larry, who had been
on painkillers for an extended period of time after undergoing back surgery, turned to
alcohol and cocaine to help ease both his physical and emotional pain.
52
It was that
familiarity with drugs Larry Bright used to help lure his victims.
The first body was found in a cornfield on July 27, 2003.
53
Bright had picked 36-
year-old Sabrina Payne up on the South Side before taking her with him to the house he
lived in with his mother in a different part of the city.
54
At some point, Bright decided
Sabrina was trying to steal from him and “he lost control and the next thing he knew she
was dead.”
55
Afterwards, he drove her lifeless body to the outskirts of Peoria and
74

dragged her by her feet into the cornfield.
56
A similar scenario played out months later
when Bright picked up his next victim. On February 4, 2004 he took 36-year-old Barbara
Williams to the one-room “guest house” he lived in behind his mother’s newly acquired
home on Starr Court in Limestone Township—a neighborhood directly adjacent to
Peoria’s South Side. Bright and Barbara were doing crack cocaine when he again
thought he was being ripped off and again “lost control,” punching Barbara in her throat
until she began choking. After she was dead, Bright dumped her body in a ditch in a
rural area where she was discovered the next day.
57
Barbara’s death was the turning
point for Bright because it was then that he claimed he began “hunting”—picking women
up with the express intent of murdering them.
58

About six months later, near the end of August, three women, Shaconda Thomas,
Laura Lollar, and Shirley Ann Trapp, all went missing. Less than a month later, a fourth
woman, Tamara Walls, also went missing. However, the next body found belonged to 40-
year-old Linda Neal. She was discovered on September 25 in a rural area of neighboring
Tazewell County, nude, with a leather shoelace wrapped around her throat. It is not clear
when she was last seen alive, but sometime before September 25 Bright picked Linda up
in a parking lot next to a bar on the South Side, coercing her by revealing his drug stash.
He took her back to his Starr Court home where they drank whiskey, consumed cocaine,
and had sex before Bright choked her to death. Then, using her own shoelace so that he
could get a grip on her, he dragged Linda’s lifeless body to his vehicle and drove her to a
remote area, dumping her on the dirt road where she was ultimately found.
59
A few
weeks later Bright struck again. On October 15, two days after Leatry Sanders saw her
75

daughter Brenda Erving alive for the last time, she was found, naked except for her socks,
lying face up in the mud near a farm entrance road.
60
Although Brenda was, according to
Bright, the victim who put up the fiercest fight and came closest to getting away, she too
met death when Bright’s hands tightened around her throat, though this was not until
after they had spent an hour having sex and smoking crack together.
61

Less than a month later, Bright sealed his fate while being questioned at the
Peoria County Police Department concerning a separate incident.
62
Following that
interview, Detective Dave Wilson collected Bright’s left over cigarette butts and
submitted them for forensic testing. The DNA evidence was a match to a sample
previously collected during the autopsy of Linda Neal.
63
The “separate incident” that
brought Bright to police attention involved charges made by at least two prostitute
women claiming to have narrowly escaped the same fate as Bright’s other victims.
64
One
of those women, thirty-something Vicki Bomar, helped police with grand jury testimony
that preceded Bright’s indictment on murder charges. She revealed how, in July 2004,
Bright picked her up near Harrison Homes—a dilapidated public housing complex on the
South Side—with promises of free drugs or sex-for-cash. Once back at his home, Bright
pulled a knife on Vicki and raped her before she was eventually able to run away.
65

Due largely to testimony and tips by Vicki and other prostitute women, by
December 2004 Larry Dean Bright’s fifteen-month murder spree had finally come to an
end. He was originally charged with drug possession and unlawful restraint charges
before ultimately confessing to the murders in January 2005.
66
Bright did not know the
names of any of his victims, but identified them via photographs and descriptions of
76

where their bodies were discovered. During that confession, Bright also explained what
had happened to the four women who disappeared between August and September of the
previous year. The murders of 32-year-old Shaconda Thomas, 33-year-old Laura Lollar,
45-year-old Shirley Ann Carpenter, and 29-year-old Tamara Walls all went, according to
Bright, very similarly to the others. Yet none of their bodies were ever found. Bright
revealed that instead of dumping their bodies as he had done the others, he dug a hole in
his backyard to be used as a fire-pit. There he would light fires and allow the women’s
bodies to burn for hours until nothing was left but bones and ashes. He would then gather
up the remains and scatter them throughout various locations within Peoria County,
including his own and his grandmother’s backyards.
67

Although he originally entered a not guilty plea in the murder of Tamara Walls at
the behest of his family,
68
Bright eventually plead guilty to all eight murders on May 30,
2006.
69
His plea deal held that in exchange for not facing the death penalty, he would
admit guilt, spend the rest of his life in prison, and waive all rights to appeal. His twenty-
five-word courtroom apology came in the form of a letter read by his attorney—a slight
that resonated with the family members who were present during the plea hearing.
70
For
Brenda Erving’s daughter, the court proceedings that spring day were particularly
upsetting. Although, by her own admission, she is not especially assertive, Carmea had
spent the previous sleepless night physically and emotionally preparing to confront Larry
Bright. The state’s attorney had assured her she would have the opportunity in court to
express to Bright her sense of loss and publicly eulogize her mother. But although
pictures of each of the victims were shown briefly during the hearing, neither Carmea nor
77

any other family member ever received the chance to speak. Thus they felt, in Carmea’s
words, “played two times,” first by Bright, and then by the authorities who throughout
the duration of the case never sufficiently considered their collective needs or wishes. Not
only was she rebuffed in her attempts to “bring close” the life of her mother, she was
frustrated by what she felt was a disregard for her family’s wishes by the prosecution.
While some of the family members of other victims, particularly those who were more
socially connected than Carmea’s, were quick to say they were satisfied with Bright’s
plea deal, Carmea wanted to at least have the opportunity to seriously discuss the
possibility of the death penalty. It was an opportunity she would never receive. As
Carmea put it, “we had no voice, we had no say-so, it wasn’t nothing we could do but
settle for what they wanted us to settle for.”

Race, Sex and Crime
It was, in a sense, the perfect storm of all that race has meant in this country, because you
had these three things coming together—race, sex, and crime.
—Pam Adams
71

The confluence of race, sex, and crime implicated in the then unresolved deaths of
Bright’s victims resulted in a crisis in Black Peoria between 2003 and 2004. As life-long
Peorian, South Side resident, and journalist Pam Adams noted, “everybody had someone
that they were worried about.”
72
Peoria’s black community is small enough that it
seemed most people had some connection, however tenuous, to at least one of the women
who had turned up dead or gone missing. That, or they had a relative or other loved one
“in the life” who fit the demographic of the murdered women. The unease was most
78

palpable in the conflicts between police officials and residents and victims’ family
members who felt the Department had been inexcusably slow in responding sufficiently
to the deaths and the threat posed, particularly to black women, by the unsolved
murders.
73
Eventually, high-profile leaders and activists within the black community
began to agitate on behalf of family members and the black population at-large and the
tension came to a head at a townhall meeting held at a local church on October 25, 2004,
approximately two weeks before Vicki Bomar’s disclosures would lead police to question
Larry Bright.
74

Pastors Timothy Criss and Clara Underwood hosted the first public forum in
which some 400-500 residents questioned police as to why the investigation was moving
so slowly and why there were no black people on the task force that had been created less
than a month earlier—too late in some residents’ opinions—and shared with community
leaders their stories of how fear and grief had impacted their lives during the previous
months.
75
Police responded to the residents’ concerns by assuring them they were doing,
and had been doing, everything possible to find the killer. Furthermore, in response to
specific charges leveled at the Department, they extended search details and added three
black people to the task force.
76
However, not all police officials were convinced the
Department had failed to recognize the urgency of the situation, including John Stenson,
Peoria’s first black Police Chief. Stenson, who retained the chief position in 1997 and
retired in April 2004 in the midst of the case, suggested the problem was not due to police
neglect but was an effect of the murdered women’s lifestyles. Timeliness is crucial in a
missing persons case, he noted, and when families have become accustomed to not
79

having regular contact with their loved ones, late reporting becomes a hinderance to
effective investigative work.
77
For instance, Shaconda Thomas had not been seen by
anyone for over a month before a missing persons report was filed, and both Laura Lollar
and Tamara Walls had been missing approximately three weeks before being reported.
78

For some of the women not found immediately after their deaths, it is not clear whether
missing persons reports were ever filed.
The transience of the women was clearly a real problem for the investigation, yet
something else was implicated in Stenson’s evaluation of police response to the murders.
His comment that “there’s an acceptable casualty rate in a war, there’s an exceptional
violence level in the drug world, and for prostitutes there’s a certain amount of perversion
that goes along with the business,” gives teeth to the concern that police were not
immediately alarmed about the deaths because they involved women known to be drug
addicted prostitute women.
79
His further comment that “some people live on the edge
because they’re pushed there, some people live on the edge because they like it,” hints at
the wide-spread belief that prostitute women somehow deserve, or at the very least
should not object to, the violence they are constantly subjected to because it is the
consequence of their “chosen” profession—a belief that may very well have permeated
the Peoria Police Department. Yet, police were not the only people implicated in
devaluing Peoria’s prostitute women. When reflecting on the sentiment of the black
community and purported universal agreement by the victims’ families to accept without
protest the plea deal preventing Bright from being charged with the death penalty,
80
Pam
Adams suggested the lack of vengeance might have been the product of collective guilt:
80

“There could be some guilt there in the sense of how we felt about those girls. Until this
happened we were ignoring them, didn’t want to see them, all those stereotypes and
everything else that we feel about women who are on the street and addicted to drugs.”
81

Those “stereotypes and everything else we feel” about impoverished black women,
particularly (but not solely) those who are single mothers and/or coping with drug-
addiction and prostitution, are constitutive of a moral economy in which the “image of
the ‘whore’…has been invested with semiological and ideological values whose origins
are concealed by the image itself.”
82
Hence, black prostitute women become the signifiers
of vice, disease, immorality, lasciviousness, and any number of other depravities that get
ascribed to prostitution, without benefit of a simultaneous discourse about the inequalities
that make prostitution and, by extension, prostitute women possible in the first place.

Transgressive Pleasures
This damn puritan morality decrees that we pay for the night’s pleasures with the
morning’s remorse. But we’re getting around it. The guilt is fast becoming our real
pleasure.
—Clive Springer, in Brown Girl, Brownstones
83

Black people have rhythm. Black men have large penises. Black women have
big butts. Certain logics circulating around the physicality of black bodies have become
dogma both within and outside of black cultural discourses. The embrace of these
fictional truisms signals the Black Imagination’s reworking of historically specific
myths—the happy dancing darky, dangerous brute, and hypersexualized hottentot have
given way to celebratory understandings of supposed black bodily difference. Yet, for as
81

much as the body is exalted, black sexuality gets checked in peculiar ways, ways that
have particular implications for how the nappy-headed ho gets read onto the bodies of
black prostitute women. A number of scholars, black women especially, have done
important work in helping us understand the racist and misogynistic foundations upon
which sexualized typologies—also referred to by Patricia Hill Collins as “controlling
images,” and by Hortense Spillers as “nicknames”—of black womanhood are
established.
84
They have revealed the nature of the oppressive work done by ideations of
black women that seek to fix them as little more than sexually deviant beings with little
claim to respect, power, or even basic humanity. But while black female scholars have
been most proficient in outlining the historical contingencies of such ideations, black
women across a range of socioeconomic positions thoroughly understand, or at the very
least, anticipate, their consequences. Thus, in the push to invalidate negative connotations
of black female sexuality, “legitimate” black sexuality often becomes normative and
restrictive:
Like all Americans, black Americans live in a sexually repressive
culture. And we have made all manner of compromise regarding our
sexuality in order to live here. We have spent much energy trying to
debunk the racist mythology which says our sexuality is depraved.
Unfortunately, many of us have overcompensated and assimilated the
Puritan value that sex is for procreation, occurs only between men and
women, and is only valid within the confines of heterosexual marriage
… black folks have to live with the contradictions of this limited sexual
system by repressing or closeting any other sexual/erotic urges, feelings,
or desires.
85

Perhaps nowhere is this repressed sexuality more evident within the black
community than in the black Christian church. The “puritan” values Cheryl Clarke
references above stem from a strict morality endemic to the black church which, while
82

necessarily liberal in many of its political views, is often aligned with fundamental
conservatism in its rigid interpretations of scripture. The black Christian church is
important in this context not only because of its undeniable role in the historical struggles
of and for black community in the U.S. generally, but also because of the specificities of
the case at hand. Black Peorians often locate themselves socially in terms of two things—
which of the four major high schools they graduated from, and the churches they belong
to. While certainly not a homogenous group, Peoria’s black community largely identifies
as Christian protestant. Many, if not all, Larry Bright’s victims had some familiarity with
the Christian church. Furthermore, Christian leaders took the lead in mobilizing and
supporting the victims’ families by organizing prayer vigils, hosting the townhall forums
that were so crucial in getting the grievances of the black community aired, keeping the
community united through prayer and fasting, and eventually even opening a drug
treatment center in response to the deaths.
86

The death of Tamara Walls, who was known to myself and her friends and family
members simply as “Tammy,” was alarming to some who knew her because they could
not believe she would have been involved with either drug-use or prostitution. Unlike
some of Bright’s other victims who had long been associated with the drug world,
stemming back in the case of at least two of the women to their mothers who were also
drug-addicted, it seemed in Tammy’s case it was just “one of those things”
87
—that is,
there appeared to be no logical explanation for Tammy’s drug-abuse and lifestyle. One
resident suggested she “hooked up with the wrong man” and thus began her descent.
88

Tammy’s parents had been, and still are, in the words of another resident, “churchy,
83

churchy.” Moreover, Tammy, her older sister, and her younger brother, were all members
of the church choir as young adults and faithful church attendees themselves. Tammy
was, by all accounts, raised to be an upstanding Christian woman. Yet something went
wrong, so wrong her parents seem unable to acknowledge exactly what it was. To date,
they still have not held a public memorial or funeral in her honor; some say they just will
not talk about her.
89
Perhaps they are in denial, particularly since their daughter was one
of the victims who was burned to ash, thus there is no body to lay to rest. But, perhaps
the inability of Tammy’s parents to publicly embrace her death or celebrate her life also
has something to do with her grooming as a “good Christian girl.” Becoming a good
God-fearing Christian insinuates an understanding of sex as a loving act, but one that is to
be tightly contained within certain proscribed parameters—parameters that are, in theory,
meant to apply to both men and women, but which, in practice, are particularly restrictive
for women. Black women’s sexuality thus becomes circumscribed within the boundaries
of heteronormative marriage and the “virtuous” woman becomes identified as virginal,
self-sacrificing, pious, and modest. The narrative of the über-moral Christian woman acts
as a check upon black women’s sexual agency such that any woman who dares exhibit
any “illicit” behavior—lesbianism, extra-marital sexual activity, consumption of or
participation in pornographic material, sexy dressing, etc.—gets marked as deviant. It is
thus within this context that the body of the black prostitute woman becomes the ultimate
symbol of a fall from grace.
These strictures on black women’s sexuality have roots in the “politics of
respectability” that flourished within the black church women’s movement at the turn of
84

the twentieth century. Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham contends that “while
adherence to respectability enabled black women to counter racist images and structures,
their discursive contestation was not directed solely at white Americans; the black Baptist
women condemned what they perceived to be negative practices and attitudes among
their own people.”
90
Black Baptist church women (as well, I would argue, as men and
individuals of other faith backgrounds) delineated the boundaries of respectable
behavior—boundaries that closely mirrored those of white America—such that they
could make claims for their earned inclusion within the national citizenry. And because
inclusion inherently requires exclusion, church women distanced themselves from the
seemingly less productive members of the “underclass.” They did this most effectively
by marking the church and the private space of the home as the sites where respectable
women toiled, and by marking the public sphere, or “the street,” as the location where
danger thrived and the immoral engaged in lawless and sinful activities.
91

The politics of respectability continues to persecute marginalized black women in
the twenty-first century. Although in the hundred-plus years since the advent of the black
women’s church movement social and sexual mores have relaxed, the black church and
black middle class continue to have a large role in defining the criteria of acceptable
behavior for all black people, and those criteria have changed little since the end of
Reconstruction. Moreover, as the nation increasingly engages colorblind rhetoric, with
its focus on individual responsibilities and successes, and moves further away from social
programs and institutions aimed at addressing larger structural oppressions, discourses of
85

respectability and self-help regain momentum and marginalized black women come
to/continue to signify a form of social life that refuses a hearing/telling.
It is this acquaintance with the nearness of death, with being-toward-death within an
asphyxiating matrix of racism, sexism and classism, that drives some black women to the
street. It is the denial of this acquaintanceship that produces the nappy-headed ho. Yet
Don Imus actually is not the issue because the nappy-headed ho—which is ultimately just
another in a long line of public iterations of the black-woman-as-whore narrative—pre-
exists Imus’s racist name-calling and misogynistic myopia. The real issue concerns the
way in which the nappy-headed ho functions as both an ideological trope and a national
problem that is centered around a deviant black female sexuality that goes unnamed even
as it becomes the fodder for our moral outrage.
As Brooks Higginbotham notes, the emphasis on respectability promulgated by
the black church and laced through much of the contemporary discourse around black
struggles for equality was and is not meant to simply mimic white behavior, but is a
strategy for attaining social justice that, for better and for worse, is alternatively
conservative and radical in its implementation. The thing about strategies, however, is
that there is often more than one in circulation at any given time. The impulse toward
defending the Rutgers women as not nappy-headed hos is part of a strategy for which the
final goal is to achieve and maintain social parity with the dominant group—that is, white
folks. But Carmea’s impulse toward defending her mother is part of a strategy for which
the final goal is to establish the recognition of a life that was worthy of having been lived.

86

Conclusion
We have nothing to fear from anonymity. If we cannot recall a face that looks like our
own, then we cannot fear our own death in quite the same way.
—Sharon Holland
92

Today when Carmea brings up the name Larry Bright to people outside of her
immediate family, they often have no idea to whom she’s referring. Even while Bright’s
case was still active, there were few people, she says, who seemed to know or care what
was happening. Estella Davis, a resident who began a family support group in response
to the killings in late 2004, echoes Carmea’s sentiment. She claims that while there were
“wall-to-wall” people interested in the case while the killer was still at-large and there
was no clear profile of the suspect, wide-spread community support, including that of
some church leaders, quickly diminished once Bright was in custody.
93
This is,
ultimately, the work of the nappy-headed ho. Not only does the nation shun their
existence, but even their local communities dis(re)member them once the immediate
threat to their own lives is gone. As a continuation of the narrative of black female
sexual depravity—a narrative that gets obscured by our national obsession around who
should get named by it—the nappy-headed ho covertly promulgates the very same
subject it is meant to regulate.
Peoria may have only scant memories of eight dead prostitute women, many
residents cannot even call out their names, but their families do remember, and they are
still grieving mothers, sisters, aunts, lovers, cousins, grandmothers, and friends. Shirley
Ann Carpenter, Brenda Erving, Laura Lollar, Sabrina Payne, Shaconda Thomas, Tammy
Walls and Barbara Williams may be gone, as are countless other black women whose
87

names we may never know, but may those who continue to grieve remind us what it
means to be a problem.
88

CHAPTER TWO ENDNOTES

1
Sharon P. Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 15.

2
Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50 (2008): 188.

3
Carmea Langford, in telephone discussion with the author, November 30, 2007.

4
Ronald Weitzer, “Why We Need More Research on Sex Work” in Sex for Sale:
Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry, ed. Ronald Weitzer (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 3.

5
The term “prostitute women” also has a longer history that is often associated with
those individuals who are proponents of the abrogation of prostitution laws. Ibid., 346.

6
Tracy Quan, “The Name of the Prose: A Sex Worker by Any Other Name?” in
Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate about the Sex Industry, ed. Jessica
Spector (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 341-48.

7
Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 187.

8
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1982), 5.

9
Holland, Raising the Dead, 4, 15.

10
Ibid., 6.

11
Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of
Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 2.

12
Ibid.

13
Ibid., 17.

14
Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 188.

15
Ibid., 213.

16
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in
Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago:
89

University of Chicago Press, 2003), 209; emphasis in original. Originally published in
Diacritics 17 (1987): 65-81.

17
Roland S. Martin, “Imus Might Be Spark for Debate on Sexism,” April 13, 2007,
http://www.rolandsmartin.com/blog/?p=52; Gwen Knapp, “Women Need to Raise
Voices on Imus Insult,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 10, 2007. Knapp argues that the
media uproar was focused almost solely on the “racially repulsive element,” which was
partially due to the fact that there are “no women with the brand of clout wielded by a
Jackson or Sharpton.”

18
Media Matters for America, “Imus Called Women’s Basketball Team “Nappy-Headed
Hos,” April 4, 2007, http://mediamatters.org/items/200704040011.

19
Richard Sandomir, “In Old Movies, Fresh Look at Rutgers and Robinson,” New York
Times, April 17, 2007. Sandomir explains that the Rutgers women’s basketball team had
been similarly derided before, as when a columnist comparing them to Connecticut’s
women’s basketball team in 2000 stated that, “[a]ll the tattoos, all the black uniforms and
the headbands and the bravado don’t mean a thing” and “that street style has never
meshed well against the Huskies’ poise and depth.”

20
Michelle Kaufman, “In My Opinion: Imus’ Rant is Hardly Funny,” Miami Herald,
April 10, 2007.

21
WENN.com, “Snoop Dogg: Rappers’ Hos Are Different,” April 11, 2007,
http://www.hollywood.com/news/Snoop_Dogg_Rappers_Hos_Are_Different/3679198.

22
Social critic Michael Awkward argues that the public outrage over the Imus incident
was overblown, and that it ignored and/or trivialized Imus’s commitments to social
justice and elided the complex issues within contemporary racial politics. While I do not
agree completely with Awkward’s formulation, I do believe he is right to point out how
these types of racial spectacles mask the more consequential effects of sexism and
racism. See Michael Awkward, Burying Don Imus: Anatomy of a Scapegoat
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

23
Janet Wilson, “Atkins Convicted of Killing 11 Women,” Detroit Free Press, April 22,
1994; Janet Wilson, “Suspect Describes Raping, Cursing, Killing—11 Times,” Detroit
Free Press, August 29, 1992. Atkins died of HIV infection four years into his prison
term. Joe Swickard, “Serial Killer Dies 4 Years Into 11 Life Sentences,” Detroit Free
Press, October 11, 1997. Atkins’s victims included: Vicki Beasley-Brown, Patricia
Cannon George, Valerie Chalk, Debbie Ann Friday, Juanita Hardy, Bertha Jean Mason,
Brenda Mitchell, Joanne O’Rourke, Darlene Saunders, Vickie Truelove, and Ocinena
Waymer.

90

24
Paul Nowell, “Killer Condemned, Apologizes for Deeds,” The Star-Ledger, January
30, 1997. Wallace’s known victims include: Betty Baucom, Shawna Hawk, Brandi
Henderson, Valencia Jumper, Caroline Love, Vanessa Mack, Debra Slaughter, Audrey
Spain, and Michelle Stinson.

25
Jason Lapeyre, “The Serial Killer the Cops Ignored: The Henry Louis Wallace
Murders,” http://crimemagazine.com/henrylouiswallacemurders.htm (accessed June 5,
2009).

26
Ben Schmitt and David Ashenfelter, “Detroit News Briefs,” Detroit Free Press,
March15, 2007. Brooks’s known victims include: Sandra Davis, Pamela Greer, Thelma
Johnson, Rhonda Myles, Melissa Toston, and Marion Woods-Daniels.

27
Christine Pelisek, “Silent Wraith: Chester Turner: By Slaying Black Women, LA’s
Worst Serial Killer Operated Invisibly for Years,” Los Angeles Weekly, May 2, 2007. In
total, Turner was convicted of eleven murders, those of the ten women and the fetus of
one woman, Regina Washington, who was six and a half months pregnant at the time of
her death. Turner’s other victims were: Mildred Beasley, Brenda Bries, Annette Ernest,
Anita Fishman, Diane Johnson, Desarae Jones, Natalie Price, Andrea Tripplett, and Paula
Vance.

28
Jill Leovy and Peter Hong, “Jury Orders Death Penalty for Man Convicted in Freeway
Slayer Case,” Los Angeles Times, January 3, 2007. Hill’s victims were: Debra Denise
Brown, Roxanne Brooks Bates, Donna Goldsmith, Betty Sue Harris, Helen Hill, and
Cheryl Sayers.

29
Jim Schoettler, “Jury Calls for Death Penalty: Alternate Juror Notes Durousseau
Seemed ‘Cold as Stone’ at Murder Trial,” Florida Times-Union, June 29, 2007; Jim
Schoettler, “Mom Waits 8 Years for Death Sentence,” Florida Times-Union,
December14, 2007. Durousseau was convicted of killing Tyresa Mack. His other
alleged victims were: Surita Cohen, Tracy Habersham, Jovanna Jefferson, Nikia Kilpatrik
(who was six months pregnant at the time of her death); Shawanda McCaliser (who was
also pregnant at the time of her death), and Nicole Williams. Angela Spears, “Jury
Selection Begins in Trial of Accused Serial Killer,” First Coast News, May 21, 2007,
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/mostpopular/news-
article.aspx?storyid=82412&provider=top.

30
Sabrina L. Miller and Terry Wilson, “Suspect Glad He’s Caught, Cops Say; Taped
Confessions, DNA Help Make Case,” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 2000; Matthew
Walberg, “Serial Killer Hears 21 Verdicts of Guilty; Man is Convicted of 11 Grisly
Slayings from 1993 to 1999,” Chicago Tribune, December 11, 2009; Matthew Walberg
and Stacy St. Clair, “Serial Killer Spared Death by Split Jury; Verdict Met with Tears and
Disappointment,” Chicago Tribune, December 19, 2009. Crawford’s victims were
91

Constance Bailey, Sonja Brandon, Cheryl Cross, Tommie Dennis, Patricia Dunn,
Evandre Harris, Sheryl Johnson, Rhonda King, Angela Shateen, Nicole Townsend, and
Shaquanta Langley.

31
Richard Battin, “Milwaukee Serial Killer Suspect’s Trial to Start in May,” September
27, 2009, http://www.examiner.com/x-15948-Homicide-Examiner~y2009m9d27-Photo-
gallery-update-Milwaukee-serial-killer-suspects-trial-to-start-in-May. Ellis has, to date,
been charged with the deaths of Joyce Mims, Quithreaun Stokes, Sheila Farrior, Florence
McCormick, Irene Smith, Deborah Harris, and Tanya Miller. He is also suspected in the
deaths of Carron Kilpatrick and Jessica Payne (his only alleged victim who was white).
“Walter Ellis Charged with Five More Women’s Deaths: Suspected Killer Accused of
Homicides from 1986 to 2007,” September 10, 2009,
http://www.wisn.com/news/20839180/detail.html.

32
Christine Pelisek, “How They Caught Grim Sleeper Suspect Donnie Franklin Jr.: His
Own Son’s DNA Trail Led Them Straight to Him,” LA Weekly, July 7, 2010; Andrew
Blankstein and Richard Winton, “New Cases Linked to Sleeper; A Pair of Slayings
Convinces the LAPD that the Serial Killer Never Really Stopped During a 13-year
‘Gap,’” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2011. Franklin’s alleged victims include Debra
Jackson, Henrietta Wright, Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, Mary Lowe, Lachrica
Jefferson, Alicia “Monique” Alexander, Princess Berthomieux, Valerie McCorvey, and
Janecia Peters.

33
Barbara Smith, “Twelve Black Women: Why Did They Die?,” in Fight Back!:
Feminist Resistance to Male Violence, ed. Frédérique Delacoste and Felice Newman (San
Francisco: Cleis Press, 1981): 68. Smith discusses the deaths of twelve young black
women in Boston between January and May of 1979, and the lack of media coverage in
the case; Chuck Hustmyre, “B.R.’s Other Serial Killer,” February 27, 2007,
http://www.225batonrouge.com/news/2007/feb/27/brs-other-serial-killer/. Hustmyre
states that at least eleven, and as many as twenty, black women were murdered in Baton
Rouge between 1996 and 2004; Vicki Hyman and James Varney, “Forgotten Faces,”
Times-Picayune, August 27, 1995. Hyman and Varney detail the stories of twenty-one
black women and three gay black men killed in New Orleans between 1991 and 1995.
The known victims in this case include: Danielle Britton, Stephaney Brown, Henry
Calvin, Wanda Ford, Karen Ivester, Cheryl Lewis, Delores Mack, Lydia Madison,
Regetter Martin, Stephanie Murray, Regina Okoh, Noah Philson, Charlene Price, Sharon
Robinson, Teira Tassin, George Williams, and Sandra Williams; Krista Gesaman, “How
the Media Treat Murder: Why Isn’t the Story of Several Missing Women in North
Carolina Getting Attention?” Newsweek, October 21, 2009.

34
A quick google of the topic of black serial killers will reveal a number of sites where
white men, in particular, are invested in cataloging stories about black serial killers as
92

“evidence” that black men are just as prone to commit mass and serial murders as are
white men.

35
Eric W. Hickey, Serial Murderers and Their Victims, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA, 2006):
141-48. Hickey suggests that one in five serial killers is a black man. Furthermore, he
suggests black men are actually disproportionately overrepresented when taking into
account the race and ethnicity of known serial killers, noting that “there have been at least
200 cases of black serial murder in the United States since the mid-1800s.”

36
Alex Johnson, “Damsels in Distress: If You’re Missing, It Helps to Be Young, White
and Female,” July 23, 2004, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5325808.

37
Because of its demographics and geographical location, Peoria has historically been
thought to be an ideal test market—thus the slogan, “Will It Play in Peoria?”
38
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of Global Change:
Remapping the World, ed. R.J. Johnston, Peter J. Taylor, and Michael J. Watts, 2nd
edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 261.

39
“ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates: 2006. Peoria city, Illinois.” American
Factfinder. Bureau of the Census (2006). American Factfinder lists Peoria’s total
population in 2006 at 111,983.

40
American Factfinder lists Peoria’s black population at 30,621 (27% of the city’s total
population). However, while black people are overrepresented in Peoria in comparison to
their numbers in the general U.S. population and 67% of the population is white, only 4%
of the demographic is Asian, 4% is Latino or Hispanic, and less than 1% is American
Indian.

41
See the Peoria Police Department’s website at www.peoriapd.com for crime density
statistics within Peoria’s nineteen police districts.

42
Of Peoria’s fifteen Title I schools, nine are in School Improvement Status and six of
these—Manual High School, Trewyn Middle School, Tyng Primary School, Roosevelt
Magnet School, Garfield Primary School, and Harrison Primary School—are located on
the South Side. Peoria Public Schools District 150, 2007 School Report Card (2007),
http://www.psd150.org/SRC07/PeoriaDistrict07.pdf.

43
“Fact Sheet: Census 2000. Peoria city: Illinois.” American Factfinder. Bureau of the
Census (2000).

44
Andy Kravetz, “Royster’s Charges of Racism Denied: 2 School Board Members
Respond to Suit Filed by Former District 150 Superintendent,” Peoria Journal Star, July
6, 2006.
93

45
John Sharp, “City May Rethink 4 A.M. Bar District Decision,” Peoria Journal Star,
November 6, 2007.

46
Pam Adams, “Police Crackdown Raises Bigger Issues,” Peoria Journal Star, October
11, 2007. The students were dubbed the “Manual 22.”

47
Phil Luciano, “School Stands by Hair Color Decision,” Peoria Journal Star, November
3, 2007. Shawnterya Carter was allowed back in school after the school district received a
letter from the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union and local NAACP president
condemning Carter’s removal as prejudicial and discriminatory. Frank Radosevich II,
“Student with Dyed Hair Will Go to Class,” Peoria Journal Star, November 9, 2007.

48
Aamer Madhani, “Peoria Fears Serial Killer is Preying on Addicts,” Chicago Tribune,
November 18, 2004.

49
Most of Miller’s and Davis’s victims were white prostitute women. Phil Luciano,
“What Drove Bright to Kill?,” Peoria Journal Star, June 3, 2006. Davis was convicted of
murdering Laurie Gwinn. People v. Davis, Ill. S. Ct (1998). Miller was convicted of
killing Marcia Logue, Sandra Csesznegi, Helen Dorrance, and Bernice Fagotte. He’d
previously served time for killing two Chicago-area prostitute women, Ann Maxham and
Martha Kowalski, and later claimed to have killed other women, including Valerie Sloan
and Stacey Morrison. Dave Orrick, “True Confession?: Convicted Killer Says He’s the
Answer to a Pair of Decade-Long Mysteries,” Chicago Daily Herald, December 12,
2004.

50
Ibid.

51
Phil Luciano, “Bright’s Mother Blames Drugs for Spawning an ‘Evil Monster,’”
Peoria Journal Star, February 2, 2005.

52
Ibid.

53
While Bright was ultimately convicted of the deaths of eight women, ten women
actually went missing between 2001 and 2003. Wanda Jackson’s strangled body was
discovered on March 21, 2001. Frederickia Brown went missing on Christmas Eve 2003
and her decomposed body was discovered in a field two months later. Although the
deaths of Wanda and Frederickia were similar to the those of the other women and they
shared a similar background with Bright’s victims, because Bright denied having any
involvement in their deaths and there was no forensic evidence to link the women to him,
their deaths remain unsolved and they are not officially considered Bright’s victims.
Leslie Williams, “Suspect’s Arrest is Adding Questions—Case Quandry: If Larry Bright
94

Says He Didn’t Kill Peorians Wanda Jackson and Frederickia Brown, Then Who Did?,”
Peoria Journal Star, February 1, 2005.

54
Although Bright lived with his mother throughout his killing spree, she reportedly
spent many evenings away at the home of her boyfriend, leaving Bright to engage in his
nighttime activities undisturbed. Luciano, “Bright’s Mother Blames Drugs.”

55
Bright’s Confession.

56
Ibid.

57
Barbara’s death was officially determined to be a cocaine overdose, for which Bright
was charged with drug-induced homicide. Ibid.

58
Ibid.

59
Ibid.

60
Sarah Okeson, “Coroner Says Woman Died of Asphyxiation,” Peoria Journal Star,
October 17, 2004; Bright’s Confession.

61
Ibid.

62
Bright was initially questioned on November 11, 2004. Ibid.

63
Ibid.

64
Matt Dayhoff, “Prostitute Flees Deadly Grip—A Peoria Woman Recounts Her Night
with Slaying Suspect Larry Bright, Saying He Promised Drugs and Read Her Miranda
Rights,” Peoria Journal Star, February 4, 2005; Dave Haney, “Stories in the Shadows,”
Peoria Journal Star, December 5, 2004.

65
Dayhoff, “Prostitute Flees Deadly Grip.”

66
Jan Dennis, “Bright Trial DNA Tests Could Take Six Months—So Far, Evidence
Collection Has Been ‘Slow Going,’ Lyons Says,” Peoria Journal Star, February 25,
2005.

67
Bright’s Confession.

68
Jan Dennis, “Accused Serial Killer Pleads Not Guilty to Latest Charges—Change of
Venue Motion Postponed,” Peoria Journal Star, January 28, 2006.

95

69
Bright’s Confession.

70
Bright’s confession read: “I know that I have committed some horrific and unthinkable
acts. I am very sorry for the grief and the heartache that I have caused.” Andy Kravetz,
“Relief and Anger: Peorian Will Spend Rest of Life in Prison,” Peoria Journal Star, May
31, 2006.

71
Pam Adams (Features Reporter, Peoria Journal Star), in telephone interview with the
author, November 4, 2007.

72
Ibid.

73
Dave Haney, “As Peoria County-Based Task Force Pursues Possible Links to Series of
Slayings, Families Are Left Guessing at Their Loved Ones’ Fates,” Peoria Journal Star,
October 20, 2004.

74
Steve Nicoles, “Police, Community Get Together to Fix Violence Issue,” Peoria
Journal Star, October 27, 2004.

75
Dave Haney, “Second Meeting Scheduled on Six Killings: African-American
Community ‘Wants to Know What’s Going On,’” Peoria Journal Star, November 5,
2004; Adams Interview.

76
Sarah Okeson, “Peorians Weep for Lost Women—At Church Forum, Participants
Discuss Unsolved Cases and Pray for Their Loved Ones,” Peoria Journal Star,
November 9, 2004.

77
John Stenson (Retired Police Chief, Peoria Police Department), in telephone interview
with the author, November 7, 2007.

78
Bright’s Confession.

79
Stenson Interview.

80
Pam Adams, “The Politics of Punishment,” Peoria Journal Star, September 7, 2006.

81
Adams Interview.

82
Hortense J. Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” in Black, White and In
Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (1984; Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 174).

96

83
Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959; New York: The Feminist Press,
1981): 245. Citations are to the Feminist Press edition.

84
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000); Spillers, “Mama’s
Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 210.

85
Cheryl Clarke, “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,” in
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table:
Women of Color Press, 1983; New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000): 190,
192. Citations are to the Rutgers edition.

86
Okeson, “Peorians Weep for Lost Women”; David Zalaznik, “Center Seeks to Aid
Drug Addicts—Plight of Recent Murder Victims Spurs Peoria Pastor Into Action,”
Peoria Journal Star, June 21, 2006.

87
Naomi Butler (Peoria Resident), in interview with the author, November 10, 2007
(name changed for confidentiality).

88
Manita Calhoun, (Peoria Resident), in interview with the author, November 10, 2007
(name changed for confidentiality).

89
Aamer Madhani, “Guilty Plea Brings Peace to Families; Relatives of Eight Slain in
Peoria Start to Feel Closure After Killing Spree,” Chicago Tribune, June 1, 2006.

90
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the
Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993): 187.

91
Ibid., 194-211.

92
Holland, Raising the Dead, 38.

93
Estella Davis (Founder, Families United for Christ), in telephone interview with the
author, November 25, 2007.
97

CHAPTER THREE

(Mis)Performing Morality:
Sacred Sexuality and the Making of a Good Christian Girl

In September 2009 the foundations of Black Christiandom were, if not completely
shaken, certainly rattled a bit. Tonéx, the artist otherwise known as Anthony Charles
Williams II, caused a holy brouhaha when he finally responded to the rampant rumors
and speculations about his sexuality in the affirmative.
1
Yes, the two-time Grammy
nominee and seven-time winner of gospel music’s highest honor—the Stellar Award—
did indeed, in his words, “lean more towards the same sex.” Ever since first coming to
national attention with the release of his inaugural major-label album Pronounced Toe-
Nay in 2000, the San Diego native had dodged, dismissed, and sometimes forcefully
renounced accusations that he was either gay or bisexual. Of course, such accusations are
not uncommon in the gospel music industry which, perhaps even more than its secular
counterparts (e.g., R&B and hip hop), is relentlessly committed to the proliferation of a
certain brand of black hypermasculinity.
Yet, in the case of Tonéx the suspicions could hardly be dismissed as mere
occupational hazard. Both on-stage and off, his theatrics (often purposely) do more to
inflame his critics than to quiet them. Particularly during the earlier years of his career,
Tonéx was as known for his extravagant costuming, which included top hats, boas, wigs,
platform shoes, elaborate head wraps à la Erykah Badu, multi-colored hair-pieces,
mohawk hairdos, and prominent piercings and tattoos, as he was for his music. His
penchant for yodeling and unabashed exhibition of his multi-octave range, including a
98

particularly strong falsetto, adds an additional element of flare to his stage and video
performances, which have often featured highly choreographed dance routines.
Ultimately, Tonéx’s musical repertoire is as overtly influenced by gospel music
heavyweights such as Fred Hammond and The Clark Sisters as it is by pop icons such as
Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson, and he has often been referred to as gospel music’s
version of Prince. Even his stage name, ostensibly a play on “Tony,” a shortened version
of his birth name, arguably has a queer subtext.
Equal parts singer, rapper, and producer, Tonéx resists being labeled as either a
gospel or a secular artist, and he deliberately pushes the boundaries of both with
provocative tunes that merge the sacred and secular. The majority of his music catalogue,
which includes more than a dozen mainstream and underground albums and a multitude
of EPs and singles released over the past decade and a half, feature songs that could just
as appropriately, and in some instances more appropriately, be placed on R&B or pop
charts as they could gospel music charts. His 2003 independent release Oak Park 92105
(which was re-released two years later exclusively via iTunes) was the first “Christian-
based” album to carry a parental advisory label because of content Tonéx referred to as
possibly being “a little too deep for children.”
2
And his most commercially successful
album, Out the Box (2004) includes songs that extol the virtues of God with the help of
samples from the Quincy Jones-produced song “He’s the Wizard” from the 1978 film
The Wiz (“Work on Me”), the Jackson 5 hit “Dancing Machine” (“Alive”), and the theme
music from the game show Family Feud (“Games”).
99

Since his early years in the national spotlight, the controversy surrounding Tonéx
has only grown as he has dealt with a number of personal and professional issues,
including the illness and sudden death of his father in 2004 that forced Tonéx to become
the pastor of his father’s church virtually overnight; his divorce in 2005 from Yvette
Williams (née Graham), his wife of four years; a very public dispute with his then record
label Verity (an imprint of Zomba Label Group) that resulted in Tonéx splitting with the
company and being sued for over one million dollars; and eventually, in 2006, a physical
and emotional breakdown that led him to announce he was retiring from the music
industry. The retirement was short-lived, however, because in 2007 Tonéx released via
his Myspace page the song “The Naked Truth,” an angry, profanity-laden diatribe against
the individuals and institutions he felt had betrayed and castigated him over the course of
his career. Once released on the internet the song quickly took on a life of its own, and
most Christian audiences were thoroughly appalled by Tonéx’s unabashed harangue.
“I’ve got my cock back / No longer castrated,” he chants at one point. And speaking
directly to his critics he proclaims: “Ya’ll tried to defame me, ya smashed me, but I got
back up / I never thought that I would have the strength to man back up / but now I stand
with both my fingers stuck right up / yep, I did it / I made it / the genius, the faggot, the
weirdo, the homo, the hobo, the magnet.”
3
While Tonéx later issued an open apology
letter to his church home, his denominational organization, Pentecostal Assemblies of the
World (PAW), and his fans, eventually even adopting a new spelling of his name
(TON3X) as a symbolic gesture of the metamorphosis he says he underwent as a
consequence of releasing his built-up anger on the track, the damage had been done. In
100

early 2007 Tonéx had managed to make amends with Zomba, but he was officially
dropped from the company’s roster after the release of “The Naked Truth” because of
what Zomba cited as “Tonex’s decision to move in an artistic direction outside the scope
of gospel music.”
4

Most significantly, “The Naked Truth” incident signaled the beginning of Tonéx’s
obligatory shift away from the gospel music mainstream. No longer the industry’s golden
child, his pariah status was solidified when an interview he conducted with The Lexi
Show, a talk show produced by the Christian-based Word Network, aired in September
2009. During the interview, music artist-turned-journalist Lexi Allen questions Tonéx
about lyrics in “The Naked Truth” that reference episodes of sexual molestation he
experienced as a child. In responding to her inquiry, Tonéx begins to delve into the
speculation surrounding his sexuality that has dogged him for so long. He states that
while, yes, he has been molested, he does not want to blame the molestation on his later
“sexual explorations,” including those with other men. This is a direct challenge to claims
made by other high-profile Christians, the most obvious being gospel artist Donnie
McClurkin, who have said their same-sex liaisons/attractions are a consequence of sexual
abuse they suffered earlier in their lives (which then allows them to claim they have been
“delivered” from homosexuality because God has “delivered” them from the
psychological trauma of the sexual abuse).
5
Following that revelation, Tonéx, ever the
performer, coyly dodges the more pointed questions about his sexuality that are then
inartfully put to him by his clearly flustered host:

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Lexi: Is…being attracted to men under control?
Tonéx: Under control?
Lexi: You said you were attracted to men at one point.
Tonéx: Am.
Lexi: Am?
Tonéx: Mm-hmm.
Lexi: So…do you practice?
Tonéx: Like piano? [He laughs.]
Lexi: Homosexuality. I don’t know how to put that. I’m trying to put it as—I’m
literally trying to put this the best…do you sleep with men?

Tonéx: I don’t sleep with men.
Lexi: You’re making this real hard for me, and you know exactly where I’m
going. Um, you say you don’t—when I said do you struggle with homosexuality
you said no it wasn’t a struggle.

Tonéx: It’s not a struggle. No.
Lexi: What are you doing, man? Who are you dating? Are you considering dating
men? Are you considering dating women? Is homosexuality a thing of the past for
you?

Tonéx: Is homosexuality a thing of the past? I think that when someone
understands who they are sexually, and they know that they’re a free spirit, and
they understand who they are as a person, it’s really difficult to label that.

Though clearly reluctant to label himself as “gay” or “homosexual,” by the end of
the interview Tonéx has made it quite evident what he is “doing,” and attempting to put
homosexuality “in the past” is not it. He states unequivocally that he is attracted to men
and “has experienced gay sex before,” but stresses his refusal to leave the church or stop
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preaching because of his view that there is space in the Kingdom of God for people with
alternative sexual identities, a space he is increasingly invested in nurturing, despite the
disapproval of the Christian majority. And disapprove they clearly do. Immediately
following the airing of The Lexi Show interview, concerts and appearances Tonéx had
lined up were cancelled, his friends and colleagues in the gospel music industry grew
distant, and his critics took to the internet, radio airwaves, and pulpits to advocate the
need for his divine deliverance.
6
Even Lexi was careful to distance herself from her
interviewee. In a post-interview segment of the show just before the final credits roll she
is shown sitting alone in the show’s control room where she looks sedately into the
camera and makes the following statement:
I would like to take this time to thank my friend and brother Tonéx for a
very open, honest, and candid interview. It is my belief that a man is made
for a woman, and a woman is made for a man. I believe that the Bible
speaks very clearly about this. However, as a journalist it is my job to tell
the story. And as a Christian, it is my job to love absolutely everybody and
I do that, unequivocally, and unapologetically. So until next time.

Thus, within seconds, any semblance of journalistic neutrality Lexi might have
seemed to be committed to during the interview with Tonéx is effectively disavowed.
Essentially, her disclaimer is a reworking of the “hate the sin, love the sinner” rhetoric
that often gets used in reference to LGBTQ people by Christians ostensibly concerned
with upholding competing biblical authority—namely, that homosexuality is an
“abomination” (Leviticus 18:22), yet Christians are called upon to withhold judgment of
other people (Matthew 7:1-6) and commanded to love their neighbors emphatically (i.a.,
Leviticus 19:18). Nevertheless, the notion that the “sin” of homosexuality (i.e., sex with
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and/or physical attraction to someone of the same gender) can be separated from the
person who commits that alleged sin rests on the faulty supposition that homosexuality is
akin to something like adultery. But, as Michael Eric Dyson notes in his criticisms of the
black church’s
7
discomforting reckoning with sexuality, “with gay and lesbian identity, to
hate what they do is to hate what they are.”
8
Yet many Christians who advocate against
LGBTQ people continue to conceive of homosexuality as a condemnatory act or series of
acts rather than, say, a formulation of identity. As such, the argument that one can no
more profess to love a gay person but not their gayness than profess to love a black
person but not their blackness is effectively lost on Christians who are at once convinced
by the deliverance stories of individuals like Donnie McClurkin and committed to the
“don’t ask, don’t tell” policies that permeate black churches.
While it is not often that individual journalists feel the need to so explicitly
distance themselves from the subjects of their inquiries, Lexi’s disclaimer is not
surprising. Given the audience to which she speaks, which is largely black and Christian,
she had to know Tonéx’s interview would be highly controversial and that there would be
viewers who would be looking for her to stake a claim—because to most of those viewers
her primary allegiance should be to her Christian ethics, “properly” defined. What is most
significant about Lexi’s disclaimer, however, is the way it situates her in relationship to
Tonéx. Where he is implicitly positioned as the morally deficient backslider, she
positions herself as the righteous Christian who does not condone Tonéx’s behavior, but
in interviewing him is responsibly fulfilling her duties as a journalist and simultaneously
following the mandates of Christian law.
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Lexi is, in effect, performing the “good Christian girl.” Though we cannot
ascertain from the Tonéx interview alone many of the personal details of Lexi’s life, her
off-screen behavior is for the most part beside the point. The narrative arc she cultivates
through her on-screen posturing suggests she is morally upstanding and aware of and
devoted to the appropriate roles for Christian women and men (though there are moments
in the interview when she seems to be subtly critiquing them), that she is responsible and
committed to her work, and that even when she disagrees with them, she remains loving
and embracing toward the men in her midst. Lexi’s professed naivety about even the
terms of homosexuality speak to the girlishness indicated by the term “good Christian
girl,” which is meant not to suggest immaturity so much as it indicates an innocence
(particularly in terms of sexuality) that is cultivated in childhood and is presumably
retained by virtuous Christian woman who are expected to remain virgins until marriage,
and then to have only their husbands as sexual partners for the duration of their lives,
except in the case of death (which, it should be noted here, is the case with single mother
Lexi whose husband, music producer Michael Allen, died of cancer circa 2004).
Further, Lexi’s grooming adds to the narrative—she is positively feminine, her
nails are manicured, her make-up is flawless and understated, her long blondish brown
hair (weave) falls down to her full breasts which are appropriately, but stylishly, covered
by a denim jacket and gold necklace, and her long black dress falls to her ankles. Thus,
she is physically attractive without being so overtly sexual as to distract or “tempt” any
(straight) Christian men she might come into contact with. To be sure, bodily aesthetics
are key to the maintenance of morality scripts, as is suggested by the opening segment of
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The Lexi Show interview in which Tonéx and Lexi discuss Tonéx’s faith background and
its relationship to his styling choices as a performer:
Lexi: I’ve seen you come to the Stellar Awards with, um, the spiked hair, with, ah,
earphones, you know huge around your neck. Uh, you’ve been known to wear a
boa.

Tonéx: Mm-hmm.

Lexi: You have been known to, uh, wear makeup—

Tonéx: Mm-hmm.
Lexi: —in a video. Uh, You have been known to—I’ve seen you with a lollipop
ring, uh, on your hand.

Tonéx: Yeah, the lollipop, yeah.
Lexi: We could go on and on. Platform shoes. Uh, wigs. Uh, Bobs. And nobody
every knows what vein you’re gonna come in. They never know if—what is he
gonna wear today? Is he gonna wear a bob today? You know, so it—that’s
controversial, and you have to know that. You grew up what, PAW, COGIC?
9

Tonéx: PAW.
Lexi: PAW. You know, I grew up COGIC.

Tonéx: So you know [what it’s like to grow up Pentecostal].

Lexi: And COGIC we’re—ya’ll was worse than us.

Tonéx: Uh-unh.

Lexi: PAW was Jesus only.

Tonéx: No, ya’ll was the ones, we couldn’t see past ya’lls hats.

Lexi: Well excuse me, PAW the women couldn’t wear hats ‘cause they had doilies
on they heads.

Tonéx: Not at our church. That’s more, um, uh, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ
or Apostolic Assembly. We didn’t wear the doilies.
10

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Lexi: Oh you didn’t do that?

Tonéx: Uh-unh.

Lexi: But still no makeup?

Tonéx: Right.

Lexi: Skirts down to your ankles. Elbows covered.

Tonéx: Yes.

Lexi: Never a piece of cleavage ever?

Tonéx: No.

Lexi: Yeah, you were pretty strict. And for you, for you to come up through that
upbringing to go all the way to the opposite side of the universe with this.

Tonéx: Yeah.

This exchange between Lexi and Tonéx alludes that women are primarily
responsible for the maintenance of Christian morality. The tight control of church
women’s bodies, in this case via their clothing and physical appearance, is indicative of a
wide-spread theological framework that names women, particularly “loose” or
provocative women, as the raison d’être for the moral failings of the black church and,
consequently, the black community as a whole. This, of course, should not come as a
surprise to most people. Actually, the more compelling aspect of this exchange lies in
what goes unsaid. Lexi does not seem to find it at all odd to discuss Tonéx’s styling
wholly in relationship to the stylings of women, and neither does Tonéx. They take it for
granted that the prohibition against makeup, and the long skirts and covered elbows and
cleavage mandated for women had, or should have had, a cognizable effect on Tonéx.
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While Lexi defines Tonéx’s style as “controversial,” she never does comment directly on
the topsy-turvy gender dynamics at play in Tonéx’s costuming that ultimately serve to
make it so controversial.
In a video interview he granted blogger Darian Aaron in the weeks following the
airing of his interview on The Lexi Show, Tonéx proclaims that he is officially “a grown
ass man” as a result of his revelations. “You can’t be a punk, or a sissy, or whatever other
colloquialisms are being used and be that upfront and bold and translucent, transparent,
without having a—a pretty big pair of cojones,” he insists. Tonéx’s gender
misperformances, which are styled around the aesthetic conventions denied to the women
in his denominational affiliation (and which he, importantly, never at any point
renounces), are thus buttressed by his own forceful claim to a macho masculinity
conceived of as courageous and truthful but simultaneously at odds with the heterosexist
machismo typically identified with black male Christians.
I would like to suggest, then, that the unspoken correlation between Tonéx’s
queer sartorial displays and the constrained bodily aesthetics of black church women does
actually speak to the narrative of hypermorality that gets articulated within black
Christian communities. That is, the condemnation of LGBTQ people and practices (the
“fear of the queer,” so to speak) is tightly bound up with the materialization of the good
Christian girl, where “materialization” specifically refers to the discursive production of
the body as sexed and gendered.
11
In an environment in which queer sexualities are rarely
ever spoken about except to be condemned and denied, yet are evident from the “sissies”
in the choir stand to the “bulldaggers” on the usher board, the good Christian girl stands
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in as the conceptualization of “true” womanhood. As the consummate prototype of
Christian virtue she is thus, as James Baldwin once put it, “God’s decoy,” who is
ultimately charged with “saving the souls of the boys for Jesus and binding the bodies of
the boys in marriage.”
12

While, as many scholars have argued, “positive” formulations of black identity
such as the good Christian girl have historically developed so as to combat racist, sexist
notions of black identity, Tonéx’s story and The Lexi Show interview suggest there is a
more complex and specific relationship between racism, patriarchy, heterosexism,
religious doctrine, and the conservative theology of sexuality that dominates many black
churches that must be more fully considered in relation to certain of these formulations as
well. To be a morally upstanding good Christian girl, for instance, clearly requires that a
woman do something more than simply identify as heterosexual, but the woman who
does not identify as such is automatically defined as immoral. And while I would argue
that there is something to be said for those individuals who explicitly resist the
boundaries of normative respectability, the concern here is to consider how the morality
plays of black Christian communities effectively diminish the lives of black women both
within and outside of the church.

Juanita Bynum: God’s Divine Decoy
The narrative of the good Christian girl as a sanctified receptacle for male lust is
even more forcefully realized in the experience and ministry of popular televangelist
Juanita Bynum. Bynum first rose to prominence in the late 1990s after preaching a
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sermon entitled “No More Sheets” at a women’s conference hosted by perhaps the
nation’s most celebrated and recognizable modern-day black minister, Bishop T.D. Jakes,
who pastors The Potter’s House, a 30,000-plus member church in Dallas, Texas. After
being released on video, “No More Sheets” reportedly sold more than one million copies,
primarily to black women, and was quickly followed by a bestselling book of the same
name.
13
Essentially, the sermon, as well as the ensuing book, is a passionate harangue
about the ills of extramarital sexual activity for single Christian women. Bynum, who
refers to herself as both “Prophetess” and “Dr.” (it is not clear where she received the
degree that earned her this latter honorific), uses the term “sheets” to refer to “layers of
bondage that have affected [a woman’s] emotions through sexual experiences.”
14

In the video, Bynum, dressed in a shapeless pink suit with an ankle-length skirt, a
white scarf wrapped around her neck so that no skin is visible, and her face bare of
makeup, contends that single women who are frustrated with being single and married
women who are unsatisfied with their husbands feel the way they do because they are
still dealing with the consequences of their “sheets.” When a woman has sex with a man,
Bynum argues, she receives a “deposit” that stays with her long after the sexual episode
has ended. Those “deposits” lead the woman to be unsatisfied with the mate she has
and/or causes her to obsessively compare her current or potential mates with her former
sexual partners. Consequently, each “deposit” must be “purged” by God, there is a
penalty to be paid for each sexual partner a woman has who is not her husband, and the
penalty occurs through a “processing” that God must put the sexually deviant woman
through. Ostensibly, this “processing” is largely responsible for the relational pain and
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suffering women experience, and if women recognize the process for what it is, can result
in the removal of “sheets,” an occurrence Bynum literally demonstrates in the sermon by
wrapping and unwrapping herself with white hotel bed linens. She ultimately concludes
that women should learn to surrender to the painful purging process—recognizing it as
God’s response to sexual sin (which, as the book version of the sermon reveals, includes
masturbation, the consumption of pornographic materials, and homosexuality)—because
it will help to prepare them for the husbands God is readying for them.
Bynum also argues that part of the preparation process for being a good wife
includes a woman’s ability to, as the saying goes, “get her house in order.” Bynum scolds
single women who say they desire to be married but cannot cook, clean, or do laundry, as
well as “divas” who buy material things but do not have monetary savings or own
property. She further admonishes “needy” women who want their men to be “Zorro” to
work toward establishing themselves financially so that when they do enter relationships
they can point to the resources they bring to their unions and therefore be less
burdensome on their husbands. All of this is meant to ensure that women will not “mess
over” the “men of God” but be better prepared to “minister” to them.
By the time Bynum concludes her sermonizing, the thousands of women filling
the arena are in various stages of ecstatic praise and supplication. Tears run down the
faces of some as they raise their hands in silent worship. Some are crying out loudly for
God’s grace, mercy and deliverance. Others are jumping up and down and clapping their
hands. Many are locked in tight embraces with other women as they collectively send up
prayers of repentance. Women (and a smattering of men) throughout the place are
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walking around greeting their neighbors and chanting “no more sheets,” “no more
sheets.” And, in the midst of it all, Bynum stands on the stage, sweat and tears pouring
down her face, exclaiming that she sees the spirits of “perversion,” “homosexuality,” and
“lesbianism” “flying out of the walls.” She finally commands everyone to get tissues or
scarves in their hands and start “cleaning the mess off” of themselves so that they will not
go home “dirty”—which results in a fresh outbreak of holy praise, spiritual dance, and
worship. The final seconds of the video end with Bynum looking into the camera and
decreeing that there will be “no more sheets” either in the lives of the people convened in
the arena or those watching the video.
“No More Sheets” quickly solidified Bynum as a powerhouse on the national
evangelical stage. While black Christian women were gathering together at “No More
Sheets” parties to watch and discuss the popular video, Bynum became a sought-after
speaker for high-profile events such as conferences hosted by Essence magazine and
Christian heavyweights like Rod Parsley and Jakes, as well as for various television and
radio programs.
15
She also began to host her own female empowerment-type conferences
throughout the country and recorded several music CDs (she also refers to herself as a
“psalmist”) and, to-date, she has written at least half-a-dozen books—some of which
have listed among Publishers Weekly’s top ten religion bestsellers. Her 2005 title, The
Threshing Floor: How to Know Without a Doubt God Hears Your Every Prayer, went on
to become a New York Times bestseller. Eventually the Christian network TBN (Trinity
Broadcasting Network) began airing her sermons, and for a time she hosted the network’s
flagship talk/variety show, Praise the Lord.
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Bynum’s brand of moral proselytizing is so popular due in no small part to her
“keep it real” philosophy and willingness to reveal her own sexual indiscretions and
spiritual shortcomings to her audiences. As theologian and ordained minister Renita
Weems puts it, “her preaching [and] her theology is [not] revolutionary; it’s actually
conservative and fundamental from her interpretation of the Bible….But living a
promiscuous life, it’s not that women haven’t heard that message, it’s just they’re not
accustomed to women in ministry admitting to that in the pulpit.”
16
And in “No More
Sheets,” and more explicitly in the book version of the sermon, Bynum baldly
acknowledges that she has struggled with her own “sheets.”
Bynum was raised one of five children in a strict Pentecostal household where she
attended church seven days a week, and where disobedience could result in “scripture
whippings”—being hit with a belt in intervals as her father attempted to drive spirits out
of her by driving the Word of God into her—that could last up to two hours, and where as
a teenager she was given “a beating she never forgot” to her naked body for being caught
with a pornographic magazine (she names the purchase of the magazine as the moment
when her “sheets began” ).
17
Thus, unsurprisingly, she was still a virgin when she
married her first husband in her early twenties. However, she quickly realized she had
made a mistake. While she later claimed her husband had been physically abusive, she
never claims abuse had anything to do with the divorce in No More Sheets.
18
Instead, she
claims the problems in her marriage were a result of the fact that she married “in the
flesh” and did not properly consult God about the marriage before entering into it. “It
wasn’t so much as the wrong done to me—he was just being himself,” she comments.
19

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She further erred in marrying her husband, Bynum contends, because she was not willing
or able at the time to take on the full weight of her vows, and the problems in the
marriage ultimately led her to attempt suicide. Though following the failed suicide
attempt she claims to have prayed to God to forgive her and to help her fulfill her vows,
and she began cooking, cleaning, and otherwise living up to her marital edicts, the
marriage ultimately ended in divorce in 1985. Thereafter, she became sexually
promiscuous, even accepting money and material items from some of her partners in
return for sex. She also asserts that following the separation from her husband and her
divorce she went though a number of other ordeals that were the consequences of her
“sheets,” including a bout in a mental institution, a stint on welfare, and a temporary
struggle with anorexia.
20

Having acknowledged her own struggles with sexual indiscretions and failed
relationships, Bynum ends No More Sheets with a “Certificate of Accountability” that she
urges single women to sign with someone they trust to help them be accountable for their
dating relationships. It also includes a list of twenty-seven dating “dos and don’ts” that
should govern those relationships, such as: “Allow him to pursue you. Remember that a
real man will.”; “Do not allow a potential mate to call your house after 12 midnight,
especially while lying in bed.”; and, “If a man invites you to his home for any reason
all…always take a friend.”
21
She also describes the characteristics of a “virtuous” woman
who lives according to the mandates laid out in Proverbs 31. According to Bynum, a
Proverbs 31 woman is organized and disciplined, she is “a woman of respect and dignity
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[who is] not a loud-mouthed, disrespectful woman that is constantly ‘going off,’” and she
is “a lady at all times.”
22

Bynum’s message of moral uprightness and marital preparedness seemed to pay
off for her when, at the height of her popularity, she met and married the significantly
lesser-known Thomas W. Weeks III, a preacher and preacher’s son from Washington
D.C. who had also been married previously. Around that time Bynum also began to
update her personal style. During the “No More Sheets” sermon she had revealed that she
did not dress provocatively because she wanted men to see “her heart and not her body.”
But by the time she married Weeks, the short-cropped haircut and shapeless, ankle-length
suits had been traded in for long hair-weaves, form-fitting (but still below-the-knees)
skirts, stylish jewelry, and flawless makeup. In July 2002 she wed Weeks in a private
ceremony, and in 2003 she held a second lavish million-dollar wedding ceremony at the
Regent Wall Street Hotel in New York. The black-tie wedding, complete with a wedding
party of more than eighty people, a diamond-encrusted wedding dress with a twenty-five
foot train, an eight-carat diamond wedding ring, a twelve-piece orchestra, and a guest list
of more than one thousand people, was repeatedly broadcast on TBN.
23
On the heels of
the highly publicized wedding, the couple began conducting well-attended relationship
seminars and they quickly co-authored a self-help book on how to conduct godly
relationships entitled Teach Me How to Love You: The Beginnings (2003). In 2006, their
burgeoning success as a Christian power couple culminated in their founding of Global
Destiny International Ministries in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth, Georgia, where Weeks
was positioned as pastor with Bynum as his “First Lady.” As one journalist put it:
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The wedding seemed like a coda to “Sheets.” Here was a Christian woman
who’d admitted to sleeping around and living off men, but who turned her
life around by being obedient to God and the reward for obedience was a
God-fearing and God-preaching man. For her legions of fans, it seemed
the ultimate if-I-can-do-it-you-can-too moment. Particularly in the
evangelical community, they became a celebrity couple, the Bishop and
the Prophetess.
24

But things began to take a bad turn for the couple soon after the establishment of
Global Destiny, and in spring of 2007 they quietly separated in the midst of ongoing
disagreements about finances, church business, and scheduling conflicts. It was not long
before the lid completely blew off of their rocky relationship. As the story goes, on
August 21, 2007 the two met at an Atlanta-area hotel restaurant to discuss the state of
their marriage. Once there, they ended up getting into a heated argument that spilled out
into the parking lot where, as Bynum tells it, Weeks, who was angered by Bynum’s
response to his demands for her to come home, grabbed her by her throat and threw her to
the ground and then began stomping and kicking her until being pulled off of her by a
hotel bellman.
25

The incident caused an uproar in the black Christian community as both Bynum
and Weeks began jockeying for position. Shortly after the altercation, Bynum granted
several high-profile interviews, including one that aired on the television show Divorce
Court which had her also serving as counselor to another woman dealing with an abusive
marriage, and she anointed herself “the new face of domestic violence,” vowing to use
her platform to raise awareness around domestic abuse by beginning a foundation and
conference series entitled “Love Don’t Hit.”
26
In response, Weeks proclaimed his
innocence and suggested that because she allegedly would not agree to private mediation
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or a settlement conference, Bynum wanted “to keep [the] matter public and to expand her
career and public persona by doing so.”
27
Bynum and others were also concerned by the
silence of the black Christian leadership. Other than T.D. Jakes who published an op-ed
in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, few other prominent ministers spoke out openly in
defense of Bynum or against domestic violence.
28
The only organization that called for
Weeks’s resignation from the pulpit was a consortium of black and Latino churches
called the National Black Church Initiative (NBCI), and for its troubles the NBCI was
purportedly criticized privately by certain religious leaders,
29
some of whom referred to
Bynum as being “‘loud,’ ‘angry,’ ‘aggressive’ and ‘out of control.’”
30
Many lay
Christians were also upset, including those who did not agree with Bynum’s public
handling of the fall-out and those who felt she was betraying her own message of
unwavering marital fidelity.
Yet, despite his previous assertions of innocence, in March 2008 Weeks
apologized publicly to Bynum and pled guilty to a felony aggravated assault charge in an
Atlanta courtroom. He was sentenced to three years probation, two hundred hours of non-
church related community service, and ordered to attend anger management classes.
Under the terms of the plea agreement, once Weeks met the conditions of his sentence the
conviction was to be expunged from his record. Paul Howard, the district attorney who
prosecuted the case, later revealed that jail time was not pursued for Weeks at the behest
of Bynum who asked the court for leniency after Weeks’s grandfather contacted her to
intervene on Weeks’s behalf.
31
Three months later, the couple was legally divorced.
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In the aftermath of the media blitz, legal maneuverings and divorce proceedings,
Weeks ended up getting evicted from the building that housed Global Destiny, which he
had retained ownership of in the divorce, for failure to make the appropriate financial
payments. He subsequently moved his church to a smaller Atlanta location, self-
published a memoir about his marriage to Bynum, and hosted an online reality show
called “The Next Mrs. Weeks.” In October 2009 he married another “prophetess,”
Christina Glenn, who is the current co-pastor of Global Destiny. For her part, Bynum also
faced financial difficulty, eventually filing bankruptcy after falling behind on the $40,000
in attorney’s fees she was ordered to pay Weeks in the divorce settlement, and later
claiming she was more than $5.25 million in debt. Bynum also returned to the Christian
conference circuit—though the domestic violence foundation and conference series she
proposed immediately after the altercation with Weeks has yet to materialize. Instead, she
returned to the platform that initially launched her career. In March 2010 Bynum released
a revised edition of No More Sheets, entitled No More Sheets: Starting Over, under the
name Juanita Bynum II, and began advertising the No More Sheets Conference geared
toward single Christians.

The Good Christian Girl: Embodied
If the sermon is, as Hortense Spillers suggests, “a paradigm of the structure of
ambivalence that constitutes the black person’s relationship to American culture and
apprenticeship in it,” then “No More Sheets,” and the autobiographical narrative upon
which it is formulated, speaks volumes about the estranged theology of sexuality that
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currently structures the black church and about which Bynum’s life and work is
testimony.
32
For instance, the same logic that resulted in Bynum being harshly disciplined
for daring to look at a pornographic magazine as a teenager undergirds the mandate
against extramarital sex that is the foundation of Bynum’s platform and which so many
Christians rally around, regardless of if they actually adhere to it. That is to say, there is a
stiff penalty to be paid for any type of sexual exploration outside of heterosexual, State-
sanctioned marital unions. Further, the charge that Bynum places on women who want to
attract and keep “good” Christian men that requires them to be able to cook, clean, do
laundry, and be respectable ladies who know their roles, do not “go off,” and do not
“mess over” their men, gives license to the Church’s ongoing silence around patriarchy,
domestic abuse, and rape (particularly marital rape). Finally, Bynum’s notion that
homosexuality is a “spirit of perversion” that can be purged out of the body through
appeal to God’s grace affirms the homophobia that motivates the materialization of the
good Christian girl; which is to say, finally, that homosexuality marks the boundaries of
heteronormative behavior and desire, and it is within this marked boundary that the good
Christian girl is produced and operates.
What Bynum’s performance, and attendant misperformances, of gendered
religiosity thus reveal is that the good Christian girl’s sexuality is marked by an “absence
of articulation” that cannibalizes her woman potential—when “woman” is understood,
for the sake of argument, as the fully recognized embodiment of female sexual capacity.
33

This is to not to say that sexuality, as a derogative of power, is any better defined for
black women who are beyond the ambit of the good Christian girl, but is to acknowledge
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the dispersal of even a claim to something we might call black women’s sexuality. As
woman dispossessed, the good Christian girl sustains the Church’s righteous hypocrisy
around sex/sexuality that reverberates in abstinence programs that equate an intact hymen
with virtue and suggest to young people (especially young female people) that because
“true love waits” for marriage, any expression of sexual desire outside of that union is
malicious; that tacitly approves of the largely disproportionate numbers of female clergy
and leadership in an institution dominated by women; and that commonly enforces a
practice of “sitting down” and/or demanding public apologies from single women who
become pregnant, oftentimes without requiring the same of single fathers.
The foregoing is not meant to trivialize the strongly held belief systems or
experiences of black Christians—certainly there are independent and holistic reasons why
some people choose abstinence as a lifestyle choice, I recognize that the work church
women do beyond the pulpit is necessary and often very much fulfilling, and respect that
some people have a God-relationship that mandates public confession of what they
conceive of as sin—but I am concerned with considering how the Church’s dismal
discourse on sexuality, which is at once everywhere and nowhere, contributes to the
disembodiment of black women, disallows non-heteronormative formulations of
sexuality, and then, in its messiness, spills out beyond the walls of the Church in the form
of moralistic respectability politics that suture middle class aspiration to positive social
life and degenerative government regulations meant to manage crises such as HIV-AIDS,
drug use and abuse, and teenage pregnancy.
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Bynum’s ministry is evocative of this very concern. When she preaches “No
More Sheets” Bynum openly acknowledges her sexual desires, admitting she struggles
daily to “kill the flesh” and proclaiming that there are plenty of times when she wants to
“fall and have some sex”—an admission that brings forth a thundering chorus of “amens”
and shouts of affirmation from the audience of women. But the response Bynum has to
this daily struggle in the flesh is rooted in a girlhood experience in which punishment for
disobedience was meted out with a belt and a Bible, the cure for illness was “bless oil”
and prayer,
34
and her extracurricular activities were limited by daily church services and a
mother who, instead of allowing her to play outside, forced her to sit inside the house and
“listen to the voice of God.”
35
Bynum’s young life (she even attended a residential
COGIC high school in the South) was thus conditioned by a disciplinary structure that
had little tolerance for secular or bodily pleasures deemed anathema to a strictly
fundamentalist interpretation of the Word. It is no wonder, then, that her remedy to the
carnal desires of women is a rigid sexual ethic that likens masturbation to “eating vomit”
and requires repentance for those who engage in even “tongue kissing” before marriage.
36

Bynum’s brand of Bible-based, faux feminist, moral proselytizing echoes the
work of a genre of women-centered literature that began emerging at the behest of
primarily white conservative evangelicals in the mid-twentieth century. As the 1960s and
1970s began giving way to the “second wave” of feminist criticism and ushered in a
sexual “revolution” of an intensity never previously witnessed in the U.S., the Christian
book publishing industry also began to witness a period of phenomenal growth. A
significant factor in that growth were marital-advice books that outlined the intricacies of
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sex for married couples and, increasingly, woman-authored self-help books that were
dedicated to revealing how Christian women should go about developing and maintaining
healthy marriages and keeping their husbands emotionally and sexually satisfied. In
juxtaposition to the eschewal of proscribed gender roles that motivated traditional
feminist theory, these authors emphasized their embrace of gender roles as part of a
biblically mandated submission to male authority that properly ordered their families and
the world.
Among the most successful Christian marital advice books of the 1970s was
Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman (1973) which spent twenty-five months on the
National Religious Bestsellers list and eventually sold over ten million copies.
37
Though
she never joined the clergy and began her career as a housewife and mother, Morgan, like
Bynum, used her personal experiences to buttress her marital advice. The Total Woman,
along with its sequel, Total Joy (1976), grew out of Morgan’s extensive, and successful,
attempts to save her foundering marriage to a busy attorney. What initially began as
informal gatherings wherein Morgan detailed for other women the methods she had used
to reinvigorate her marriage eventually morphed into a company, Total Woman, Inc.,
which employed more than seventy people and hosted Total Woman seminars throughout
the country. In a description that resonates with Bynum’s evocation of the proper
deportment of women looking to snag and keep good Christian men, historian Rebecca
Davis outlines the mandates of the Total Woman strategy:
The body the Total Woman presents to her husband requires hours of
preparation. To ensure a happy homecoming, Morgan coaches wives to
plan their days around a 5 P.M. scented bubble bath, during which they
should be careful to “remove all pickly hairs and be squeaky clean from
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head to toe. Be touchable and kissable.” Sounding like a dental hygienist,
Morgan further reminds her readers to brush their teeth, floss, brush again,
and rinse with mouthwash. Thus antiseptically cleansed, a Total Woman
will have strategically modified her body. Her performance might require
costumes, lest a standard greeting in casual attire grow tedious. In both
The Total Woman and Total Joy, Morgan offers an array of sartorial ideas,
from nothing but pearls to a maid’s costume. The suspense builds to the
moment of the husband’s return, at which point the Total Woman’s body
would be ready for its close-up.
38

Davis goes on to note that the onus Morgan places on Christian women to keep
their husbands happy is also rooted in concerns about parenting and the “proper”
ascription of gender roles to children. The wife who caters to her husband by ensuring
that she does not “nag” him unnecessarily, actively attending to his physical needs, and
successfully reinforcing his masculinity via her own feminine wiles, displays and
enacts—that is, “performs”—a model of heteronormative womanliness that is necessary
to prevent homosexuality because, according to Morgan, the daughters of absentee
fathers often grow up to hate all men, and the sons of henpecked fathers are exposed to a
dangerously inverted gender structure that then makes them susceptible to inverted
gender identification. Thus it is that the Total Woman, whose body “simultaneously
displays and inscribes femininity, restores her husband’s masculinity, and thus insures the
complementary sex roles at the heart of the conservative Christian marriage,” serves as
the safely seductive counterpart to Bynum’s saved and sexless single sister.
39
In either
case, the female body serves as the conduit through which moral codes are enacted and
marks the boundaries of normative sexual practice.

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Marketing the Good Christian Girl
In the past several years the terrain of the good Christian girl has expanded
beyond the boundaries of the Church due in large part to the contrivances of Christian
playwright and film and television producer Tyler Perry. In 2009 Perry was named by
Forbes magazine as the sixth-highest paid man in Hollywood after having made more
than $75 million during the previous year, adding to a fortune he has been steadily
amassing since the late 1990s by developing entertainment that caters largely to a black
Christian female audience. The foundation of the New Orleans native’s success lies in the
so-called “chitlin’ circuit,” the realm of urban stage plays usually characterized by
rousing gospel numbers and B-list black actors and R&B and gospel artists in headlining
roles that play to predominately black audiences in large U.S. cities. After years of
struggling financially, at points he was both jobless and homeless, Perry produced and
financed his first successful play, I Know I’ve Been Changed, in 1998. Two years later he
introduced the gun-toting, chain-smoking, loud-mouthed Mabel “Madea” Simmons, his
most popular and prolific character (whom Perry himself plays in drag) and the key to his
meteoric rise, in the play I Can Do Bad All By Myself. Several highly profitable plays
followed, most of which featured Madea, and in 2005 Perry self-financed his first film,
Diary of a Mad Black Woman, which debuted at number one and went on to make more
than $50 million on a $5.5 million production budget. The undeniable success of Diary,
thanks in no small part to the faithful audience he had cultivated through his stage plays,
stunned film executives and critics who had overwhelmingly underestimated the strength
of Perry’s target demographic, and opened the door for his climb into the ranks of the
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Hollywood elite. By 2010, Perry’s nine films, five of which had debuted at number one
and all of which had opened in the top five, had earned more than $475 million
40
; his
stage plays had earned more than $200 million;
41
he was producing and directing two
television series on TBS, House of Payne and Meet the Browns, which, like his films, he
has sole ownership of; and he was sitting at the helm of Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta,
Georgia, one of the largest independently owned studios outside of Hollywood, and the
first established by an African American since the early years of film production when
the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and a number of other smaller black studios were in
operation.
To the consternation of critics and the assumed delight of his core audience, Perry
has built his empire on a strategically formulaic blend of black bourgeois middle class
uplift ideology, Christ-centered family-friendly fare, and how-I-got-over survival stories;
and the good Christian girl narrative lies staunchly at the core of his aggressively
consumed “churchploitation” film genre.
42
Whether they start out as icons of religious
virtue, or become such by way of purposeful plot mechanisms, somehow, someway, the
“good girls” always win. Though they are plied as female empowerment warriors who
have successfully battled any manner of societal ills and hardships—including physical
and domestic abuse, rape, divorce, poverty, single parenthood, and joblessness—to come
out whole in the end, Perry’s “sheros” have one significant thing in common. They are
all, seemingly, in need of heroes. In the tradition of masculinist Christian theology, Perry
has created a fictive world where fiercely independent single women, women’s
survival/kinship networks, or female-dominated partnerships cannot thrive. Case in point:
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his most popular character. Funny wisecracks and random bouts of sermonizing aside,
Madea’s tyrannical gun-slinging, intimidating displays of strength, anti-church
philosophizing and loud invectives against anyone who dares to cross her path serve only
to make her a beloved example of what not to be.
43

Helen (Kimberly Elise), the protagonist of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, is the
prototype of Perry’s scorned woman template. In the opening scenes of the film she is
shown dutifully fulfilling her role as pretty arm-piece while her obscenely wealthy
husband Charles (Steve Harris) receives Atlanta’s “Lawyer of the Year” award. Helen
recognizes that all is not well in her marriage, but apparently does not realize the full
extent of her marital trouble even though Charles does not have one kind word to say to
her and kicks her out of his car in the driveway of their home and then drives off after
receiving the award. Instead, Helen, the ever-faithful and loving wife, arrives
unexpectedly at Charles’s job the next day to surprise him, only to be summarily rejected
by her husband who is in the company of a woman who everyone except Helen seems to
know he has something illicit going on with. Later, when Helen arrives home to find her
clothes packed up and an entire closet full of new clothes in their place, she is convinced
her “doting” husband has seen the error of his ways. It is not until Charles arrives home
with his workplace mistress in tow (who he announces is also the mother of his two
children Helen knew nothing about) that Helen finally realizes her eighteen-year
marriage just might be over. Charles then proceeds to drag her, literally kicking and
screaming, outside of their home where a moving truck filled with her things is awaiting
her. All is not lost, however, because waiting inside the truck is also the most handsome,
126

kind, and charming driver one ever did meet. The driver, Orlando (Shemar Moore),
deposits Helen at her grandmother Madea’s home where she receives a hearty dose of
tough love and fightback feminism—at one point pistol-packing Madea invades Charles’s
home where she berates his mistress and destroys his furniture with a chainsaw. But,
ultimately, it is Orlando’s patience and persistence that salvages Helen’s bitter and
broken heart, and by the end of the film she is a happily divorced woman with a good
God-fearing man by her side.
This is a formula Perry continues to much success in subsequent films. In Why
Did I Get Married (2007) Sheila (Jill Scott), a Godly plus-sized woman who, like Helen,
is oblivious to her husband’s obvious indiscretions, finds comfort in the arms of Troy, a
debonair sheriff (Lamman Rucker), after her verbally abusive husband unceremoniously
dumps her for another, thinner, woman while they and their friends are all on vacation.
Single mother Brenda (Angela Bassett) and her three children are whisked away to
happiness in the form of a newly refurbished Southern home by Harry (Rick Fox), a
former NBA player and basketball recruiter, after she loses her job and the father of her
oldest child refuses to help her make ends meet in Meet the Browns (2008). And in
Madea Goes to Jail (2009), Perry’s highest grossing film to date, drug-addict and
prostitute Candace “Candy” Washington (Keshia Knight Pulliam) is convinced to leave
the drugs and sex work behind by the loving embrace of her former college classmate
Joshua (Derek Luke), a successful district attorney who leaves his manipulative fiancé
Linda (Ion Overman), another district attorney, at the altar in order to be with Candy.
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Then there are the uptight, resentful, angry black women whose primary problems
appear to be that they need to find good men to give them attitude adjustments. In
Daddy’s Little Girls (2007), Julia (Gabrielle Union) is a six-figure partner in a law firm
who is obsessed with finding a “good” man, but coldly disregards her handsome driver
Monty (Idris Elba) because he is, well, a driver. Turns out, he is also a single father who
is struggling to provide for his three young daughters and chauffeuring Julia is a second
job he works while trying to save up enough money to buy the shop where he is also
employed is a mechanic. Following a series of circumstances in which Monty is forced to
ask an ever-irritable Julia to help him retain custody of his children, Julia finally
recognizes what a hard-working, dependable man Monty really is, and as she falls in love
with him the chip also falls off of her shoulder and she becomes a less rigid and more
likable person. Likewise, in Madea’s Family Reunion (2006), Vanessa (Lisa Arrindell
Anderson) begins dating a poetry-writing bus driver named Frankie (Boris Kodjoe) after
he is able to crack her tough exterior by wooing her on his bus route. The two single
parents eventually marry, but not until it is first revealed that Vanessa’s initial
standoffishness with Frankie had to do with the fact that as a child she was repeatedly
raped by her stepfather with her mother’s consent. April (Taraji P. Henson), the boozy
nightclub singer who is at the center of I Can Do Bad All By Myself (2009), has a similar
story. Initially she is overtly mean and dismissive toward the niece and nephews she is
forced to take in after their caretaker, April’s mother, dies, and she is equally callous
toward Sandino (Adam Rodriguez), the Colombian immigrant her pastor talks her into
providing shelter for while he is making the necessary improvements to her house so that
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the children can remain in her care. However, after Sandino prevents her ogre-of-a-
boyfriend Randy (Brian White) from raping her niece—an act which resonates with April
who was also sexually abused when she was younger—she begins to realize what a good
man she has in Sandino, learns to embrace and love her niece and nephews the same way
Sandino already has, and eventually they marry.
Perry contends that the issue of abuse comes up again and again in his work
because of his personal story. According to Perry, he and his mother Maxine were both
physically and verbally abused by his father throughout his childhood and he was
sexually molested between the ages of five and twelve by a man and woman in his
neighborhood. Those experiences left him miserable and suicidal for the first twenty-
eight years of his life until he found it in himself to forgive the people who had caused
him so much pain, including his father.
44
However, the abuse narratives in Perry’s films
are as problematic as his “female empowerment” narratives. Though physical, emotional,
and verbal abuse is such a focal point of his work, when it comes to making a statement
about the trauma of abuse and domestic violence in people’s real lives, Perry is
essentially “talkin’ loud and sayin’ nothing.” While he recalls his father once whipping
him with a cord until the skin came off his back,
45
when Madea spanks her foster
daughter Nikki (KeKe Palmer) with a belt in Madea’s Family Reunion it’s played up for
laughs, and supposedly is enough to convert the heretofore problem child into a model
citizen. Even more troubling, this occurs while an infamous scene from the 1970s sitcom
Good Times, in which Penny (Janet Jackson) is burned by her abusive mother with an
iron, plays in the background. Evidently the message is that while what Penny
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experienced at the hands of her mother was abuse, Madea is simply doling out much
needed discipline. Even in a cultural context in which spanking is an acceptable practice,
the waters are abysmally muddied here. As critic John Beifuss noted in his review of the
film: “It’s interesting that nobody ever connects the dots between Madea’s frequent
corporeal punishment of children (which is presented as instructive comedy) and the
abusive grownups who function as Perry’s villains.”
46

Perry’s abusive villains are dealt with just as inadequately. In a tragic bit of role
reversal in The Family That Preys (2008), when the adulterous Andrea (Sanaa Lathan)
reveals to her husband Chris (Rockmond Dunbar) that the child he thought was his son
was actually fathered by Andrea’s boss, Chris promptly slaps her across a lunch
counter—much to the glee, it seems, of many of the film’s viewers.
47
And, as it turns out,
the male villains fair no better. Even after the cruel treatment Helen receives from her
husband in Diary of a Mad Black Woman, she agrees to become his nurse when he is
paralyzed by a gunshot he receives at the hand of a drug dealer who is also his client.
Charles eventually regains his mobility and Helen forgives him, but not before she enacts
her revenge Misery style. She starves him, allows him to sit unattended while he spoils
himself, and nearly drowns him in the bathroom tub. Revenge is served up in Reunion as
well when Vanessa’s sister Lisa (Rochelle Aytes), who has been repeatedly beat on by
her fiancé Carlos (Blair Underwood), takes a cue from Madea and throws hot grits in his
face before beating him with a frying pan

.
48
And in I Can Do Bad All By Myself, when
April learns of her boyfriend’s failed attempted to rape her niece she nearly kills him by
dropping a radio that is plugged into an electric socket into the bathtub as he is bathing.
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Though he jumps out in time to avoid being electrocuted, he still receives a severe shock.
Of course, all of these scenes are designed for comic effect. Thus Perry rarely deals
seriously or honestly with the very real trauma women (as well as children and some
men) who have experienced domestic abuse actually go through—trauma which often
includes years of therapy, bouts of depression, physical injuries, emotional instability,
and dangerous self-medication that no amount of revenge can effectively heal—instead
choosing to exploit and cheapen an issue that very much needs addressing in black
Christian communities for the sake of laughs. Ultimately, the answer Perry seems to have
for women who have been physically and emotionally abused: Get married or get even,
and when you can, do both.
The corrective to Perry’s marriage-as-cure-all motif comes in his two films that
attempt to deal most explicitly with the complexities of marriage and the physical and
emotional strain that sometimes undercuts it, Why Did I Get Married? (2007) and the
awkwardly-named Why Did I Get Married Too? (2010), which follow the lives of four
couples who have been friends since college and meet annually to vacation and assess
their marriages. Yet in his ardent determination to disavow the “black man as dog”
theory, Perry takes a turn in the complete opposite direction and paints marriage as a
prolonged experiment in emotional turmoil for which women are largely to blame;
because by the time the four couples reconvene in the Caribbean, and then return to their
homes in Atlanta in Why Did I Get Married Too?, it is clear that men are getting the short
end of the relationship stick.
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Although Sheila’s abusive husband Mike is now her ex and she is re-married to
Troy, she and Troy are having marital troubles because Troy is frustrated by his inability
to find a job and Sheila’s inability to understand that not being able to provide for his
family is a severe blow to his manhood. Then, Mike returns, his tail between his legs and
his body racked with cancer. So noble is he now in the thrust of his deadly illness that he
even helps Troy get his much-needed job. When Terry (Tyler Perry) of couple number
two senses his wife Dianne (Sharon Leal) is a mite “too” happy, he discovers that, despite
the fact that he is a faithful and caring husband and father, Dianne has been cheating on
him “emotionally” with a man at her job. Marcus (Michael Jai White), the husband in
couple three, is not cheating either, but he might as well be. While in Why Did I Get
Married? he is constantly being harped on by his “hyper-jealous shebeast”
49
of a wife
Angela (Tasha Smith) for not having a job, in the second installment he is being targeted
because he has a job, and Angela (who apparently is meant to carry the comic load in
place of Madea who is absent from these films) spends the entire film wrongly accusing
Marcus of cheating with women she suspects he has met via his new job as a sportscaster.
The final couple consists of Patricia (Janet Jackson) and Gavin (Malik Yoba) who, to the
surprise of the other couples, announce plans to divorce during their vacation. The two
have been unable to rebound from the death of their young son in a car accident several
years earlier, something that Gavin blames Patricia for because he believes she has shut
him out and does not love him anymore. He informs her of all this one night while he’s in
a drunken rage in which he throws her around and sets fire to the only remaining pictures
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of their son. But before their problems can be resolved one way or the other, Gavin is
killed in a sudden car crash.
What the viewer is left with, then, is “the queasy dynamic in which the male
characters’ violent impulses are condemned in theory but, when acted on, seem to be
implicitly excused, or at the least overlooked. Over all, it’s the men who always end up
the victims—misunderstood, shut out, sick, dead. They’re the ones who bear the cross of
marriage.”
50
It turns out that the solace marriage is supposed to bring, if you buy into any
of Perry’s other films, is in actuality only a momentary grasp at happiness that is not to be
trusted, and women, it seems, are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
Although almost all of Perry’s films have been poorly reviewed—he has not done
traditional press-screenings since his first film, Diary, was badly panned—they are still
highly successful and have gone on to make millions, owing primarily to his intensely
loyal following. Film critics have resigned themselves to the fact that Perry is “critic-
proof”
51
and that “liking or not liking a Tyler Perry film is beside the point.”
52
Yet Perry
does have his critical advocates, and their defenses of him often go something like this:
Perry’s plays—and his films—reach an audience many in Hollywood
weren’t aware existed. He tells stories of dreamy black heroines who find
their voices, features attractive and attentive Prince Charmings, highlights
the beloved matriarchs who care of their families and solve problems with
gentle wisdom and peace (or, in Madea’s case, wisecracking wisdom and
a piece), and hilarity that includes cultural in-jokes while walking that line
between merely bawdy and truly blue. Some characters are Christians
whose faith has transformed their lives in normal but significant ways.
Although his work isn’t high art and is occasionally problematic, he’s
telling stories that aren’t often told, and he has created his own niche by
tapping an untapped market. It’s a start. And for that, this black woman
can’t be too mad at him.
53

133

But I am not sure that a few more black women (and a lot of other folks besides)
shouldn’t be mad at him. Perry has created a Christian family landscape that excludes as
many people as it includes, and, unfortunately, is indicative of the black church’s often
oppressive ideological regime. Having witnessed Perry’s comment on domestic abuse in
black Christian communities, it should come as no surprise that few people were willing
to come to Juanita Bynum’s defense after her husband attacked her, or that she was
unable or unwilling to mount a sustained platform against domestic abuse. The world of
Tyler Perry is a world where women who are not looking for “Prince Charmings,” and
men who are, essentially do not exist; where men in drag can rule the stage, but sexuality
can nowhere be discussed; and where good Christian girls are both the source of the
Church’s morality and the reason for its downfall.

Conclusion
I have bracketed my discussion of the good Christian girl with the story of men in
order to expose the optics of fetishism in its relationship to black religiosity. In the end,
the good Christian girl exists as a discursive alliance between gender, patriarchy and
heterosexism that, in its embodiment, conceals the very same forms that call it into
existence. Lexi, Juanita Bynum, Tyler Perry’s sheros—these women are real women.
That is, they are not flamboyant gay men. They are not dykes. They also are not the
women who prowl the streets at night, or the women who have multiple children by
multiple men. Unless, of course, they have been redeemed. The good Christian girl
emerges out of a moral imperative to constrain sexuality, particularly black sexuality,
134

within a religious normality that refuses—that is, disavows—the queer, deviant, abjected
social subject it is meant to save. It is not enough to suggest that Perry needs to add more
complex representations of black women to his repertoire—an argument that is made
often in relation to his work as well as to problematic media texts involving black folks
more generally. While it may very well be true that Perry’s work could benefit from more
robust character development, the erasure of the good Christian girl as an embodied
media image does nothing to rid us of the narrative for which she stands in. The stylized
gender performances of Lexi and Juanita Bynum are testament to an entrenched
ideological regime that manifests itself through the rhetorical and physical binding of
black female bodies. This is what the good Christian girl reveals, but never actually
confronts.
135

CHAPTER THREE ENDNOTES

1
Though Tonéx has recently adopted a new spelling of his name (TON3X), and has
sometimes gone by other stage names, including “The Black Maverick” and “T. Bizzy,”
for the sake of clarity and readability I am using the name and spelling that are most
commonly used to reference the artist.

2
Justin Camacho, “Tonex Releases Oak Park: 92105 Via iTunes,” The Christian Post,
December 29, 2005, http://www.christianpost.com/article/20051229/tonex-releases-oak-
park-92105-via-itunes/index.html (accessed March 2, 2010).

3
“The Naked Truth,” The Naked Truth Mixtape, compact disc, 2008 Nureau Ink. Like
Oak Park 92105, The Naked Truth Mixtape featured a parental advisory label.

4
Jay Allen Sanford, “Truth Hurts,” San Diego Reader, September 13, 2007,
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2007/sep/13/truth-hurts/ (accessed March 27,
2010).

5
McClurkin contends that he developed “homosexual lust and desire” after being raped
when he was a boy. See Kalefa Sanneh, “Revelations: A Gospel Singer Comes Out,” The
New Yorker, February 8, 2010.

6
Ibid. Additionally, in recent months Tonéx seems to have virtually disappeared from the
public spotlight, his websites have been taken down, including his once well-trafficked
Myspace page, and he has removed his music videos from YouTube.

7
I am borrowing from C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya when I refer to the “black
church” as “those independent, historic, and totally black controlled denominations,
which were founded after the Free African Society of 1787 and which constitute[] the
core of black Christians.” Lincoln and Mamiya suggest that close to ninety percent of
black Christians are members of the seven major black denominations and a few smaller
black denominations. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the
African American Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 1. However, I also
include in my definition predominately black churches that are members of historically
white denominations, for example, Trinity United Church of Christ located in Chicago,
Illinois.

8
Michael Eric Dyson, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley, 1996), 105-06.

9
PAW (Pentecostal Assemblies of the World) and COGIC (Church of God in Christ) are
both black Pentecostal denominations distinguished in particular by their belief in the
136

requirement of Holy Ghost baptism, otherwise known as glossolalia or “speaking in
tongues,” as well as, in some congregations, their conservative dress codes for women.

10
While fancy hats have a storied history among black church women, some Pentecostal
and Holiness churches shun elaborate headwear and mandate plain doilies or simple
white hats for their female members instead. For a more thorough discussion of the
cultural and religious significance of black church women’s headwear, see Lena
Williams, “In Defense of the Church Hat,” New York Times, May 12, 1996.

11
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993).

12
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; repr., New York: The Modern Library,
1995), 17.

13
Shaila Dewan, “A Minister’s Public Lesson on Domestic Violence,” New York Times,
September 20, 2007.

14
Juanita Bynum, No More Sheets: The Truth about Sex (Lanham, MD: Pneuma Life
Publishing, 1998), 22.

15
Dewan, “A Minister’s Public Lesson.” I can personally remember being invited to at
least one such party.

16
Rosalind Bentley, “For ‘Prophetess’ of True Romance, Marriage a Mess,” Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, August 26, 2007.

17
Bynum, No More Sheets, 42-45.

18
ABC News, “Preacher Juanita Bynum Deals with Domestic Abuse,” September 26,
2007, http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3651790&page=1 (accessed April 13,
2010).

19
Bynum, No More Sheets, 49.

20
Ibid., 53-66.

21
Ibid., 186-93.

22
Ibid., 173-86.

23
Joy Bennett Kinnon, “Weddings of the Year,” Ebony, February 2004, 56.

137

24
Bentley, “For ‘Prophetess’ of True Romance, Marriage a Mess.”

25
Denene Millner, “I’ve Come This Far by Faith,” Essence, December 2007.

26
Denene Millner, “Dawn of a New Day,” Essence, January 2008, 85.

27
Mike Morris, “Bynum on Good Morning America: First Marriage Was Abusive Too,”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 26, 2007.

28
T.D. Jakes, “Domestic Abuse is Unholy; Church Must Fight against It, Not as Judge
but as Protector,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 4, 2007.

29
Millner, “Dawn of a New Day.”

30
Dewan, “A Minister’s Public Lesson.”

31
D. Aileen Dodd, “Bishop Pleads Guilty, Apologizes to Bynum,” Atlanta Journal-
Constitution, March 12, 2008.

32
Hortense J. Spillers, “Moving On Down the Line: Variations on the African-American
Sermon.” Chap. 10 in Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 254.

33
Hortense J. Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words.” Chap. 6 in Black, White
and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 157.

34
Bynum, No More Sheets, 41-43.

35
Valerie G. Lowe, “A Call to Preach,” Ministry Today, July/August 1999.

36
Bynum, No More Sheets, 150, 169.

37
Jennifer Heller, “Marriage, Womanhood, and the Search for “Something More”:
American Evangelical Women’s Best-selling ‘Self-Help’ Books, 1972-1979,” Journal of
Religion and Popular Culture 2 (2002): 5.

38
Rebecca L. Davis, “Eroticized Wives: Evangelical Marriage Guides and God’s Plan for
the Christian Family,” in The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in
Christianity, ed. Margaret D. Kamitsuka (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 174.

39
Ibid., 175.

138

40
I arrived at this figure by combining the domestic gross totals for Perry’s films reported
by Box Office Mojo (accessed April 2010).

41
Margena A. Christian, “Becoming Tyler: Bill Collector Turned Billion-Dollar Media
Mogul Was Molded from Pain, Promise and Persistence,” Ebony, October 2008, 74.

42
Though the good Christian girl narrative runs throughout Perry’s work, including in his
stage plays and television series, I have chosen to focus on his films here for the sake of
focus and brevity, and because his films are the most widely consumed works in his
catalogue.

43
Perry himself admits to this: “Madea is a necessary tool to draw people in to hear from
the righteous….That’s what I think of her. She should never be saved. If she was, that
wouldn’t show the differences in us.” Nina Hämmerling Smith, “The Power of
Forgiveness: How Letting Go of His Painful Past Made Tyler Perry a Superstar,”
Guideposts, http://www.guideposts.com/story/tyler-perry-power-
forgiveness?page=0%2C0 (accessed April 19, 2010).

44
Christian, “Becoming Tyler.”

45
CBS, “Tyler Perry’s Amazing Journey to the Top,” October 25, 2009,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/22/60minutes/main5410095.shtml (accessed
April 19, 2010).

46
John Beifuss, review of Madea’s Family Reunion, Commercial Appeal (Memphis,
TN), March 17, 2006.

47
Mark Anthony Neal, “Tyler Perry Reflects Black Culture But Some Hate What They
See,” TheGrio.com, September 11, 2009, http://www.thegrio.com/2009/09/tyler-perry-is-
easily-the.php (accessed May 1, 2010). Neal recounts screening the film and seeing
audience members standing up and applauding during this scene—an experience that was
recounted to him by various other people.

48
The grits throwing scene plays upon a 1974 incident involving singer Al Green. Mary
Woodson, a girlfriend of Green’s who was allegedly upset that he would not marry her,
threw a scalding hot pot of grits on his naked body, causing third-degree burns that
landed him in the hospital for several months. Immediately after the incident, Woodson
shot herself to death.

49
Brian Orndorf, review of Why Did I Get Married Too?, Brianorndorf.com, April 2,
2010, http://www.brianorndorf.com/2010/04/film-review-why-did-i-get-married-too.html
(accessed April 19, 2010).

139

50
Mike Hale, “At Couples’ Reunion, Laughs, Then Grief,” New York Times, April 3,
2010.

51
Hilton Als, “Mama’s Gun: The World of Tyler Perry,” The New Yorker, April 26,
2010; Ken Hanke, review of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Mountain Xpress, March 2,
2005, http://www.mountainx.com/movies/review/diaryofmadblackwoman.php (accessed
April 19, 2010).

52
Stephanie Zacharek, “Is It a Sin to Wish Tyler Perry’s Movies Were Better?” Salon,
March 21, 2008,
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2008/03/21/browns/index.html
(accessed April 19, 2010).

53
LaTonya Taylor, “Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion,” Christianity Today,
February 24, 2006,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/movies/reviews/2006/madeasfamily.html (accessed
April 19, 2010).
140

CHAPTER FOUR

“Not Gon’ Cry”:
Black Feminist Corporeality and the Strong Black Woman Narrative Tradition

[T]he black woman must translate the female vocalist’s gestures into an apposite
structure of terms that will articulate both her kinship to other women and the particular
nuances of her own experience.
—Hortense J. Spillers
1

The fans understand that whatever they’re going through in their lives, I’m probably
going through it too—and then some. But whatever happens, we’re gonna get each other
through it. We’re gonna cry at my concert, we’re gonna be mad, we’re gonna go through
the emotions that we’re having….It’s not just songs and glamour. It’s sweat, blood,
broken toes, and mistakes….It’s life.
—Mary J. Blige
2

When literary critic Hortense Spillers wrote “Interstices: A Small Drama of
Words” more than a quarter of a century ago, she was concerned with addressing the
contours of lack. Faced with navigating the thorny terrain of black female sexuality in
public, she found herself at pains to find a space where black women’s non-fictionalized
sexual experiences were depicted, by black women and for black women, free from the
encumbrances of ritualized trauma. For Spillers, black women’s unarticulated sexuality
was, at base, the outcome of a systemic discursive maneuvering:
In order to name black women in the sexual, the investigator is obligated
to back all the way up to that suspenseful chapter in the unfolding of
subjecthood, which begins for Africanity in the West not with a body
(which one sees well enough), but what that body was made to mean via
the powerful grammars of capture: “A small drama of words”
distinguishes this sexuality as a meaning, as a position in discourse.
3

In particular, Spillers was concerned with delineating the consequences of black
women’s discursive lack within prevailing academic feminist texts, which she named as
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the “privileged mode of feminist expression.”
4
She noted that, with few exceptions, when
the silence around black women’s sexuality was broken, it was done so by male authors
or by white women who typically obscured more about the topic than they actually
revealed. Black women were thus “word-poor,”
5
because sexuality, and the terms that
describe it, is ultimately the function of the power dynamic denied black women whose
historical legacies differ vastly from those of white women. Black women therefore had
no acknowledged sexuality because sexuality as a term is reserved for the empowered.
And, in its desire for power, feminism would often co-opt the terms of patriarchist
discourse for its own means, keeping in place the conceits of the “dominative mode of
culture” that would have feminism remain a bourgeois white female enterprise.
6
As such,
Black women’s sexuality was, in Spillers’s estimation, the “interstice,” the unmarked
sequential gap that allows the dominative mode to reign unchecked.
Spillers went on to name black female vocalists as the cultural producers most
able to articulate the contours of black female sexuality: “The singer is likely closer to the
poetry of black female sexual experience than we might think, not so much, interestingly
enough, in the words of her music, but in the sense of dramatic confrontation between
ego and the world that the vocalist herself embodies.” Accordingly, the singer’s will to
control her womanhood at the performative moment through her vocal antics, interpretive
prowess, and corporeal exhibitions suggests that “Black women have learned as much
(probably more) that is positive about their sexuality through the practicing singer as they
have from the polemicist,” she argued.
7
As an example of the productive function of the
black female singer, Spillers cited the work of Michele Russell who argues that blues
142

women embody the alternative theoretical, political and sexual modalities of, in
particular, poor black women. Specifically, Russell claims that singers such as Bessie
Smith, Bessie Jackson, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Esther Phillips,
recall the worst aspects of our collective situation and teach how to wring
from that the best transformation consciousness can achieve at precise
moments in history. They are the bearers of the self-determination
tradition in Black women’s blues. Unsentimental. Historical. Materialist.
They are not afraid to name a job a slave, a marriage a meal ticket, and
loving a grind. They all recreate our past differently. But each, in her own
way and for her own day, travels the road from rape to revolution.
8

The work of Spillers and Russell on blues women attests to the abiding concern
second-wave radical black feminists had with expanding the boundaries of feminism to
include non-traditional theorists, including poets, community activists and leaders, artists,
mothers, and musicians, who could and would speak to the fullness of black female
experience. Since the publication of “Interstices” in 1984, definite strides have been made
in that regard, as feminist thinkers have strived to include the heterogeneous
positionalities of women of various racial and ethnic groups within the ambit of their
theorizations. For black women, music, the blues in particular, has continued to serve as a
fruitful space for considering how black women negotiate the intersections of race, class,
and gender, as significant contributions by scholars such as Hazel Carby (1986), Ann
Ducille (1993), Angela Davis (1998), Tera Hunter (2000), and Eileen Hayes and Linda
Williams (2007), and numerous others, reveal.
9
Further, in books that include Gail
Wyatt’s Stolen Women (1997), Kelly Brown Douglas’s Sexuality and the Black Church
(1999), Tricia Rose’s Longing to Tell (2003), Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Sexual Politics
(2005), Candice Jenkins’s Private Lives, Proper Relations (2007) and Lisa Thompson’s
143

Beyond the Black Lady (2009), black women have begun theorizing in detail the
racialized and gendered dimensions of their sexuality even outside of the parameters of
musical texts.
10

Despite these efforts, however, much remains to be said about the shape and
substance of black female sexuality. I hope to contribute to that burgeoning conversation
here by discussing black women’s sexuality in conjunction with yet another under-
theorized field of inquiry—contemporary R&B music. Despite the considerable attention
that has been given to other black musical forms including, as noted above, blues, as well
as jazz, traditional gospel, and, more recently, hip-hop music, relatively little work
situates R&B musicianship as a productive site for cultural criticism and analysis—
though, thankfully, eminent scholars Daphne Brooks and Mark Anthony Neal have been
at the forefront of a movement in that direction.
11
Considering that its origins are
staunchly rooted in the experiences of working class black people primarily, R&B is
potentially an important barometer of social sentiments and antagonisms. In the pages
that follow, then, I will consider anew Spillers’s charge that the primary articulate of
black female sexuality is the black female singer by tracing how the trope of strength is
marked on the black female singing body and how that marking resonates with
contemporary, or what gets designated, controversially, as “third-wave,” black feminism.
The definition of “sexuality” I am advancing here is also culled directly from Spillers,
and is meant to refer to the act of sex inclusive of its “moments of inauguration,
transition, and termination” as they are embedded within human and social processes and
“pledged to time and to notions of mortality.”
12

144

Finally, I am interested in investigating the potential opening up of a previous
closure exposed by Spillers in “Interstices.” The most forceful work of that essay was to
reveal how the lexicographical dimensions of sexuality, particularly as articulated within
feminist texts, ultimately foreclosed a reckoning with the black woman as embodied
sexual subject. My aim here is to do at least a provisional exploration of the space that
has been cleared, and the space that is left to be cleared, under the thematic of black
female sexuality given the evolution of feminism since the publication of “Interstices.”
Consequently, where Spillers was primarily concerned with addressing the terms of lack
in sexual discourse, I am concerned with thinking about how the constituencies of excess
in the sexual performative are both discursively and materially rendered, a project I will
situate in a reading of the narrative of the “strong black woman.”

Strong Black Woman
Black feminist scholars have been persistent in confronting the narrative terrain of
the strong black woman (sometimes referred to as the “strongblackwoman” or “SBW”) or
“superwoman.” One of the earliest and most strident of these analyses comes from
Michele Wallace’s controversial book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman,
first published in 1978. Though she later reconsidered some of the arguments she made in
Black Macho,
13
Wallace’s critique of the notion of invincible black women who
emasculated black men was an important intervention. For black women both enmeshed
in the contradictions of the waning Black Power era—with its simultaneous commitments
to social justice and black patriarchy—and invested in the promises of the contemporary
145

black feminist movement, Black Macho, whatever its shortcomings, helped make more
visible the struggles against racism and sexism black women were engaging in,
particularly within nationalist organizations.
14

In attempting to understand its consequences for black women, scholars have
continued delineating the definition, origins and function of the strong black woman
across a range of cultural texts since the publication of Black Macho. The strong black
woman has typically been described by these scholars as a selflessly enduring woman
who takes on the concerns of everyone around her, including her children, friends,
employers, lovers and family members, without regard to her own health, happiness, or
well-being. Marcia Ann Gillespie, for instance, argues that “[i]f good women work
endlessly, strive to look pretty and keep silent while serving, the strong Black woman
(SBW), the ultimate heroine, is expected to bear increasingly heavy burdens while
holding herself and our world up no matter the sacrifice,” and Meg Henson Scales claims
that the strong black woman’s “most striking characteristics are her gross displays of
endurance and the absence of a personal agenda. [She] lives for (and sometimes through)
others, and is culturally valued in direct proportion to her personal sacrifice.”
15
Gillespie
and literary critic Trudier Harris both suggest the strong black woman is often asexual,
while Patricia Hill Collins and Joan Morgan suggest that what sexual agency the strong
black woman does have is sublimated for the needs of her (male) partners.
16

Generally, these scholars contend that the origins of the strong black women are
inseparably linked to chattel slavery.
17
Black women were conceptualized as being
extrahuman in direct juxtaposition to white women of the planter class so as to justify
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requirements that they produce at the same or greater level as their male counterparts in
addition to tending to their own families and, often, the families of their white owners.
This seemingly extended to slave women’s emotional durability as well, as they were
expected to silently suffer the selling away of their children, ongoing physical and sexual
abuse, and the trauma of the auction block. Thus the very conditions that occasioned
black women’s extraordinary survival abilities marked them as particularly suited to
surviving those conditions and justified their continued abuse.
Despite its roots, a number of authors contend that the continued proliferation of
the strong black woman narrative is a consequence of black women’s “internalization” of
it for protective reasons. In her discussion of literary representations of the strong black
woman, Harris argues that “the portrait of strong black woman character became the
preferred representational pattern that has influenced African American writers for the
past 150 years” because for many of those writers it is a counter to images of black
women as sexually and morally deficient.
18
Henson Scales describes the strong black
woman as a “survival tactic” used by black women to combat difficult circumstances,
Melissa Harris-Lacewell describes it as an “alternative symbol” black women have
developed in order to “redefine black womanhood,” and, similarly, Tamara Beauboeuf-
Lafontant suggests the strong black woman is “a historically complex distillation of
images” that black women and men use to “define womanhood” for themselves.
19
Almost
universally the scholars who have commented on the strong black woman narrative
recognize that while the notion that they are über-strong is empowering for many black
women, the strong black woman narrative ultimately does black women a disservice by
147

encouraging them to deny their own needs in the service of others and making them more
susceptible to oppression and exploitation. For Harris-Lacewell the strong black woman
and black women’s embrace of it supports more punitive policy decisions regarding, for
example, welfare recipients and drug-addicted mothers,
20
and Beauboeuf-Lafontant links
the strong black woman to heightened levels of depression and weight gain among black
women.
21

Crucial though the work done by the foregoing scholars in delineating the
narrative contours of the strong black woman has been, it does evidence a reading
practice that is itself questionable. Particularly troubling is the trend toward reifying the
logic of pathology that purportedly necessitates the conceptualization of the strong black
woman by black women. If, as I argue, the paramount problem with the collective of
terms that aid in the fetishization of the black female body—of which the strong black
woman is one—is that they pathologize their subject while obscuring the structures that
are themselves the source of that supposed pathology, then the quick dismissal of black
women’s investment in the strength concept and the concomitant discourse of
internalization aids in that same project. Take, for example, Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s
discussion of a single mother named Crystal who she interviewed for her study. After
recounting Crystal’s experience with single-handedly caring for her dying mother while
her father and brothers ostensibly did nothing, Beauboeuf-Lafontant argues that
“Crystal’s presumed strength allowed her male family members to avoid the emotional
and physical labor of tending to her mother.”
22
The implicit suggestion is that if Crystal
had refused to accept her family members’ assessment of her as a strong black woman
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then the situation would have played out differently. Thus Crystal eventually becomes the
source of her own oppression. But what is missing here is a sustained analysis of the
patriarchal assumptions that motivated Crystal’s father and brothers to exploit Crystal,
assumptions that likely would have still been in place had Crystal not been considered a
strong black woman in the way that Beauboeuf-Lafontant suggests.
A related problem is the suggestion by some authors that most black women do
not have the wherewithal or good sense to avoid being “socially conditioned” as strong
black women, or that they only adopt the typology in order to “boost [their] fractured
self-esteem.”
23
In When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, journalist Joan Morgan tells
of fleeing temporarily from New York to northern California in order to rejuvenate after
years of trying to balance a demanding career and acting as a support system to her
friends, families and lovers while denying her own physical and psychological needs. She
claims it was during her west coast sabbatical that she determined she was no longer
going to be what she refers to as a “STRONGBLACKWOMAN,” and was going to start
more adequately tending to her own needs and desires, even if in the process she
disappointed other people in her life.
24
Empowering though this move might have been
for Morgan, it masks the reality that many black women do not have the resources to
“flee.” A prolonged sabbatical, a trip to the spa, a day off work, a solitary meal, an
unplugged phone, an appointment with a therapist, even a quiet walk around the
neighborhood, can all be extravagances that are beyond reach for women coping with
poverty, dilapidating communities, single or primary parenthood, dependent family
members, and depressed wages. Kimberly Springer suggests that for some black women
149

fleeing might just constitute taking a “mental health break” with “those people, female or
male, with whom [they] can be less than strong.”
25
Certainly, there is merit to this
argument and such a “break” can be a necessary intervention for black women fortunate
enough to have people in their lives who they can take one with. But, in neither Morgan’s
nor Springer’s analysis is it clear what is supposed to happen when the break is over and
real life must resume for those women for whom strength is not a luxury and dismissing
those people who rely on them is not an option. Moreover, such analyses refuse to
consider the possibility that some black women embrace the notion that they can do all
things for all people knowing full well, and accepting, that it might kill them; that even if
they had the resources to flee they would not, and not just because they do not know
enough not to, but because for some black women self-sacrifice is a politics in itself. Or,
it just might be that for some black women indoctrinated into the myths of their
nothingness, the fantasy of their superhuman abilities is not just welcome, it is actually
life sustaining.
The point of this critique is not to deny or romanticize the lived suffering of black
women, but to suggest a different point of entry into analyzing the function of the strong
black woman that does not privilege any one way of performing black womanhood.
Accordingly, what I would identify as being more troubling than the characterization of
black women as stoic superheroes, is the way that the strong black woman narrative
inextricably links black women’s sexuality to work, in the form of both physical and
intellectual labor. Though we could argue endlessly about whether the strong black
woman narrative as understood by the foregoing authors is ultimately helpful or
150

detrimental for black women, what seems more certain is that discussions of the strong
black woman always include recourse to the laboring body. And therein, it seems to me,
lies the primary tension. Because it is always tethered to discussions of black women’s
capacity to work—be it manual, domestic, or academic labor—the strong black woman
narrative potentially truncates black female sexuality writ-large, whether or not
individual black women decide to identify it as a trope of empowerment for their own
reasons. By biding it so tightly to work, the strong black woman narrative ensures that
black women’s sexuality is displaced from any independent notions of erotic pleasure,
passion, or romantic love that would complicate the well-rehearsed history of black
female sexuality as either wholly wanton or wholly asexual, or only valuable to the extent
that it services the needs of their (usually male) partners. In what follows, I will expand
upon this conceptualization by thinking about what black women’s sonic engagement
with the strong black woman narrative reveals about how black women respond to their
purportedly diminished sexuality.

Superwoman
In the summer of 2008, I was tasked with planning the perfunctory rite of marital
passage—the bachelorette party—for one of my closest friends. Given that we are both
late 1970s babies, my friend and I decided the party would be 80s-themed, complete with
fluorescent colors, big hair, chintzy outfits, and heavily synthesized pop music. So, one
muggy July evening, I gathered my friend and twenty or so of her closest (mostly black)
female friends and family members at the home of another family friend for a night of
151

light, Madonna-inspired, debauchery. After cutting into the requisite penis-shaped
celebration cake, examining (and recounting our various experiences with)
technologically advanced sex toys and enhancements, consuming innumerable gelatin
shots, and exhausting the electric slide (and its multitudinous variants), the night finally
began to wind down. The women gathered in the room ranged in age from their early
twenties to the middle-aged women in their forties and fifties, including my friend’s
mother and her mother’s partner. Many of the women I knew personally from the church
home where my friend and I had both spent much of our adolescence, and during the
evening I had been struck with the thought that I had unwittingly found, in a dark,
basement party room in my small Midwestern hometown, a truly revolutionary space.
Although many of us had laughed, cried, worshiped, and celebrated together before in
different places for different reasons, it was here, in an occasion of nostalgic pre-wedding
silliness, that we had created a safe, collective space for talking about, and regaling in,
tales of our sexual (mis)adventures, fears, desires and fantasies. We had been shocked to
discover just who had actually experimented with the more daring sexual contraptions
and products we had demonstrated, laughed aloud at our bedroom mishaps and (literally)
failed partnerships, and been instructed in the most pleasurable procreative techniques by
the more experienced women in our midst. It was, for me, an exhalable moment.
Yet, as we often say-sing in the black church world, the best was yet to come. As
women sat nursing their final drinks, I decided to shift the musical vibe away from the
pop rock and hard dance beats that had been fueling the party, to what my clique lovingly
refers to as “real” 80s music (with many apologies to Cyndi and them). After playing a
152

few tracks by the likes of Debarge (“All this Love”), Debra Laws (“Very Special”) and
Ready for the World (“Love You Down”), I hit gold as all the background chatter fell
away and the selected song opened up and began to fill the space:
Early in the morning
I put breakfast at your table
And make sure that your coffee
Has its sugar and cream

Your eggs are over easy
Your toast done lightly
All that’s missing is your morning kiss
That used to greet me…

By the time the song Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, one of its writers (along with L.A.
Reid and Daryl Simmons), once called the “Women’s National Anthem” hit the chorus,
every woman in the room was singing along (and a-loud), our off-notes and imperfect
pitches mingling to create a symphonic ode to female dissonance:
I’m not your superwoman
I’m not the kind of girl that you can let down
And think that everything’s okay
Boy I am only human
This girl needs more than occasional hugs
As a token of love from you to me.
26

Despite the song’s abundantly heterosexual references—which I would contend
ultimately discounts it from consideration as the “Women’s National Anthem” Babyface
champions—“Superwoman,” which was released in 1988 on Karyn White’s debut album
and eventually peaked at number eight on the U.S. Hot 100 charts and number one on the
R&B charts, has seemingly continued to correspond to the lived experiences of a range of
black women. I would even go so far as to argue that “Superwoman” is one of a handful
of songs that might be considered the post-soul generation’s version of Aretha Franklin’s
153

“Respect”—that 1967 jam that, like “Superwoman,” put men on notice that their women
were no willing (if they ever were) to put up with being mistreated or disrespected.
27
That
does not mean, however, that only women who came of age during the 1970s and beyond
can appreciate the urgency of White’s contribution to pro-woman music culture. Gladys
Knight, Patti LaBelle and Dionne Warwick teamed up to re-record “Superwoman” for
Knight’s 1991 album, Good Woman, and the following year Phyllis Hyman and Melba
Moore performed their own rendition of the song during the Essence Awards.
More to the point: the reaction one particular party participant had to
“Superwoman” that women-filled July evening. Nina, my friend’s mother’s partner, not
only sang along word-for-word to the song, she seemed to be enraptured by it. Though
she had been relatively reserved throughout the preceding activities, during the playing of
“Superwoman” Nina sat up in her perch in a pose typically reserved for religious
adoration, her arms raised to the sky, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, as she uninhibitedly
bellowed along with the rest of us. Most striking about Nina’s “Superwoman”
performance was the way it resonated with Spillers’s observation that the singer is “in the
moment of performance, the primary subject of her own invention. Her sexuality is
precisely the physical expression of the highest self-regard and often, the sheer pleasure
she takes in her own powers.”
28
It is not Nina’s potential embrace of the literal words of
the song that is illustrative here, as a woman in a partnership with another woman it may
not have been that the appeal to male fidelity was foremost on her mind at the
performative moment; instead, it is how Nina embodied the spirit (or the soul, perhaps) of
the text that is crucial.
154

“Nina,” Peoria, Illinois, 2008. Photo: Terrion Williamson

A superficial reading might suggest “Superwoman” is but a rehashing of a
familiar story about female/male relational discord (a story that, of course, is not confined
to opposite-sex relationships), as White confesses her frustrations about an unresponsive
partner who does not acknowledge her efforts to please him and clearly doesn’t “love
[her] the same.” However, I would argue that Nina’s response suggests a broader reading.
“Superwoman” is, firstly, a critical “first-order naming.” As Spillers explains it, a first-
order naming conveys “words that express the experience of a community in diachronic
time, in daily social relationship, in economic well-being, in subject identity.”
29
It is these
expressions, these first-order namings that come directly from the experiences of black
155

women themselves, that are necessary to fill the discursive voids around black women’s
sexuality. Secondly, while “Superwoman” is a critique of the strong black woman
narrative, it is not actually the domestic labor women are often expected to perform that
is being contested. Certainly, White does comment on that labor, she mentions making
breakfast and racing through rush hour traffic to get dinner on the table, and in the video
for the song she is shown tending to her children, doing laundry, and going back and
forth to the grocery store. Yet White’s complaint is not actually about the work, but that
the work seems to be conditioning her existence. Toward the end of the song, she wails:
Oh, baby look into the corners of your mind
I’ll always be there for you in good and bad times
But I can’t be that superwoman that you want me to be
I’ll give my everlasting love if you’ll return love to me.

She thus situates the work she does as an outgrowth of her love for her partner, and she is
calling on him to understand it as such, and not just as a consequence of the fact that she
is a (strong) black woman. For White, a superwoman is not simply someone who is
called on to take care of everyone else’s needs, but someone whose desires for love and
affection are thwarted by her supposed ability to labor ceaselessly on the behalf of others
and, in particular, on behalf of her partner. As a result, when she claims that she is “only
human,” she is demanding to be understood as a sexual being apart from the gendered
domestic work she performs. And when, in the fevered closing rifts of the song, she
commands her listeners to “stop right where you are / everybody sing along with me,”
White beckons to black women like Nina to demand the same.

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More than a decade after Karyn White’s “Superwoman,” another “Superwoman”
topped music charts. In 2001, R&B artist Cynthia “Lil’ Mo” Loving released what is, to
date, her biggest hit, “Superwoman Pt. II,” which was the first release from her debut
album Based on a True Story and features the rap artist Fabolous.
30
Unlike its
predecessor, however, this “Superwoman” is about a woman embracing and expanding
upon the notion of her superhuman abilities specifically in relationship to other women,
who she claims are ordinary in comparison:
(Chorus)
Baby they can’t play you
Cause I’ll save you with my superpowers
Boy I’m only human
But I’ll be your superwoman.

They don’t make any girls like me, no no
Take a girl like me to get
A guy like you to understand how girls ain’t the same
I’m not your average chic
Cause they can’t do it like this
I’ve been sent to save your day
And things won’t be the same.
31

The song’s corresponding music video features the singer—complete with a form-
fitting outfit featuring superman logos and her trademark waist-length braids in brilliant
blue—enacting a playful and fantastical brand of superwomaness. The video ostensibly
features a day in the life of Lil’ Mo, who is first shown working in a café where she is
easily able to open a jar that her muscular male co-worker was previously struggling
with. Afterwards, she is shown outside of the Compton Swap Meet where she moves at
lightening fast speed (and while wearing thigh-high boots, I might add) to prevent a
would-be thief who grabs a purse off of a woman’s arm from getting away. Finally, at the
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end of the video she is shown at a bowling alley where she out-bowls all of the male
bowlers by throwing her ball down the lane so hard that she strikes out her lane, as well
as all of the surrounding lanes. Consequently, she is finally able to attract the attentions
of the man she has been admiring the entire day. The spectacular displays of strength and
ability featured in the video are seemingly meant to underscore Lil’ Mo’s contention that
she can take care of her man in a way that few other women can. And Fabolous’s rapped
claim that his superwoman can make him “cum faster than a speeding bullet” and that her
hips make him feel like he’s “under [her] spell,” suggests that, in this instance, being a
superwoman also means having extraordinary sexual powers. Ultimately, Lil’ Mo’s
interpretation of the strong black woman narrative as literal superhero, while still strongly
indebted to the linkage between work and sexuality that is the strong black woman’s
organizing principle, locates a place for black female sexual agency that re-reads
academic textual references to the strong black woman narrative that frame it as merely
oppressive or as a function of a deficient internalization. As such, “Superwoman” also
riffs on earlier musical proclamations of sexual prowess by blues women, as well as later
declarations of black female superability by R&B artists, such as Chaka Khan’s promise
that she can “do anything [her man] wants done” in her 1978 hit “I’m Every Woman.”
32

More recently, R&B/pop star Alicia Keys has taken on the superwoman/strong
black woman motif. In 2008 Keys released “Superwoman,” as the fourth single from As I
Am (2007), her third studio album. She went on to win the 2009 Grammy award for Best
Female R&B Vocal Performance for the song, which she wrote along with Linda Perry of
4 Non Blondes fame, bassist Steve Mostyn, and her long-time producer, Kerry “Krucial”
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Brothers. Like Lil’ Mo before her, Keys willingly embraces the idea of the superwoman.
During the opening bars, she sings:
I hang my head from sorrow
State of humanity
I wear it on my shoulders
Gotta find the strength in me

(Chorus:)
‘Cause I am a superwoman
Yes I am (yes she is)
Still when I’m a mess, I still put on a vest
With an “S” on my chest
Oh yes, I’m a superwoman.
33

Aided by its music video, “Superwoman”—which peaked at number eighty-two
on the Hot 100 charts, and number twelve on the R&B charts—was quickly taken up as
something of a feminist anthem. The video features Keys alternatively playing the roles
of four different black women whose identities are eventually revealed at the end:
entrepreneur, mother and actress, Jada Pinkett Smith; African student, Nassanga
Galabuzi; astronaut Joan Higginbotham, and single mother and future college student,
Wynter Williams. Underneath the listing of her name and occupation, each woman is
designated a “Superwoman.” Keys thus reinforces the strong black woman narrative as it
is often espoused by black female theorists, which is to say that it glorifies the
accomplishments of black women that occur in the face of heavy odds and highlights
their self-dependency. Further, the strong black woman is directly linked to the world of
work and children (domestic service) and the sexuality of the women who are profiled,
outside of those realms, goes uncommented upon. Yet the fact that so many black women
across various socioeconomic positionings have found Keys’s “Superwoman” edifying—
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as demonstrated by innumerable web comments and feminist blogs and the song’s
successful charting history—suggests the standard trope of female empowerment
embedded with the strong black woman narrative should not be ignored or easily
dismissed.
Taken together, the readings of the superwoman done by Karyn White, Lil’ Mo,
and Alicia Keys suggest black women’s variant responses to the strong black woman
narrative. For some black women, the narrative restricts their abilities to be recognized by
their partners as physically and emotionally needy, for others the narrative opens up a
space for imaginative possibility, and for others still it is an empowering declaration of
female sustainability. And, I would venture to guess, for many black women the narrative
represents a combination of all three readings, as well as, perhaps, other readings that are
not considered here.

Black Feminism?
Given my argument about the linkage that gets made within the strong black
woman narrative between sexuality and work and the narrative’s problematic foreclosing
of the possibilities of black female sexuality, I am interested in this section in thinking
about how the sonic reckonings of the strong black woman/superwoman by R&B women
reflect, respond to, or create, contemporary black feminism(s). But, first, I should say
something about what it means to attempt to locate any cultural text as feminist, or to
even attempt to locate feminism itself, at this particular historical moment. Though
certain media outlets have been quick to declare the end of feminism, feminist scholars
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and activists have continued to assert the viability of feminism into the twenty-first
century. They point to the enduring wage disparities between men and women, the
ongoing femicide of women of color, the feminization of poverty, the escalating numbers
of women being imprisoned, the political attacks against abortion, and any number of
other societal inequities as rationales for the continued necessity of feminist engagement
and activism. What is more debatable for these scholars is figuring out what gets to be
defined as feminism and who gets to be named as a feminist, and, subsequently, who gets
to do those namings or create those definitions.
As feminists following the lead of individuals like Rebecca Walker, Lynn Chancer,
and Naomi Wolf began advocating the rise of a “third-wave” of feminism in the early
nineties, the wave metaphor typically used to historically situate the women’s movement
became more actively contested.
34
Traditionally, the first-wave has been book-ended by
the suffrage movement of the mid-nineteenth century and the ratification of the
Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, while the second-wave is typically thought to have
begun in the mid-1960s with the heightened national activity by women against gender
inequality and discrimination in the wake of the civil rights movement, and it is
considered to have ended by the mid-1980s due to major disputes within feminist
communities themselves. The third-wave, then, both “signals a new generation of
feminists”
35
and “responds to the [‘category of women’] debates of the 1980s that
hobbled feminist theory and practice.”
36
Those debates called into question the efficacy
of the category of “woman” as a unifying field of analysis for feminism because of the
way it tended to assume a shared identity that, in actuality, often excluded women of
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color, queer women, and queer women of color. Partially as a consequence of the
fracturing portended by those challenges to second-wave feminism, as well as the
seeming reticence of many second-wave feminists to engage with popular cultural texts,
the third-wave was ushered in as a corrective to the supposed rigidity and exclusivity of
the second-wave. R. Claire Snyder effectively lays out the primary motives of feminism’s
third-wave:
First, in response to the collapse of the category of “women,” the third
wave foregrounds personal narratives that illustrate an intersectional and
multiperspectival version of feminism. Second, as a consequence of the
rise of postmodernism, third-wavers embrace multivocality over synthesis
and action over theoretical justification. Finally, in response to the
divisiveness of the sex wars, third-wave feminism emphasizes an inclusive
and nonjudgmental approach that refuses to police the boundaries of the
feminist political.
37

The founding of Bust in 1993 and Bitch in 1996, magazines explicitly dedicated to
feminist analyses of media culture; as well as the reclamation of words like “bitch” and
“cunt;” the increased visibility of female pop icons; the embrace of “girlie” culture in the
form of dolls, fashion and beauty; the publication of personal narratives by women,
particularly women of color, trumpeting a new brand of feminism; the expressed
inclusivity of multiple political viewpoints; and the promotion of sexual experimentation
and aggressiveness as a form of female empowerment, all reference the expanded
feminism that supposedly distinguishes the third-wave.
Nevertheless, certain scholars have been careful to point out that the presumptive
need for a third-wave of feminism is itself indicative of the limitations of the wave model
of feminist historiography. While some scholars argue for a complete extermination of
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the wave metaphor and others suggest that a re-tooling will suffice, they tend to agree on
the basic reasons why the wave model as currently promulgated is insufficient, a couple
of which I will briefly outline here. First, the wave model privileges the activism of
middle-class white women who often failed to take into account how issues of race and
class affect the lives of low-income women and women of color. Moreover, it obscures
women’s activism that took place in alternative places, such as male-dominated
organizations and labor unions, as well as the activism that occurred before the first-wave
or during the trough of the first and second waves—for instance, the resistance of slave
women, the work of women in the antislavery and antilynching campaigns, and the work
of welfare activists and 1950s labor activists are largely missing from traditional
renderings of feminist history. Second, the wave model begets generational differences
that often pit second-wave feminists against third-wave feminists. Because the wave
model privileges certain types of feminist organizing, the second-wave often gets
caricatured as sexually frigid, judgmental and exclusionary, while third-wave feminists
get accused of being less theoretical, less attuned to the need for political struggle, and
under-appreciative of the battles fought by second-wave feminists. As such, the white
middle-class bias of the second-wave gets overplayed, the white middle-class bias of the
third-wave gets underplayed, the diversity of viewpoints that inhere within both second
and third-wave feminism are concealed, and the potential for coalition building across
generational perspectives is often thwarted.
38

Premilla Nadasen notes that the limitations of the waves model are directly linked
to the definitional confusion around feminism. As mentioned above, the practice of
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“gatekeeping” continues to be a concern within feminism as scholars and activists who
want to broaden the boundaries of feminism work to add the perspectives of non-white
and lower-income women, transwomen, in some cases, men, and other non-normative
groups to historical and contemporary narratives about feminism. Nadasen suggests that
feminism, “in the broadest sense, is a political program working to empower women, to
ensure them autonomy and control over their lives in a way that does not impede the
autonomy or contribute to the exploitation of other women.”
39
The strength of Nadasen’s
definition is its recognition that women are differentially located and that women can and
do exploit other women. But broad though it may be, Nadasen’s definition is still not
quite as broad, or as radical, as the definition bell hooks advanced earlier. In Feminist
Theory: From Margin to Center, first published in 1984, hooks defines feminism as “a
struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the
ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a
commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take
precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”
40
In hooks’s
conceptualization, feminism is not just for women, and one does not become a feminist
simply as a consequence of being a woman, but feminist activism involves an explicit
political commitment to ending the cultural basis of group oppression, which in turn
requires that classism and racism be considered feminist issues in conjunction with
sexism.
While feminism still clearly involves “a struggle to end sexist oppression,” given
the currents of feminist thought during the latter half of the twentieth-century and early
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twenty-first century, the question over just what should be considered “sexist oppression”
has become more hotly contested. The careful embrace of the traditional nuclear family,
rap music, pornographic texts, sex-work, and the fashion industry by some self-defined
feminists exemplifies the willingness of feminist thinking to transcend any easily-marked
boundaries. Further, as advanced technology and media culture have saturated everyday
practice—and in conjunction with the ratcheting up of the post-race, post-feminism, post-
affirmative action rhetoric that has become particularly potent since the 2008 presidential
campaign—concerns over gendered imagery and its effects on the lives of individual
women have become more centralized on feminist agendas, even as movements for
collective social justice have become less visible. With these observations about the
current situatedness of feminism in mind, my purpose in the final section of this chapter
is to think through the project of contemporary black feminism by analyzing how the
work of one black female musical icon potentially synergizes the feminist sensibilities of
a wide swath of black women, including those who do not necessarily self-identify as
feminists.

Mary, Quite Contrary
In her discussion of the dense connections between black women’s “pop”
literature and nineties R&B, Daphne Brooks argues that the enormous popularity of Terry
McMillan’s fiction, in particular her 1992 New York Times bestseller Waiting to Exhale
which was followed in 1995 by a film of the same name, paved the way for the explosion
of black female R&B artists in the early nineties, and that McMillan’s work is important
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to understanding the thematics of those artists’ output. Brooks contends that due to the
historically disconnected black bourgeois angst that characterizes Exhale and similar
texts, “much of the material recorded by Black female pop music artists in the nineties
extended the trope of emotional weariness and spiritual emaciation stylized by
McMillan.”
41
The musical response of R&B women to the male braggadocio and
frequent misogyny of late twentieth-century hip-hop and New Jack Swing (a hybrid
R&B/hip-hop genre usually identified with producer Teddy Riley) therefore “appears to
be trapped in a vortex of alienation, betrayal, and a vaguely mapped blueprint of social
independence.”
42
Of particular concern to Brooks is how the potential empowerment
narratives of songs such as Whitney Houston’s “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” (1999),
Destiny Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills” (1999), and Mary B. Blige’s “Not Gon’ Cry” (1996),
while demanding male accountability for the wrongs they have done to women, short-
circuit by failing to imagine alternative spaces of autonomy wherein the female
complainants might be able to extricate themselves from the domain of heteropatriarchal
partnerships and, simultaneously, critique the sociopolitical structures that bind the lives
of both the women and their chosen mates. What this ultimately portends is a musical
landscape that, much like its literary counterpart, shifts away from the work of earlier
R&B artists that was more centrally concerned with analyzing the cultural instability
wrought by racism, sexism and, classism, in favor of a focus on middle-class black
women’s material and sexual dissatisfaction.
43
Brooks ultimately concludes by arguing
that, “All too often, the press and the public continue to christen these narratives of
discontent as revisionary anthems for the new Black middle-class woman professionals
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who are uncomfortable with the label feminist but who, nevertheless, long to transform
their current social and cultural positioning.”
44

Though her primary concern is not with critiquing feminist practice directly,
Brooks’s arguments clearly resound with accusations that get lodged at third-wave
feminism as being too politically disconnected and individualistic. If, as Brooks suggests,
black women’s popular literature and R&B are emblematic of the embittered and
materialist bent in turn-of-the-century black communities, what are the implications for
contemporary black feminism? More specifically, what is at stake in Brooks’s
designation of black women’s music as a site of excess sexual tension when, just twenty
years earlier, Spillers named the black female singer as the primary articulate of black
women’s absent sexuality? In what follows, I contend that a response to this potential
impasse is suggested by the musical stylings of Mary J. Blige, the still-reigning “Queen
of Hip-Hop Soul,” and the artist Brooks names as one of the first and most prevalent
R&B progenitors of the McMillan oeuvre.

There is perhaps no contemporary music artist who better actualizes the emotional
discontent of black women than Mary J. Blige, whose consummate ability to embody the
pseudo-independent, woman-scorned urtext of nineties R&B elucidates her positioning as
one of the premiere embodiments of the strong black woman narrative in the twenty-first
century. In “All That You Can’t Leave Behind: Black Female Soul Singing and the
Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Daphne Brooks builds upon her
earlier reading of black women’s R&B to suggest the rampant disillusionment
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characterizing much of that work gets rearticulated by Blige at a particular historical
moment—during a network telethon that aired in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina—via what Joseph Roach characterizes as “surrogation.”
45
Roach describes
surrogation as a process of substitution intended by cultural performers to respond to
distinct social absences and negations; it is a process that is never complete and never
exact, for the proposed substitution is typically either deficient or superfluous. Further,
Roach claims it is this ongoing process of substitution that is referred to be the term
“performance.”
46
Accordingly, Brooks contends that in her rendition of Irish rock band
U2’s signature song, “One,” Blige “creates a particular kind of black feminist
surrogation, that is, an embodied cultural act that articulates black women’s distinct
forms of palpable sociopolitical loss and grief as well as spirited dissent and
dissonance.”
47

That she can so demonstrably marshal loss and grief in a way that “sonically
resists, revises, and reinvents”
48
the black female body in public is testament to Blige
having spent her life spilling her pain into her vocal and stage theatrics, pain that no
doubt originated in her hard upbringing. Mary Jane Blige was born January 11, 1971 to
Cora Blige, a teenage mother who raised her and her older sister, LaTonya, in the
Scholobohm (a.k.a “Slow Bomb”) housing projects in Yonkers, New York (her mother
would later have other children). Though she credits him with first introducing her to
singing, Blige’s father, Thomas Blige, was never a significant presence in her life; he left
the family when she was still very young. Blige claims that growing up she was
constantly teased for her appearance by relatives and that she was routinely involved in
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physical altercations with other people in her neighborhood. She also claims to have been
privy to the physical abuse her mother suffered at the hands of her father before his
departure, as well as the abusive relationships of her aunts, and that she was herself
sexually molested by a family friend as a child. As with many soul and R&B artists,
Blige grew up in church, and for a time she was a member of the junior choir at the
House of Prayer Pentecostal Church. But being in church was not enough to keep her out
of trouble, by the time she was fifteen or sixteen she had begun experimenting with drugs
and alcohol, and by the time she was seventeen she had dropped out of school.
When she was around age seventeen, Blige’s life took an abrupt turn after she
made a fortuitous trip to the local mall where she recorded Anita Baker’s “Caught Up in
the Rapture,” karaoke-style at the behest of friends. The amateur recording ultimately
made its way into the hands of Andre Harrell, the founder and then-CEO of Uptown
Records, which during the early nineties was one of the most prolific and high-profile
labels producing R&B and hip-hop artists; its early roster included notable artists such as
Al B. Sure!, Jodeci, Heavy D, and Guy. Upon hearing her recording, Harrell quickly
signed Blige to his label and charged his A&R executive, Sean “Diddy” Combs (who was
then known as “Puff Daddy”), with taking charge of the production for her first album.
Released in 1992, What’s the 411? was eventually certified triple-platinum and it is
typically credited with ushering in “hip-hop soul”—the sample-heavy genre that melds
R&B singing with hip-hop beats that came to dominate nineties R&B and permanently
changed the pace of popular R&B music.
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Despite the fact that she holds the place of honor in the origin story of hip-hop
soul, none of Blige’s subsequent albums would be as heavily beholden to the genre as
What’s the 411? Though she clearly had the biography to support the straight-from-the-
streets, around-the-way-girl personae she so brilliantly projected, Combs and company
were largely responsible for Blige’s initial packaging and the shape of her sound. The
rough-around-the-edges swagger, “ghetto fabulous” styling, jagged vocals, and “Queen
of Hip Hop Soul” honorific were all constitutive of the promotional tooling meant to
mold Blige into the female version of her male labelmates. The reputation Blige earned
during those early years of her career as a temperamental bad-girl who would arrive
hours late to photo shoots and interviews, and would just as soon curse out her
interviewers as she would refuse to speak to them at all, only added to the narrative.
Allegedly, her label did not initially attempt to reign in Blige’s unprofessional behavior,
including the excessive drinking and drug abuse that aided in its perpetuation, because it
helped to buttress the image they were economically invested in projecting.
49

Still, Blige’s continued success has never hinged on manufactured imaging, but
on the raw emotionality and embodiedness of her performances; a trait that often conjures
up comparisons to soulsters like Chaka Khan, Aretha Franklin, and Gladys Knight (the
comparisons are also bolstered by Blige’s frequent covers of songs like Rufus’s “Sweet
Thing” and Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”), and even blues
siren Billie Holiday. While Blige acknowledges the comparisons and will admit that the
breaks and imperfections in her voice distinguish her from her more pop
contemporaries—women like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey—she is careful to say
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she believes “there’s no ‘next’ after an Aretha or Chaka.”
50
Yet, those comparisons hold
the key to the overwhelming response black women have to Blige. Journalist Sasha
Frere-Jones captures the sentiment of many when she notes:
Lines that would sound banal from most singers sound urgent and feel
immediate, as if Mary were leaving you an especially long voice-mail
message—one that she might not even remember the next day. That’s why
Blige’s fans feel especially proprietary about her: self-consciousness is
absent from even her most wound-up performances. Blige has no truck
with artifice; many of her recordings sound like single takes, where she
simply lets go and forgets what she’s doing.
51

As successful as What’s the 411? was, it was not until Blige released her second
album, My Life, in 1994 that she really began to expand her fan base beyond those who
could most immediately relate to her personal story and she began to morph into the
battle-scarred woman-warrior that is relatable to so many women today. On My Life,
which was also released on Uptown and largely produced by Combs, Blige took over
much of the songwriting, and the album remains one of her most critically successful to-
date, even eventually making it onto a number of “greatest albums” lists. It is also,
according to Blige, the album that reflects the lowest point in her life. Not only was her
drug and alcohol abuse at an all-time high, but she was also in an emotionally and
physically abusive relationship with a man widely rumored (but never directly confirmed
by Blige) to be K-Ci Hailey, the lead singer of the group Jodeci.
52
The songs on the
album, which include a cover of Rose Royce’s “I’m Going Down,” “Be Happy,” which
samples Curtis Mayfield’s “You’re Too Good to Me,” and “My Life,” built upon a
sample of Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” are replete with stories of love
gone wrong and Blige’s quest for self-fulfillment. And those themes would continue to
171

fill the spaces of her next albums, particularly on songs like “Not Gon’ Cry” and “I Can
Love You” from 1997’s Share My World—the first album she recorded on a different
label (MCA) and without Combs (she left Uptown after Harrell left for Motown in 1995,
and she split with Combs for undisclosed reasons), and the first that she reportedly had
full autonomy over—and “Deep Inside,” “Your Child,” and “No Happy Holidays” from
Mary, released on MCA in 1999.
Around 2001 Blige’s normally grief-filled milieu began to shift. That year she
released her fifth studio album, No More Drama, which, both sonically and lyrically,
signaled a divergence from her previous three albums. “Family Affair,” the first single, is
an uptempo number encouraging people to leave the “hateration” behind and get on the
dance floor; but it was the second single that really fueled sales and helps explains the
album’s overall more upbeat trajectory and refuse-to-be-a-victim mentality. In the title
track, Blige declares the end of drama in her life, proclaiming, “Only God knows where
the story ends for me / But I know where the story begins / It’s up to us to choose
whether we win or lose / And I choose to win.” Less than a year prior to the release of No
More Drama, Mary had met Kendu Isaacs, the man who would later become her
husband. She credits Issacs, as well as the trauma she experienced after both the death of
R&B singer Aaliyah in a plane accident in August 2001 and the September 11 attacks on
the World Trade Center, with the dramatic changes she began to make around the time of
the release of No More Drama. She sobered up, stopped partying excessively, established
a relationship with God, and set about trying to love herself and accept Isaacs’s love,
which she said was unlike anything she had ever experienced before from a man.
53

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In August 2003, several months before marrying Isaacs, Blige released Love &
Life, which continued the theme of Mary Redeemed. But although it still went platinum,
Love & Life was, and remains, her most unsuccessful album. Critics and fans alike felt
that the new, happy, Mary lacked the artistic depth she exhibited on earlier recordings.
One reviewer suggested that “the fulfillment she wished for in ‘Real Love’ is finally hers,
and now only her music is suffering. Ms. Blige has something to lose, and as a result, she
has lost her fearlessness. Before she writes her next album, she should spend her time
getting mad again.”
54
Blige responds to those criticisms by contending that the people
who would have her misery continue in order that she produce a certain kind of music
“just want someone to waddle with them in their environment,” suggesting that she “lost
a million fans” with the release of Love & Life.
55
But instead of returning to the themes of
unhappiness that saturated albums like My Life, Blige turned her attentions to how-I-go-
over survival narratives. In 2005 she released The Breakthrough which went triple-
platinum and for which she received a career-high eight Grammy nominations; she
ultimately won three. The biggest single from the album, “Be Without You,” was a love
song written for Isaacs. Her next two albums, Growing Pains (2007) and Stronger with
Each Tear (2009) rehearse similar narratives as The Breakthrough, with Blige continuing
to proclaim that she is a work-in-progress who is trying to manage problems similar to
those of many of her fans and that she is working to stay happy and maintain her sense of
self-love and respect.

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I have spent time discussing Blige’s biography because of its key role in the
establishment of her fan base and the way it connects up with the narrative of the strong
black woman that is so fundamental to her success. In particular, the contention that fans
are more responsive to Miserable Mary than saved-and-sober Mary is suggestive of the
fetishistic nature of the narrative Blige enables, because it evinces a tendency to celebrate
the voice that pain brings forth without attending to the pain itself. Yet the performance
of the strong black woman that Blige engages through her vocal riffs and stage theatrics
is altogether different, it seems to me, than that engaged by the singers Spillers and
Russell valorize—women such as Bessie Smith, Nina Simone and Esther Phillips. This
difference has to do with the fact that the world of work Mary inhabits is fundamentally
different than the world of work those earlier singers inhabited, which is to say there is a
generational and situational difference that must be accounted for. Blige performs a
strength narrative that was embodied by the women whose music informs her own. This
is not to suggest Blige is not “strong” in the sense of the term as it is parlayed within
everyday black cultural practice, but is to suggest that the late twentieth, early twenty-
first century context in which Blige is situated has created different conditions of
possibility for the creation and circulation of her work. Yet the gestural economy that
Nina and many other black women participate in when they bear witness to Blige and her
contemporaries is indicative of a black female—and dare I say, feminist—space where
the vagaries of strength are contested, affirmed, and negotiated.
174

CHAPTER FOUR ENDNOTES

1
Hortense J. Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Black, White and in
Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 167. Previously published in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female
Sexuality, ed. Carol Vance (London: Routledge, 1984), 73-101.

2
Ethan Brown, “There’s Something About Mary,” New York Magazine, September 20,
1999.

3
Hortense J. Spillers, “Peter’s Pan: Eating in the Diaspora,” in Black, White and in
Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 14 (emphasis in original).

4
Spillers, “Interstices,” 153.

5
Ibid., 154.

6
Ibid., 157-58. Spillers adopts the term “dominative mode” from Edward Said (who is, in
turn, borrowing from Raymond Williams) as a more precise substitute for the terms
“race” and “racism.”

7
Ibid., 165-66.

8
Michele Russell, “Slave Codes and Liner Notes,” in All the Women Are White, All the
Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and
Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982), 130-31.

9
Hazel Carby, “‘It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime’: The Sexual Politics of Women’s
Blues,” Radical America 20 (1986): 9-22; Ann Ducille, “Blues Notes on Black Sexuality:
Sex and the Texts of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen,” Journal of the History of Sexuality
3 (1993): 418-44; Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma”
Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Tera W.
Hunter, “‘Sexual Pantomimes,’ the Blues Aesthetic, and Black Women in the New
South,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 145-64; Eileen M. Hayes and Linda F.
Williams, eds., Black Women and Music: More than the Blues (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2007).

10
Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our
Lives (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997); Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the
Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999); Tricia
Rose, Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy (New York:
175

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African
Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005); Candice M.
Jenkins, Proper Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Lisa B. Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady:
Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2009). See also important articles by Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s
Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 738-55; Lorraine O’Grady,
“Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Afterimage 20.1 (1992): 14-
23; Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,”
Differences 6.2 (1994): 126-45; and Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of
Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial
Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty
(New York: Routledge, 1997), 170-82.

11
Daphne A. Brooks, “‘It’s Not Right But It’s Okay’: Black Women’s R&B and the
House that Terry McMillan Built,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture
and Society 5 (2003): 32-45; Daphne A. Brooks, “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’:
Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,”
Meridians 8 (2008): 180-204; Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular
Music and Black Public Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998); Mark Anthony Neal, Soul
Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge,
2002); Mark Anthony Neal, Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation
(New York: Routledge. 2003). See also, Marlo David, “Afrofuturism and Post-Soul
Possibility in Black Popular Music,” 41 African American Review (2007): 695-707.

12
Spillers, “Interstices,” 164.

13
See, in particular, the introduction to the 1990 version. Michele Wallace, Black Macho
and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Verso, 1990).

14
For examples of black women’s activism in one such organization, the Black Panther
Party, see: Robyn Ceanne Spencer, “Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle:
Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party,” Journal of Women’s
History 20.1 (2008): 90-113; Tracye Matthews, “No One Ever Asks What a Man’s Place
in the Revolution Is: Gender and the Politics of the Black Panther Party, 1966-71,” in The
Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles Jones (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic
Press, 2005), 267-304.

15
Marcia Ann Gillespie, “The Myth of the Strong Black Woman,” in Feminist
Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and
Men, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Paula S. Rothenberg, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Company, 1984), 33; Meg Henson Scales, “Tenderheaded, or Rejecting the Legacy
176

of Being able to Take It,” in Tenderheaded: A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories,
ed. Juliette Harris and Pamela Johnson (New York: Pocket Books, 2001), 31.
16
Gillespie, “The Myth of the Strong Black Woman,” 34; Trudier Harris, Saints, Sinners,
Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (New York: Palgrave,
2001); Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 208-09; Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads
Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1999), 87. Both Hill Collins and Morgan specifically address male/female
partnerships, and pay very little attention to same-sex partnerships.

17
But see Sheri Parks’s discussion of the “Sacred Dark Feminine” and her argument that
the beginnings of human existence are the strong black woman’s point of origin. Sheri
Parks, Fierce Angels: The Strong Black Woman in American Life and Culture (New
York: One World Books, 2010).

18
Harris, Saints, Sinners, Saviors, 19.

19
Henson Scales, “Tenderheaded,” 31; Melissa Harris-Lacewell, “No Place to Rest:
African American Political Attitudes and the Myth of Black Women’s Strength,” Women
and Politics 23 (2001): 2; Tamara Beaufoeuf-Lafontant, “Strong and Large Black
Women: Exploring Relationships between Deviant Womanhood and Weight, “ Gender &
Society, 17 (2003): 111.

20
Harris-Lacewell does also argue, however, that “There does seem to be room in black
public opinion for acceptance of black women who need help to meet life’s many
demands.” Harris-Lacewell, “No Place to Rest,” 24-25.

21
Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and
the Embodiment of a Costly Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).

22
Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, “Keeping Up Appearances, Getting Fed Up: The
Embodiment of Strength among African American Women,” Meridians 5 (2005): 113.

23
Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, 109.

24
Ibid., 85-111.

25
Kimberly Springer, “Third Wave Black Feminism?” Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society 27 (2002): 1071.

26
“Superwoman,” Karyn White, compact disc, 1988 Warner Brothers Records.

27
Mark Anthony Neal uses the term “post-soul” to “describe the political, social, and
cultural experiences of the African-American community since the end of the civil rights
177

and Black Power movements.” Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies, 3. Nelson George
makes a similar claim in Post-Soul Nation (New York: Viking, 2004), ix.
28
Spillers, “Interstices,” 167.

29
Ibid., 168.

30
“Superwoman Pt. II” is the remix to “Superwoman Pt. I” which was not featured on the
album and was never officially released as a single.

31
“Superwoman Pt. II,” Based on a True Story, compact disc, 2001 Elektra.

32
I would argue that Whitney Houston’s 1993 house-inspired cover of the song, although
it charted better than the original, watered down the sexual agency that seems so urgent in
Chaka Khan’s version.

33
“Superwoman,” As I Am, compact disc, 2007 J Records.

34
Works by Wolf, Chancer, and Walker have all been cited as initiators of the third-wave
movement. See, for example: Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: Doubleday,
1991); Lynn Chancer, “Third Wave Feminism,” Village Voice, May 28, 1991; and
Rebecca Walker, To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism
(New York: Anchor Books, 1995).

35
Springer, “Third Wave Black Feminism?” 1063.

36
R. Claire Snyder, “What Is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34 (2008): 183.

37
Ibid., 175-76.

38
For in-depth discussions of the problems with the waves model, see, for example:
Kathleen A. Laughlin and others, “Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the
Waves Metaphor,” Feminist Formations 22 (2010): 76-135; Snyder, “What Is Third-
Wave Feminism”; and Jo Reger, ed., Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary
Women’s Movement (New York: Routledge, 2005).

39
Premilla Nadasen, “Black Feminism—Waves, Rivers, and Still Water,” in Kathleen A.
Laughlin and others, “Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor,”
Feminist Formations 22 (2010): 101.

40
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: South
End Press, 2000), 26.

178

41
Brooks, “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay,” 39.

42
Ibid., 38.

43
This argument is echoed by Alexander Weheliye who, following Bat, refers to
contemporary R&B as “hypersoul,” because of its alleged “antagonism towards soul
values.” Alexander Weheliye, “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black
Popular Music,” Social Text 71 (2002): 32.

44
Brooks, “‘It’s Not Right But It’s Okay,’” 44 (emphasis in original).

45
Although I do not discuss it here, Brooks argues that Beyoncé’s 2006 album, B-Day, is
another productive example of black female surrogation.

46
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996).

47
Brooks, “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind,’” 183.

48
Ibid.

49
Jacob Bernstein, “Proud Mary,” Women’s Wear Daily, December 12, 2005.

50
Gail Mitchell, “The Billboard Q&A: Mary J. Blige,” Billboard, December 8, 2007.

51
Sasha Frere-Jones, “Living Pains: Mary J. Blige’s Chronic Brilliance,” The New
Yorker, February 11, 2008.

52
Garry Mulholland, “Bling Me Sunshine,” Time Out, April 10, 2002.

53
Kevin Chappell, “Mary J. Blige’s Tearful Plea: I’ve Got to Be Me,” Ebony, October
2003; “Oprah Talks to Mary J. Blige,” O, The Oprah Magazine, May 1, 2006 [Oprah
Interview]; Kierna Mayo, “Success is Nothing Without Someone You Love to Share It
With,” Essence, June 2007.

54
Jessica Willis, “Sadly, Mary J. Blige is Happy at Last,” New York Times, August 24,
2003.

55
Oprah Interview.
179

CHAPTER FIVE

Baby Mama’s Drama

In an interview following the release of his much-heralded film Precious: Based
on the Novel Push by Sapphire in 2009, Lee Daniels reflected on criticisms that the film
relies on reductive stereotypes of black people and his own initial reluctance to screen the
film for non-black audiences by way of an identificatory gesture toward what Herman
Gray might call a “cultural move”—a notable reconfiguration in the sociopolitical terms
and practices that come to represent blackness:
As African-Americans, we are in an interesting place…Obama’s the
president, and we want to aspire to that. But part of aspiring is
disassociating from the face of Precious. To be honest, I was embarrassed
to show this movie at Cannes. I didn’t want to exploit black people. And I
wasn’t sure I wanted white French people to see our world…But because
of Obama, it’s now O.K. to be black. I can share that voice. I don’t have to
lie. I’m proud of where I come from. And I wear it like a shield. Precious
is part of that.
1

The shift in terrain that Daniels attempts to mark is not, however, the “vibrant black
cultural maneuver” Gray anticipates when foregrounding alternative cultural practices
that disrupt hegemonic discourses about black representation, practices that include the
artistic renderings and performances of Kara Walker and the interventions of jazz
musician Wynton Marsalis at the Lincoln Center.
2
Instead, Daniels suggests a move
toward a twenty-first century erasure of the Du Boisian color line that, in his estimation,
liberates black people from the onus of their blackness, but which, in actuality, reifies
that ghettoized blackness from which he would attempt to escape. His claim to be
representing “our” world—that is, the world of black people—via the bleak landscape of
180

pain, poverty and pathology that infests Precious conflates black sociality with a
historically wrought thematic of abjectedness that is, apparently, in need of salvation. As
such, this move toward black citizenship that Daniels declares is occasioned by the ascent
of Barack Obama is really not so much a move as it is a cultural trick masquerading in (a)
black/face. But Daniels’s formulation is key because it is this insurgent mythology
surrounding post-civil rights, post-soul, post-race conceptualizations of raciality that
helps explain the overwhelmingly positive reaction critics, white critics in particular, had
to Precious—a film about a poor, obese, functionally illiterate sixteen-year-old black girl
(Gabourey Sidibe) who is twice-impregnated by her father and physically and
emotionally assaulted by her welfare-dependant mother (Mo’Nique)—at a moment (like
most of the moments before it) when films centered around black social structures are
routinely panned or ignored.
Despite scathingly insightful reviews of Precious by individuals like Ishmael Reed
and Armond White, and a deluge of commentary by other black cultural critics, the
enormity of the stunt the film pulls has yet to be sufficiently addressed.
3
Certainly there
are plenty of black folks who embraced Precious. And certainly there are those
individuals who are concerned, I think rightly, that Precious-bashing is the consequence
of black bourgeois gate-keeping, and who appreciate that someone has been able to bring
a story about marginalized black people to a wider, more mainstream, audience.
4
Despite
those valid concerns, I would still contend that rather than opening up an alternative
space for theorizing black community as some might hope, the film actually deceptively
forecloses that same possibility. In much the same way that Gray argues televisual
181

representations of the law make invisible the systemic racial, gender and class
oppressions that undergird legal processes by highlighting individualized character
defects and occupational hazards, Precious relies on a single social subject to explain the
wretched life of its protagonist.
5
There is no sustained discussion of racism in Precious.
Or sexism. Or classism. Not only is there not a discussion of such social inequalities,
there is no room to even ponder their possibilities because the film is suffocated by the
presence of its villain—the single black mother. By the time Precious’s virtually
nameless mother has realized she has lost her vice grip on her daughter and consequently
attempts to show an iota of human decency, we have been so inundated by her Badness
that her performance is effectively truncated, seeming to amount to little more than a
cheap ploy to regain her malevolent power over her daughter-prey. The fetish function of
Precious thus relies on the narrative of the morally deficient black mother to make social
despair visible while simultaneously marking its generative force as the source of that
despair.
Consequently, Precious is, as Daniels alludes, the ultimate signifier of Obama-era
racial discourse. That a film like American Violet, which is also about a poor, young
black woman and was released just months before Precious, received little of the
recognition or fanfare that Precious did is patently commonsense. American Violet
features a black mother fighting against legal and social injustices that come in the form
of racist white government officials, while Precious allows us to point a finger at
someone for Precious’s continued social inequality without indicting institutions, the
government, or white people, and without casting aspersions on black people as a whole.
182

Ultimately, Precious is fat because her bad black mother force feeds her, she is raped
because her mother allows it, she is illiterate because her mother places her welfare check
before Precious’s education, and she is poor because her mother is too lazy to get a job.
When Precious does begin to take charge of her life, her primary help comes in the form
of two beautiful (and apparently childless) professional black women—a beloved teacher
(Paula Patton) and a longsuffering social worker (Mariah Carey)—who are diametrically
opposed to Precious’s overbearing, overweight, spandex-wearing, tyrant of a mother.
6

And, when at the end of the film Precious leaves the welfare office, vowing that she will
never return, and walks down the street to—wherever—she is seemingly a self-made,
self-sufficient, fully functioning person. There is no real suggestion of how an HIV-
positive teenage girl who has been systematically abused her entire life, who has no work
experience and no family support, has very little education, and who has two young
children in tow, one of whom has Down syndrome, is going to survive. As the film
hastens us to embrace our heroine, there is no time to consider that she just might be
walking right back into her mother, that all of this baggage threatens to make Precious
become the exact thing she flees, and we detest. Because that is not the point. This is
Daniels’s Fantasyland, a place where a single man can make it “O.K.” to be black and
where the self-proclaimed exploitation of black people is a righteous form of personal
catharsis.
The setting of Precious in the late 1980s, when Reagan-era poverty discourse was
beginning to pave the way for the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) under the Clinton administration, is
183

fundamental to the film’s fatalistic apparatus. At base, PRWORA reformulated
government entitlement programs in accordance with neoliberal work and family values
and dislodged Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in favor of Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), thereby establishing strict time limits and work
requirements as criteria for the receipt of benefits. Numerous scholars across a range of
academic fields have outlined the deleterious effects welfare “reform” has had on low-
income women, despite congratulatory reports about the reduced numbers of people
receiving governmental benefits—from 4.6 million in 1996 to 1.6 million in mid-2008
7
—
and the increased employment rates of single mothers.
8
They observe that the numerical
markers of PRWORA’s “success” obscure the fact that most families who no longer
receive TANF remain at or near the poverty line and continue to work in jobs that do not
afford them a livable wage. Many have also noted how media punditry about the “culture
of poverty” that allegedly suppresses the work ethic and achievement potential of poor
people contributed to the political climate that birthed PRWORA. Of these scholars,
political scientist Ange-Marie Hancock has been among the most astute at revealing how
the narrative of the scheming, immoral, welfare recipient, i.e., the welfare queen, was
central to the “politics of disgust” that scapegoated single black mothers as a key
stimulant in the country’s moral and economic decline. She notes that during the media
and political deliberation over what became PRWORA, the welfare queen was the axis
around which debates about the “undeserving poor”—debates that ultimately made their
way into draconian reform legislation—were made.
9

184

The welfare queen, aptly defined by Wahneema Lubiano as “the agent of
destruction, the creator of the pathological, black, urban, poor family from which all ills
flow; a monster creating crack dealers, addicts, muggers, and rapists—men who become
those things because of being immersed in her culture of poverty,” is the mobilizing force
behind, not just the production of Precious, but also its box office receipts.
10
The film’s
monster-mother turns that post-Katrina guiltmongering back in on itself, assuring the
citizenry the debt has been paid to all of those black mothers who went wading through
the water. And, in an even more covert maneuver, she manages to corral black female
sexuality back into the zone of animality that threatens to be eclipsed by the corporeal
disruptions of contemporary black female cultural producers, including those produced
by Serena Williams’s catsuits, Superbowl Janet’s nipple-shielded breast, Erykah Badu’s
nude protest-walk, and Michelle Obama’s exposed arms and rounded rear. Taken
together, these cataclysms suggest a recalibrated black female subject whose sexuality,
rather than being already foretold, emerges at least within a terrain of indecipherability
that portends a future nameability. Precious, however, returns us to the realm of the
familiar wherein black sexual practice is either rendered invisible or beastial, and black
reproductive capacity rips away at the seams of our vaunted social fabric.

Heir to the Throne
As welfare restructuring plans were being implemented nationally, the narrative
of the welfare queen began to give way to another, similar, articulation of deviant black
motherhood in the form of the baby mama.
11
That the baby mama became a popular
185

cultural trope simultaneously with the enactment of PRWORA, particularly given the
Act’s intensified child support enforcement and paternity mandates, is, I think, no mere
coincidence. The baby mama colloquialism first entered the national lexicon via the
music of male R&B and rap artists in the late 1990s. One of the first songs to implicate
the baby mama was “My Baby Daddy,” which was released by rap group B-Rock and the
Bizz in 1997 and eventually reached the top ten of the music charts (it would be their
only hit). “My Baby Daddy,” which heavily samples the Emotions 1977 hit “Best of My
Love,” is essentially the comedic enactment of a conversation between T-Bird, who
suspects he is being cheated on, and his girlfriend who is attempting to ensure T-Bird that
the man he believes she is cheating on him with is “just her baby daddy.” Near the end of
the song when the woman asks T-Bird for money to buy something for her baby, he
refuses because he believes the child in question (ostensibly she has more than one) is not
his, despite her protestations to the contrary.
Perhaps the single most damning articulation of the baby mama came two years
later when R&B artist Dave Hollister, previously of the group BLACKstreet, released
“Baby Mama Drama” off of his debut album, Ghetto Hymns. “Baby Mama Drama” also
revolves around an argument between a man and woman, but unlike with “My Baby
Daddy,” it is not played up as slapstick comedy. The song functions as an ode to
victimhood in which the victim is the responsible black man and the victimizer is the
greedy and vindictive black woman who attempts to use their children as a means of
financial gain. Hollister complains that his ex keeps taking him to court and harassing
him in an attempt to extract unwarranted money from him and he “just can’t take it no
186

more.” During the song’s outro, his claims are validated when, during an argument the
two are having, the scorned woman is heard telling him, “I put in time, now it’s time for
me to get mine” and “Nigga, I gets mean when you mess with my green.”
In 2001, the rap duo Outkast released “Ms. Jackson,” the most commercially
successful baby mama song to date; it ultimately reached number one on the U.S.
Billboard Hot 100 chart and in 2002 it won a Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance
by a Duo or Group. The titular Ms. Jackson serves as a referent for “all the baby’s mamas
mamas” (grandmothers) who allegedly meddle in the affairs of their daughters by
instigating baseless custody battles and fights over money because they are unaware of
the contributions the fathers have made, or have attempted to make, to the livelihoods of
their children. The song is presented as a backhanded apology for the misunderstandings
that occur, evidently, at the behest of the mothers—the final point being that despite the
fact that the relationship between the parents has ended, the fathers are still attempting to
maintain their relationships with, and responsibilities toward, their children.
Within the narrative framework B-Rock and the Bizz, Dave Hollister, and
Outkast—along with other male groups and artists such as Luniz (“My Baby Mama,”
1997), Three 6 Mafia (“Baby Mama,” 2001) and Lil Boosie and Webbie (“Baby
Momma,” 2005)—collectively formulate, the scheming, manipulative, money-hungry
black mother is no longer (just) a problem of the state, she is now the black man’s plague
who, and this is a crucial point, is only able to get away with her avaricious machinations
because of the man’s investment in the well being of his children, an investment she
apparently does not share, at least not with anything approaching parity. The trope of the
187

bad black mother is, most assuredly, nothing new. It was common knowledge that
mammy, that most dependable of all black servants, frequently nurtured her white
charges at her bosom with no concern that she might be neglecting the needs of her own
children, while Moynihan’s matriarch and Reagan’s welfare queen had nothing positive
to give anyone’s children. To be sure, when black reproduction is itself inherently
pathological, it stands to reason that the reproductive source would be appropriately
vilified. Yet, this twenty-first century rendition of black degenerative motherhood is
particular in its enunciation, as is the artifact of at least three contemporary sociopolitical
trajectories.
First, as suggested above and about which I will say more later, is the strict
requirement that women report the fathers of their children in order to receive TANF
benefits, as mandated by PRWORA. This often has the effect of forcing mothers who
otherwise would not to get the fathers of their children entangled in the child support
system or risk sacrificing the well being of themselves and their children. The problem
with this structure is not that it purports to force fathers to be accountable, but that in its
blanket stringency it, one, places many women in vulnerable positions vis-à-vis their
children’s fathers (and is a special hardship on women who have been in abusive
relationships with those same men) and, two, typically ignores loose financial
arrangements the mothers may have with the fathers, who are often as economically
distressed as the mothers. The second trajectory concerns the way in which the baby
mama serves as something of a backlash to the narrative of absentee black fathers that
saturates culture of poverty discourse. Without challenging the discourse itself, the baby
188

mama narrative suggests black men have been unfairly fingered—by pointing the finger
back at black women. Third, the “golddigger” quality of the baby mama is informed by
what Paul Gilroy discusses as the complex interaction between consumerism and
citizenship that affects modern-day African Americans. Gilroy argues that beginning in
the mid-twentieth century, “political outlooks were being reshaped by patterns of
interaction in which racialised subjects discovered themselves and their agency through
their social life as consumers rather than as citizens.”
12
Gilroy pays particular attention to
how “American automotive utopianism” figures into black Americans’ quest to be
recognized as humans and citizens, but I would extend his argument to the current
discussion as well. While I want to be careful to leave space for an understanding of the
improvisational aesthetic conventions and forms of self-actualization Kobena Mercer
discusses in relationship to black hair styling practices and John Jackson discusses in
relationship to “ghetto fabulousness,” for example, I would contend that Gilroy’s point
about the investment in culture as property via “status purchasing”—the disproportionate
accumulation of publicly visible items and, thus, the status that attaches to them—
resonates with the narrativization of the baby mama.
13
That is, the struggle over money
and material things actualized by the baby mama narrative is indicative of a larger
struggle over the terms of inclusion within the American civic body—and the strife that
struggle causes between black men and black women—when that inclusion is defined by
the ability to enter the marketplace on par with middle class white citizens.

189

In 2008, Universal Pictures released Baby Mama, a film starring Tina Fey as Kate
Holbrook, a single Wharton School graduate in her late thirties who hires a surrogate
mother (Amy Poehler) to birth her child after learning she has an infinitesimal chance of
ever being able to conceive due to a medical condition. In true Hollywood fashion, Kate
ultimately does conceive and the surrogate mother (i.e., the baby mama) keeps the child
she is carrying, who, through a not entirely unpredictable series of events, actually turns
out to be her own biological child. The willingness of a major film studio to co-opt the
imagery of deficient single black motherhood for a film about two white women, one of
whom is a successful business executive, suggests the narrative shift the baby mama has
taken in recent years. As is often the case with black cultural products, while the term
has become more mainstream, the narrative has become less about signifying a deviant
sociality and more about a playful articulation of individual personhood—particularly
when it attaches to those for whom it was not originally ordained. This re-coding, or what
might be called in the language of Stuart Hall, “decoding,” is apparent in the output of a
number of male pop/R&B artists who have either made the baby mama the object of their
romantic affections, or at least attempted to defend her honor. These artists include the
contemporary don of love song production, Babyface (“Baby’s Mama,” 2001), the
“neosoul” crooner, Musiq Soulchild (“Babymother,” 2003) and even the inimitable
Prince (“Future Baby Mama,” 2007).
But, lest we be wooed into thinking all is now well in the world of baby
mamadom, recent events make clear that, however much we might like to play with the
term, the baby mama still references a stigmatized form of sociality when it adheres to
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certain black bodies. This point was forcefully brought home to R&B artist and American
Idol winner Fantasia Barrino when, in 2005, she released the song “Baby Mama” off of
her debut album. Barrino’s hardship story—raised poor in North Carolina, high school
dropout, pregnant at sixteen—had almost as much to do with her successful reign on
America’s favorite talent show as did her LaBelle-inspired vocal theatrics. But when she
released her baby mama anthem Barrino seemed to some to be betraying the fan-base that
had helped catapult her career. The song is essentially a triumphant recognition of the
difficulties low-income single mothers, like she herself once was, often face: “I see you
get that support check in the mail / You open it and you’re like what the hell / You say
this ain’t even half of day care / Saying to yourself this here ain’t fair…This goes out to
all my baby mamas / I got love for all my baby mamas.”
14
Barrino was quickly accused
of glorifying single motherhood and sending the “wrong” message to teenagers regarding
sexual activity. What thus becomes clear is that it is one thing to celebrate overcoming
the odds as a single black mother, and something entirely different to celebrate actually
being one. Similarly, the ire of many was raised when Fox News had the audacity to
refer to Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama” on a screen graphic during the 2008
presidential campaign. Though she had previously referred to her husband as her “baby
daddy” without incident, Fox’s display was deemed a “subliminal ghettoization” of Mrs.
Obama (And who really wants to be associated with the ghetto?),
15
and the network
quickly issued forth the obligatory public apology, claiming that a producer had
“exercised poor judgment.” The chasm between Michelle Obama’s lighthearted reference
to her “baby daddy” and Fox’s inflammatory reference to “Obama’s Baby Mama” is
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characterized not just by gender difference, but by an exploitation of narrative affiliations
to marginalized blackness that do more to keep in place rigid socioeconomic hierarchies
than to reveal the structures of that marginality. Consequently, in a Precious-like tactical
maneuver, the baby mama narrative ultimately obscures the source of its functionality,
which encompasses a litany of grievances including welfare restructuring, gendered
violence, extreme rates of incarceration, concentrated and calculated poverty, a sustained
lack of viable work opportunities, and the broad-based move away from government
accountability to the working class and working poor.

Baby Mama: A Case Study
In what follows, I will discuss how the life of one state-assisted, single black
mother reveals the narrative terrain upon which the baby mama is formulated. My
intention is not to use this woman’s story as a way to generalize about all women
similarly situated, or even to generalize about a particular segment of such women. In
fact, I hope to be so specific as to ensure her story is emphatically ungeneralizeable.
What I do want to do, however, is use this story to consider the radically imaginative
space that might be opened up as we begin to disentangle black women’s history from the
torrid logics that continue to structure their representability. It is a space that is
definitively flawed and contradictory, and altogether human. In service of this attempt, I
will return one final time to a site that has played a prominent analytical role throughout
this project—for reasons I hope have been, or will be, made abundantly clear.

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“Even now, the answer to everything is ‘we gonna pray about it. Gotta get on your knees
and pray more.’ Ok, that’ s fine, I understand we need to pray more, but God gave us
common sense to know that here on Earth we have to do things to work situations out
too.”
16

Roughly thirty years ago, Selina was born in Peoria, Illinois, the youngest of her
mother’s five biological children.
17
Her parents, Ardetta and LB, had married just over a
year earlier after having been introduced by a mutual friend. At the time of their meeting,
LB was a recent transplant to Peoria and was working a blue-collar job with the school
district while also ministering at a local church. Ardetta was living in Peoria and working
at Caterpiller, the country’s premier construction equipment manufacturer, and the only
Fortune 500 company headquartered in the city. Both LB and Ardetta were migrants from
the South. LB’s mother had moved to Springfield—a city similar in size and about
seventy miles south of Peoria—from Mississippi after splitting with his father, and after
reaching adulthood LB had moved north to join her there. By the time he met Ardetta in
Peoria, LB had two children from previous relationships (a third would eventually claim
to be his child, but this has never been proven conclusively), and was in the aftermath of
his fourth divorce (although Ardetta would only learn this years later; at the time she
believed he had only been married once before). Ardetta moved to Peoria from West
Memphis, Arkansas in the mid-1960s to join her sister who was already living and
working in Peoria, and who had encouraged her to move to Peoria because of the
possibility of finding work at Caterpiller. At the time, Ardetta was in her mid-twenties
and the single mother of two sons, neither of whom had relationships with their
respective fathers, so she moved in with her sister, and after a series of procedural hurdles
she was hired at Caterpiller. By the time she met LB in the late 1970s, Ardetta was in her
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late thirties and had given birth to two other children, a son and a daughter, by a Peoria-
area man who had deserted her soon after their youngest child was born.
During the first year of his marriage to Ardetta, LB continued working. However,
Ardetta soon became the sole income earner after LB decided to enter into ministry full-
time. Eventually, he founded a small church on the South Side of Peoria, which Ardetta
purchased, and until it became self-sufficient many years later, she alone paid the bills for
both their home and the church (even at its peak, the church never had more than about
fifty to seventy-five members). Although LB had been raised Baptist, his own church was
affiliated with Church of God in Christ and preached a strict brand of Pentecostalism.
Selina could not listen to secular music, was a teenager before she ever wore a pair of
pants, and was in eighth grade the first time she went to a movie theatre with anyone
outside of her small, close-knit, church community. Because they were not to mingle with
people “of the world,” Selina was unable to play organized sports until she started
attending a private school in seventh grade and was allowed to join the Christian league.
In addition to the ban on pants, the women and girls of the church were forbidden to wear
makeup of any kind, and were expected to dress modestly at all times. On Sundays, the
church was in service the entire day and there were various services and meetings most
other days of the week as well. Adding to their already busy schedules, LB and Ardetta,
who were both masterful singers, formed a gospel singing group with another family and
they would often perform at various churches throughout the city. When she was eight,
Selina began playing drums for the group, and when she was about twelve she and her
sister began singing background with them as well.
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Ardetta’s ongoing work and church responsibilities (she was, after all, the “First
Lady” of the church in addition to being its financial backer) strained the family, even
while keeping them afloat. Her absence was particularly difficult on Selina who was the
youngest; her next closest sibling in age, her sister Ina, was ten years her senior.
18

Because Ardetta typically worked second, and sometimes third-shift, Selina grew to
consider her big sister her real mother figure, as it was she, along with her father, who
had the biggest hand in raising her. Selina did have a particularly close relationship with
her father, who she describes as both “laid back” and “selfish.” Unless he was on the
pulpit or singing, LB was generally a quiet man. During the week he spent much of this
time by himself lying on the bed in his bedroom watching television, and on most
weekends he would go into a “shut-in” at the church in which he would spend the
weekend praying and preparing for Sunday services. When he was home LB did not
overly concern himself with the affairs of the house, though we would occasionally cook
or clean. As Selina remembers it, the only time he would get very upset about anything
was if her bedroom or the rest of the house was unclean. LB’s sister and brother, Selina’s
aunt and uncle, would later tell Selina that she seemed to be the only person he ever
really cared about, and the only person he ever showed much affection toward. For the
most part, he considered both his time and his material things to be his and his alone, and
he never seemed to get very close to anyone emotionally. His siblings thought some of
this had to do with the fact that LB had been their parents “golden child,” and they often
resented the preferable treatment they seemed to give him as they were growing up.
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This dynamic was one Selina understood well. Because she was the youngest
child by a considerable margin, and the only one who had the benefit of both her mother
and father’s presence in her life, there was often friction between Selina and her siblings.
The bulk of the problems came when Selina would get into arguments with her older
brothers and then would have her father intervene on her behalf. Her brothers’ complaints
were both that Selina seemed to think she was special because she had her father around,
and that LB let her get away with too much. Selina freely admits (now) that she did get
away with a lot with her father—especially if she cried. She learned early on how to cry
herself out of trouble and acknowledges that in many ways she did receive preferential
treatment. It was undeniable that LB and Selina’s relationship was special. Selina talked
to LB and knew more about him than anyone else in the house, including her mother.
Likewise, LB was the one person Selina felt she could go to with anything:
I always tell people, I talked to him more than anybody—and even if, like,
he wouldn’t even reply a lot of times. I would have conversation, I would
just go and plop down on the bed and just go talkin.’ Even if he wasn’t
paying attention—somebody listened. I felt like, ok he was listening—
alright, I’m done now, and I can get up and walk out the room and feel
better about everything because I just told somebody everything that’s
going on in my head. And there was nothing said about it. It’s like I
wasn’t judged…maybe because he wasn’t paying attention!

The same cannot be said, however, of Selina’s relationship with Ardetta. Despite
the fact that it was her mother who catered most to Selina’s material whims, Selina felt
she never had much of a mother/daughter connection with her. There was nothing Selina
could ask her mother for and not receive—other than her time. Ardetta was as generous
as LB was selfish, and not just with her own family. It was common knowledge that
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Ardetta would bend over backward to help any person in need. And she had a particular
heart for children. When Selina was a child Ardetta began taking in foster children. Two
of the earliest of these children were a brother and sister around the same age as Selina
who ended up staying with the family for over thirteen years. These were the only foster
children Selina would come to accept as her siblings. Because she had a hard time turning
them away, Ardetta continued taking in even the most troubled of children throughout
Selina’s childhood. At one point she took in three siblings because the foster agency
could find no one else who would take all three of them at once. One of these children
went on to accuse one of Ardetta’s sons of sexually molesting her and, for a time, all of
the foster children were removed from the home. The state also threatened to remove
Selina. A full investigation revealed that the child had made the story up at the behest of
her biological mother who was attempting to find a way to have the children returned to
her. The experience was a crushing blow to the entire family. Yet, afterward the foster
agency asked Ardetta to take the children back in. This would be one of the only times
she would refuse to take in children—and they were eventually split up and sent to
different homes. One of the last groups of children Ardetta would take in was a group of
four siblings, a sister and three brothers, all of who had significant mental and behavioral
problems. Though these children were not as close with the family as some of the earlier
children had been, by the time they were in their teens their biological mother
relinquished her parental rights and, feeling sorry for them, Ardetta officially adopted the
youngest three.
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Though Ardetta’s work schedule played a big part in the distance between her and
Selina, it was not the only issue the two had. Selina felt her mother’s past was shrouded
in mystery and that she was very difficult to get close to because she would not open up
about her life or her feelings about her life. And this was not just Selina’s experience of
her mother. She felt her siblings knew just as little about their mother as she did, perhaps
less. Ardetta would never even speak much about the fathers of her older children.
Selina’s second oldest brother knew the name of his father and nothing more. The only
time Ardetta’s children would get a hint at what her younger years in West Memphis
were like would be when they were at a family function of some sort and one of her
brothers or sisters (she had seven) might mention something anecdotally. Her refusal to
speak about any of her past failures or indiscretions continues to be frustrating for Selina
who feels her mother always tries to portray herself as “so holy.” For the most part,
Ardetta’s answer to every difficult situation seems to Selina to be “take it to the Lord,”
and, consequently, Selina cannot get close to the person in her life whose experiences
seem to so closely mirror her own:
Maybe she don’t want us to take the same—you know, she don’t want to
put it out there that, oh, I did this and I did that…When, all and all, when
you look at the way the cycle is going, because you haven’t talked to me
about things, I’m kind of following in the same—and it’s hurting you
more to see, ok my daughter’s going through this, my daughter’s going
through that, and I think deep down inside you’re realizing that you went
through the same thing. You know, ‘cause, just kinda look at our patterns,
we’re kinda following the same thing. You know, I’m on child number
three with daddy number three. You were on child number three with
daddy number three.

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“It was just one of those things you kinda dealt with when you got home.”

By the time Selina was in high school, the underlying tensions fragmenting her
family had come to an explosive head. When Selina was about fifteen, Ardetta herniated
a disk in her back while at work and was put on medical leave. She would never return to
full-time employment again. For Selina, who had grown used to her mother’s absence,
Ardetta’s now consistent presence was an unwelcome development. Selina and Ardetta
fought constantly, as Selina did not like the disruptions her mother caused to the routine
she had known for so many years, plus she felt she should not have to answer to a person
whose presence had been so lacking in her life to that point. What’s more, by this time
the authority figure she really did respect—her older sister—had gotten married and
moved out of the house.
Yet the fighting between Selina and Ardetta was not all that was amiss. Selina
spent enough time around her father to be able to sense that he was also unhappy. She
knew that a major problem for him was Ardetta’s rampant generosity. Because he did not
contribute to the bills or bring in much in the way of an income, LB was reluctant to
question any of his wife’s decisions. Most significantly, he never did agree with what
Selina describes as her mother’s “executive decision” to begin taking in foster children.
Excepting Selina, he did not have much in the way of a relationship with his own
children; he certainly was not interested in taking on anyone else’s. He also disagreed
with Ardetta’s continued support of her oldest son, Jeffrey, who by that time was in his
mid-thirties. Though he had once been married and off on his own, Jeffrey was now
separated from his wife and living with Ardetta and LB. He also suffered from
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alcoholism and became very belligerent when he was under the influence, which was
often. For a man like LB who was attempting to preach to his congregation about the ills
of the ways of the world and uphold a certain moralistic image, the situation with Jeffrey
was hugely embarrassing and undercut his ministry.
One day as Selina sat looking through her father’s cell phone, she figured out how
to get into his voice mail and listen to his messages. She heard a message that led her to
believe her father was involved with another woman. She erased the message. And she
erased every subsequent message her father received from the woman that she possibly
could. She believed that if she could prevent her mother from finding out what was going
on she could also save their marriage. Unbeknownst to Selina, Ardetta did know what
was going on. Soon, everyone else did too. LB had been having an affair with a member
of his church, and she was not just any member. The woman was a recovering drug
addict and cancer survivor, and someone who Ardetta, in one of her bouts of generosity,
had allowed to live in their home for a period of time when she had nowhere else to go
after getting sober. After leaving Ardetta and LB’s home, the woman had gotten married
and, within a couple of years, gotten divorced. It was after her divorce that Selina
believes the woman began pursuing her father, using the information she had gleaned
during her stay in their home to her advantage. She began cooking for LB and taking the
food to him during his weekend shut-ins at the church, and otherwise making herself
available. Most significantly, she did not come with any children or the time-consuming
work and church responsibilities that Ardetta did.
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The affair and its aftermath rocked LB and Ardetta’s families and church
community, causing a very messy, and very public, scandal. Soon thereafter, LB and
Ardetta divorced and LB moved back Down South, and the church was dismantled. After
LB moved, the close relationship he and Selina shared deteriorated. Even today she rarely
sees him, and they only speak very occasionally. By the time the divorce was finalized,
Selina was seventeen. About a year later, LB married the woman with whom he had been
having the affair. Within a few years she died of a resurgence of her cancer. LB went on
to marry once again after his wife’s death, this time to a woman at least thirty years his
junior. Before long, that marriage also ended in divorce. LB’s betrayal and the messy
divorce devastated Ardetta. Her consistent crying and depression soon overwhelmed
Selina, who threatened to go live with her sister permanently. It was particularly difficult
for Selina to no longer have her father to turn to when she needed someone to talk to or
take up for her. But, afraid that she would lose her daughter as she had already lost her
husband, Ardetta began to dramatically loosen the reigns on Selina to ensure she would
not leave.

“If it was my choice, I would have sex probably five times a day.”
Even given the strict moral code she had been taught to uphold, which included a
rigid mandate against sex before marriage, Selina had begun experimenting sexually by
the time she was eleven or twelve. She was fifteen the first time she had full-on
intercourse—to a boy she had only talked to over the phone prior to the encounter, and
who she never saw again after that day. Another of the consequences of LB and Ardetta’s
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work and church commitments was that they rarely attended any of Selina’s school-
related events. At various points she was on the speech team, a member of the
cheerleading squad, and played basketball and volleyball. While her brothers would try to
support her every so often, LB and Ardetta were rarely, if ever, present. Thus, Selina
spent a good time with friends from school and their families, and this helped opened the
door for her to get involved in things at odds with her religious upbringing. On the day
she lost her virginity, Selina had a friend’s mother drop her off at the boy’s house after a
school function, and it was the boy’s father who later drove her back home.
About five months after her first sexual encounter, Selina had sex again, this time
with a man she had met at a grocery store who was nine years older than her. And this
time it got back to her parents. Selina found out LB knew one day after he picked her up
from school and, seemingly out of nowhere, began talking to her about sex. He responded
to Selina’s tears by telling her he was not upset with her, but that he did want her to be
safe and he offered to get her protection if she needed it. Ardetta, however, did not have
quite the same reaction. By this time Selina was sixteen and the family was deep in the
eye of the storm wrought by LB’s affair. As Selina recalls it, the first time her mother
ever said anything to her about what she knew was when she unexpectedly began
berating her about her “loose” behavior in the middle of a church service in front of other
congregants. Ardetta was particularly incensed by LB’s handling of the situation. She did
not agree that he should have offered to provide Selina with sexual protection because, in
her estimation, he was only aiding her in having sex, as opposed to attempting to stop her
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from having sex altogether, which is what she would have preferred and what she felt
was the morally correct response.
Despite her anger and hurt over Selina’s fall from grace, by the time the divorce
was finalized and LB had moved out of the state, Ardetta had begun loosening her hold
on Selina in an attempt to keep her pacified. She had no curfew, she was given whatever
material items she asked for, and she had no real responsibilities in the home. The
primary edict was that she not leave. It was around then that Selina really began wearing
makeup and going out partying, drinking heavily, smoking cigarettes, and staying out
late, and she was also no longer going to a private Christian school, but was attending her
local public high school. This rebellious period was short-lived, however, because shortly
after turning eighteen she started dating Columbus, the man she would soon marry.
Selina did not necessarily want to marry so young, but she still did not like living with
her mother and was looking for a way out of the house, but knew her parents would not
approve of her “shacking up”—living with her boyfriend before being legally married.
So, at age nineteen, Selina married Columbus in an elaborate wedding ceremony for
which Ardetta spared no expense, and the two moved in together.
Getting married helped settle Selina down, she stopped partying and drinking and
re-invested herself in the church, and while Columbus did not come from a religious
background, he started attending church with Selina as well. But it was not long before
Selina’s escape plan began to backfire on her. She quickly realized that although she and
Columbus had an amazing sex life, they were otherwise completely incompatible. For the
first two years of their marriage they lived together off and on—between fights she would
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go and stay with her mother or sister—until Selina finally decided to permanently
separate from Columbus. After graduating from high school, Selina had started working
as a pharmacy technician at a local drugstore, so by the time of the separation she was
making enough money to move into her own apartment. Newly single and living
completely on her own for the first time in her life, Selina began to fall back into some of
her former habits. She began partying and drinking again, and also became heavily
promiscuous, sometimes waking up to men whose real names she did not know.
Eventually, she met and started dating a man who lived in Michigan. The
relationship did not last long, partly because of the strain of the long distance, but it was
only after they had broken it off that Selina discovered she was pregnant. She was
twenty-three, and still technically married to her husband. The pregnancy served to
hasten along the divorce, however, and in 2004 her marriage to Columbus was officially
dissolved and her son Isaiah was born. Once again, the change in her family structure had
a stabilizing effect on Selina. After finding out she was pregnant, she immediately
stopped drinking and going out, and before Isaiah was born she moved in with her sister
who by this time was also a divorced single mother. For months after Isaiah was born,
Selina did nothing but work and stay home taking care of her son. Eventually she started
making her way back into the party scene, yet her son was always her first priority. She
always made sure he was taken care of and when she went out rarely let anyone other
than Ardetta watch him. She also upheld a certain standard when it came to the men in
her life. She might sleep around, but the men could never have anything to do with her
son, and Isaiah was never to see her with a man he did not know.
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Four years after her son was born, Selina found herself pregnant with her second
child. In the intervening years between her first and second pregnancies, Selina’s party
life had slowed down considerably, she had once again moved into her own place, and
she had started taking courses at the local community college so that she could start
working toward a pharmacy degree. Yet she had continued to maintain an active sex life.
Her second child, a girl named Ilene, was the result of a casual sexual relationship with a
local musician. Selina was devastated when she found out she was pregnant a second
time, particularly given the circumstances of the pregnancy—initially she was not sure of
the child’s paternity, it could have been one of two people, and it was not until Ilene was
born that the paternity could be established with certainly. Even after receiving the results
of the paternity test, the father refused to have anything to do with the child and
continued to claim she was not his. But, despite her initial devastation, Selina had never
seriously considered terminating her pregnancy because abortion was against her
religious beliefs, and she knew she had the full support of Ardetta and the rest of her
family, even if they were disappointed with her. At this point Ardetta was living with
Selina and helping her with her son, in addition to helping Selina’s sister with her three
children. Ardetta’s unemployment benefits had ended when she reached retirement age,
and the small pension and social security checks she received were not enough to allow
her to maintain her own home, which she ultimately lost in foreclosure.
But, regardless of the havoc her unexpected pregnancies wreaked in her life, and
despite the fact that her sexual life has been at odds with the moral teachings she was
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raised to believe in, Selina neither apologizes for, nor feels ashamed about, the way she
has lived her life:
I feel like in life if you want to do something, you do it. I don’t think
people should be ashamed of the things they do. I have no shame and
guilt in saying I’ve been with multiple partners, you know, I’ve been with
this many guys at the same time. Because, at the time I wasn’t ashamed
of what I was doing…But I did it, and at the time, I was like, “Oh my
God I can’t believe I just did that, but I did that, and it was fun, and I
might just do it again!” I just always had the attitude like, you’re not me,
you can’t live me, you can’t judge me. So, ‘til you’ve walked in my
shoes, don’t say anything about what I do.

However, the church Selina and her family have been attending for the past several years
is not so liberal in its views on sex. When they found out she was pregnant with Ilene, the
church leadership promptly sat Selina down because she was unmarried—she could not
sing in the choir, play drums, or have any other leadership role in the church until after
her daughter was born.
At the time of our interview Selina was almost five months pregnant with her
third child. Selina had met Damien, a man at her church who had recently moved to
Peoria to be near family he had in the area and to search for work, when Ilene was three
months old. Seeing as she inherited her mother’s generosity gene, to the extent she could
Selina helped support Damien financially as he was working toward establishing himself.
Before long, they had fallen in love and Damien ended up informally moving in with
Selina, her mother, and her children. And when Ilene was just over a year old, Selina
found herself unexpectedly pregnant again. But, although Selina and Damien are living
together and engaged to be married, the church once again sat Selina down. Damien, on
the other hand, was allowed to continue in his leadership capacities. Consequently, when
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we met Selina had not been to church in over a month—an eternity for someone raised to
be in church every single Sunday and several times during the week, and who has always
been very active in her church community—and she was clearly frustrated with her
church’s policy:
The thing [the pastor told] me was, “What example are you setting for the
other girls that are not married? For me to allow you to be up singing and
this that and the other, you’re not setting a good example.”…Clearly I’m
upset about it ‘cause I have not gone…Now I’m just like, whatever, I’ll
just stay at home until after I have the baby and pop back up with a
child…What people fail to realize is that you have people that
continuously sin, but it’s okay because it’s not something that they see.
But, getting pregnant might just be a one-time thing, you know what I
mean? I could never lay down again with this man again in my life, and
me and God are here [on good terms], but all you see is that I have this
belly, and I’m a sinner…We sin daily. So, what makes the lie that you tell
the IRS any better than me laying down and sleeping with this man that
I’m not married to? There’s no difference…I’ve heard pastors even say, “I
sin daily, I have to pray daily, to ask for forgiveness daily.” You just
acknowledged the fact that you’re human.

“Who wants that? Who wants to go and have to answer to somebody? It’s like living at
home with your parents and you’re fifty years old…Who wants to have to report if you
get a ten cent raise?”

Selina first started receiving public assistance after getting pregnant with her son,
and well after PRWORA had been implemented. She was still working as a pharmacy
technician and was already struggling to make ends meet before getting pregnant, and her
medical bills were taking a considerable toll. A co-worker first made her aware of the
Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, which provides specific foods and
nutritional services to low-income pregnant women and children under the age of five,
and which then put her in queue to receive medical assistance through Medicaid. Selina
was initially repulsed by the idea of accepting public assistance. Her mother had never
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been on it, and Selina thought of it as somehow degrading. It was not until after her co-
worker, a white woman, explained to her that as someone who had been working
continuously since she was eighteen, and who planned to continue working, she was only
pulling from a pot that she was helping contribute to, that Selina reluctantly decided to
meet with a caseworker.
The assistance she received through WIC and Medicaid ended up being a big
relief to Selina; all of the medical expenses for her son were taken care of with the
exception of a small deductible, and she stayed on Medicaid until Isaiah was about a year
old and she started receiving insurance through her job. When Isaiah was three, Selina,
having been working in a pharmacy as a technician, at that time for over five years, and
weary of living paycheck-to-paycheck, decided she wanted to go to school to become a
pharmacist. The debt she had accumulated from her marriage, unpaid medical bills, and
payday loans she had taken out for herself and other people in order to stay afloat (and to
help other people stay afloat, including her mother and her son’s father), had already
forced her into bankruptcy, and she was eager to get her financial situation straightened
out and obtain a better paying job. However, once she started classes Selina was soon
overwhelmed by trying to work forty hours a week while taking a full load of classes and
taking care of her son, particularly when she was still struggling to make ends meet. She
went back to speak with her caseworker and was told that if she could get her income to
under a certain amount per month she would be eligible to receive benefits in the form of
a grocery supplement through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—
what was originally referred to as the “food stamp” program. Selina subsequently
208

reduced her work schedule so that she was working part-time. Each raise she has received
since then is required to have been reported to her caseworker, and with each raise she
must also work fewer hours so that her income does not pass the threshold where she can
no longer receive benefits. SNAP benefits typically end after five years, but each time she
has gotten pregnant, Selina’s benefits clock has been re-set, and each of her children is
eligible to receive WIC benefits until turning five. In 2008, she was also approved for
Section 8, a governmental subsidized housing program administered through the United
States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that bases the amount she
pays in rent upon her income.
Thus while she has never received cash benefits, Selina does receive grocery and
housing supplements and medical benefits that help her to make ends meet when she
otherwise would not be able to, yet the income restrictions attached to those benefits
prevent her from substantially improving her financial situation. Every toy, vacation, trip
to the hair salon, birthday party, or any other purchase beyond basic food and shelter
requirements, are extravagances that she must weigh carefully and typically make certain
sacrifices to acquire. But Selina ultimately sees public assistance as a means to an end—a
way of getting support as she completes school—for which she is grateful. The
pregnancies did set her back and she is no longer attempting to become a pharmacist, but
she continues to work toward a nursing degree (she was recently accepted into a nursing
program that she has had to delay entering for a year because of her pregnancy). Still, she
sometimes resents the intrusions that come along with public assistance. Because she
receives Section 8, at least once a year someone does a walk-through of her home to
209

make sure it is being well-maintained, and because she receives WIC, caseworkers also
visit her home to ensure the children have acceptable living conditions, and as a further
condition of WIC she must take the children in to the local healthcare center once or
twice a year for checkups. She also must keep regular appointments with her caseworker,
and must report any change, however minor, in her income or living arrangements.
Consequently, she has to prevent her caseworker from finding out that her fiancé and
mother, who are both crucial to helping her with child care, are living with her, or risk
having her benefits reduced or stripped away altogether. Getting on public assistance also
caused a problem for Selina with the father of her son who still lives in Michigan and
only provides her with marginal financial assistance in the form of small, sporadic cash
payments. Selina had initially tried to claim she did not know whom Isaiah’s father was
in order to keep the state from going after him for child support, but she eventually had
no choice but to give up his name. When the state finally tracked him down, Isaiah’s
father became upset with Selina, claiming she was “selfish” for wanting to go back to
school and thereby forcing him to get involved in the system.
Nevertheless, Selina’s primary complaint with being on public assistance is the
trips she must take to the public aid office. She recounts that when she initially started
going to the office most of the caseworkers were rude and acted as though the clients
were bothering them by being present. But she found that when the caseworkers got to
know her and her story they seemed to change their behavior, and would even attempt to
tweak the system in order to help her out. This, she suggests, is because many, if not
most, of the women who are on public aid do not have her own standards for success:
210

The degrading part of having to go to the public aid office is when you’re
sitting around all these people that like really in life you can tell they have
no goals or ambitions…If you come in with a purse that looks halfway
decent it’s like, “Oh, how did she afford to get that purse?” They pay
attention to your nails…A lot of these people can’t even say that they’ve
held a job better than McDonald’s or Burger King for longer than six
months…If you go into a public aid office one day, just kind of walk in
and sit down and sit in the waiting area like you’re waiting for somebody,
and listen to the conversations. Sometimes, you get sick at the stomach.
It’s just like, you just want to turn to the person and say, “You know what,
it’s people like you that are making it hard for the rest of us.”…There’s
just people who don’t wanna [do anything], and they’re not gonna, but
they make it hard for people like me who are really tryin’…I think there’s
a lot of people like me, [but] there’s probably more people that don’t give
a doggone…You can honestly sit down there and watch the people that
come through there and tell who’s like that and who’s not. It’s not even
based on the way they’re dressed, you can just kinda tell by the
conversation they keep. You can kinda tell by their demeanor when they
walk in there. They have this look like, “I don’t really want to be in here,
but I gotta do what I gotta do.” Then you have the ones...it’s like,
“Seriously? Ya’ll screaming across this place and these folks helping ya’ll,
and ya’ll talking about being in the club?”

Revealed/Conclusion

Selina’s story is an appropriate endpoint for this project for a couple of reasons.
The first has to do with Homi Bhabha’s argument that
as a from of splitting and multiple belief, the stereotype requires, for its
successful signification, a continual and repetitive chain of other
stereotypes. The process by which the metaphoric ‘masking’ is inscribed
on a lack which must then be concealed gives the stereotype both its fixity
and its phantasmatic quality—the same old stories of the Negro’s
animality, the Coolie’s inscrutability or the stupidity of the Irish must be
told (compulsively) again and afresh, and are differently gratifying and
terrifying each time.
19

Though I have, until now, discussed each typology I have named—the angry black
woman, the nappy headed-ho, the good Christian girl, the strong black woman, the baby
211

mama—as discrete narratives of black female sexuality, what Selina reveals is the
necessary overlap between all of them. As fetish, the black female body rotates on an axis
of depravity that requires a range of narratives to fix that depravation. This narrative
range not only affects Selina at the level of the individual, but is also reflected in the
relationship Selina has to her mother and, to a lesser extent, her sister. This is not to
suggest that there is no “escape” from the fetishistic notion of the black female body for
black women, but is meant to point to the cross-currents of meaning that often move
beyond the realm of “representation” to discipline the lives of black women. The
representability of black women is thus tethered to narratives of black female sexuality
and subjectivity that emerge and reverberate within popular culture and public discourse.
The second reason I end with Selina’s story is related to the turn toward Fanon
that Bhabha makes in his discussion of the stereotype in colonialist discourse. He recalls
that infamous moment when a white girl fixes her gaze on Fanon: “Look, a
Negro…Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened.” Bhabha recognizes this as one of the
“primal scenes” that marks the origin of Fanon’s social subject; it is the moment when
racial and cultural stereotypes of “white heroes and black demons” converge into a point
of psychic identification. And this moment is replayed repeatedly in the course of
everyday living. Thus Bhabha argues:
The drama underlying these dramatic ‘everyday’ colonial scenes is not
difficult to discern. In each of them the subject turns around the pivot of
the ‘stereotype’ to return to a point of total identification. The girl’s gaze
returns to her mother in the recognition and disavowal of the Negroid
type; the black child turns away from himself, his race, in his total
identification with the positivity of whiteness which is at once colour and
no colour, In the act of disavowal and fixation the colonial subject is
212

returned to the narcissism of the Imaginary and its identification of an
ideal ego that is white and whole.
20

This point is significant because it returns us finally to the notion of the cringe I
discussed in the first chapter. The cringe, what I defined there as the antagonistic
response made spontaneously by many black Americans, both privately and publicly, to
particular expressions of black female difference, is part and parcel of the fetish function
of the black female body. It emerges out of a logic of disavowal that turns back in on
itself and names itself as the source of its pathology. This gets evidenced by Selina’s final
comment about all the black women sitting in the very same public assistance office that
she sits in who purportedly “have no goals or ambitions.” It is also evidenced by the
black folks who dislike the “ghetto” black people who inundate reality television, the
cultural critics who charge poor black people with not loving themselves, and the
commentary about which black women who do not actually “deserve” to be the targets of
racial attacks. But all is not lost. For Selina’s story is as much about the emergence of a
peculiar form of black social life as it is about the politics of the cringe. Though she often
rehearses a kind of culture of poverty argument that sustains the narrative of pathology in
which she is herself entangled, Selina is also clearly aware of the value of her life in a
way that many other people are not. Working poor, single mother of three, welfare cheat,
absent father. For Selina, these terms are irreducible to her basic humanity. She lives a
life worth living. She lives in a place called Home.

213

CHAPTER FIVE ENDNOTES

1
Lynn Hirschberg, “The Audacity of ‘Precious,’” New York Times Magazine, October
25, 2009.

2
Herman Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 10.

3
Ishmael Reed, “Fade to White,” New York Times, February 5, 2010; Armond White,
“Pride & Precious,” New York Press, November 4, 2009.

4
Erin Aubry Kaplan, “Black Viewers Divide on Film’s ‘Precious’-ness,” Los Angeles
Times, November 29, 2009.

5
Gray, Cultural Moves, 22.

6
Numerous critics have also pointed out that the “good” characters—the teacher and her
partner, the social worker, the nurse, the children—are all fair-skinned, while Precious,
her mother, and her father, are all played by darker-skinned actors.

7
Sandra Morgen, Joan Acker, and Jill Weigt, eds., Stretched Thin: Poor Families,
Welfare Work, and Welfare Reform (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 5.

8
See, for example, Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the
Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Sharon
Hays, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003); Jane Henrici, ed., Doing Without: Women and Work
after Welfare Reform (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006); Morgen, Acker, and
Weigt, Stretched Thin; Frank Ridzi, Selling Welfare Reform: Work-First and the New
Common Sense of Employment (New York: New York University Press, 2009); and
Sanford F. Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording, eds., Race and the Politics of
Welfare Reform (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

9
Ange-Marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen
(New York: New York University Press, 2004).

10
Wahneema Lubiano, “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological
War by Narrative Means,” in Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita
Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Toni Morrison (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 339 (emphasis in original).

11
Though most often associated with African American culture, the term “baby mama”
probably first emerged within Jamaican culture, specifically within Jamaican Creole, or
214

di Patwa. Peter L. Patrick, “Recent Jamaican Words in Sociolinguistic Context,”
American Speech 70 (1995): 232-33; Julia Turner, “Where Do ‘Baby-Daddies’ Come
From: The Origins of the Phrase,” Slate, May 7, 2006, http://www.slate.com/id/2141083;
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “baby” (accessed September 4, 2009).

12
Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 11.

13
John L. Jackson, Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), 58-61; Kobena Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics,” in Welcome to
the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 97-
128.

14
“Baby Mama,” Free Yourself, compact disc, 2004 J Records.

15
Miles Marshall Lewis, “Baby Mama Drama: How Did an Urban Slang Insult Cross
over into the Political Mainstream, and why is it So Offensive?” Salon.com, June 13,
2008, http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2008/06/13/baby_mama (accessed September
12, 2010).

16
Selina, in discussion with the author, May 24, 2010.

17
This and all other names in this section are fictionalized.

18
Here I am considering only her mother’s children. Selina has had very little interaction
with her father’s other biological children.

19
Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of
Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 75.

20
Ibid., 76.
215

EPILOGUE

Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds.
—Robin D.G. Kelley
1

When I was a senior in college I moved into my first apartment. And it was
exhilarating. For the first time I was no longer under the all-seeing eyes of my parents,
nor was I confined to one of the closets that passed as dorm rooms on my campus, nor
was I subject to the whims of a party-all-night, sleep-all-day roommate any longer. It was
one-sixth of a six-flat on the South Side of Chicago, and I loved every square inch of it. I
soon learned that not only did I love having my own space, but I took pride in that space
as well—second-hand furniture, dripping faucets, suspect neighbors, critter problems and
all.
The excitement of that moment was not lost on one of my best friends at the
time—my grandmother. She bought me my first set of cookware, typed out recipes for
me to experiment with on index cards, and seemingly reveled in the details of my budget-
friendly décor. Not long after I moved into my new place I went to visit her in Danville,
Illinois, the (very) small town a couple hours south of Chicago where she lived her entire
life. We were standing in the kitchen talking about all of the mundane stuff that comes
with running a household when she said to me, “See, Terri, it’s not so bad taking care of
your house and family, now is it?” I agreed. I was quickly learning that I really enjoyed
entertaining my friends and family at home, washing dishes helped to soothe my nerves,
and having a clean and organized home actually helped to keep me sane in the midst of
working twenty to thirty hours a week and keeping up with a full load of classes.

1
Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002),
11.
216

But the real significance of that moment in my grandmother’s kitchen would not
hit me until much later. In August 2007, as I was studying for my qualifying exams, my
grandmother died of Parkinson’s Disease. In the years leading up to her death, I had
watched with growing frustration and sadness as the take-no-prisoners woman who had
loved, disciplined, scolded, hugged and cherished me for my entire life began to
disintegrate mentally and physically. I watched as the light that had always sparked in her
eyes whenever she saw me (because, you see, everyone knew I was Grammy’s baby)
slowly began to dim. The very last time I saw her alive, less than a month before she
died, was when I was in town for a family reunion. She was too weak to leave the nursing
home where she lived, but as a family we gathered there to present her with a plaque as a
way of showing our appreciation for all she had done for our family. By this time she was
confined to a wheelchair and her speech had gotten so soft and slurred that my mother,
who was her primary caretaker outside of the medical professionals, often had to act as
her translator when she wanted to say something. After receiving the plaque, my
grandmother, weeks away from dying, sitting in a wheelchair, too weak to even feed
herself, and speaking through my mother, told us that she loved us very much and that if
there was anything we ever needed from her she would do anything she could to help us
out.
And then it all began to come clear for me. The growing frustration my
grandmother had been exhibiting about her condition was not just about her inability to
tend to her own needs and take care of herself. Fiercely independent as she had always
been, it certainly had to be difficult for her to have to rely on someone else for her every
need. But I realized that perhaps more than that, my grandmother’s zeal for life was
217

waning because she could not do for us. Here was a woman who had spent her entire life
taking care of her family, and she loved it. Tending to her home, taking care of her
children and grandchildren, cooking, cleaning—for my grandmother these things were
not the drudgery of life—they were life. I do not mean to romanticize her existence,
certainly there were times when my grandmother, like many other women in similar
situations, had to have grown weary of working and tired of cleaning up after others. But
what I do mean to say is that my grandmother taught me a significant lesson about the
meaning of life and the beauty of living. Because what I also do not ever remember is my
grandmother trying to amass a fortune, stressing about running up the corporate ladder, or
complaining about not having enough “stuff.” She wasn’t poor, but neither was she
wealthy. She had a high school education, worked in a bank most of her life, and was
solidly working class.
And she was happy. She took joy in the simple—planting her garden, gathering
her family around her on holidays, and plucking away at the family newsletter on her
computer (that she was forever and always calling my mother and asking how to work).
My grandmother was one of the few people in my life who always made me feel okay.
Even though she would not hesitate to let me know if I messed up, I was never the
“mean” little girl with the “bad attitude” with her. I never had to explain who I was. With
her, I could just be. With her, everyone could just be. This was the same woman who
cried because “I was so smart” when she saw my first article in print. She didn’t fully
understand what I was writing about, she may have never even read it all the way
through, but somehow she just knew it had to be special because it came from me.
218

Someone will say that I understand my grandmother in this way precisely because
she was that—a grandmother. That this is just what grandmothers do, just how they are.
Perhaps. But if that’s the case, then perhaps we could all learn something from our
grandmothers. This project is testament to the type of living my grandmother did.
Because if I know nothing else about the life she lived I know this: my grandmother knew
the color of the sky.
219

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Asset Metadata

Creator Williamson, Terrion L. (author)

Core Title Marks of the fetish: twenty-first century (mis)performances of the black female body

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 05/27/2011

Defense Date 03/09/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African American women,Black feminism,Cultural studies,fetishism,OAI-PMH Harvest,popular culture,stereotypes

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Keeling, Kara (committee chair), Gray, Herman (committee member), Halberstam, Judith (committee member), Hancock, Ange-Marie (committee member), Moten, Fred (committee member)

Creator Email terrion79@gmail.com,terrionw@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c127-614267

Unique identifier UC1358693

Identifier usctheses-c127-614267 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Williamson-5-0.pdf

Dmrecord 614267

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Williamson, Terrion L.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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