rainbowbabywoman: Poethics of racial-sexual cross-identification

rainbowbabywoman synthesizes black feminist and queer theories to highlight the psychosocial commonalities and symbiosis between African-American women and effeminate gay men in their struggle against a racist, sexist and homophobic environment. I use two central models, one psychoanalytic and one cultural, to schematize this cross-identification: the phenomenon of transference, and the imagined bond of a black female star and her effeminate gay boy fan. With the liberty granted by interdisciplinary cultural studies, I take texts of diverse pedigrees to describe the symbiotic social psyche that emerges between a black girl and an effeminate gay boy. The resulting racial-sexual identities produce new understandings of what it means to be black, female, or homosexual. This is the "poethics" of the title: the mutually positive political effects of creatively imagining the fluidity between gay and black feminine identifications.;My first chapter, "this is the book you wrote...and i am the girl you were: feminine strategies of racial identification" is a conversation between Celie of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Anais Nin's diary-writing persona, the biracial pop star Mariah Carey, Pecola Breedlove of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and Topsy of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, all of whom share the challenge of overcoming a specifically raced sense of dispossession from the female gender.;The second chapter, "colored girl star therapist: psychotechnology of effeminate identification," explores from a psychoanalytic perspective the effect of the social upon the psyche, and inversely, fantasy's production of materiality. My "case study": a little protogay effeminate boy longing to become the pop star Jennifer Lopez.;Chapter Three, "Butterfly Butt: narratives of colored performativity," continues this work by charting the shared sexuality of the effeminate gay boy and the colored girl, which is created in face of violent racism and homophobia. I call "colored performativity" the performance of non-normative sexuality that creates in tandem a non-normative racial identity.;The thematic persona of the last chapter, "The Joy of the Castrated Boy," is the racially castrated (to invoke David Eng) gay Asian-American boy, who defies the social abjection of his racial-sexual identity by pursuing not a compensating masculinity, but an extreme femininity. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...