Sex talk: Black middle class women represent sexuality

Sex Talk: Black Middle Class Women Represent Sexuality , examines how portrayals of black middle class women's sexuality in contemporary autobiographies, novels, plays and critical moments in U.S. popular culture challenge the perception of African Americans as a monolith. Revealing the ways African American women writers depict black female desire underscores the limitations of modern theories of sexuality that ignore black women as a whole, and middle class black women in particular. This project intervenes in the fields of African American literature and cultural studies and draws on and extends the work of black feminist theorists to offer an alternate reading of the overly determined racial and sexual script that traditionally casts middle class women as the bastions of African American propriety. In place of the theoretical paradigm adopted by much African American literary and sociological criticism, in which sexual desire is envisioned as problematic, this study presents alternative class and racial readings that allow for a more complicated understanding of black female sexuality.; Chapter one interrogates print and visual media coverage of the Anita F. Hill controversy and evaluates her memoir, Speaking Truth to Power (1997) to show how the spectacle of Hill's testimony both contributes to and undermines the performance of black middle class femininity in the public sphere. Chapter two discusses how contemporary plays, WOMBmanWARS (1994) by Judith Alexa Jackson, and Long Time Since Yesterday (1985) by P. J. Gibson, reveal the difficulties black middle class women experience reconciling their sexual choices with family and community demands. Chapter three charts the departure Andrea Lee's novel, Sarah Phillips (1984), makes from customary ideas of black middle class identity by portraying a heroine whose sexual and geographic explorations allow her to navigate the relationship between her “blackness” and her womanhood. Chapter four fractures static notions of racial authenticity in autobiography by addressing the divergent strategies Lorene Cary's Black Ice (1991) and Jill Nelson's Volunteer Slavery (1993) use to negotiate the social and sexual landscape. Each of these texts attests to the ways that containing the black body remains a tool in the construction and preservation of political and social power.