“Why Can’t We Flip the Script: The Politics of Respectability in Pearl Cleage's What Look Likes Crazy on an Ordinary Day.”

Doctoral Candidate in the Feminist Studies Program in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, Twin cities. I am also currently the Predoctoral Fellow in the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Rochester. My dissertation Now That’s a Good Girl: Discourses of African American Women, HIV/AIDS, and Respectability draws upon black feminist theory, black queer studies, and HIV/AIDS cultural studies to examine discursive representations of African American women and HIV/AIDS beginning in 1990.

Abstract: The mid-1990s was an important time period for women, particularly African American women, in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1995, for the first time, the proportion of black Americans reported with AIDS was the same as white Americans. The following year, in 1996, the proportion of black Americans reported with AIDS exceeded white Americans. Additionally, in 1996, women accounted for 20% of the total adult AIDS cases, the highest proportion reported in any year to date. These new highs in reported AIDS cases, together created a moment of intensification in discourses about African American women and AIDS. This paper examines Pearl Cleage's What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, arguing that the politics of respectability continue to shape African American discourses of race, gender, sexuality and in this example the ways they intersect with discourses of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Rayna, Precious, Ava, and Madison. These are the HIV-positive protagonists that populate the four novels published between 1995 and 1997 by black female authors. The novels are: touch by Charlotte Sherman Watson, Push by Sapphire, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage, and Li’l Mama’s Rules by Sheneska Jackson. [2] Excluding Sapphire’s Push, the remaining three novels share eerily similar plot trajectories and conclusions. The female protagonists begin the novels as self reliant, (fairly) successful, women in control of their own lives and sexualities with no fear of expressing themselves. However, as the women either learn of or reflect upon their recent HIV-positive diagnosis, they are cast not only as women who should regret their previous choices, but as women who are ultimately being punished for their sexual transgressions. Finally, each novel ends with a marriage or coupling, positioning the female protagonist within traditional gender and sexual roles.

In this analysis I will focus on Pearl Cleage's What Look's Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (from here on referred to as What Look’s Like Crazy). After being published in 1997, the novel was announced as an Oprah's Book Club selection the following year on September 25, 1998. The novel is important both for the amount of attention it garnered due to being chosen for Oprah's Book Club as well as being an excellent example of how these narratives wrestle with the contradictory discourses of the desire for respectability, marriage, and family while also intervening in the dominant gendered and racialized discourses of HIV/AIDS that exclude black women from the category of the innocent victim and inclusion within normative heterosexuality, and the rights and privileges associated with it. The combination of racialized stereotypes of black female sexualities as hypersexual and deviant and the disproportionately high rates of HIV/AIDS among black women in the U.S makes discourses of the HIV/AIDS epidemic highly contentious, requiring interventions that engage both dominant U.S. discourses as well as politics and discursive representations specific to African Americans. What Looks Like Crazy traverses these multiple discursive landscapes and holds their similarities and contradictions in tension as Ava, the protagonist, negotiates her life including HIV/AIDS, sexuality, marriage, and community.

The novel begins with Ava sitting in the airport waiting for a flight to her childhood home of Idlewild, Michigan, where her sister Joyce still resides. We learn that Ava is leaving Atlanta after being ostracized once knowledge of her AIDS diagnosis became public. She has sold her lucrative hair salon and is planning a move to San Francisco, but first plans to spend a few months with her sister. Upon her return to Idlewild she quickly realizes that the peaceful, quiet town she left so many years ago is now under siege by the same problems plaguing larger cities including: drugs, crime, poverty, and AIDS. The escape she has planned to Idlewild turns into a period of awakening for Ava as she and her sister take in an abandoned newborn infant and she begins assisting her sister in mentoring young women at the local church. By the end of the novel Ava has decided to stay in Idlewild and uses her profits from selling her business to open a community center. Along the way Ava has also met and fallen in love with Eddie, who is as committed to rebuilding Idlewild as Ava and her sister. The final scene in the novel is of Ava and Eddie's wedding.

I begin with an examination of how the novel speaks back to the categories of innocence or guilt, and deserving or undeserving, often used to separate the "us" from the "them" in the AIDS epidemic. I argue that the novel pushes the reader to challenge the meanings of these categories as well as who is allowed to claim the status of victim in the AIDS epidemic. Second, I identify and highlight the politics of respectability in What Looks Like Crazy that influence the way the protagonist is able to negotiate HIV/AIDS, race, class, gender, and sexuality, arguing that these politics hinder full discussions of both black female sexualities in the U.S. and the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on African American women. These politics function to limit what is prioritized and discussed in the overlapping discourses of HIV/AIDS and African American women's gender and sexuality, both loaded with overdetermined rhetoric of who is and who is not 'at risk' in the epidemic, the presumed deviance of black female sexualities, and the need to place black women in heteronormative relationships not only to save them, but to also save black communities.

Finally, I return to Ava's original plan to move to San Francisco because it is a place where she can imagine being free to explore all of her desires. I read this desire for and ultimate denial of San Francisco as an illustration of how blackness and queerness continue to be constructed as mutually exclusive terms. Ultimately, Ava is unable to imagine herself in both spaces. San Francisco and its queer possibilities stand in juxtaposition to Idlewild, where instead Ava chooses marriage and service to her childhood home and community.

Talking Back to Dominant HIV/AIDS Discourses

As discussed above, the novel begins with Ava initiating her journey home, literally and figuratively. As she waits in the airport for her flight there is a daytime talk show on the television in which the guests are two HIV positive women. Ava is annoyed with the women's denial of deviant behavior in order to be included in the privileged category of the innocent victim (i.e. children, hemophiliacs, faithful wives who contracted HIV from a cheating spouse). Ava is clear about her opinions of these frames of reference employed in the media to categorize people with HIV/AIDS. They are often separated into the categories of those deserving of sympathy and those who are not, those who deserved to be stigmatized and those who are unfortunate victims in this epidemic. In this way, HIV/AIDS continues to be contextualized as a disease of the other as well as an epidemic the heterosexual population need not worry about. However, very quickly that idea is contested in this novel through Ava. She thinks,

Ava's inner monologue calls forth the dichotomies of innocence and guilt, only to swiftly deny their explanatory power. Ava, almost defiantly, claims her route of transmission, her agency and her sexuality. Through Ava, Cleage seems to make a clear statement about the discursive politics of women and heterosexual HIV/AIDS. Rather than blame the intravenous drug using or cheating, possibly gay or bisexual, male partner, or attempting to prove her innocence by ascribing to a sanitized construction of true womanhood, Ava acknowledges her role in acquiring HIV, she has sex with men.

Additionally, I argue that Cleage is placing an emphasis on the need for more people to recognize that HIV/AIDS is increasingly affecting women. In 1996, women represented twenty percent of AIDS cases reported in adults, which was greater than any previous year. [4] Continuing to frame women with HIV/AIDS as exceptional or innocent victims of an epidemic primarily located in deviant populations ignores the growing number of women with HIV/AIDS. In other words, Ava does not let herself or us, the readers, off the hook. Readers are not given an extraordinary set of circumstances surrounding how Ava acquired HIV, which we can in turn use to say "that is not me," "I do not belong to that group," or "that would not happen to me." Ava makes it very clear, if you have sex, this pertains to you.

To further drive home the significance of the innocent versus the guilty in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Ava's disgust with this television spectacle continues, but now complicates who gets to deploy these strategies to claim the status of innocent victim. She thinks,

Cleage invokes the well publicized stories of Ryan White, who acquired HIV through blood-based products used to treat hemophilia, and Kimberly Bergalis, who accused her gay dentist of infecting her with HIV, to illustrate how the identities allowed to claim innocence in the epidemic often exclude women and men of color, often associated with the inner city and/or ghettos.

Katie Hogan contrasts the media representations of Kimberly Bergalis to those of Helen Cover [6]. She writes,

Hogan continues,

Bergalis, middle class and white, was portrayed as an innocent virgin, which was later found to be untrue, whereas Cover was imprisoned because she was seen as a public health risk. Cleage invokes the Bergalis case and the trope of the innocent victim to counter the racialized discourses that excludes black women from these categories based on ideals of sexual purity and genteel femininity. As stated above, during this time period not only is the epidemic perceived as shifting to one of inner city women and men of color, but women are representing an increasing proportion of reported AIDS cases. Women of color, particularly black women, are not included in the privileged and protected category of innocence. Therefore, it becomes imperative that black women negotiate and intervene in HIV/AIDS discourses that continue to designate them as deviant, pathological, and already guilty in the epidemic.

Through Ava, Cleage intervenes in these discursive representations from the beginning of the novel. She disrupts these stereotypes by having Ava speak back to them and deny their ability to explain her life and her choices. Cleage challenges the reader to keep all of Ava's complexities in tension with one another. She is a sexual, black woman who is unapologetic, and refuses to submit to the idea that she deserves AIDS, no matter what her actions. Ava demands that we see her on her own terms.

Coupling

In this section, I draw upon the politics of respectability, as detailed by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, to situate Ava's return home and choice to remain there and work to restore Idlewild in a longer history of black women's service to black communities [8]. Higginbotham examines the politics of respectability espoused by black women in the Baptist church in the early twentieth century. She writes,

Higginbotham argues that these politics are internally as well as externally directed, with the intended purpose of elevating African Americans’ social standing within the nation. Her emphasis on the way these politics were directed toward multiple audiences with a variety of intended purposes is key to how I employ the concept. Like Higginbotham, I employ the politics of respectability not solely as an effort to prescribe proper gender and sexual roles for the purposes of producing normative African American family structures and communities, but also as a tool for political resistance to racism that excluded African Americans from accessing the full rights of citizenship. I argue that respectability and the accompanied requirements of normative gender roles, sexualities, families, and communities has to a large extent shaped the discourses produced by African American women about the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

I want to situate this analysis of the politics of respectability in relation to HIV/AIDS within the specific sociopolitical discourses of the 1990s, particularly within the rhetoric of "changing face of the epidemic" or the perception that the AIDS epidemic was increasingly becoming an epidemic of inner city black and Hispanic women and men. In addition, as I consider how the politics of respectability shaped women's constructions of gender and sexuality I want to consider how the related discourses of respectability and the "Strong Black Man" were also employed in these novels to situate black men as the rightful heads of families and communities. [10]

Marc Anthony Neal begins chapter one of the New Black Man with a discussion of the public obsession with cataloguing the many problems and crises of the black man in America, which often focuses on the "disaffected and demonized hip-hop generation." [11] Neal argues that the contemporary (male) talented tenth are invested in their own forms of policing black men's and women's behavior in order to maintain their privilege within patriarchy. As an example of this he cites the upsurge in rhetoric calling for a renewed emphasis on the rebuilding of the black family and black communities. Neal cites the 1995 Million Man March as one of the "grandest" examples of this reclaiming of black families and reinvigorated investments in black patriarchy. He argues that for many purposes the march was a performance of respectable black masculinity, citing the chivalrous treatment of the few women who were in attendance as well as the Million March Pledge that the men took which emphasized the need for the "demonic male forces with in the black community" to atone for their behavior, mostly as it pertains to abusing black women and children. In short, Neal argues that the March was a call for the (re)birth of the Strong Black Man. Consequently, if the Million Man March was invested in shaping strong black men, it simultaneously had to call for the submissive black female to take her place as helpmate to the men. As Neal writes, "The march organizers explicitly told black women and girls [...]"so now that we have made up our minds to stand up for you and our families, we want you to aid us in this march by staying home with the children teaching them in sympathy with what Black men have decided to do." [12]

I draw on Neal to illustrate the social context within which I want to situate What Looks Like Crazy and discourses about black women's sexuality and HIV/AIDS. The 1990s are seemingly a time of economic growth for some while the 1996 Welfare Reform Act dismantled the social safety net for many. While AIDS rates for blacks and Hispanics are rising, the emergence of new AIDS drugs have led some to announce the end of AIDS, while not only are these drugs not a cure, but their cost makes them unattainable to many. All of these antagonistic discourses must shape how we read and understand the importance of the emergence of this small group of black women authors writing about HIV/AIDS, and the literary conventions they draw upon to speak with and back to these discourses, specifically their use of the coupling convention.

What Looks Like Crazy draws upon a long tradition in black women's fiction that employs the concept of marriage within specific formations of race, class, and gender, but also links this tradition to larger projects of community/racial uplift and progress. Since the early 20th century in the U.S., black women writers have used fiction as a terrain to challenge and resist the exclusion of black women from the institution of marriage and ideals of true womanhood, thus redefining the meaning of marriage as it intersects with race, class, and citizenship. Some black feminist critics have critiqued black women writers' focus on marriage as an acceptance of white ideologies of true womanhood. Others, like Ann DuCille, have argued that the inclusion of marriage in black women's fiction has many meanings including, an acknowledgement of the previous denial of this right, making it that much more important, as well as the desire to access the rights of marriage as a way to defend black women from racialized stereotypes sexualities. Combining Evelyn Higginbotham's politics of respectability and Ann DuCille's analysis of marriage in black women's fiction, which both argue that the adherence by black women to proper gender and sexual roles have had different meanings and levels of sociopolitical importance attached to them in differing contexts, I analyze the theme of marriage in What Look Like Crazy in the context of the mid-90s with its rising AIDS rates for African Americans, the Million Man March, and discourses about welfare reform.

As detailed above, What Looks Like Crazy began by speaking back to dominant discourses about innocence and guilt in the HIV/AIDS epidemic as well as establishing Ava as an independent woman, financially and sexually. However, upon her return to Idlewild she quickly begins a relationship that leads to marriage at the conclusion of the novel. Ava falls in love with Eddie almost immediately. He is calm, centered, and understanding. Everything Ava is not right now. In addition, Ava, who has come home to rest, becomes enmeshed in the community's sociopolitical problems and begins volunteering with a group of young women her sister, Joyce, has organized.

If we read Ava's story as both a cautionary tale and a tale of redemption then several important readings emerge. First, women who are sexually active and not interested in monogamy, family and children risk being punished for not accepting their proper roles. Ava's story implies that she has learned the consequences of her lifestyle too late. In the scene following Eddie's marriage proposal to Ava she thinks,

Ava refers to her actions as a crime. She is looking her ideal man in the face, but all she can think about is what her future holds in terms of her health. In this moment, Ava who has previously spoken of her sexuality and HIV/AIDS in terms of choices, freedom and expressing herself, now speaks of her actions in terms of crime and punishment. To be sure, I am not arguing that Ava would or should not express an array of emotions about having HIV/AIDS or what that means for her and her partner that may include guilt, anger, or sadness. However, what I want to draw attention to is the shift in her attitude toward how she contracted HIV and her transition into marriage to Eddie and both of their commitments to rebuilding Idlewild.

In this narrative, Ava's transition makes her redeemable into African American politics of respectability. Ava's increasing reinvestment in Idlewild and its black community is an important part of the coupling convention seen in black women's fiction. The desire to couple is often closely tied to a larger project of racial uplift that the couple will embark upon together. In this way, the coupling or marriage strengthens black communities in two ways, one by creating heteronormative nuclear families that stand in contrast to the stereotypes of the broken single parent black home often lead by black female matriarchs, and second this family literally works to rebuild the community around them.

Second, marriage becomes important to this narrative for the way it redeems Ava, but also, because HIV/AIDS is becoming more prevalent with African Americans, specifically women, her redemption is even more important. If the mid- 1990s is a time period where the rebuilding of communities, and the emergence of the Strong Black Man is prioritized, those men and women will need to negotiate HIV/AIDS. Problematically, I argue, this novel finds its solutions in a bolstering of heteronormative family units. When heterosexual transmission is rising, and it is clear that the "general population" needs to come to terms with the need to protect themselves, this narrative posits the home and the transformed patriarch as an unreal estate that can save us. Ann DuCille defines the "unreal estate" as

The unreal estate is applicable to the narrative of What Looks Like Crazy precisely because of the ways it sutures Ava, Eddie, Joyce, and Idlewild together in an effort not only to redeem Ava, but through her marriage and service, redeem black families and communities during a time period when HIV/AIDS, poverty, drugs, and welfare reform are a few of the crises seen as plaguing black communities. This unreal estate is a space where a future can be imagined for both Ava and black communities in general. It serves the dual role of constructing representations of normative, respectable black communities, while also serving as a much needed intervention into racialized discourses of the epidemic that stereotype African American women's and men's gender, sexualities, and behaviors as aberrant.

Resisting the Queer Possibilities

In the final section I highlight the queer possibilities for Ava's life that the narrative ultimately represses. In this queer reading of Ava’s desire to move to San Francisco in hopes of finding a more progressive community, queer is not inherently linked to sexuality, but is used to discuss a position or belief that is anti-normative, calling into question many ideas including sex, sexuality, gender, race, and even time. Ava is initially trying to find a space where she can include all of her identities (e.g. black, sexual, HIV-positive), a place where her contradictions are allowed.

In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Judith Halberstam argues for an understanding of queer or queerness that is detached from the sexual and instead is more interested in discussing queerness as a ‘way of life’ that structures how people use space and time. [15] Instead of viewing life in terms of longevity with particular phases such as marriage, family, and death, people should be able to structure their lives according to different logics. To this end Halberstam writes, “I try to use the concept of queer time to make clear how respectability, and notions of the normal on which it depends, may be upheld by a middle-class logic of reproductive temporality." [16] We place value on the assumed desired progression from birth and adolescence to adult responsibility, with the goal of a long and productive life. In queer time, people prioritize different criteria by which to measure their life. Halberstam argues that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has influenced the way that many gay men, specifically, conceptualize time. The toll HIV/AIDS has taken on gay communities has made many reprioritize their life goals as not successful based on longevity or success, but on family structures and social behaviors that emphasize the present. Halberstam’s discussion of queer time and place are helpful because they speak to Ava’s imagined, but never realized, life in San Francisco.

For Ava, if San Francisco is an imagined space for her to perform her queer identities, her return to Idlewild (and finally her marriage) serve as a reminder of what she should value. Ava’s narrative places her firmly within the politics of respectability, because Ava not only adopts a more acceptable form of sexuality but also becomes involved in literally rebuilding Idlewild. In the end, Ava’s hope for an alternative lifestyle in San Francisco is exchanged for a new future in her hometown, a future that reinforces the legacy of the politics of respectability and the extension of those beliefs to contemporary times. In accepting her responsibilities Ava denies her initial desire for a more radical, queer performance of identity for one that situates her instead securely within African American traditions and community.

San Francisco is invoked several times throughout the novel in juxtaposition to Idlewild. San Francisco is HIV friendly, understanding, progressive, and accepting. Whereas Idlewild is not HIV friendly, it is not progressive or accepting, and is riddled with problems of poverty and drugs. San Francisco serves as a trope for queerness as well as whiteness while Idlewild is coded as non-queer and black. This dichotomy is supported by Ava's thoughts that she may become a lesbian once she arrives in San Francisco, yet she never considers this possibility in Idlewild. As discussed above, at the beginning of the novel when Ava is refusing to recast herself as an innocent victim of AIDS by claiming that she was "practically a virgin" or never did anything wrong, but instead acknowledges her sexual relationships, she thinks,

This is the first reference to lesbianism that Ava makes. Here she denies the possibility for herself through a lack of attraction, but acknowledges that she can see why other women make that choice as an escape from men. However, later in the novel Ava thinks,

Here, Ava seems more open to the possibility of lesbianism, and in contrast to her earlier comment denies heteronormative remarks about the navigation of anatomy and gender roles. In fact, she hints at a reading of lesbianism that does not rely upon gendered role play by asking, what if they both get to be women? Ava continues,

Ava's ideas about being a lesbian may vacillate, but what becomes clear is that San Francisco is a site where Ava believes she can perform her sexuality in a variety of ways. She wants to move to San Francisco because that is where she can be her "black, female, sexual, HIV-positive self.” She thinks, "From where I was sitting, San Francisco looked like heaven..." [20] Problematically, the quotes illustrates the belief that some women turn to lesbianism out of desperation to the lack of available black male partners. Here, Ava's desire to move to San Francisco because it is a queer and AIDS friendly city, and her consideration of lesbianism can be read as a retreat from the social problems equated with black communities. Through the narrative, Ava's desire for San Francisco and queer possibilities are replaced by her renewed investments in heterosexuality and black community. Idlewild becomes the place where Ava can be her new found self. Instead of fleeing, she finds the possibilities that this community can hold for her.

In another scene, Ava has gone to the drug store to pick up her medication where she is subject to ridicule and abusive remarks by the pharmacist and other Idlewild residents. As she considers leaving Idlewild, Ava thinks,

Again, Ava's hope of finding someone to hold her is equated with San Francisco, an "AIDS informed haven", even though she begins to question whether or not even in San Francisco she will be able to find a partner. Initially, Ava wants to move to San Francisco because she believes that it is where she will most likely be able to find a supportive community. However, through the narrative as she becomes reinvested in Idlewild through service and her relationships with her sister and her future husband, Ava's idea of what a supportive community may look like is reformulated with an emphasis on what Idlewild has to offer her.

In the final scene of the novel Ava is talking to Sister Judith, a new pastor who has recently moved to Idlewild from San Francisco. Ava wonders:

This exchange between Ava and Sister Judith reminds the reader one final time that Ava has made the right decision to stay in Idlewild. Sister Judith has lived in San Francisco and can report that the city "never really belonged" to her, at least not like Idlewild does. Throughout the novel Ava's choices have been between leaving for San Francisco and exploring, in Halberstam's understanding, queer possibilities for her life or remaining in Idlewild where she is currently positioned in the gendered roles of wife, service, and proper black female respectability. Sister Judith confirms for Ava that Idlewild, and what it stands in for, is the right choice for Ava and ostensively serves as an example for African American women in general who may have been prepared to give up on black men and communities. Ava and Sister Judith are committed to returning Idelwild to its former glory. They both find the community they have been looking for here. Ultimately, Ava's hope that she can find freedom in what she sees as the liberatory space of San Francisco, where a queer lifestyle can be imagined, is eclipsed by her transition into respectability, marriage, and community. The trope of San Francisco and what it stands for, whiteness and queerness, is invoked as the temptation Ava must resist. It is the foil that makes it even more clear the choices Ava must choose as a respectable black woman.

Conclusion

Cultural responses to HIV/AIDS, by and about African Americans, are an important site for analyses because while the politics of AIDS has, at lease marginally, been contested by official leaders and institutions, it has also been taken up, perhaps more significantly, in popular responses. What Looks Like Crazy is exemplar of the contradictory discourses of desire for respectability as well as challenges to normative discourses of gender and sexuality. The novel engages the oft used literary devices of marriage, coupling, and service, historically found in African American women's fiction, and uses them to highlight how discourses of HIV/AIDS rely upon and alter the ways categories race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship converge.

My intention has not been to argue whether or not marriage was the right choice for Ava, but rather to analyze the choices the protagonist made in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the sociohistorical context in which black women are located with all of its significance in relation to racialized constructions of race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. I locate Ava and Idlewild in these longer histories of African American politics and discourses because without that how can we understand the multiple meanings of marriage and its relation to racial uplift and proper citizenship that African Americans have been striving for since emancipation? My goal has not been to prescribe appropriate roles of gender and sexuality for black women, nor to argue that anyone who chooses marriage or perceivably adheres to the politic of respectability has denied their self true freedom. To the contrary, my emphasis is on reading black women's choices in relation to their history in order to begin opening up the possibilities for discussions of black female sexualities not polarized by either deviancy or respectability. Ava is an example of how African American women must negotiate these contentious and overdetermined discourses of race, gender, and sexuality no matter what life decisions we make.

By examining What Looks Like Crazy in the context of the 1990s and the sociopolitical changes of this time period, I have sought to illustrate the ways focusing on HIV/AIDS, as a site that magnifies the need for intersectional analyses, can lead to greater understandings not only of the complexities of the epidemic and its discursive significance, but also of how these social identities are continuously re-articulated.

Works Cited

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, U.S. HIV and AIDS Cases Reported Through December 1996, 8 (2). http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/resources/reports/pdf/hivsur82.pdf (accessed April 26, 2008).

Cleage, Pearl. What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day. New York: Avon Books, 1997.

duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: University of Oxford Press., 1993.

Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Hogan, Katie. "Gendered Visibilities in Black Women's AIDS Narratives" In Gendered Epidemic: Representations of Women in the Age of AIDS, ed. Nancy Roth and Katie Hogan, 165–190. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Jackson, Sheneska. Li'l Mama's Rules. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Neal, Marc Anthony. The New Black Man. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Sapphire. Push. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1997.

Watson Sherman, Charlotte. touch. New York

1. Pearl Cleage, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (New York: Avon Books, 1997), 10.

2. Charlotte Watson Sherman, touch, (New York: Harper Collins, 1995); Sapphire, Push, (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1997); Pearl Cleage, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, (New York: Avon Books, 1997); Sheneska Jackson, Li’l Mama’s Rules (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

3. Cleage, What Looks Like Crazy, 3.

4. HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, U.S. HIV and AIDS cases reported through December 1996, 8(2)

5. Cleage, What Looks Like Crazy, 4.

6. Katie Hogan, "Gendered Visibilities in Black Women's AIDS Narratives," in Gendered Epidemic: Representations of women in the Age of AIDS, eds. Nancy Roth and Katie Hogan (New York: Routledge, 1998), 165- 190.

7. Ibid., 168- 168.

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

9. Ibid., 187.

10. Marc Anthony Neal, New Black Man (New York: Routledge, 2006).

11. Ibid., 2.

12. Ibid., 17.

13. Cleage, What Looks Like Crazy, 204-5.

14. Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: University of Oxford Press, 1993), 18.

15. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

16. Ibid., 5.

17. Pearl Cleage, What Looks Like Crazy, 3.

18. Ibid., 102.

19. Ibid., 102.

20. Ibid., 10.

21. Ibid., 113.

22. Ibid., 243.