Title: Towards an Aesthetic of Transgression: Ann Allen Shockley's "Loving Her" and the Politics of Same-Gender Loving
Abstract: [W]e know more about the elision of sexuality by black women than we do about the possible varieties of expression of sexual desire. Thus what we have is a very narrow view of black women's sexuality.--Evelynn Hammonds The differences made by race in self-representation and identity argue for the necessity to examine, question, or contest the usefulness and/or the limitations of current discourses on lesbian and gay sexualities ...; from there, we could then go on to recast or reinvent the terms of our sexualities, to construct another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual.--Teresa de Lauretis In her pioneering novel Loving Her (1974), Ann Allen Shockley challenges rigid discourses on sexuality that do not provide apt paradigms that either capture or illuminate the complex terrain of black women's sexuality. More than thirty years following the publication of her groundbreaking work, which affirms transgressive behavior outside then-existing social conventions, it is still difficult to examine the sometimes nebulous circumstances surrounding black women's intimate lives. How, given the limitations of discourses on sexuality, do we analyze black women's sexuality, which has both historically and contemporaneously been hypervisible, yet paradoxically suppressed and shrouded in dissemblance? (1) How might we examine black women's complicated sexual relationships with other women, when existing sexual categorizations and labels, while valuable, do not always encompass the essence of black women's sexualities or self-established identities? (Hammonds 483; JanMohamed 16). (2) How, additionally, can an appropriate analysis of such relationships apply in literary criticism in ways that delineate and reflect, rather than obfuscate, the particularities of black women's sexual lives? This essay foregrounds Loving Her to provide, under the rubric an analytic and discursive lens by which to examine the intricacies of certain sexual intimacies between women, specifically protagonist Renay Davis and her partner Terry Bluvard. By same gender loving, I mean those sexual engagements between individuals, regardless of their perceived sexual orientation, marked by same-sex desire and physical sexual acts accompanied by sexual fidelity, commitment, and/or romantic love. (3) As an analytic, same-gender loving provides a discursive paradigm by which to capture and analyze the nuances and complexities of particular sexual acts between individuals that are, given the rigidity of sexual labels and categories, otherwise overlooked or misinterpreted. (4) Same-gender loving is pragmatic in that it enables a critical examination of sexual subjects and their sexual intimacies, and thereby offers insight into the specificity of certain sexualities. It expands existing discourses on sexuality, as well as the ways in which we conceptualize and theorize about sexual desire, intimacy, and the erotic especially within a racialized context. In addition to contextualizing and applying same-gender loving as an analytic, this essay also illustrates the ways Shockley inscribes, complicates, and polemicizes same-gender loving, which functions as a paradigm and affirmation of transgression in her novel. In her characterization of her black female protagonist who leaves her husband for an interracial same-gender loving relationship--Shockley challenges the ideological conflation of same-sex desire, homoeroticism, and with non-blackness; and, she subverts nationalist ideologies and social constructions of womanhood, manhood, family, and nation. In her inscription of same-gender loving in a black context, Shockley problematizes illusive notions of a fixed or unitary black heteronormativity. What's in a Name?: Same-Gender Loving--A Context The Black Power and Gay Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s challenged and redefined identity politics, especially the meanings of blackness and homosexuality respectively. …
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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