Protesting little sister: Black women's sexual politics, 1940--1953.

Abstract

Although Richard Wright's novel <italic>Native Son</italic> establishes the tradition of the African American protest genre, the political desires of African American women are not addressed in this masculinist script. This dissertation reexamines the period and the genre by exploring black women's struggle for agency and subjectivity in works that challenge the conventions of the protest novel. Reimagining the minstrel and race woman constructs, and discovering the cultural commentary in female neurosis and the blues, my project argues that black women produce social criticism by defining political desire as a longing for racial equality <italic>and</italic> an end to the sexual exploitation that confines their experiences. In a gendered revision of the protest novel, writers use representations of black female protagonists to engage social protest by moving beyond the dichotomy of hypersexuality and true womanhood, and by challenging the boundaries of literary aesthetics. This proto-womanist discourse not only shifts the direction of the tradition by critiquing white privilege and patriarchal constructions of womanhood, but it also explores black women's alternate methods for expressing and fulfilling political desire. Examining four icons of black womanhood---the predatory woman in Ann Petry's <italic>The Street</italic> (1941) and Dorothy West's <italic>The Living Is Easy</italic> (1948), the minstrel in Zora Neale Hurston's <italic> Seraph on the Suwanee</italic> (1948), the neurotic in Curtis Lucas' <italic> Third Ward Newark</italic> (1946), and the race woman in Gwendolyn Brooks' <italic> Maud Martha</italic> (1953) and the black press---I attempt to demonstrate how black women negotiate stereotypes of sexual promiscuity to achieve subjectivity through artistic performance, economic independence, and political activism. In deviations from the school of social realism (including the middle-class domestic novel, pulp fiction, and a white-plot text), each character tries to actualize a new model of black social protest by rejecting the supposed pathology of black female sexuality in her expression and repression of personal and political desire. Thus, black women articulate a discourse of protesting subjectivity in their revision, rejection, and negotiation of bourgeois ideals of black womanhood.