Abstract
Young, low-income black women in Detroit, by definition, live at the intersection of age, class, race, gender, and place. Positioned on the wrong side of these socially constructed identity markers, these young women must negotiate the boundaries of respectability and deviance most often erected in the space where race and sexuality meet. In addition to their network of family, friends, and coworkers, many of these young women are also immersed in a web of social service institutions that inform the way they perceive the possibilities not only for achieving social mobility but also for defining and expressing their identities.
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Notes
Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries …,” in Black Geographies and The Politics of Place, ed. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2007), 4.
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 524.
See, Leith Mullings, “African American Women Making Themselves,” Souls 2, no. 4 (2000): 18–29.
For more on the historical context that frames contemporary codes of respectability in black women’s lives see Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
and E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
Exclusionary inclusion is a term with some fairly obvious connotations that has been used across disciplines including economics, political science, psychology, education, sociology, and anthropology. It is meant to define the precarious status of being only provisionally or inconsistently included in the nation state, recognized as citizens or as part of a larger mainstream community. Exclusionary inclusion has been used to characterize the status of youth, the disabled, refugees, ethnic minorities, and women. For a specific example in relation to refugee women, see Susan Kneebone, “Women Within the Refugee Construct: ‘Exclusionary Inclusion’ in Policy and Practice The Australian Experience,” International Journal of Refugee Law 17, no. 1 (2005): 7–42.
See Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)
and Judith Goldstein, “Microenterprise Training Programs, Neoliberal Common Sense and the Discourses of Self-Esteem,” in The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States, ed. Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 236–72.
Michelle Fine, “Discourse of Desire: Sexuality, Schooling and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire,” in Disruptive Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research, ed. Michelle Fine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 31–59.
“Other mother” is a term that emerges from black feminism and refers to the role that women who are nonbiological mothers play in the lives of other, usually younger or less experienced, women. Other mothering behaviors may include providing emotional and/ or financial support, sharing wisdom and advice, and mentoring and professional skill building; in general, acting as an other or another mother. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 178–83. Collins cites the “centrality of women in African-American extended families” (178) as the cultural frame for other mothers.
Catherine Kingfisher, “Producing Disunity: The Constraints and Incitements of Welfare Work,” in The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States, ed. Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 276.
Outsider Within is the title of Faye V. Harrison’s book about working to expand the traditional, exclusionary boundaries of anthropology by working as an outsider (black and female) inside of the discipline. I use “outsider within” here as a black female anthropologist/activist to allude to this connotation in my own work with ethnographic work that I see as an intervention. In addition, I use “outsider within” as discussed by Patricia Hill Collins in Fighting Words, to describe the status of traversing various contexts and feeling as if one never really belongs to one group. This was my feeling at Fresh Start, where I never fully felt integrated into the organization as a legitimate social worker. This “outsider within” status also marked my experience in graduate school, where I studied inside of anthropology department that I always felt outside of due to my black female body and advocacy orientations. See Faye V. Harrison, Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age (Urbana Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008)
and Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women & the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
Rose Giallombardo, Society of Women: A Study of Women’s Prison (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966)
Ann Propper, Prison Homosexuality: Myth and Reality (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice NIJ Publishers, 1981). Propper includes a discussion of both males and females in the adult and juvenile justice systems.
See Judith Butler’s “Gender Is a Performance and a Stylized Repetition of Acts,” in Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 140. Lucal’s theory of gender performativity derives from her work.
Betsy Lucal, “What it Means to Be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System,” Gender and Society 13, no. 6 (1999): 783.
See Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990)
and Peggy Phelan, “Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism and Performance,” TDR 32, no. 1 (1988): 107–27.
L. Susan Williams, “Trying on Gender, Gender Regimes and the Process of Becoming Women,” Gender and Society 16, no. 1 (2002): 29–52 utilized “trying on gender” instead of “doing in gender” in her work where she talks about the gendering processes of girls in the liminal stage of adolescence. For Williams, trying on gender implies the experimental, tentative, playful, and resistant nature of the trying-on process.
See Judith Halberstam’s, “Mackdaddy, Superfly, Rapper: Gender, Race and Masculinity in the Drag King Scene,” Social Text 52, no. 53 (1997): 104–31.
Leith Mullings, “Households Headed by Women: The Politics of Class, Race and Gender,” in The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States, ed. Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 49
See Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18, no. 1 (1992): 1–43 for discussion on the historical dimensions of the racial division of labor and the consequences for women of color engaged in low-wage work in areas such as child care and health care services and food preparation.
Refer to Robin D. G. Kelley’s introduction in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 11
and Cathy Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” DuBois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 27–45.
James A. Tyner, “Urban Revolutions and the Spaces of Black Radicalism,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, ed. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 218.
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© 2012 Shaka McGlotten and Dána-Ain Davis
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Cox, A. (2012). Thugs, Black Divas, and Gendered Aspirations. In: McGlotten, S., Davis, DA. (eds) Black Genders and Sexualities. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077950_6
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