Queer in black and white: Interraciality, same sex desire, and contemporary African American culture

Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages 1-136

  Dunning, Stefanie K ^a  

^a MIAMI UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84896146519     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (182)

1. Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring (1932)
2. is the first such novel, and the first representation of black gay desire is thought to be Bruce Nugent's "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" (1926).
3. Vincent Woodward, "Just as Quare as They Want to Be: A Review of the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference", Callaloo 23(2000):1278-84.
4. Here I am referencing a term used by Dwight McBride in his essay "It's a White Man's World: Race in the Gay Marketplace of Desire." In Black Queer Studies, ed. Mae Henderson and E. Patrick Johnson (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2007).
5. My use of the term "signifying" refers to Henry Louis Gates's use of it in his book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
6. See the work of James Edward Smethurst's The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism of the 1960's and 1970's (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
7. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 58.
8. Quoted in Dwight McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 69.
9. Wahneema Lubiano, Rhonda Williams, Dwight McBride, Kendall Thomas, and Phillip Brian Harper are among the authors who have identified the ways in which homosexuality is figured as whiteness. I take up this subject at length in chapter 1. Elucidating this point, Gregory Conerly comments on the idea that blackness is incongruent with gay or lesbian identity in the essay "Are You Black First or Are You Queer?" He writes that the question in his title "embodies a central conflict many African American lesbians, bisexuals, and gays experience in dealing with two identities often at odds with each other." The essay appears in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2000).
10. Eva Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law", in Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Werner Sollors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 61-80.
11. Michelle Wright, Becoming Black (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 3.
12. M. Giulia Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 6.
13. Dwight McBride has argued that we could read Giovanni's Room as the text which inaugurates black queer studies. See "Straight Black Studies" in Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch.
14. See Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Race, Sexuality and Madness (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985);
15. Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2001);
16. and José Esteban Muñoz, Disindentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
17. See Judith Raiskin, "Inverts and Hybrids: Lesbian Rewritings of Sexual and Racial Identities", in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
18. There are innumerable texts which consider the question of interraciality in American literature. Some notable examples are Werner Sollors's Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
19. Naomi Zack's Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997)
20. Cassandra Jackson's Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex and Nineteenth Century American Literature (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004)
21. Stephen Talty's Mulatto America (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2004)
22. Joel Williamson's New People (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995)
23. and Karen Weierman's One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal and Law, 1820-1870 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).
24. This term is taken from José Muñoz's formulation in his book Disindentification: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). I have taken some liberty and altered the word here for structural reasons.
25. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1991), p. 63.
26. Fanon, Black Skin, p. 63.
27. McBride, "White Man's World", p. 121.
28. Christopher Cutrone, "The Child with a Lion: The Utopia of Interracial Intimacy", GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 2(2000):249-285.
29. Fabi, Passing, p. 3.
30. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 88.
31. See Valerie Smith, "Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing", Diacritics 24(1994):43-57;
32. and Gayle Walde, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in 20th Century US Literature and Culture (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
33. The range of black phenotypes is often commented on. See F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
34. Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), p. 97.
35. See Robert Reid-Pharr's essay "Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual", in Black Gay Man (New York: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 44-61.
36. I use this date since it is the publication date of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. The case has been made elsewhere that Du Bois anticipated postmodern conceptions of race in his groundbreaking work. Michelle Wright makes this case quite forcefully in her book Becoming Black.
37. Wright, Becoming Black, p. 3.
38. Werner Sollors makes this point in the introduction to Interracialism, pp. 3-22.
39. Reid-Pharr, "Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual", p. 55.
40. Alain Locke, "The New Negro", in The New Negro (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 3.
41. Locke, "The New Negro", pp. 3, 7.
42. Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law", p. 62.
43. This quote refers to a phrase of Eve Sedgwick's, but it is quoted in Linda Garber's Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 192.
44. Maurice Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 380.
45. McBride, "White Man's World", p. 93.
46. Reid-Pharr, "Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual", p. 10.
47. Bill T. Jones, Still/Here with Bill Moyers, PBS documentary, 1997.
48. Reid-Pharr, "Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual", p. 1.
49. The first epigraph is from Sterling Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 28. The second epigraph is from the film Black Nation/Queer Nation, directed by Shari Frilot (1995).
50. Rhonda Williams, "Living at the Crossroads: Explorations in Race, Nationality, Sexuality and Gender", in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U. S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), p. 136.
51. See "Can the Queen Speak? Racial Essentialism, Sexuality, and the Problem of Authority", by Dwight McBride, in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2000);
52. "Eloquence and Epitaph: Black Nationalism and the Homophobic Impulse in Responses to the Death of Max Robinson", by Phillip Brian Harper, in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
53. "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense", by Wahneema Lubiano, in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U. S. Terrain. ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997);
54. "'Ain't Nothin' like the Real Thing': Black Masculinity, Gay Sexuality, and the Jargon of Authenticity", by Kendall Thomas, in Representing Black Men, ed. Marcellus Blount and George Cunningham (New York: Routledge, 1996);
55. "Living at the Crossroads: Explorations in Race, Nationality, Sexuality and Gender", by Rhonda Williams, in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U. S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997);
56. and Sister Outsider: Speeches and Essays, by Audre Lorde (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984).
57. Robert Reid-Pharr, "It's Raining Men: Notes on the Million Man March", in Black Gay Man (New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 166.
58. Sterling Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 6.
59. Lubiano, "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense", p. 236.
60. From Black Nation/Queer Nation.
61. Lubiano, "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense", p. 233.
62. Reid-Pharr, "It's Raining Men", p. 167.
63. Lubiano, "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense", p. 232.
64. William L. Van Deburg, ed., Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 275.
65. Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism, p. 290.
66. Charles L. Isbell, Jr., "Me'Shell NdegeOcello's Hip Hop", December 1994.
67. Isbell reviews hip-hop regularly on his website, "Homeboy from Hell"; the review can be found at http://www.isbell.org/~isbell/HFh/ reviews/059.nj47.html (accessed August 31, 2008).
68. Mark Anthony Neal, Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 15.
69. A good example of this is the album by Sounds of Blackness, The Drum: Africa to America.
70. The lyric to the title song says, "Kings and Queens, beat down in the new Babylon called America." In response to such fantasies of a royal past, Essex Hemphill reminds us, in a poem recited at the 1995 Black Nation/Queer Nation conference, that "someone had to clean the bathrooms"
71. Diana Collecott, "What Is Not Said: A Study in Textual Inversion", in Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 92.
72. Black nationalist discourse has frequently been critiqued-both from inside and outside the movement-for its sexist politics. See Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).
73. Ana Louise Keating, "The Intimate Distance of Desire: June Jordan's Bisexual Inflection", Journal of Lesbian Studies 4, no. 2(2000):84.
74. Neal, Songs in the Key of Black Life, p. 13.
75. As Mark Anthony Neal notes, in her subsequent work NdegéOcello rejects Afrocentricity and black nationalism in general. See Neal's Songs in the Key of Black Life.
76. Quoted in Neal, Songs in the Key of Black Life, p. 15.
77. Collecott, "What Is Not Said", p. 92.
78. Barbara Smith, "Towards a Black Feminist Criticism", in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 138.
79. Mainstream hip-hop is normally understood as being a primarily male genre. See Tricia Rose's Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, N. H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
80. See Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).
81. For more information on the butch aesthetic, see Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Butch/Femme Reader (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992).
82. Lubiano, "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense", p. 236.
83. The remark by Eddie Murphy, which first appeared in Entertainment Tonight in 1997, is quoted in Mark Anthony Neal's Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 127.
84. Rhonda M. Williams, "Living at the Crossroads: Explorations in Race, Nationality, Sexuality and Gender", in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U. S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), pp. 136-156.
85. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 64. I made this argument in a previous version of this chapter in the journal MELUS in 2001.
86. Stefanie Dunning, "Parallel Perversions: Interracial and Same-Sexuality in James Baldwin's Another Country", MELUS: The Journal for the Multi-ethnic Literature in the United States 26, no. 4 (Winter 2001):95-112.
87. Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 23.
88. "The Black Panther Platform: What We Want, What We Believe", in Takin' It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, ed. Alexander Bloom and Mini Brieni (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
89. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969; New York: Ace Books, 2000).
90. Warren J. Blumenfield and Diane Raymond, Looking at Gay and Lesbian Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), p. 94.
91. Williams, "Living at the Crossroads", p. 136.
92. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984), p. 51.
93. Sharon P. Holland, "Bill T. Jones, Tupac Shakur and the (Queer) Art of Death", Callaloo 23, no. 1(2000):388. This idea of the masculine as the authentic site of suffering in the black community is one that Sharon P. Holland discusses in relation to discourses of death.
94. For a discussion of the flaws of Eurocentric forms of nationalism, see George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985).
95. Robert Reid-Pharr, "Tearing the Goat's Filesh: Homosexuality, Abjection and the Production of Late-Twentieth-Century Masculinity", Studies in the Novel 28 (Fall 1996):356.
96. James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: Vintage Books, 1960). This is a question that Rufus asks Vivaldo on p. 51.
97. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Ramparts/McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 102.
98. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, p. 57.
99. For a very good discussion of Cleaver's desire in relation to Baldwin, see Robert Reid-Pharr's "Tearing the Goat's Filesh", cited in note 14 above, pp. 372-394.
100. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, p. 103.
101. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosexual Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
102. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, p. 106.
103. Laura Quinn, "'What's Going On Here?' Baldwin's Another Country", Journal of Homosexuality 34, no. 3(1998):51-65.
104. Kevin Ohi, "Sexuality, Race and Thwarted Revelation in Baldwin's Another Country", African American Review 33, no. 2(1999):261-281.
105. David Bergman, Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 165.
106. Holland, "Bill T. Jones, Tupac Shakur and the (Queer) Art of Death", p. 388.
107. Baldwin, Another Country, p. 107.
108. Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2006).
109. Baldwin, Another Country, p. 26.
110. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
111. Baldwin, Another Country, p. 132.
112. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, p. 107.
113. Baldwin, Another Country, p. 67.
114. Robyn Wiegman, "The Anatomy of Lynching", in Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 3 (January 1993):446-483.
115. Baldwin, Another Country, p. 416.
116. For a discussion of Ida B. Wells, see Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
117. Quinn, "'What's Going On Here?, '" p. 52.
118. Baldwin, Another Country, p. 435.
119. Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney, Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1995), p. xiv.
120. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Black Man's Burden", in Fear of a Queer Planet, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 230.
121. Jennifer DeVere Brody, "The Blackness of Blackness⋯ Reading the Typography of Invisible Man", Theatre Journal 57(2005):681.
122. Frantz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness", in Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1991).
123. Evelyn Hammonds, "Black (W) holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality", in Feminism and Race, ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 383.
124. Jewelle Gomez, "A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women", in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (1983; New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 110.
125. Ann Allen Shockley, "The Black Lesbian in American Literature", in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (1983; New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 83.
126. Ann Allen Shockley, Loving Her, foreword by Alycee Lane (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), p. 44.
127. Alycee Lane, foreword to Loving Her, by Ann Allen Shockley (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), p. ix.
128. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Ramparts/McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 177.
129. See E. Patrick Johnson's Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2003).
130. Gates, "Black Man's Burden", p. 234.
131. Lane, foreword to Loving Her, p. viii.
132. Jeanne Cordova, cited in Lisa Walker, Looking Like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 116.
133. Walker, Looking Like What You Are, p. 117.
134. Marlon B. Ross, "Some Glances at the Black Fag: Race, Same-Sex Desire, and Cultural Belonging", in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 498.
135. Shockley, Loving Her, p. 75.
136. Jewelle Gomez and Barbara Smith, "Talking about It: Homophobia in the Black Community", Feminist Review 34 (Spring 1990):48.
137. Shockley, Loving Her, p. 31.
138. Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book", in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 257-279.
139. Ross, "Some Glances at the Black Fag", pp. 504-505.
140. Gomez, "A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered", p. 114.
141. Shockley, Loving Her, p. 97.
142. Barbara Smith, in Gomez and Smith, "Talking about It", p. 54. Bayard Rustin comes to mind as Smith is talking here; as a major figure in the black civil rights movement his sexuality was closeted, and ultimately he was "erased" from the official history of black liberation because he was gay.
143. Shockley, Loving Her, p. 5.
144. Gerda Lerner, "Black Women in White America", in Feminism and Race, ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 48.
145. Shockley, Loving Her, p. 22.
146. Walker, Looking Like What You Are, p. 131.
147. Shockley, Loving Her, p. 51.
148. See Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of Sexual Thought, 1920-1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
149. Shockley, Loving Her, p. 86.
150. Walker, Looking Like What You Are, p. 135.
151. Shockley, Loving Her, p. 37.
152. Walker, Looking Like What You Are, p. 135.
153. Shockley, Loving Her, p. 63.
154. Laura Alexandra Harris, "Queer Black Feminism: The Pleasure Principle", Feminist Review 54 (Autumn 1996):12.
155. Shockley, Loving Her, p. 100.
156. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 6.
157. Wahneema Lubiano, "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others", in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U. S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), pp. 232-252.
158. Missy Elliott, "She's a Btch", Da Real World, East/West Records, June 1999.
159. Queen Pen, "Girlfriend", My Melody, Interscope Records, 1997.
160. Jewelle Gomez, "But Some of Us Are Brave Lesbians", in Black Queer Studies, ed. Mae Henderson and E. Patrick Johnson (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 290.
161. Robert Reid-Pharr, "Makes Me Feel Mighty Real: The Watermelon Woman and the Critique of Black Visibility", in F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 130.
162. Dwight McBride, "Can the Queen Speak? Racial Essentialism, Sexuality and the Problem of Authority", in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2000), p. 29.
163. Bell hooks, "Homophobia in Black Communities", in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2000), p. 70 (emphasis mine).
164. Toure, "Hip Hop's Closet: A Fanzine Article Touches a Nerve", in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2000), p. 320.
165. Hooks, "Homophobia in Black Communities", p. 72.
166. Reid-Pharr, "Makes Me Feel Mighty Real", p. 130.
167. Jewelle Gomez, "A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women", in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (1983; New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 114-115.
168. Andrea Braidt, "Queering Ethnicity, Queering Sexuality", in Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media, ed. Elizabeth Kraus and Carolin Auer (Rochester, N. Y.: Camden House, 2000), p. 185.
169. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 85.
170. Braidt, "Queering Ethnicity, Queering Sexuality", p. 187.
171. Gomez, "A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered", p. 114.
172. Mark Winokur, "Body and Soul: Identifying with the Black Lesbian Body in Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman", in Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, ed. Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 240-241.
173. Winokur, "Body and Soul", p. 247.
174. See Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", in The Film Studies Reader, ed. Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings, and Mark Jancovich (London: Arnold, 2000), pp. 238-248.
175. Reid-Pharr, "Makes Me Feel Mighty Real", p. 139.
176. Winokur, "Body and Soul", p. 239.
177. See Christopher Cutrone's essay "The Child with a Lion: The Utopia of Interracial Intimacy", GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 2(2000):249-285.
178. Elizabeth Alexander, "Overture: Watermelon City", in Antebellum Dream Book (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2001), pp. 9-10.
179. Laura L. Sullivan is one of the few critics of Dunye's film to actually ground her analysis in a consideration of the representation of black identity. See her "Chasing Fae: The Watermelon Woman and Black Lesbian Possibility", Callaloo 23, no. 1 (Winter 2000):448-460.
180. Kobena Mercer, "Black Hair/Style Politics", in Welcome to the Jungle (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 99.
181. See, for example, the films New Jack City (1991), Boyz in the Hood, and Jungle Fever. For a fabulous discussion of urbanity in the context of the black community, see Mary Pattillo, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
182. Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man (New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 11.