A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee

This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj's complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as “straight” or “queer,” while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj as yet another pop diva, the author proposes that Minaj signals the emergence of the femmecee, or a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes. This article engages a pair of music video releases that reflect the range of Minaj's gender performances as cinematic lenses into the strategic moves that Minaj is able to make from her femmecee stance. King Nicki's hypervisibility as a black femmecee and refusal to cede to any regime of recognition confound the multiple common senses that seek to produce her as a compliant subject.     

Surpassing the word: Aileen Wuornos

This article explores the dynamics of Richard Move's drag performance of the late Martha Graham. Drag dance is remarkably self-aware as historiography, and it employs a rhetoric of bodies becoming other bodies: channeling, paying homage, re-embodying, reliving, being possessed. This article argues that drag dance has a historical project for dance history; specifically, that drag bodies can become a new medium through which aesthetic/kinetic histories are transmitted. In the case of Richard Move, the exaggeration and excess of the ageing Martha Graham become modalities that align with the ‘wrongness’ of his body. This is drag dance as a strategy of re-embodiment after the original body has been lost, and Richard Move presents his performance as a ‘haunting,’ much like the feeling Martha Graham describes as the result of a dancer's “first death,” when she watches someone else dance a role she had originated. Ballets like Graham's Lamentation and Cave of the Heart give Move the opportunity to portray Graham's struggle to continue to dance after this “first death,” using drag as a strategy to show up the eerie perfection of voice against the hollowness of the ageing dancer's body. Combining vaudeville and séance, moving from the restless gay “underworld” of the Meatpacking District to the right to presume himself the heir to the mother of modern dance, Richard Move first embodies and then moves beyond Susan Sontag's camp “etc etc” of Graham's self-performance.     

Ourtown for teens: Long-term impact of a youth diversity program

This study fills a gap in the literature in regards to the effectiveness of youth diversity programs by exploring the sustaining effects of a week-long youth diversity camp program. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, the study results suggest the camp achieved positive, sustaining impacts. Some of these findings include (1) enhancement of leadership skills; (2) greater understanding of “the other”; and (3) increased communication skills, particularly when oppression was observed. These effects were observed in the respondents who had recently attended the camp, as well as those who had attended a long time prior. Such impact reported in the study reiterates that more diversity programs for youth should be developed, implemented, and evaluated.     

Techniques of black male re/dress: corporeal drag and kinesthetic politics in the rebirth of Waacking/Punkin’

The improvisation-based dance Waacking/Punking developed in gay underground disco clubs of 1970s Los Angeles and circulated transnationally via television's landmark black music/dance show Soul Train. With almost all male progenitors passing during the early AIDS crisis, the culture was reborn in the 2000s to the transnational hip-hop/street dance arena, now a competition style dominated by nonblack cisgender females. While seeming to promote hetero-normative gender performance, learning the dance practice potentially queers movement norms through corporeal drag – techniques for trying on and refashioning movement that transform kinesthetic consciousness. At the same time, the obscure structural positioning of the black male figure associated with Waacking/Punking's historical context complicates and disorients gendered notions of power and racialized sexuality in its rebirth. This trans-methodological study centers experiences of black practitioners, drawing from first-person stories of pioneer and new generation dancers, as well as native ethnography and archival research. In subtle ways, Waacking practices redress black masculinity and question performing social inclusion under terms of a white patriarchal order – terms that suture blackness-to-pathology-to-violence. The erotic practice of Waacking/Punking may be understood as an embodied re-negotiation of hegemonic demands on gender and sexuality, made possible through its transmission of a black kinesthetic politics.     

Black organs and optics: gazing at viscera in the work of Doreen Garner

Between Doreen Garner’s performance The Observatory and sculpture Black Ocean/Big Black, a significant divergence in gazes and spaces emerges. On the one hand, The Observatory arguably evokes a metaphorical nexus between body, flesh, organs, and land – a move that integrates archaeological and clinical gazes into a black female optic of pleasure wherein an oppositional gaze disidentifies the theatrical and scopophilic framing of black women’s bodies. The author argues that while Garner’s vitrine-enclosed performances, which elicit several gazes at once, signify a geological position and attempt to exhume the gory archives of black women’s bodies in art and science, her sculptural installation Black Ocean signals a queer liquidation and kinetics of black flesh.     

Dependency and Distress at Summer Camp

Examined the relation of dependency to psychological distress among youngsters adapting to summer sleep-away camp. Levels of dependency, self-criticism, and psychological distress were assessed in three groups of campers: children attending a neighborhood day camp, children who were returning to sleep-away camp, and children who were attending sleep-away camp for the first time. Psychological distress was assessed in terms of depression and low self-esteem. The results supported the prediction that dependency would be more predictive of distress for children at sleep-away camp (particularly for names) than at day camp. The specificity of dependency as a vulnerability factor during attachment-related transitions was supported by showing that children's level of self-criticism was not differentially related to distress for the three groups of campers. Results are discussed within the framework of the Personality-Event Congruence Model of Depressive Vulnerability.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Elsa's Housebook, A Woman's Photojournal, by Elsa Dorfman. Boston: David R. Godine. Pp. 80, with 80 black and white photographs. $5.95, softcover original.

Elsa's Housebook: A Woman's Photojournal, by Elsa Dorfman. Boston: David R. Godine, 1974.     

Successful female aging for beginners: Carolyn Heilbrun/Amanda Cross and perspectives of gendered aging in The Players Come Again

Although Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926–2003) is best known for her best-selling mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction which evidence an intense reflection upon female aging as well as her long-standing commitment to feminism. Works such as Reinventing Womanhood (1979), The Representation of Women in Fiction (1983), Writing a Woman's Life (1988), and The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997) explore the ways in which women in general and the author in particular experience the changes that maturity involves as an enriching process rather than as a path into decay and loss. This paper contends that these might perhaps shed a new light into her fiction as Amanda Cross, which includes The Players Come Again (1990). Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis, my aim was to reveal the extent to which Heilbrun's commercial mystery novels represented a springboard to the theories she put forward in her essays, which vindicated the difficulties as well as the joys involved in a gendered experience of aging.     

Editorial voices

Jack Smith is an artist on the margins of official narratives of art of the 1960s. This essay attempts to read his works as a means of questioning the challenges posed to normative readings of the work of culture, by presenting ideas about queer performance. Smith's almost hysterical identification with Maria Montez, a 1940s film siren, is privileged in my reading. Her key film, Cobra woman, turns on the image of a wound that will not heal. In this essay, I read the wound as signaling the breaches in our attempts at full communication, and compare this state of being to the idiosyncratic form of the camp effect, which functions as a kind of hieroglyph, or broken sign. Read through Maria Montez, the ‘failures’ of Smith's practice are explored in order to invogorate the seemingly exhausted discourse on camp, as well as to pose a critique of the ways in which certain bodies are failed by dominant culture.     

Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages

This essay examines the personal accounts of married Filipina-Japanese couples living in urban Japan to show how the women negotiate power and influence over their husbands. Centering on Filipino ideas about power and “America,” the article draws on various ethnographic vignettes that illuminate the Filipinas' cultural knowledge. By negotiating their relationships, Filipinas' marriages to Japanese emerge as ongoing processes rather than as a static institution in which the women are simply (oppressed) gender-role performers. While these women's struggles are not denied, their actions engender possibilities for the subversion of existing gender-national hierarchies. Belle faced Kawai. “I can't marry you.…I was raped by the son of a powerful man in my hometown. I'm no longer a virgin…” In tears, “Will you still marry me?” Kawai assured her firmly, “It doesn't matter.”     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

‘Sentimental Follies’ or ‘Instruments of Tremendous Uplift’? reconsidering women's same-sex relationships in interwar Britain

In 1985 Sheila Jeffreys alleged that the rise of sexological discourse concerning female inversion in the early twentieth century obliged women of the interwar period in the UK to reject female affection for fear of being labelled lesbian. Several historians have demonstrated that sexological ideas gained very little general currency before Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Research on specific women suggests that such fears were less prevalent than surmised. An influential discourse invoking tropes of emotional femininity, rather than inversion, was embodied in Clemence Dane's Regiment of Women (1917), presenting female same-sex relationships as mired in morbid emotions and parasitic manipulation. It had significant cultural resonance for well over a decade. A counter-discourse argued that emotionally healthy, reciprocal female friendship might form a sustaining element for women unable to marry. Stress, however, was laid on the need for self-knowledge and psychological understanding.     

‘I Want to Wear It’: Fashioning Black Feminism in Mahogany (1975)

ABSTRACT

In this article I focus on the portrayal of fashionable clothing in the 1975 film Mahogany and connect it to the history of African American women engaging with sartorial self-representation as a means to assert their visibility in American culture. My aim is to analyse Mahogany’s emphasis on brightly-coloured highly-ornamented clothing, which has a long history of signifying bad taste and became part of accusations of racial and sexual inferiority. I want to show how Mahogany’s representation of fashion undermines the historically entrenched bias against colourful, highly adorned clothing while also revealing how this bias has played a subtle but significant role in the racism and sexism black women have encountered, further (but not finally) impeding them from the forms of recognition the category of femininity offers. Mahogany represents those impediments and repeats the sexual and racial commodification underlying them, but also resists them (albeit quite subtly) through the film’s loving display of fashion and its attention to the work of designing and making clothes. Mahogany tells a story of bright sartorial resistance that can be understood as an articulation of black feminist desires for women of colour to be able to compose the images through which their bodies are perceived.     

Corrigendum

In issue 18:41, unfortunately a few minor errors crept through. In the photo credit, on the inside front cover, Susan Magarey's name has acquired an extra ‘r’ in the first syllable. In Dr Alison Ravenscroft's article, p. 188, there is a comma missing between ‘black–white relations’ and ‘(racially neutral)’; p. 196, the final line should be one space lower, and begin flush left with the margin; and the second sentence of Note 2 should read: ‘See also Sue Thomas, The World of Jean Rhys, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, no. 96 (Greenwood Press), Westport, CT and London, 1990.’.     

Untitled and Outdoors: Thinking with Saidiya Hartman

In some ways, critical conversations on black performance studies focus the first part of Scenes in its particular engagement with black fungibility. Arguably, the first half is black performance studies’ founding text. Even still, the authors argue that black performance studies is never not a question of ecological possibility, of being black outside in the wake of self-possession’s overdetermined white particularity. Such questions foreground Scenes’ second half. Just as Hartman elucidates how the “nonevent of emancipation insinuated by the perpetuation of the plantation system” bespeaks the state’s anti-black insistence on keeping blackness outside and in the field, the authors argue for the field’s persistence and just as well as for the question of what’s out from the field. It is in that spirit that the authors argue for the centrality of Scenes’ second half for black performance studies.     

Overcoming Inner Division: post-suffrage strategies in the organised German women's movement

German women were working within a context strikingly different from either the USA or the UK following the granting of suffrage in 1918. Focusing on the largest of the bourgeois women's organisations, the Federation of Women's Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF), this article situates the post-suffrage strategies and priorities of the German women's movement within their particular national context. The BDF have been accused of failing to fully utilise the vote as a tool for change, but a study of their journal, Die Frau, shows that it was the weight of external factors that reduced the BDF's impact, rather than any failure of courage or commitment by the women. An overview of German press coverage of female suffrage before, during and after the war sets out the mental landscape within which the women were operating and gives for the first time a much-needed indication of public response to the issue.     

Contesting Rural Resources: Emerging ‘Forms’ of Agrarian Production in Uzbekistan

The most recent land reform in Uzbekistan, in which Large Farm Enterprises (LFEs) were split into medium-sized fermer enterprises, left, alongside the country's overwhelming majority of small dekhan peasants, continued strong state intervention in agrarian production. Three ‘forms’ (rather than ‘modes’) of production emerged: (1) state-ordered production of cotton and wheat; (2) commercial production, in particular of rice; and (3) household production of other food staples, including wheat and rice. These production ‘forms’ or processes are characterised by distinct input and output relations, terms of trade and technical requirements. They interrelate through competition for limited resources, such as land, water and other inputs, rather than competition amongst the actors themselves (the state, the new medium-sized fermers and the small dekhan peasants). A contest over resources is particularly evident between the (state-ordered) cotton crop and the (commercial) rice crop in the case study on which our argument is based, namely the province of Khorezm, a downstream part of the Amu Darya river basin, in the western part of the country.