The nightmares of the heteronormative

Abstract

Race and sexuality have always intersected in African‐American racial formation. In this article, I argue that this intersection has inspired certain epistemological, political, economic and cultural formations. In terms of epistemology, American sociology and African‐American literature have historically addressed the connections between race and sexuality. Both were interested in the ways that African‐American racial formation transgressed ideal heterosexual and patriarchal boundaries. As far as cultural formations were concerned, such transgressions materially and symbolically aligned African‐American racial formation with homosexuality. Attending to the political and economic effect of this alignment, I maintain that it helped to articulate African‐American racial difference and worked to exclude African‐Americans from the privileges of state and capital. Thus, the article argues that African‐American racial subordination can best be understood as it converges with heteronormative and patriarchal modes of regulation and exclusion. After showing how the most prominent sociology during the 1940s (Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy) marked African‐Americans as pathologically heterosexual, I go on to read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to determine how the alignment between blackness and homosexuality suggests alternative and oppositional epistemological, cultural and political practices.     

Lifting the Veil: African American Images and the European American Gaze

Patricia Hill Collins presents and discusses gender and gender role norms, behaviors, and ideologies among African Americans in an interdisciplinary diagnostic endeavor that calls attention to health, economic, behavioral, and psychosocial patterns related to social injustice and inequality. Collins presents several popular culture, mass media, and social science literature topics that call for a progressive Black sexual politics necessary for African American empowerment. A most crucial and apparent point of Collins's discussion is that improvement in the lives of African Americans requires inspection and analysis of gender and sexuality related intragroup variation and diversity. I situate this discussion primarily within a post-civil rights ideological revolution related to the European American “gaze,” multiculturalism, and European American emotional ambivalence toward the Black body. It is proposed that Collins's analysis of the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality among African Americans occurs within an American context that reciprocally impacts African American intragroup dynamics.     

Sexuality and Contemporary Issues in Black Parenting

Negotiating the burgeoning sexuality of adolescent children is an age-old challenge for parents of every cultural background. Contemporary parents must also manage increasingly sexualized social media that allow children and adolescents to be sexually engaged in unprecedented ways. For Black parents, this quandary is exacerbated by racism and internalized racism-often expressed through the hypersexualization of African American males and females in music, videos, advertising, and popular culture in general. Additionally, as more diversity regarding sexual orientation in African American families emerges, the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Black adolescents must be addressed This article will outline a conceptual framework for consideration of these issues and make recommendations to assist Black parents in successfully guiding Black adolescents through the development of safe and healthy sexuality.     

The Black Family in the 21st Century and the Church as an Action System: A Macro Perspective

Abstract

The Black church has played a leadership function for African Americans during times of crisis such as slavery and the civil rights movement. This article suggests that the current crisis in the African American community is the disintegration of the African American family because of economic, social and value shifts, as well as misguided social policy. The Black church must again mount a spiritual and political campaign to save African American families, thereby ensuring their prosperity.     

Differences Between Black/African American and White College Students Regarding Influences on High School Completion,College Attendance,and Career Choice

Compared with White persons, Black/African American persons in the United States continue to experience high rates of educational deficits and employment stagnation as well as lower college graduation rates. This study examined the influences on Black/African American and White college students' high school completion, college attendance, and career choice. Results indicate that future income and future status have a greater influence on the career choice of Black/African American college students than on the career choice of White college students. The authors discuss these findings and present implications for career development professionals.     

Perceptions of Academic Achievement and Educational Opportunities Among Black and African American Youth

Research focusing on disparities in academic achievement among Black, African American, and other youth has largely examined differences in quantitative risk and protective factors associated with levels of achievement. Few interpretive studies of academic achievement by race or ethnicity have considered how the context of young people’s lives impact their perceptions of academic performance. Furthermore, the lived experiences of Black and African American youth have rarely been considered. This study examined perceptions of academic achievement among a sample of Black and African American elementary and middle school students living in four public housing neighborhoods in a Western US city. Twenty-five Black and African American youth participated in the study. Fourteen youth were in grades 4 and 5, and 11 youth were in grades 6, 7, or 8. Sixty-four percent of participants (n?=?16) were male and 36% (n?=?9) were female. Four themes emerged regarding participants’ perceptions of academic achievement: (1) (in)equity and the internalization of messages; (2) teachers as gatekeepers; (3) family and community factors promoting and inhibiting academic success; and (4) cultural considerations—language, stereotypes, and difference. Implications for improving academic outcomes and reducing the achievement gap among Black, African American, and other students are noted.     

Methodological Issues in Conducting Community-Based Health and Social Services Research Among Urban Black and African American LGBT Populations

Abstract

Health and social service utilization experiences of disenfranchised groups have recently gained renewed public attention. Reducing and eliminating racial disparities in health care has become a major national agenda. While a fairly substantial literature on Black and African American health outcomes and social service utilization does exist, and may help to influence interventions to reduce disparities, there is no comparable literature for Black and African American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons. In this article the author examines factors affecting research with urban Black and African American LGBT populations. A brief case study is included that demonstrates the viability of the recommended research methods and discusses the possible negative consequences of deviating from these methodological suggestions.     

Talent,the Staying Power of Racism,and Transformation: Trans-Atlantic Observations

Abstract

This paper argues that the transformation of universities will not happen until the central issue of racial discrimination is consciously addressed at Predominantly White Universities (PWUs) in South Africa. The paper makes a concerted effort to address issues that reveal why Black faculty members in North American and South African academies have had to struggle to make their presence felt as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. It does this by looking initially at the history of intelligence testing the early pioneering South African Black faculty members, and by comparing the current contemporary scenes of both societies insofar as what African American and Black South African faculty members undergo. The paper concludes by positing that only in the event of a strong anti-racist agenda will genuine transformation of the PWUs be possible without alienating Black talent.     

Exploring African American Masculinities: An Integrative Model

To date, African American masculinity has been explored from several perspectives and across many disciplines. Much of the work on Black masculinity derives from scholarly fields and paradigmatic approaches that are seldom in conversation with one another. This review explores the applications and critiques of deficit, Afrocentric, gender/sex role, and identity paradigms commonly applied to discourses on African American manhood across various disciplines. Additionally, this paper concludes with a call for paradigmatic triangulation in Black gender scholarship towards creating a comprehensive notion of African American masculinity.     

African American and Black Caribbean feelings of closeness to Africans

African American and Black Caribbean relations dominate research on interactions across black ethnic divides. Using National Survey of American Life data, we explore a different aspect of black interethnic attitudes: how close these groups feel towards Africans. African Americans and Black Caribbeans were largely similar in their feelings of closeness to Africans. For Black Caribbeans, younger and male respondents, those reporting higher levels of financial strain, living in the northeast and persons who immigrated to the US at least 11 years ago, report feeling especially close to Africans. Being male was the only significant correlate among African Americans. The findings are discussed in relation to how race, ethnicity and national origin shape personal identities within the US and their significance for intergroup perceptions. These broader issues warrant further consideration in light of assertions that race as a defining feature of American life and intergroup relations is obsolete.     

Ministers' Perceptions of Foster Care,Adoptions, and the Role of the Black Church

ABSTRACT

Results from survey research of 51 Black ministers indicate that the Black church is potentially an untapped resource for the placement of African American children in permanent homes. The study population indicated knowledge of the need for African American foster care and adoptive families but did not include this need as part of the focus of work for their respective churches. Implications for additional research are highlighted.     

Changes in Diverse Sexual and Contraceptive Behaviors Across College

Researchers have made repeated calls for a better understanding of normative sexuality development during adolescence and young adulthood. We examined how the occurrence of seven penetrative, nonpenetrative, and contraceptive behaviors changed longitudinally across seven waves, and how individual (gender) and contextual (romantic relationship status) factors related to these changes in a sample of college students (N = 730, M age = 18.4 at Semester 1; 51% female; 26% Hispanic/Latino American, 22% Black/African American, 30% Asian American/Pacific Islander, 45% White/European American). Across college, reported kissing, touching, performing and receiving oral sex, and penetrative sex rates increased, and contraception use (any type) and condom use (in particular) rates decreased, demonstrating changes with age independent of young adults’ romantic relationship experiences. Rates of all sexual behaviors were higher, and of contraception use lower, when students were in serious romantic relationships. Contraception use decreased more for men than for women, particularly in semesters men were not in serious relationships. Condom use decreased for men, and for women in semesters they were in serious relationships. Findings demonstrate normative trends in sexuality development, as well as suggesting the value of enhanced sexual health promotion programming, with a particular focus on contraceptive behaviors, across college.     

Patricia Hill Collins's Black Sexual Politics and the Genealogy of the Strong Black Woman

Increasingly, as Black Sexual Politics nears its ending, a shift in tone and level of intensity makes a reader aware that Collins's analysis of interlocking social institutions and media representations is aimed not just at informing, but at liberating, individual African American readers—that she wishes to give African American men and women the tools to resist the internalization of racist sexual ideology and denigrating gender roles. The texts that I examine here—by young Black feminist writers Veronica Chambers, Joan Morgan, and Kimberley Springer, along with a response to their work from Sheila Radford-Hill—continue Collins's deconstructive work on Black gender stereotypes by focusing on the Strong Black Woman role. These autobiographical/theoretical texts not only provide a historical context for the role's origins and development, but also add a psychological and emotional dimension: they tell us what it means to individual African American women to live up to the gender role requirements of Strong Black Woman. Juxtaposed through my analysis, these texts provide a kind of dialogue that moves, in the spirit of Collins' earlier pioneering work on standpoint theory, toward a collective standpoint on the Strong Black Woman gender role and its psychic and emotional costs.     

Marginalization by the Marginalized: Race,Homophobia, Heterosexism,and “the Problem of the 21st Century”

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States. This historic election occurred 105 years after W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed in the introduction to The Souls of Black Folk, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” (1994, p. v). According to Du Bois, the problem of the color line is racialized segregation and oppression. This article posits, however, that “the problem of the 21st century” is the further marginalization within already marginalized groups, and this article focuses on the history and occurrence of homophobia and heterosexism within the African American community as well as its links to gender discrimination. Special focus is placed on the Black Church as a possible causal factor for homophobia and heterosexism in the African American community. Possible solutions are also proposed, which consist of a nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage and African American leaders actively and publicly supporting lesbian, gay, and bisexual members of the African American community.     

African American Women's Self-Concept: Implications for Career Decisions and Career Counseling

The multiple self-referent model (Brown-Collins & Sussewell, 1986) provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the personal, social, and historical aspects of self-concept formation in African American women and has important implications for understanding the complexity of career development issues for Black women. Excerpts from recorded interviews and autobiographical writings of four well-known African American women provide examples of the basic components of this model. Suggested interventions for career counseling with Black female clients are discussed.     

Self-Perceived Physical Attractiveness,Self-Esteem,Race, and Gender

Abstract

African American self-perceptions of physical attractiveness are found to be higher than white self-perceptions, while there is no difference by race in the correlation between self-perceived attractiveness and self-esteem. Controlling for self-perceived attractiveness, African Americans have lower self-esteem than whites, suggesting that African American perceptions of physical attractiveness, mirrored in the slogan “Black is Beautiful,” may have contributed to the disappearance over the past forty years of the gap between African American and white self-esteem. Self-esteem is more strongly related to self-perceived physical attractiveness for females than males, particularly among whites.     

Desire and Procreation in the Ukrainian Tales of Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko

Recently, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko has come under criticism from feminists for originating female characters whose repression of sexuality contributed to the perpetuation of a “patriarchal discourse” constitutive of Ukrainan populism. The problem with this take is that it ignores the fact that it is anxiety about sexuality as such, including its essential “patriarchal” correlate procreation, that informs Kvitka’s Ukrainian stories. The consequences of this anxiety—namely, an entire series of childless heroes and heroines, whose erotic desires are effectively foreclosed—is to undermine the conservative patriarchal order that is at the heart of Kvitka’s overt ideology. As in Gogol, what remains is a vision of an occluded, doomed society.     

The Social Environmental Elements of Resilience Among Vulnerable African American/Black Men Who Have Sex With Men

Resilience theory has been suggested as a strong framework for research on HIV prevention among men who have sex with men (MSM). Among this population, literature indicates that African American/Black MSM are particularly vulnerable to health and social disparities associated with HIV transmission risk. Conceptualizing resilience as a part of one’s social environment, this qualitative study investigates the specific elements of resilience, and the associated contexts and relationships, among a sample of 21 substance-using African American/Black MSM. Data indicate that (1) elements contributing to resilience are multiple and co-occurring, including inner strengths, social relationships, diversity of experience, religion/spirituality, altruism, and creativity; (2) as an element of resilience, social support was experienced differently among men who did and did not have supportive relationships with other gay and bisexual men, which has implications for social service provision and intervention approaches; and (3) diversity of experiences and relationships is an important influencing factor on expressions of resilience. Social services or interventions that facilitate the development of these elements of resilience will likely be especially beneficial for vulnerable African American/Black MSM.