Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class

by Lisa B. Thompson

In this book, Lisa B. Thompson explores the representation of black middle-class female sexuality by African American women authors in narrative literature, drama, film, and popular culture, showing how these depictions reclaim black female agency and illustrate the difficulties black women confront in asserting sexual agency in the public sphere. Thompson broadens the discourse around black female sexuality by offering an alternate reading of the overly determined racial and sexual script that casts the middle class "black lady" as the bastion of African American propriety. Drawing on the work of black feminist theorists, she examines symptomatic autobiographies, novels, plays, and key episodes in contemporary American popular culture, including works by Anita Hill, Judith Alexa Jackson, P. J. Gibson, Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons, Jill Nelson, Lorene Cary, and Andrea Lee.

Genres: Academic

200 pages, Hardcover

First published July 8, 2009

Reviews

[Elizabeth Higginbotham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class by Lisa B. Thompson is an interesting look at how the image of the proper woman has shaped the actions of many middle-class Black women. Thompson begins with Anita Hill and the pressure to present herself as respectable even as she talked about Clarence Thomas’ explicit sexual advances. This is also revealed in her later account of that time, Speaking Truth to Power. In 1991, discussions of racial politics were dominated by attention to sex and gender inequality. Thompson looks at films, plays and written work that pushes against the barriers to more openly discuss Black women’s sexuality. I was not raised in the Black middle-class, so not sure about the socialization, thus the rebellions of some women. As I became middle class via mobility, it was shaped by the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the women’s movement—as well as my own sociological investigations.

Sexuality and identity, especially the choices that women see is the lens via which Thompson critics Eve’s Bayou and Daughters of the Dust, two films by Black women directors in the 1990. These films challenge the representation of Black women in popular films with majority Black casts. The popular celebratory films about Black families were more likely to stereotype the professional Black woman who did not put family and her man first. The discussions of the autobiographies of Lorene Cary’s Black Ice and Jill Nelson’s Volunteer Slavery are also interesting as sex has much to do with their identities, but what they disclose is their own choice.

I never read the novel Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee. I think I just never could get into it. As a raised working-class Black woman, I think the privileges and consequently the battles the character thinks she has to tackle are foreign.

Overall, Thompson’s book is enlightening in terms of how stereotypes, especially the work of avoiding them, can shape the behaviors of Black women.