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Pauli Murray In The 1930s: Portraits And Post-Soul Eccentricity, Sarah Scriven

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

In my thesis I follow the qualities in Murray’s life that suggest contrariety and eccentricity. In particular, I trace Murray’s performances in her portraits from the 1930s, which display her racial, gender, and sex reinvention. I illuminate these portraits as markers of Post-Soul Eccentricity to place Murray in a tradition in which her quare performance can be understood and suggest that her offbeat performances were part of her politics invested in Queer World-Making. I locate these ideas in portraits of Pauli Murray’s scrapbook viewed synchronously with her autobiography, Song in A Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (1987) and biographical sources.