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Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
And They Entered As Ladies: When Race, Class And Black Femininity Clashed At Central High School, Misti Nicole Harper
And They Entered As Ladies: When Race, Class And Black Femininity Clashed At Central High School, Misti Nicole Harper
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
“And They Entered as Ladies: When Race, Class and Black Femininity Clashed at Central High School,” explores the intersectionality of race, gender and class status as middle-class black women led the integration movement and were the focal point of white backlash during the 1957 Little Rock Central High School crisis. Six of the nine black students chosen to integrate Central High School were carefully selected girls from middle-class homes, whose mothers and female family members played active parts in keeping their daughters enrolled at Central, while Daisy Gatson Bates orchestrated the integration of the capital’s school system. Nevertheless, these women …
The Hollow Class: African-American Class-Passing And The Popular, Whitney Martin
The Hollow Class: African-American Class-Passing And The Popular, Whitney Martin
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
My project presses to include popular fiction, television, and film for serious critical consideration. To contextualize my research, I use theories that critically examine popular literature, connecting to the work of Janice Radway and Keenan Norris, and I study the African-American focus on class as explored by E. Franklin Frazier. In focusing on the popular, I highlight the everydayness of class and race anxieties. I build on Gwendolyn Foster’s work on class passing but stress racial intersections with identity performance. I rely on New Historicism and Critical Race Theory to substantiate my examination of the literature. I look at specific …
The Black Maternal And Cultural Healing In Twentieth Century Black Women's Fiction, Paula Wingard White
The Black Maternal And Cultural Healing In Twentieth Century Black Women's Fiction, Paula Wingard White
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This work examines representations of maternal relationships between black women in five contemporary novels: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Sula by Toni Morrison, The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Louisiana by Erna Brodber. Rather than situating the origins of black feminist literary studies during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s, I argue that Hurston’s work shapes contemporary black feminist literary studies. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny provides a mothering archetype that inspires a dominant theme and practice—the black maternal, within contemporary black …