Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation

by Trimiko Melancon

Overview

Unbought and Unbossed critically examines the ways black women writers in the 1970s and early 1980s deploy black female characters that transgress racial, gender, and especially sexual boundaries. Trimiko Melancon analyzes literary and cultural texts, including Toni Morrison’s Sula and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, in the socio-cultural and historical moments of their production. She shows how representations of black women in the American literary and cultural imagination diverge from stereotypes and constructions of “whiteness,” as well as constructions of female identity imposed by black nationalism.

Drawing from black feminist and critical race theories, historical discourses on gender and sexuality, and literary criticism, Melancon explores the variety and complexity of black female identity. She illuminates how authors including Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones engage issues of desire, intimacy, and independence to shed light on a more complex black identity, one ungoverned by rigid politics over-determined by race, gender and sexuality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439911464
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	11/28/2014
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Trimiko Melancon is Assistant Professor of English, African American Studies, and Women's Studies at Loyola University New Orleans.

Table of Contents

Contents

 

Acknowledgments

 

Introduction: Disrupting Dissemblance

 

1 “New World Black and New World Woman”: Or, Beyond the Classical Black Female Script

2 Toward an Aesthetic of Transgression: Ann Allen Shockley’s Loving Her and the Politics of Same-Gender Loving

3 Negotiating Cultural Politics

4 “That Way Lies Madness”: Sexuality, Violent Excess, and Perverse Desire 

5 “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”: Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place

 

Conclusion: “Without Fear of Reprisals”: Representation in the Age of Michelle Obama 

 

Notes 

 

Bibliography 

 

Index

Editorial Reviews

10/20/2014
Melancon, a professor of English, African-American studies, and women’s studies at Loyola, brings all three disciplines to bear in this critical analysis of five “post-1960s black women’s texts.” Specifically, she looks at how the novels—Toni Morrison’s Sula, Ann Allen Shockley’s Loving Her, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man, and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place—challenge “myopic representations of black women” in American literature. Her concluding chapter assesses Michelle Obama, more as she exists in America’s collective imagination than as a real person, as a figure who fulfills the same purpose. Perhaps most provocatively, Melancon concentrates on the transgressive sexuality present in all of these books (“adultery, promiscuity, interracial sexual intimacy, circumvention of marital sex, sexual violence, same-gender loving, and/or other politics of the intimate”) and asserts its importance to the authors’ larger project. Casual readers will undoubtedly be deterred by the academic jargon rife in Melancon’s writing (“the sexual longing, desire, and intimacy enacted in these texts function metonymically for another aspirational desire”). However, serious readers of African-American literature will value the innovative observations offered on the intersection of “race, gender, and sexuality” in American life and letters. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Trimiko Melancon offers beautiful and complex readings of novels by Toni Morrison, Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Gloria Naylor while effortlessly synthesizing a generation of scholarship on black sexuality. Unbought and Unbossed is a refreshingly innovative new work destined to become a classic." 
—Robert F. Reid-Pharr, author of Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual


"Unbought and Unbossed is an interesting exploration of black female sexual politics and literary representations of black womanhood at the intersection of three political and aesthetic movements: black nationalism, (black) feminism, and postmodernism. I was especially impressed with Melancon’s close readings of the primary texts and her analysis of the symbolic sexual play and coming of age of the characters. This book is a welcome addition to the very few literary studies that deal explicitly with black womanhood and transgressive sexuality." 
—Eve Dunbar, Associate Professor of English at Vassar College and author of  Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World


"[A] critical analysis of five 'post-1960s black women’s texts.' ... Perhaps most provocatively, Melancon concentrates on the transgressive sexuality present in all of these books... and asserts its importance to the authors’ larger project.... [S]erious readers of African-American literature will value the innovative observations offered on the intersection of 'race, gender, and sexuality' in American life and letters." —Publishers Weekly


"Unbought and Unbossed is an eloquently written and well-organized book about an important era in black women's literary tradition."
—LaMonda Horton Stallings, Indiana University Bloomington, author of Mutha’ Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture

From the Publisher