Now That's a Good Girl: Discourses of African American Women, HIV/AIDS, and Respectability

Now That’s a Good Girl: Discourses of African American Women, HIV/AIDS, and Respectability A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Ayana K. Weekley IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Jigna Desai, Adviser August 2010 © Ayana K. Weekley 2010 Acknowledgements There are many, many people and institutions that played a role in my completion of this dissertation. First, I want to say thank you to my adviser, Jigna Desai. Jigna has guided me intellectually since 2004 and has always both challenged, encouraged me and treated me with respect. My success in scholarship and teaching is largely due to her. Jigna, I am lucky to have been held to your academic standards. Second, is my co-adviser, Gwendolyn Pough. Gwen made sure I came to the Feminist Studies Program and immediately assumed the role of adviser when I began. While Gwen moved to another institution, she remained on my committee and worked closely with me throughout my dissertation process. Gwen, without your early support in this process I surely would not have made it over all the hurdles. Various programs and institutions provided the financial support that made it possible for me to have time to research and write. They include the McNair Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programs at Truman State University and the University of New Hampshire, Durham; the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Minnesota; MacArthur Scholars Fellowship, MacArthur Interdisciplinary Program on Global Change, Sustainability and Justice, University of Minnesota; the HECUA Philanthropy and Human Rights Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Women's Studies Dissertation Fellowship; The Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Rochester; and the Presidential Fellowship at the State University of New York, Brockport. i There are two programs in particular I need to thank separately both for their financial and intellectual support. First, The Global Issues Honors Consortium summer program at the University of Minnesota taught me what responsible teaching, education, and social justice should look like. I am indebted to all of the people I had the opportunity to work with at GIHC including Rose Brewer, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, and all of the students in the 2008 South Africa cohort. Second, I must thank Dr. Barbara LeSavoy and the Women and Gender Studies Program at SUNY Brockport. Barb, you nurtured and supported me during my first full time teaching position, always provided kind words, encouragement, and guidance when I doubted myself. I will always be thankful for my time with WMS at Brockport. I must thank my partner in intellectual resistance Eileen Muller Myrdahl. Without her I would not have made it through coursework, exams, or my dissertation as in tack as I have. Eileen kept my fingers on the keyboard at times when I was beyond ready to give in. She came to visit me when I had to move and sent small surprises in the mail when she knew I needed encouragement. Last, but not least, on the list of reasons why Eileen was such a good friend during graduate school is that we share a love for very well made ice cream, and she introduced me to all the best places in Minneapolis. Without you, grad school would not have been as sweet as it was! ii To everyone who spent countless days and nights in coffee shops and libraries with me, I appreciate the support you provided me just by being present. Helen Crump and Vicky Pass, you deserve special recognition in this category. Helen Crump, my friend , colleague, and copy editor, has been a source of constant support since I entered graduate school, always listening and offering a kind word. Helen has also been my travel and conference buddy throughout graduate school sharing the process and anxiety of presenting new work as a student. Helen, it will be strange to not have you at my side in the future. Vicky Pass, you were a source of tremendous support in the final days of writing and revising. Vicky camped out with me in the library for ten hour study and writing shifts throughout the 2008-2010 academic years and made my relocation to Rochester bearable. Vicky, I owe a good portion of my sanity to you! Last, but surely not least, I must thank my family for their never ending support, emotionally and financially. To everyone listed here as well as those who went unnamed, Thank you. iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Gloria Weekley, who always finds a way. If she was not always right behind me, I could not have taken the risk to dream. Mom, this dissertation is for you because it only happened because of you. Thank you. iv Abstract Now That’s a Good Girl: Discourses of African American Women, HIV/AIDS, and Respectability draws upon black feminist theory, black queer studies, and HIV/AIDS cultural studies to examine discursive representations of African Americans in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This dissertation argues that the discursive production of the HIV/AIDS epidemic takes place at multiple sites within the nation-state. Combining a analysis of biomedical discourses and African American popular discourses, this dissertation interrogates the ways these discourses have worked to support normative constructions of race, gender, and sexualities. Now That’s a Good Girl illustrates both how state discourses of HIV/AIDS drew upon racist and gendered ideas of black women and men in its construction of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and how African American HIV/AIDS discourses attempted to counter these discourses. It argues that African American HIV/AIDS discourses revitalized a politics of respectability in an effort to shield African American women, families, and communities from racist stereotypes of deviancy. Finally, this dissertation attempts to read past these politics of respectability in order to question the queer possibilities these discourses attempt to repress. v Table of Contents Chapter One Introduction: Producing Black Women in the HIV/AIDS Epidemic ……………………1 Chapter Two Nobody’s Safe: The Production of Respectable Women in Ebony and Essence……..…50 Chapter Three Why Can’t We Flip the Script?: The Politics of Respectability and Silence in Black Women’s HIV/AIDS Fiction ……………………………………………………………88 Chapter Four And, Yes, the Bogeyman is for Real: Down Low Discourses of Fear…………………130 Chapter Five Conclusion: The Need to Think Queerly About Being Straight..………………………178 Notes……………………………………………………………………………………196 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………...……208 Appendix A Categorization of Articles in Ebony and Essence………………………………………215 Appendix B List of U.S. Newspaper Articles from 2000-2004……………………………………...217 vi Introduction: Producing Black Women in the HIV/AIDS Epidemic There is no reason to suppose that we will ever tell two identical stories of two different instances of making up people. Ian Hacking, “Making up People”1 The professional legitimacy of a critic, researcher, counselor, activist, and other parties in the health field of the academy depends upon the ability to create objects of study, service, and intervention. …Professional legitimacy and mobility depend on the alignments of the work of experts with policies of the state—with the problems researchers formulate, the studies they undertake, and the solutions they propose. Carlos Ulises Decena “Profiles, Compulsory Disclosure and Ethical Sexual Citizenship in the Contemporary USA” 2 All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, the 1982 anthology edited by Patricia Bell-Scott, Gloria T. Hull, and Barbara Smith, not only began to chart the beginnings of the field of black women’s studies, but reflected on the status of social movements and academic inquiries that focused solely on white women and white feminisms or black men and movements to end racial oppression. With this title the authors encapsulated the erasure of black women as unique subjects and political actors when gender is not racialized and race is not gendered. Today, awareness of the epistemic violence done to identities that are at the intersections of multiple oppressions is a concept that is not new to feminist studies. The figure of the black female subject as multiply oppressed, having to navigate multiple categories of identity, and as a subject often put into the tense and irreconcilable position of being asked to choose what is more 1 important to her reality, has received a lot of attention in African American and feminist studies. I draw our attention to these constructions of black women at the beginning of this dissertation because while these theoretical interventions have been crucial to black women’s studies and black feminisms, I argue that there are times when the black female body is hailed, as both a gendered and a racialized subject, that are also overtly racist and sexist. One example of the way gender, race, and sexuality are mutually constitutive in the lives of black women is within discourses of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This dissertation examines the multiple ways that black women have been constructed in the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the lens of national, state, and dominant African American discourses. HIV/AIDS, as an epidemic associated with stigmatized sexualities and behaviors, is a particularly loaded site to examine the proliferation of discourses about black women. As a syndrome that was first believed to be isolated within gay men, and of no threat

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