Queering Personhood in the Neo-Slave Narrative

Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories

Bibliographic Data

ID5246322
AuthorsChristopher S Lewis (0009-0007-8654-9529, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume47
Issue4
Pages447-459
Publication date2014-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican American Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1062-4783 • E-ISSN: 1945-6182
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/afa.2014.0065
OpenAlexW1499499445
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited15

This article uses the explorations of antebellum black gender and sexuality in Jewelle Gomez's neo-slave narrative The Gilda Stories (1991) to reconsider what Hortense Spillers has called the "neuter-bound" status of black gender and sexuality during slavery. Spillers's work finds whiteness to be enacted through penetration of the enslaved and blackness to be neuter/neutered, meaning both gender indeterminate and incapable of penetration. Unfortunately, this schema conflates gender indeterminacy with impotency and lack of agency, thereby framing gender indeterminacy as a social condition incompatible with liberation. My reading of The Gilda Stories seeks to move critical conversation of antebellum gender and sexuality into queer- and transpositive territory by disentangling gender-indeterminacy from its associations with impotency and reframing it as a powerful resource of resistance and survival not only for enslaved people, but for postbellum African Americans as well

Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive reframing · Epistemology · Human sexuality · Indigenous · Literature · Narrative · Personhood · Queer · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology

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