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2. RAPE AND RACIAL APPRAISALS Culture, Intersectionality, and Black Women's Accounts of Sexual Assault
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- McGuffey,C. Shawn (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Du Bois Review-Social Science Research on Race
- Journal Title Details:
- 10(1) : 109-130
- Notes:
- Using Black women's responses to same-race sexual assault, I demonstrate how scholars can use interpersonal violence to understand social processes and develop conceptual models. Specifically, I extend the concept of racial appraisal by shifting the focus from how indirect victims (e. g., family and friends) use race to appraise a traumatic event to how survivors themselves deploy race in the aftermath of rape. Relying on 111 interviews with Black women survivors in four cities, I analyze how race, gender, and class intersect and contour interpretations of sexual assault. I argue that African Americans in this study use racially inscribed cultural signifiers to root their understandings of rape within a racist social structure (i.e., a racial appraisal)-which they also perceive as sexist and, for some, classist-that encourages their silence about same-race sexual assault. African and Caribbean immigrants, however, often avoid the language of social structure in their rape accounts and use cultural references to distance themselves from African Americans. Last, I discuss the implications of my findings for Black feminist/intersectional theory.
3. THE PROPERTIES OF CITIZENS A Caribbean Grammar of Conjugal Categories
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Robinson,Tracy (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Du Bois Review-Social Science Research on Race
- Journal Title Details:
- 10(2) : 425-446
- Notes:
- This paper considers how a taxonomy of conjugality-marriage, common-law marriage, and visiting relationships-emerged as a specialized vocabulary to apprehend and govern the postcolonial Caribbean. Although the metaphor of intersections does not fully capture the ways these categories relate to each other to produce social meaning, I employ an intersectional framework to offer a close reading of the routes through which these and other social differences and equivalences are produced as dimensions of citizenship in specific historical contexts, such as the period of decolonization and Caribbean nation-formation. In so doing, I illustrate how the categorization of intimate relationships codified a hierarchy based on intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, and established rough moral boundaries for a heterosexual Caribbean nation. The lives of working class Black women animate the categorization. I show how by centering these women in intimate relationship codes their sexuality is contained and patriarchy naturalized. In this paper, I suggest that we should mark the role intersectionality plays in constituting categories of intimate association, explore how these categories shape sentiments about belonging, and articulate the social costs of their instantiations.