By Kourtney Payne, BA

We are delighted to present the following submission from our rolling call for blog posts. The present entry, “Unveiling Identity: Respectable Femininity and the Presence of Black Queer Womanhood at Historically Black Colleges and Universities” was submitted by Kourtney Payne, a recent graduate of Spelman College. She received her BA degree in Sociology and Anthropology with a minor in Public Health.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are globally recognized for their roles in producing the brightest leaders, politicians, business owners, and lawyers of color. (Johnson 2017). Under the veil of “Black excellence,” many of these institutions promote rigid, unwritten understandings of acceptable presentations of Blackness. This is particularly true for Black women’s journeys throughout HBCUs. According to Njoku and Patton (2016), HBCUs protect their students from the racial hostilities of historically white institutions while simultaneously reinforcing gendered standards for women. These standards reflect idealized femininity, patriarchy, and white supremacy due to their historical and physical representation of respectability politics. In light of this knowledge, this piece investigates how Black queer women navigate and resist respectable femininity as they reconcile their multiple marginalized identities and sense of belonging. 

 As discussed with “Explorations of Respectability and Resistance in Constructions of Black Womanhood at HBCUs” by Nadrea Njoku and Lori D. Patton, “...Black womanhood is primarily a response to stereotypes placed on Black women, the powerlessness of Black women to control these stereotypes, and the power they exercise despite prevailing these stereotypes.” (2) As the authors argue, Black womanhood is situated within the response to and by respectability context politics, thus always situating Black women as the “Other.” Within the nuanced context of respectability politics, “respectable femininity” defines femininity narrowly, often reducing the concept to outward appearance or behaviors that conform to heteronormative expectations. This framework dictates certain demonstrations of Black womanhood as deserving of respect. 

Historically, Black queer womanhood has been situated outside of the frame of respectable femininity. Black women have struggled to maintain public awareness of their humanity and sexuality at the same time. For example, during the early 1920s, visibly Black queer women were labeled as “dangerous” and “sexually deviant,” pushed to the margins of society and scorned in public. Newspapers described Black queer women as “unusual,” “crazed,” and “perverted” (Pasulka 2016). Black queer women were left with little room to avert dangerous narratives spewing in the public, resulting in their naming as criminals and perverts.  

Centering HBCUs, Black queer life has always been present and alive. Scholars such as Jasmine J. Moye and funding of programs such as the The Audre Lorde Black Lesbian Feminist Project (2006–2011) at Spelman College proves that Black queer life interacts continuously with historically Black institutions. However, there is a lack of scholarship that recognizes the extent to which Black queer women’s experiences contribute to the ever changing culture at historically Black institutions. Black queer women defy notions of respectable femininity by pushing the boundaries of both black womanhood and queer identity. For example, Clarissa Brooks, a Spelman Alumnae activist and journalist from Charlotte, North Carolina, details about how she pulled from her Black female and Black queer identities during her time at Spelman College to baseline her social justice involvement in social movements against rape culture and sexual assault in the Atlanta University Consortium (AUC). In the article "Representation and Respectability Will not Save Us”: Activist Clarissa Brooks on HBCUs and the Limitations of Black Excellence" written by Black Women Radicals founder Jaimee Swift, Brooks references the work of Black women scholars like Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Black queer activists such as Moya Bailey. Brooks uses their insights to discuss how the heavy surveillance of Black queer women is driven by outdated notions of respectability and Black excellence, which have historically been seen as pathways to Black liberation. Most notably, Brooks acknowledges that her understanding of true Black liberation is deeply influenced by her entire identity.

 Because Blackness and queerness often sit outside of respectable femininity, Black queer women are asked, by society, their families, and their counterparts, to choose between representation of their race, sexuality, or womanhood as the defining factor of introspection. Playright, activist, and writer, Lorraine Hansberry uniquely captures this tension in her Personal Papers and Writings archives, held at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Hansberry struggled with the conceptualization of her queer identity within the 20th century. Ruminated by the idea that queerness was inherently deviant, Hansberry wrestled, as she demonstrates within her scripts, with herself of whether to publicly claim the queer identity that she embraced privately.

Black queer women’s lived experience calls for a more nuanced understanding of how the social constructions of race, gender, and sexuality are tied to systems of power that dictate what is socially “acceptable” or “respectable.”  If we envision sexuality as a culturally and structurally defined mechanism for identity, it is key to analyze how the presence of heteronormativity works to further the marginalization of Black queer bodies. Heteronormativity and structural sexuality align within one another closely. Both concepts analyze the assumption of heterosexuality normative order for sexuality and sexual expression. However, structural sexuality diverts from heteronormativity, as it particularly centers Black queer women reconsideration of sexual identity based on various sociocultural climates. As Barbara Harris-Combs (2022) argues in Bodies Out of Place (BOP) Theory, “perceived out-of-place bodies evoke a response; such responses cumulatively work to affirm and reinstate the old Jim Crow social order.” (42) While I do not believe that the structural sexuality present at HBCUs is utilized to reamplify Jim Crow modernity, I do believe that it as a concept is utilized at HBCUs to reify respectable femininity and uplift specific feminine archetypes, positioning heteronormativity as ideal. Therefore, the perception of feeling like an “out of place" body in classroom or social settings evokes a response of isolation or marginalization. For example, collegiate Black queer women, such as transwomen, masculine presenting, or openly queer women, can oftentimes evade engaging in conversations about their belief systems and personal experiences in classroom or social settings they can not gauge as safe spaces. When Black queer women choose to not engage in these conversations, they engage in a double consciousness that allows them to designate which spaces are safe and which are not, exemplifying the gendered standard of order discussed by Njoku and Patton (2016). 

Similar to Combs definition of race as a structural component of marginalization, the instances mentioned above demonstrate a structural sexuality that separates various bodies at HBCUs, and beyond, into binaries of respectable femininity and non-respectable femininity. These binaries construct the need for Black queer women attending HBCUs to engage in a deep reflection of how they are viewed because of  their queerness and how this understanding impacts their view of themself. It is not enough for HBCUs to perform as feminist spaces. However, they must expand their binaries to include queer bodies who forge Black, queer feminist thought. Because they are present. They are there. 

Works Cited 

Combs, Barbara. Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society. The University of Georgia Press, 2022. 

Henderson, Mae, and E. Patrick Johnson. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Duke Univ. Press, 2007. 

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. 

Hammonds, Evelynn. “Black (w)Holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality.” differences 6, no. 2-3 (1994): 126–45. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-6-2-3-126. 

Hine, Darlene Clark. “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.” Signs, vol. 14, no. 4, 1989, pp. 912–20. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174692. Accessed 27 Nov. 2023. 

Johnson, E. Patrick. “Quare’’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Black Queer Studies, 2020, 124–58. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822387220-009. 

Johnson, E. Patrick. “Text & Perform 21/1.” University of York, 5 November 2010, https://www.york.ac.uk/media/english/documents/newsandevents/E.%20Patrick%20Johnson%20Quare%20(1).pdf. Accessed 2022. 

Johnson, Glenn S., et al. “Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the Twenty First Century: An Exploratory Case Study Analysis of Their Mission.” Race, Gender & Class, vol. 24, no. 3–4, 2017, pp. 44–67. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26529222. Accessed 7 June 2024. 

Jones, Briona Simone. Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought. The New Press, 2021. 

Kerr, Olivia N., "Rethinking the "Unusual Type": Black Queer Women and the Spatial Politics of Belonging in Twentieth Century America" (2023). Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses. 52. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/undergrad_etd/52. 

Njoku, N. R., Patton, L. D., & Patton, L. D. (2017, January 12). Explorations of Respectability and Resistance in Constructions of Black Womanhood at HBCUs (Chapter 11). 

Pasulka, Nicole. “The 'Criminal' Black Lesbian: Where Does This Damaging Stereotype Come From?” NPR, 17 March 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/03/17/456541972/the-criminal-black-lesbian-where-does-this-damaging-stereotype-come-from. Accessed 19 October 2023. 

Richardson, Mattie Udora. “No More Secrets, No More Lies: African American History and Compulsory Heterosexuality.” Journal of Women's History 15, no. 3 (2003): 63–76. https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2003.0080. 

Smith, Jaimee A. “Representation and Respectability Will Not Save Us: Activist Clarissa Brooks on HBCUs and the Limitations of Black Excellence.” Black Women Radicals, 2024, https://www.blackwomenradicals.com/blog-feed/representation-and-respectability-will-not-save-us-activist-clarissa-brooks-on-hbcus-and-the-limitations-of-black-excellence.

The Combahee River Collective Statement. United States, 2015. Web Archive. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0028151/>. 

The New School. “bell hooks - Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body | Eugene Lang College.” YouTube, 7 May 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJk0hNROvzs. Accessed 30 November 2023. 

Yates-Richard, M. (2021). ‘Hell You Talmbout’: Janelle Monáe’s Black Cyberfeminist Sonic

“About.” Black Women Radicals, https://www.blackwomenradicals.com/about. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

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