Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He’d pulled up one trousers leg and caressed his calf and said, “I’m feeling so gay tonight.” Then he shook his head as though he had curls instead of a close crop. He wasn’t smiling; he was completely serious. I didn’t know exactly what he meant but I knew he meant something quite precise. “Shut up, Morris,” Tex snapped in a cruelly direct voice and jerked his head to indicate me. I turned just in time to catch it. “And Morris,” he added, “lay off the fuckin’ eye-shadow for chrissake. I’m running a respectable operation here. One more warning you’re out on your little depilated tush.” I looked more closely at Morris. I couldn’t see any trace of makeup. Why would he wear it? I wondered. Do queers like that? Is that how they can tell who’s who? The joy of reading The Outsider had turned ugly. Snow whirled in a sudden updraft, then fell through the streetlights. Day after day the snow fell and the streets rang with the sound of shovels. People in fur hats and many layers of clothing tiptoed awkwardly over gutters piled high with the snow that street plows had turned back. At home I felt a constant tingling excitement just knowing that yesterday afternoon I’d seen Tex and again today I would snatch a few minutes with him. In Evanston, I stood in the bay window and looked out at Lake Michigan beating itself up. Ticking steadily inside me was the thought, half-thrill half-fear, that within my grasp, or almost, lay this other world. This “gay world,” you might say, with its mood swings turning slowly, then slamming you to one side like a roller coaster on a sharp turn. This world with its childlike enthusiasms and vicious attacks. I associated it with Morris’s silent pouting and the way he’d stroked his leg, licked his lips, and said, “I’m feeling so gay tonight.” Although I knew something would have to come out of my visits if I continued paying them, I feared what I hoped, and what I hoped I didn’t want to know. Tick, tick, tick. The excitement was in my pulse. I couldn’t think of anything else nor did I want to. I’d look at the mashed potatoes exhaling steam and I’d hear the ticking in my ears. In my bed at night as I peeked through the curtains at the old man across the way reading his paper and luxuriantly picking his nose, I’d hear the tick taking me nearer to my next encounter with Tex. The next afternoon Tex and I were alone in the shop. Morris was home with what Tex sourly referred to as a “sick headache” and Tex kept complaining about Morris’s inept bookkeeping. He was looking through the accounts and a long gray silence installed itself in the room.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The joy of reading The Outsider had turned ugly. Snow whirled in a sudden updraft, then fell through the streetlights. Day after day the snow fell and the streets rang with the sound of shovels. People in fur hats and many layers of clothing tiptoed awkwardly over gutters piled high with the snow that street plows had turned back. At home I felt a constant tingling excitement just knowing that yesterday afternoon I’d seen Tex and again today I would snatch a few minutes with him. In Evanston, I stood in the bay window and looked out at Lake Michigan beating itself up. Ticking steadily inside me was the thought, half-thrill half-fear, that within my grasp, or almost, lay this other world. This “gay world,” you might say, with its mood swings turning slowly, then slamming you to one side like a roller coaster on a sharp turn. This world with its childlike enthusiasms and vicious attacks. I associated it with Morris’s silent pouting and the way he’d stroked his leg, licked his lips, and said, “I’m feeling so gay tonight.” Although I knew something would have to come out of my visits if I continued paying them, I feared what I hoped, and what I hoped I didn’t want to know. Tick, tick, tick. The excitement was in my pulse. I couldn’t think of anything else nor did I want to. I’d look at the mashed potatoes exhaling steam and I’d hear the ticking in my ears. In my bed at night as I peeked through the curtains at the old man across the way reading his paper and luxuriantly picking his nose, I’d hear the tick taking me nearer to my next encounter with Tex. The next afternoon Tex and I were alone in the shop. Morris was home with what Tex sourly referred to as a “sick headache” and Tex kept complaining about Morris’s inept bookkeeping. He was looking through the accounts and a long gray silence installed itself in the room. For once the radio wasn’t on and no well-bred announcer was reading to us from Pound’s Cantos or playing us alternative interpretations of “Nessun dorma.” People stopped and looked at the books in the window but hurried on. Tex slammed the glass counter and moaned, “Honey-chile, your mother’s in a bad way.” For an instant I imagined my real mother had phoned in an emergency, but then I understood he meant himself. I was flattered that he was about to confide in me. My mother often told me her secrets, and I was an experienced listener. I could look sympathetic and I gave only welcome advice. “Your momma’s done hocked her jewels for her man and now I’s too hard up to buy needles and thread for my notions shop. Oh sweetheart, tell me, who will feed Baby?”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Someone had a studio apartment just above a used-textbook store on a corner of an otherwise nonresidential block. There at ten on a Saturday night in January, I found myself armed with a cigarette and beer (one of the four cans William had had to buy for me with my money, since I was still below drinking age). We sat on top of stacks of books, sipped and watched the twenty men squeezed into the small room. I didn’t know any of the other fellows. I’d never seen any of them at the toilets. I suspected that handsome gay men all knew each other and avoided public cruising. For the first time William seemed shy, but he said he was simply trying to butch it up. “Look, doll,” he whispered, “people think a queen’s a hoot, but the life of the party goes home alone while everyone makes a last-ditch play for the idiot hood who’s been standing in the corner all night by himself. My dear, who did the lighting here? I should get my own light man written into my contracts just like Marlene. Nothing like a baby-pink follow spot to take years off a gal.” At twenty-two William was terrified of aging. “I’m going to kill myself when I turn thirty. Thirty is gay menopause. I’ve always liked that saying, ‘Live hard, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.’ ‘O Rose, thou art sick.’ Maybe that would make a good drag name for you: Rose. Sick you certainly are.” And William laughed with his special blend of mischief, compounded of humor, spite, and sadness in a ratio even he wasn’t sure of but that he mixed by feel. I saw a big blond man in a blue crewneck sweater and tan slacks and suddenly I had the impression we were all here to please him but no one could. Pagans would have known how to worship him as the temporary perch of a winged demon; poor monotheists blind to all gods but the invisible one must ascribe their attraction to love rather than fear. And yet actually everyone in the room was afraid of Harry, the huge biology major from Canton, Ohio.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  In August Jamie and Barbara joined them in a villa that Stephen had taken at Houlgate. Mary hoped that the bathing would do Barbara good; she was not at all well. Jamie worried about her. And indeed the girl had grown very frail, so frail that the housework now tried her sorely; when alone she must sit down and hold her side for the pain that was never mentioned to Jamie. Then too, all was not well between them these days; poverty, even hunger at times, the sense of being unwanted out- casts, the knowledge that the people to whom they belonged — good and honest people -both abhorred and despised them, such things as these had proved very bad housemates for sensitive souls like Barbara and Jamie. Large, helpless, untidy and intensely forlorn, Jamie would THE WELL OF LONELINESS 457 struggle to finish her opera; but quite often these days she would tear up her work, knowing that what she had written was un- worthy. When this happened she would sigh and peer round the studio, vaguely conscious that something was not as it had been, vaguely distressed by the dirt of the place to which she herself had helped to contribute — Jamie, who had never before noticed dirt, would feel aggrieved by its noxious presence. Getting up she would wipe the keys of the piano with Barbara’s one clean towel dipped in water. ‘Can't play,’ she would grumble, ‘ these keys are all sticky.’ ‘ Oh, Jamie — my towel — go and fetch the duster! ’ The quarrel that ensued would start Barbara’s cough, which in turn would start Jamie’s nerves vibrating. Then compassion, together with unreasoning anger and a sudden uprush of sex- frustration, would make her feel wellnigh beside herself — since owing to Barbara’s failing health, these two could be lovers now in name only. And this forced abstinence told on Jamie’s work as well as her nerves, destroying her music, for those who maintain that the North is cold, might just as well tell us that hell is freezing. Yet she did her best, the poor uncouth creature, to subjugate the love of the flesh to the pure and more selfless love of the spirit — the flesh did not have it all its own way with Jamie. That summer she made a great effort to talk, to unburden herself when alone with Stephen; and Stephen tried hard to console and advise, while knowing that she could help very little. All her offers of money to ease the strain were refused pointblank, sometimes almost with rudeness — she felt very anxious indeed about Jamie. Mary in her turn was deeply concerned; her affection for Barbara had never wavered, and she sat for long hours in the garden with the girl who seemed too weak to bathe, and whom walking exhausted.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Walch, XVI. 315 sqq. J. J. Müller: Historie von der evang. Stände Protestation und Appellation wider den Reichsabschied zu Speier, 1529, Jena, 1705. Tittmann: Die Protestation der evang. Stände mit Hist. Erläuterungen, Leipzig, 1829. A. Jung: Gesch. des Reichstags zu Speier, 1529, Leipzig, 1830. J. Ney (protest. pastor at Speier): Geschichte des Reichstags zu Speier im Jahr 1529. Mit einem Anhange ungedruckter Akten und Briefe, Hamburg, 1880. Ranke, III. 102–116. Janssen, III 130–146. Under these discouragements the second Diet of Speier was convened in March, 1529, for action against the Turks, and against the further progress of Protestantism. The Catholic dignitaries appeared in full force, and were flushed with hopes of victory. The Protestants felt that "Christ was again in the hands of Caiaphas and Pilate."950 The Diet neutralized the recess of the preceding Diet of 1526; it virtually condemned (without, however, annulling) the innovations made; and it forbade, on pain of the imperial ban, any further reformation until the meeting of the council, which was now positively promised for the next year by the Emperor and the Pope. The Zwinglians and Anabaptists were excluded even from toleration. The latter were to be punished by death. The Lutheran members of the Diet, under the well-founded impression that the prohibition of any future reformation meant death to the whole movement, entered in the legal form of an appeal for themselves, their subjects and for all who now or shall hereafter believe in the Word of God, the famous protest of April 25, 1529, against all those measures of the Diet which were contrary to the Word of God, to their conscience, and to the decision of the Diet of 1526, and appealed from the decision of the majority to the Emperor, to a general or German council, and impartial Christian judges.951 The document was signed by the Elector John of Saxony, Margrave George of Brandenburg, Dukes Ernest and Francis of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, Landgrave Philip of Hesse, Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt, and the representatives of fourteen imperial cities, including Strassburg and St. Gall of the Zwinglian persuasion. They were determined to defend themselves against every act of violence of the majority. Their motto was that of Elector John the Constant: "The Word of God abideth forever." They deserve the name of confessors of the evangelical faith and the rights of conscience in the face of imminent danger.952 The protest of Speier was a renewal and expansion of Luther’s protest at Worms. The protest of a single monk had become the protest of princes and representatives of leading cities of the empire, who now for the first time appeared as an organized party. It was a protest of conscience bound in the Word of God against tyrannical authority.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  “I’m very sensitive about porn,” said Alyson Lee, tugging nervously at her dark, purple-streaked hair. Alyson was nineteen, a sophomore at a mid-Atlantic college. She’d grown up in what she called a “culturally conservative” Chinese family in a Los Angeles suburb made up almost entirely of immigrant parents and first-generation kids like her. She studied how Americans are supposed to act and feel, especially about sex and romance, by watching Grey’s Anatomy. “So now,” she said, “I have the very typical, liberal college woman point of view.” One that includes ambivalence about porn. Alyson has had two serious boyfriends—one in her senior year of high school, one as a freshman in college—and both told her the same thing: “Of course I watch porn: every teenage boy does.” “I’m not one of those people who think that porn is wrong and morally terrible and disgusting,” Alyson explained. “But it makes me feel super insecure. Like, am I not good enough? I’m definitely not as hot as a porn star. And I’m not going to do the things porn stars do. Both guys were really reassuring that it wasn’t about me, and I knew logically there was no connection between them watching porn and some flaw of mine. But it stayed in my head.” If, as bell hooks suggested, pop culture portrayals of women beg the question “Who has access to the female body?” the answer may ultimately be found in the ever-broadening influence of porn. That is, after all, the source of the arched backs, the wet open mouths, the ever-expanding breasts and butts, the stripper poles, the twerking, and the simulated sex acts. That is the source of women’s sexuality as a performance for men.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I’d plunge his cock as fast and as deep into me as possible. I knew I had to leave Dr. O’Reilly. Annie Schroeder had dug a kitchen knife into her heart. She’d been hospitalized, released, and she’d stabbed herself a second time. Now she was in a maximum-security ward. O’Reilly himself was deteriorating quickly, more and more often falling asleep during my hours, forgetting my name, mumbling incomprehensibly. I knew I had to leave him, but even my body rebelled against such a rebellion. I fell sick with a high fever, then I danced one night at a fraternity party in a shoe so tight that three days later my left foot was abscessed and I had to be hospitalized. The foot became painfully swollen and had to be lanced. Afterward it was placed inside a sort of aluminum dog kennel that protected it from the touch of sheet and blanket. For some reason, a graduate student in psychotherapy came by my bed. Outside, the first snow of the year was falling. The therapist, whose forehead was flushed and scaling, wore a tweed jacket and smelled of sweet tobacco. His mouth shot up on one side in an accent aigu of irony. We didn’t speak very directly. I was sharing the room with someone who was asleep, to be sure, but he might have been faking it. I said that I thought I was resisting breaking off with Dr. O’Reilly. “At least that’s what I assume. I don’t feel anything, naturally, since I’ve somatized the anxiety. ” He wasn’t smoking, but he touched his lip with his pipe as though he needed the feel of the cold amber mouthpiece to release his thoughts or words. “But why are you going to a shrink at all?” “I want to change.” “Change what?” “My object choice.” He looked me intently in the eye, and now I could see that he, too, must be homosexual. “But people don’t really change,” he said. “It’s useless to try. It’s more a question of adjusting, of learning to play the hand you’ve been dealt.” “Oh no,” I said, angry. “I am changing, I must change. I’d kill myself if I thought I was stuck with these cards, which frankly are lousy—and you know it.” His face folded shut, and he left after exchanging a few of the necessary banalities. I felt triumphant. I couldn’t get well. I stayed in the infirmary, first with one ailment, then another. I watched the snow fall. My foot healed, but I broke out in hives. The hives subsided, and I was wracked with diarrhea. My roommates came and went. One of them, who was in traction, turned the conversation one evening to girls, then more generally to sex, finally to men. I watched his erection grow under the sheet. My own pressed against my stomach like a ruler on a board, hour after hour through the slow routines of the hospital.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Although I was appalled by the hair fetishist who slipped his questionnaire under the partition, at least his tastes were specific enough to be fulfillable, whereas mine were raging but shifting, leaving me no peace. I couldn’t find the answer because I couldn’t phrase the question. After I ejaculated I felt full of self-hatred every time, and every time I swore I’d never return to the toilets. Every time I had a free moment during the day when I could roost in the poultry house, I felt the excitement of anticipation creep over me. My hands went cold, a blotch of blush would float cloud-slow up my chest and neck, cover my face. If a girl stopped me to chat in the hall, I’d be torn by anxiety. What if he got away, the one big fish to cruise our pond today? I’d never said one word to all but one of the other campus homosexuals who were john queens. But I knew them all: the beetle-browed man whose outsize glasses touched his hairline above and his beard below and who, in his stall, would lower his ponderous haunches just far enough for my hand to touch his canine penis; the tall law student bearing a heavy tome of torts and investing his stall like a city under siege—no cough, no tapping foot, no lightest emery board of a sigh; the businessman in monogrammed shirt and glossy sharkskin I’d seen give a blow job that first day; and Jeremy, the only one I spoke to, a fat boy with a huge mouth and pomaded hair who waddled out of his booth with a diva’s disdain, gathering his reversible windbreaker around him as though it were a sable. None of us wanted each other but contempt had bred familiarity and we’d raise a weary eyebrow or stifle a yawn as we passed each other on our rounds as though to say, “Still at it?” or, “Slim pickings tonight.” The thrill came when one bagged not another old fruit but a hot young college kid, for although I myself was at least young and in college, I already saw myself as vampire-cold, turned prematurely old as a punishment for vice, and not nearly enviable enough to be that exciting thing, a “college kid.” I’d learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it. I started dating Annie Schroeder, although I sometimes felt I was carting an aunt about. Her makeup was too elaborate and her clothes too stylish for the Beatniks I was meeting, among whom the women wore little other than black wool sweaters and skirts and black tights and paisley babushkas. For variety, they might tote a green bookbag or paint on badger eyes or let their bushy, waist-length hair bounce over their shoulders.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Indicative of this cultural upheaval, an Ebony Magazine special issue on “The Negro Woman” contained an article entitled “Problems of the Negro Woman Intellectual.”1 It began with this observation: “The Negro woman intellectual is easily one of the most misunderstood, unappreciated and problem-ridden of all God’s creatures. In fact, if it were left to many Negro males alone to decide, she would not even exist.”2 Cultural hyperbole aside, being a Black woman intellectual apparently constituted the stuff of existential crisis. Though Black communities may have been in crisis because of shifts in Black leadership and damaging national discourses, Ebony Magazine chose to place that crisis at the feet of Black women, even though the author acknowledged that it was Black men who were most uncomfortable. Black men were quick, wrote Ponchitta Pierce, to “deprecate the woman intellectual,” even though “few really know this object of their discontent.”3 Black women intellectuals defied existing categories of cultural and racial identity, creating both a political and intellectual problem within Black communities that, since the nineteenth century, had responded to political instability by reasserting the primacy of traditional gender roles. The escalation of the intergenerational conflict between Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) in the summer of 1966 dramatized not only two kinds of Black political possibilities, but also two potential kinds of Black masculine gender performance—the respectable racial manhood of old and the revolutionary militant Black manhood of the present. The fact that the constitution of Black gender categories was at stake in these political battles was obscured by the more pressing problem of choosing a political path. By 1967, in response to this cultural and political upheaval, Harold Cruse proclaimed Black intellectuals to be in full-scale crisis, in his now-classic polemic Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. With the notable exception of Lorraine Hansberry, whom he lambasted along with the rest of his targets, Cruse’s procession of Negro Intellectuals was all male. They included Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, Henry M. Turner, George Washington Williams, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois.4 The overarching narrative of crisis has been a salient feature of Black political life at least since Du Bois began serving as editor of the NAACP magazine of the same name. This recourse to the narrative of Black political crisis frequently obscures an attendant upheaval over gender politics, particularly a broad discontent over the opportunities to pursue certain kinds of respectable racial manhood. Consequently, resolutions to Black political crises are frequently pursued through the insistence on prescribing traditional gender roles for Black communities. Ebony, however, repackaged the cultural crisis over racial manhood as a crisis over Black femininity and Black womanhood, obscuring the political stakes of this battle for Black men. This repackaging laid the responsibility for rectifying the crisis at the feet of Black women who simply needed to figure out their role and play it.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  The Tropic of Cancer is a sort of human document, written in blood, recording the struggle in the womb of death. The strong sexual odor is, if anything, the aroma of birth, disagreeable, repulsive even, when dissociated from its significance. The Tropic of Capricorn represents another death and birth, the transition, if I may say so, from the conscious artist to the budding spiritual being which is the last phase of evolution. In between I have known many births and deaths, but they were minor ones. But from this point on, my feeling is that whatever metamorphoses are to occur will manifest themselves in the realm of action, in conduct and example rather than in writing. There is in process, then, a gigantic conflict between the artist resolved to finish his task and the man who knows in himself that he is no longer obliged to express his conquests in the medium of language. There is a battle going on, more or less conscious, between Duty and Desire. The part of me which belongs to the world wishes to do its duty: the part of me which belongs to God wishes simply to fulfill what is required and which is unstateable. I am obliged to adapt myself to a struggle in a realm wherein I see nothing to sustain me but my own powers. I have to write retrospectively and act forwardly. If I slip I go down into an abyss from which no man can rescue me. The struggle is on all fronts, ceaselessly and remorselessly. Like every man I am my own worst enemy, but unlike most men I know too that I am my own saviour. I know something of freedom and responsibility. I realize how easily desire is transformed into reality. I have to be careful even of what I dream, since for me between dream and reality there is only the thinnest veil. The One Book I Always Wanted to Write—The World of SexIn reading my books which are purely autobiographical one should bear in mind that I am writing of things which happened a considerable time ago. The Tropic of Capricorn , for example, which will run to several volumes, deals chiefly with a period of about seven years’ duration, my life with a woman called Mona in Tropic of Cancer . In telling this story I am not following a strict chronological sequence but have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment. The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstitution of the facts of life.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  21 And Daniel remained there until the h first year of [the reign of] King Cyrus [over Babylon; now this was at the end of the seventy-year exile of Judah (the Southern Kingdom) in Babylonia, as foretold by Jeremiah]. [Ezra 1:1–3 ; Jer 25:11 , 12 ; 29:10 ] Daniel 2 The King’s Forgotten Dream 1 I N THE second year (604 B .C .) of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams which troubled and disturbed his spirit and [interfered with] his ability to sleep. 2 Then the king gave a command to call the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the a Chaldeans to tell the king his dreams. So they came in and stood before the king. 3 The king said to them, “I had a dream, and my spirit is troubled and anxious to know the [content and meaning of the] dream.” 4 Then the Chaldeans said to the king in b Aramaic, “O king, live forever! Tell the dream to your servants, and we will declare the interpretation.” 5 The king replied to the Chaldeans, “My command is firm and unchangeable: if you do not reveal to me the [content of the] dream along with its interpretation, you shall be cut into pieces and your houses shall be made a heap of rubbish. 6 “But if you tell [me] the [content of the] dream along with its interpretation, you shall receive from me gifts and rewards and great honor. So tell me the dream and its interpretation.” 7 They answered again, “Let the king tell the dream to his servants, and we will explain its interpretation [to you].” 8 The king replied, “I know for certain that you are bargaining for time, because you have seen that my command [to you] is firm and irrevocable. 9 “If you will not reveal to me the [content of the] dream, there is but one sentence for you; for you have [already] prepared lying and corrupt words [and you have agreed together] to speak [them] before me [hoping to delay your execution] until the situation is changed. Therefore, tell me the dream [first], and then I will know [with confidence] that you can give me its interpretation.” 10 The Chaldeans answered the king and said, “There is not a man on earth who can tell the king this matter, for no king, lord or ruler has ever asked such a thing as this of any magician or enchanter or Chaldean. 11 “Furthermore, what the king demands is an unusual and difficult thing indeed! No one except the gods can reveal it to the king, and their dwelling is not with [mortal] flesh.” 12 Because of this the king was indignant and extremely furious and gave a command to destroy all the wise men of Babylon. 13 So the decree went out that the wise men were to be killed; and they looked for Daniel and his companions to put them to death.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Murray, then in her twenties and thirties, was repeatedly hospitalized with bouts of depression. She wondered about her lifelong struggles with anxiety, which for her seemed connected to a series of romances and romantic attractions to young women. 7 The deceptively simple answer would have been for Murray to accept her identity as a lesbian. However, in her questionnaire she indicated that other homosexuals irritated her. She acknowledged a clear attraction to straight, feminine women, but simply could not accept that “homosexuality” was the proper label for her feelings. She insisted and resolved that her ultimate romantic goal was a heterosexual, monogamous partnership. 8 Today, we would understand Murray’s rejection of the conflation of her sexual attraction and her gender identity in terms of transgender identity. Because Murray identified as a male, who was attracted to women, she understood herself to be heterosexual, not homosexual. But she was born in a female body, during a time where there was not yet language to articulate the distinctions between sexuality and gender, and to name the possibility of being transgender. Murray’s struggle was made more difficult by her acceptance of deeply entrenched and societally imposed heteronormative assumptions that made it nearly impossible for her to consider expressions of sexuality and gender that we would today call queer or gender nonconforming. Hospitalized again on March 8, 1940, she noted that she had been having severe bouts of emotional crisis since the age of nineteen. They usually emerged, she wrote, after she had fallen in love with a woman without having any acceptable social outlet to express her romantic attractions to women. She lamented that she could not publicly fall in love, or date, or share expressions of affection with members of the same sex. 9 Because the explanations doctors offered were unsatisfactory, Murray proposed—in her characteristic take-charge fashion and often to the great aggravation of her doctors—her own set of theories regarding her sexuality. She believed that she would have to turn to experimental treatments rather than to psychiatry for answers to her questions. But even then, she questioned her own investment in a scientific solution, because she considered herself a deeply religious person. 10 After concluding that science was still, indeed, her best bet, she asked doctors whether or not she might have intersex characteristics, such as undescended testicles. 11 Murray was so convinced of the possibility that she was an intersex person that for the next three years she asked doctors to administer hormone treatments, possibly injections of testosterone, that would allow her to become a normally functioning male. Despite her doctors’ attempts to steer her away from male hormone treatments, she insisted that she would like to experiment with a hormone regimen that could affirm her masculine gender identity.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Later, in celebrating the work of a group of Midwestern clubwomen who had started a kindergarten, she wrote that their success “is a happy justification of the wisdom and anxiety of the colored club woman to extend these schools wherever it is possible to do so.” 78 In this latter case, her use of the term anxiety referred to Black women’s aspirations to create better schools for Black children. Certainly, much of the anxiety at the heart of the club movement came from an investment in respectability politics, middle-class aspiration, and the demand that all true race women conform to such dictates. Indeed, racial respectability emerges again and again as a critical pillar of the NACW School of thought. However, racial respectability had both class-based and gender-based investments. Much of the anxiety that race women experienced issued from their concern over the stultifying and damaging definitions of Black women’s sexuality and gender identity. Thus, racial respectability acted not only as a tool of class and gender disciplining (see chapter three) but also as a tool of gender definition and theorization. This fact, together with the other pillars of the NACW school—the combatting of Black women’s civic unknowability and epistemic subjugation, the training of a Black female leadership class, the forging of a new racial sociality that respected the agency of all Black women regardless of class, the reshaping of public opinion through embodied discourse, and the systematic study and dispensation of practical forms of knowledge within local Black communities—militates against an uncritical dismissal of these women on the grounds of elitism. The organized anxiety of women placed Black women’s own racial struggles and aspirations at the center of Black public life. These women became not only builders of Black social and brick-and-mortar institutions, but also knowledge creators and shapers of public opinion. Their organized anxiety was rooted in the recognition that Black women’s lived realities are deeply tied to the set of ideas circulating about them in the social world. At the same time, however, Williams’s notion of racial sociality suggests the need for a less superficial form of racial recognition, one less concerned with shifting race public opinion and more concerned with allowing Black women to both see and be seen by each other as subjects worthy of social protections and possibilities. Fannie Barrier Williams and Mary Church Terrell combined intellectual and political resources (and class access) to shape the NACW into a formidable intellectual and political force driving Black politics in the early twentieth century. Mary Church Terrell managed to steer the critical terrain of her life beyond her initial involvement with NACW into a larger and more prominent leadership role that lasted through several decades. In the next chapter, I consider the creative ways that Terrell carried the influence of the NACW School of Thought into a whole new generation of Black politics.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  At the same time, much of the broad external support of Barack Obama, coupled with internally (and secretively) voiced dissent, can be understood through Williams’s dual anxiety framework, which catalogues an anxiety of aspiration and an anxiety of aversion. We are anxious for leaders that represent the interests of Black communities and are averse to the continuation of social conditions that disfranchise our communities. Barack Obama’s presence encompasses both these anxieties, perhaps causing folks to offer both bombastic levels of criticism and bombastic levels of support. In this regard, Williams’s call for a new racial sociality, rooted not in class relations or in easy deferrals to race unity, but in a deliberate and radical empathy for other Black people, is an idea whose time has come. Surely, her understandings of the affective relationships between black people can inform our perennial conversations about terms like the Black community and Black unity. Toni Cade Bambara, whom I examine in chapter four, issues the call for new forms of racial sociality again through what she terms a commitment to “Blackhood.” And, indeed, Alicia Garza’s herstory of the Black Lives Matter Movement suggests that this new

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  commonplaces, rather than ideas,” bookended Pierce’s spectrum. 22 She also used the work of famed scholar Richard Hofstadter to distinguish between intelligence and intellect: “Intellect is the critical, creative and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, reorder, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings in situations as a whole.” 23 One woman, Mary Turner, quoted in the article suggested: “[T]he intellectual brings another capacity besides memory and learning to the field of knowledge. She must create entirely new elements.” 24 And finally, Pierce returned to Gwendolyn Brooks, who said, “[A]n intellectual is one who observes and/or claws out facts and ideas, worries them, turns them inside out, assembles them, relates them, and—on the highest level—enhances or nourishes them.” 25 Ranging from pure, to public, to pragmatic, to pseudo, Pierce imagined a far more dynamic world of possibilities for Black women intellectuals than other Black thinkers had managed to do. Certainly, Black women have worried ideas, turned them inside out, and enhanced and nourished the constellation of terms that shape how we think about contemporary Black life. But even if Negro women intellectuals could be found, and this, it appears, was debatable, they faced age-old problems, the primary one being (apparently): Who would marry them? Just as Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Pauli Murray had done at some point in their careers, Pierce had to grapple with the effect of Black marriage politics on Black women’s intellectual work. In a section of the article, reminiscent of Murray’s “Why Negro Girls Stay Single,” interviewee Mary Turner lamented the tendency of Black women intellectuals to marry “beneath their intellectual levels.” At the same time, however, she argued that “intellectualism should not be an excuse for ignoring care of the family.” In her estimation, husbands and wives should negotiate these challenges such that “in the case of any working woman, the husband should be willing to pitch in where needed, without regarding each effort as a threat to his masculinity.” 26 If all efforts at finding a suitable mate failed, Black women, Pierce argued, could pursue a range of other outlets: “She may turn to another race, often giving more than she receives. She may wind up with a ‘shadow’ husband who, while not her equal, at least doesn’t impede her progress. ... Failing in any of the above, the Negro woman generally decides to bypass marriage completely (by becoming Lesbian or celibate) or to take a lover.” 27 Despite Pierce’s assumption that heterosexual, companionate marriage was the desired end for all professional, intellectual women, she does at least gesture toward the possibility of other intimate arrangements.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Like the works of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Black women intellectuals, Beyond Respectability proffers its own kind of list of Black women public intellectuals. But it is just one list out of many that have yet to be constructed. I chose these women not only because of their overlooked or understudied intellectual contributions, but because they are linked together through their work. Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, and other nineteenth-century Black women who make cameos in this book were colleagues, who in many cases knew each other. Mary Church Terrell is offered here as an ideological bridge between the early race women and later ones like Pauli Murray and Toni Cade Bambara. Terrell and Murray met while doing desegregation campaigning in Washington, D.C., in the 1940s, and Terrell was always among Murray’s own lists of influential Black leaders. Murray herself was connected with the advent of the Black feminist movement of the 1970s and was a key legal and social theorist, alongside colleagues like Toni Cade Bambara. There are many maps and linkages that could be drawn when telling the stories of Black women intellectuals. This is one intellectual map, offering one set of geographic and genealogical routes that can be taken to more clearly understand the long and rich history of African American women’s knowledge production. My hope is that this map, this genealogy, leads us all, as Hopkins foresaw, in luminous and unexpected directions. CHAPTER 1 Organized AnxietyThe National Association of Colored Women and the Creation of the Black Public Sphere The club movement … is nothing less than the organized anxiety of women who have become intelligent enough to recognize their own low social condition and strong enough to initiate the forces of reform. —Fannie Barrier Williams (1900) In 1899, the NACW held a storied second biennial meeting in Chicago, one that cemented the presence of the Association as a formidable racial advocacy organization.1 By custom, racial organizations often held multiple organizational meetings in one city to cut down on travel costs. That year, the meeting occurred around the same time as the meeting of the National Afro-American Council, one of the forerunners of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After the conventions, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a short newspaper article comparing the “Two Negro Conventions.” Du Bois heaped praise upon the female convention-goers for their physical beauty, noting the “varying hues of female costumes contrasting with the infinite variety in color and tint of skin [and] the predominance of the soft Southern accent.” He was especially appreciative of papers given at the women’s meeting on “equal moral standards for men and women,” “the convict lease system,” and “practical club work.” Of particular importance in all papers was the primary theme of “the necessity of work among children.”2

• From Vox (1992)

  148 that are not clear, except that of course a woman mas turbating is so important an event in the physical uni verse that elemental relations in matter are affected as it occurs, and there are these sort of currents in the fluid that slowly move in a certain direction, like lines of force, which give you some sense of where the masturbation signals are coming from, although it takes years of prac tice, and of course a great deal of native skill as well, to learn how to read the fluid correctly. It's called the Bionic Mmmm-Detector, as you might suspect. Well, I'm driv ing down the expressway of an eastern city one evening around ten o'clock, in town on business, in my rented midsize car, my Ford Topaz, with the radio going, a classics oldie station, playing 'Ain't Nobody,' and I'm just driving along, and as usual I have my Mmmm- Detector open on the seat beside me, but the fluid is dark, and then I start curving through this residential area, very close to the buildings on either side, and I glance down at the seat beside me, and my God, I'm getting a very strong signal, I'm getting wave patterns I've never seen before, from very near and to my right, and craning my neck I catch sight of a lighted window, and I know that behind it you are in process, you are begin ning. My years of practice in reading the flux patterns in the watch tells me this is something very special, some thing I cannot pass by, and so I palm the steering wheel around suddenly and veer onto the off ramp and scoot back through the narrow streets, swearing at all the one way signs, and when I come to the door where the

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Working within a heteronormative framework, Murray advocated for healthier relationships between men and women: “We desire that the Negro male accept the Negro female as his equal and treat her accordingly and that he cease his ruthless aggression upon her and his emotional exploitation of her made possible by her admittedly inferior position as a social human being in the United States.” Murray also called for the Black man to “strive for emotional maturity himself,” to “see the Negro woman as a personality,” and to “maintain the dignity and respect for human personality with relation to the Negro woman.” Although her progressive prescriptions are laudable, they also reinscribe social norms that place queer identity and racial respectability at odds. In many ways, Murray’s capitulation to respectability politics speaks less to a personal failing and more to the recalcitrance and relentlessness of gender norms in Black communities, especially for those who wanted to assume the mantle of race leadership. In a 1943 letter to Lillian Smith, Murray attested to the unyielding heteronormativity she encountered among members of her own race, indicating that much of the social conservatism around sexuality that she experienced among Black people made her absolutely miserable. 58 Evelyn Hammonds argues that “Black lesbians are ‘outsiders’ in Black communities,” and that this outsider status is conferred by straight Black women acting in service of a politics of respectability or silence. “If we accept the existence of the ‘politics of silence’ as an historical legacy shared by all Black women,” Hammonds avers, “then certain expressions of Black female sexuality will be rendered dangerous, for individuals and for the collectivity. From this it follows that the culture of dissemblance makes it acceptable for some heterosexual Black women to cast lesbians as proverbial traitors to the race.” 59 Straight Black women particularly vexed Murray, despite her fervent defense of them in her manifesto. Murray was repeatedly rebuffed by putatively heterosexual Black women who, when they became attracted to her, told her to obtain psychiatric help and treated her as a deviant. Because of these conflicts, Murray did not always move unencumbered through the Black female social networks that characterized earlier generations of Black female leadership. For while the larger society viewed Black people as racial deviants, her own community viewed her as a sexual deviant. Murray’s failure to gain broad acceptance in African American communities informed her tendency to pursue friendships, leadership, and political consciousness outside of distinctively African American organizations and networks, though she did not eschew them altogether. 60 Consequently, Murray’s inability to embody—to reconcile—the discourses available to her regarding her biological sex, her gender identity, and her sexuality alongside respectable notions of Blackness, placed her in the uneasy position of defending racial respectability politics.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Anna Julia Cooper sounded a similar note when she argued that because Black people were in a rapid state of advancement as a race, “a race in such a stage of growth is peculiarly sensitive to impressions.” These “high strung people,” needed a strong presence from Black women who “must stamp weal or woe on the coming history of this people.”41 As mobilized by white women, the discourse of impressibility served to suggest that their race was civilized and therefore responded well to impressions. Among black women, the discourse of impressibility was invoked to contend that their race was impressible and therefore capable of civilization.42 Such ideas about the relationship between discourse and the body emerged from Lockean ideas about the body as a tabula rasa, upon which ideas and experiences could be inscribed. Williams’s language of organized anxiety, coupled with Cooper’s characterization of Black people as a “high strung people” “sensitive to impressions,” makes clear that Black women perceived an integral relationship between discourse and embodiment. Matthews argued that Black women’s intellectual work—their writing—could transmit impressions. Her assertion that Black women’s intellectual work was akin to transmitting an impression directly to the body is an example of the ways Black women used embodied discourse to suture the material to the discursive, linking the fleshy precarity of Black life to the forward-looking possibilities of progressive social discourse. They aimed to use their knowledge production to reshape the Black body (the language and thinking behind impressibility) in social discourse and to create new ideological and social terrain in which Black bodies (and the Black people inhabiting them) could safely exist. From the Exceptional to the Peculiar: Black Women as Citizen-WomenShifting white American public opinion regarding the plight of Black women required fervent advocacy from race women, not only in race literature, but also in public exchanges. During her World’s Fair speech, Williams took great care to explicate for her mostly white female audience “the bitterness of our experience as citizen-women.”43 A figurative compound expression known as a kenning, the term citizen-women refracted Black women’s experience of womanhood through the lens of citizenship. Black women’s experience as women relied upon their civic construction in the public sphere. By placing the word citizen first in the kenning, Williams gave priority to Black women’s status in the American body politic, attempting yet again to make Black women legible as civically knowable persons. Simultaneously, the term pointed to the ways that gender acted upon public identity categories, like that of “citizen,” where it was often invoked to signal both exclusion and the limits of democracy, rather than more noble realities. Black women’s civic experience of womanhood had been “bitter,” after all. Thus their civic experiences exposed deep fissures in the narrative of American exceptionalism, a narrative that the ceremony and fanfare of the exhibition attempted to quell.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  The renewing of conversations about Black leadership means the time is especially ripe for correcting the historical politics of exclusion that has kept these and other Black women public intellectuals relegated to the margins of Black leadership. In chapter one, I discuss at length Fannie Barrier Williams’s contention that the Club Movement was the “organized anxiety of women.” The term organized anxiety is especially generative for contemporary conversations about leadership. A focus on the ways in which anxiety can animate our organizing or, when misdirected, lead Black communities into disarray, offers a far more productive model for thinking about where leaders should direct their attention than accusing people of betrayal. At the same time, much of the broad external support of Barack Obama, coupled with internally (and secretively) voiced dissent, can be understood through Williams’s dual anxiety framework, which catalogues an anxiety of aspiration and an anxiety of aversion. We are anxious for leaders that represent the interests of Black communities and are averse to the continuation of social conditions that disfranchise our communities. Barack Obama’s presence encompasses both these anxieties, perhaps causing folks to offer both bombastic levels of criticism and bombastic levels of support. In this regard, Williams’s call for a new racial sociality, rooted not in class relations or in easy deferrals to race unity, but in a deliberate and radical empathy for other Black people, is an idea whose time has come. Surely, her understandings of the affective relationships between black people can inform our perennial conversations about terms like the Black community and Black unity. Toni Cade Bambara, whom I examine in chapter four, issues the call for new forms of racial sociality again through what she terms a commitment to “Blackhood.” And, indeed, Alicia Garza’s herstory of the Black Lives Matter Movement suggests that this new generation of Black leaders, including the many queer, trans, and gender nonconforming leaders among them, are working out in praxis Bambara’s notions of revolutionary Blackhood, unencumbered by the traditional dictates of respectable gender ideology.