Pride

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.

Page 104 of 174 · 20 per page

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  His mother’s name was Jechiliah of Jerusalem. 4 He did right in the sight of the LORD , in accordance with everything that his father Amaziah had done. 5 He continued to seek God in the days of Zechariah, who had understanding a through the vision of God; and as long as he sought (inquired of, longing for) the LORD , God caused him to prosper. Uzziah Succeeds in War 6 He went out and made war against the Philistines, and broke through the wall of Gath, the wall of Jabneh, and the wall of Ashdod; and he built cities near Ashdod and [elsewhere] among the Philistines. 7 God helped him against the Philistines, and against the Arabs who lived in Gur-baal, and the Meunites. 8 The Ammonites paid tribute (money) to Uzziah, and his fame spread abroad, even as far as the border of Egypt, for he became very strong. 9 Uzziah also built towers in Jerusalem at the Corner Gate, the Valley Gate, and at the corner buttress [of the wall], and fortified them. 10 He also built towers in the wilderness and dug many cisterns, for he had a great deal of livestock, both in the lowlands and in the plain. He also had farmers and vinedressers in the hill country and in the fertile fields, for he loved the soil. 11 Moreover, Uzziah had an army ready for battle, which went into combat by divisions according to the number of their muster as recorded by Jeiel the scribe and Maaseiah the official, under the direction of Hananiah, one of the king’s commanders. 12 The total number of the heads of the fathers’ households, of valiant men, was 2,600. 13 Under their command was an army of 307,500, who could wage war with great power, to help the king against the enemy. 14 Moreover, Uzziah prepared shields, spears, helmets, body armor, bows, and sling stones for the entire army. 15 In Jerusalem he made machines of war invented by skillful men to be put on the towers and on the [corner] battlements for the purpose of shooting arrows and large stones. And his fame spread far, for he was marvelously helped until he was strong. Pride Is Uzziah’s Undoing 16 But when Uzziah became strong, he became so proud [of himself and his accomplishments] that he acted corruptly, and he was unfaithful and sinned against the LORD his God, for he went b into the temple of the LORD to burn incense on the altar of incense. [Num 3:38 ] 17 Then Azariah the priest went in after him, and with him eighty priests of the LORD , men of courage. 18 They opposed King Uzziah and said to him, “It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the LORD , but for the priests, the sons of Aaron who have been consecrated to burn incense.

• From Vox (1992)

  Some weeks go by, and you sell several other small pieces, a ring, some earrings, but the necklace does not sell. You’re curious, you peep through the curtain and watch Harvey taking customers over to your case, and you notice that he seems to be avoiding calling attention to the very fine piece, he’s distracting buyers when they comment on it. You realize, not without a certain pleasure, that Harvey is probably somewhat in love with you, though he’s too gentle ever to raise the issue. He now averts his gaze whenever you extend your wrist to put on one of your bracelets for a customer. And you begin to sense that he doesn’t want to sell the glorious strumulite necklace you made because he is afraid that when he does he’s going to lose you. And you feel that he’s probably right. He’s started asking you if you’re happy, if you have all the tools you need. There have been other jeweleresses in the window of Harvey’s Semi-Precious in days gone by, of course, and they have all gone on to bigger things, bigger commissions, but none of them has gotten to Harvey the way you have, you suspect.” “I’m a little full of myself, aren’t I?” she said. “You are, yes, and yet you’re uncertain too. And so one morning, you’re in your glass enclosure working away, and you look up and there’s this guy standing quite close to the glass, peering in at you. You nod, you’re used to this, and he nods. He’s wearing a suit, and he’s carrying what looks to be a fork, wrapped in a piece of paper towel. He looks up at the sign over the shop and you hear him go in and you hear him talking to Harvey. Harvey sounds a bit testy. You hear him say, ‘She can’t take her time up with uncreative work like that.’ Then the guy says something, a note of urgency in his voice. Harvey says, ‘No, I’m not kidding, really, no.’ And you pop your head out of the curtain. The two men look at you. Harvey goes, ‘I’m trying to tell this gentleman that you’re an artist and you are not able to do something like repair his fork. He doesn’t want me to do the repair, he wants you to do it.’ The guy in the suit looks embarrassed, he holds up his hands. You walk out into the shop. You take off your insulated soldering gloves and put them carelessly down on a display of rare campaign buttons. You’re wearing a shirt with small green and black stars on it, and black pants, and black sneakers. You hold out your hand for the fork, the guy gives it to you. You say, ‘An incident with the dishwasher?’ and he nods yes. And you say, ‘Harvey, it won’t take me a second.’ Harvey goes, ‘Fine!

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  Given the calculated efforts toward black racial uplift, and the ideological and sociopolitical contexts undergirding them, sentiments such as those expressed in the 1894 issue of Woman's Era are emblematic, to say the least, of a progressive and radical approach to the role of black women, as well as a competing discourse on black women's positionalities. Diverging from constructions of black womanhood monolithically or exclusively within the realm of the domestic, the quotation used as this chapter's epigraph challenges narrow conceptualizations that relegate black women to a domestic position, if even for uplift purposes. Rather, it advocates "alternatives" for black women: options and choices beyond, not myopically or exclusively constituted by, marriage, motherhood, and traditional familial trajectories. Anna Julia Cooper, widely known for her advocacy of and commitment to racial uplift, recognized women's positionality in racial progress as integral. "Only the Black Woman," as she eloquently asserted, "can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me."5 What Cooper's position on the role of women illuminates, whether in specific or broader terms, is the nexus of black womanhood-unencumbered by marginalization, restrictive dictates, disenfranchisement, violence, and gender conventions within the confines of the domestic sphere-and black racial and sociopolitical progress. Racial progress, that is, was contingent upon, rather than inhibited by, women and their access to education, protection, enfranchisement, and progressive politics neither punctuated by marginalization and female gender deference nor characterized by rigid, limited, or patriarchal perspectives. As Unbought and Unbossed is invested in the historical, ideological, and sociopolitical dynamics governing black womanhood and the representational, this inaugural chapter provides a lens, historic and contextual, by which to explore the shifting paradigms of black womanhood and prescriptions for women in the early era: emblematized by the classical black female script and "alternatives" (as "new world black and new world woman," as explicated in the discussion that follows), as these evolve and operate in post-i96os (con)texts. I am particularly vested in the nexus of the script and postmodern modalities of black womanhood; second, in those instances wherein women's roles and positionalities are not contingent upon particular racialized dictates; and, third, those "alternatives"-to allude to the opening epigraph-to prescribed conventionality and how these are treated, broached, and/or subverted in post-civil rights black women's literary and cultural production. I turn, to this end, to the post-196os novels of black women to examine how black women writers like Toni Morrison, whose work is the central focus of this chapter, revisit, subvert, or defamiliarize prescriptive tenets and positionalities for women predicated on (outmoded) Victorian and racialized constructs. Or, framed yet another way, I examine how Morrison deploys such postmodern techniques as disruption, (de)fragmentation, and (re) inscriptions with regard to black women's bodies and sexuality to gesture toward a postmodern "new world" (female) blackness.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  8 “My brothers (fellow spies) who went up with me made the heart of the people melt with fear; but I followed the LORD my God completely. 9 “So Moses swore [an oath to me] on that day, saying, ‘Be assured that the land on which your foot has walked will be an inheritance to you and to your children always, because you have followed the LORD my God completely.’ [Deut 1:35 , 36 ] 10 “And now, look, the LORD has let me live, just as He said, these forty-five years since the LORD spoke this word to Moses, when Israel wandered in the wilderness; and now, b look at me, I am eighty-five years old today. 11 “I am still as strong today as I was the day Moses sent me; as my strength was then, so is my strength now, for war and for going out and coming in. 12 “So now, give me this hill country about which the LORD spoke that day, for you heard on that day that the [giant-like] Anakim were there, with great fortified cities; perhaps the LORD will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as the LORD said.” 13 So Joshua blessed him and gave Hebron to Caleb the son of Jephunneh as an inheritance. 14 Therefore, Hebron became the inheritance of Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite to this day, because he followed the LORD , the God of Israel, completely. 15 The name of Hebron was formerly Kiriath-arba [city of Arba]; for Arba was the greatest man among the [giant-like] Anakim. Then the land had rest from war. Joshua 15 Territory of Judah 1 N OW THE lot (allotment) for the tribe of the sons of Judah according to their families reached [southward to] the border of Edom, southward to the wilderness of Zin at its most southern part. 2 Their southern border was from the lower end of the Salt (Dead) Sea, from the bay that turns southward. 3 Then it proceeded southward to the ascent of Akrabbim and continued along to Zin, and then went by the south of Kadesh-barnea and continued along to Hezron, and went up to Addar and turned about to Karka. 4 It continued along to Azmon and proceeded to the a Brook of Egypt (Wadi el-Arish), and the border ended at the [Mediterranean] sea. This was their southern border. 5 The eastern border was the Salt (Dead) Sea, as far as the mouth of the Jordan. The northern border was from the bay of the sea at the mouth of the Jordan. 6 Then the border went up to Beth-hoglah, and continued along north of Beth-arabah, and the border went up to the [landmark of the] stone of Bohan the son of Reuben.

• From Vox (1992)

  “What happened was, you went to a program in a university, and you got a masters in silversmithing, with some postgraduate work in pendant mounting and bead drilling, and you found that you had a very good eye, and you really were able to make bracelets and earrings and especially necklaces that looked good on people, not that looked good in the display case, in fact sometimes your work even looked a little strange, a little knobby and unsure of itself in the display case, but on the human form—divine. So you graduate from the program and it’s time to make a living, and you take your best work around to various jewelry places, and you get a mixed reaction, frankly, the world isn’t quite ready for you, and finally you take it to Harvey’s Semi-Precious, which you’ve avoided because in a way it’s a little down-market—it started as a head shop in fact, and Harvey’s this fairly old guy now with a big collection of fancy cigarette cases from the twenties that you find saddens you, and he’s got what you might call an old-world smell, but you interview with him, and he seems nice, and he’s very encouraging about your work, and you decide what the hay. But the only stipulation is, if you work for Harvey, you have to work in the store, in this small glass enclosure that kind of projects from one of the windows so that people walking by on the street can watch you work. You’re a little hesitant about that, but he draws the curtain open, tells you to take a seat, and it’s this nice little room, with many many small wooden drawers that are handy on either side, and a whole set of silversmithing tools that are mounted on little spring clips, and a nice flame there, a nice blue flame, with a yellow tip, and it really seems very cozy, and yet of course visible from the street, and so you start work. And Harvey could not be nicer—he treats you with kindly irony, and when you make a piece he especially likes, he is very appreciative. He sets up a special display case for just your work in the store, and he doesn’t mind when you come in a little late. And over the first few months you start doing this series of bracelets, simple elegant silver bracelets, which Harvey puts in the case. Naturally many of the customers who wander into the store are young men buying jewelry for women they love, and they’re uncertain, they want to be sure they’re right to buy that particular piece, and so Harvey gets in the habit of poking his head through the curtain and asking you, very hesitantly and politely, if you might want to come out and show the prospective buyer what the bracelet looks like on a real woman.

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

  The first example of the exercise of a sort of papal authority is found towards the close of the first century in the letter of the Roman bishop Clement (d. 102) to the bereaved and distracted church of Corinth. This epistle, full of beautiful exhortations to harmony, love, and humility, was sent, as the very address shows,217 not in the bishop’s own name, which is not mentioned at all, but in that of the Roman congregation, which speaks always in the first person plural. It was a service of love, proffered by one church to another in time of need. Similar letters of instruction, warning and comfort were written to other congregations by Ignatius, Polycarp, Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus. Nevertheless it can hardly be denied that the document reveals the sense of a certain superiority over all ordinary congregations. The Roman church here, without being asked (as far as appears), gives advice, with superior administrative wisdom, to an important church in the East, dispatches messengers to her, and exhorts her to order and unity in a tone of calm dignity and authority, as the organ of God and the Holy Spirit.218 This is all the more surprising if St. John, as is probable, was then still living in Ephesus, which was nearer to Corinth than Rome. The hierarchical spirit arose from the domineering spirit of the Roman church, rather than the Roman bishop or the presbyters who were simply the organs of the people.219 But a century later the bishop of Rome was substituted for the church of Rome, when Victor in his own name excommunicated the churches of Asia Minor for a trifling difference of ritual. From this hierarchical assumption there was only one step towards the papal absolutism of a Leo and Hildebrand, and this found its ultimate doctrinal climax in the Vatican dogma of papal infallibility. Ignatius.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  20 So Manasseh slept with his fathers [in death], and they buried him in [the garden of] his own house. And his son Amon became king in his place. Amon Becomes King in Judah 21 Amon was twenty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned for two years in Jerusalem. 22 But he did evil in the sight of the LORD , just as his father Manasseh had done. Amon sacrificed to all the carved images which his father Manasseh had made, and he served them. 23 Further, he did not humble himself before the LORD as his father Manasseh [finally] had done, but Amon multiplied his guilt and his sin. 24 And his servants conspired against him and killed him in his own house (palace). 25 But the people of the land struck down all those who had conspired against King Amon, and they made his son Josiah king in his place. 2 Chronicles 34 Josiah Succeeds Amon in Judah 1 J OSIAH WAS eight years old when he became king, and he reigned for thirty-one years in Jerusalem. 2 He did what was right in the sight of the LORD , and walked in the ways of David his father (forefather) and did not turn aside either to the right or to the left. 3 For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was still young (sixteen), he began to seek after and inquire of the God of his father David; and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, the Asherim, and the carved and cast images. 4 They tore down the altars of the Baals in his presence; he cut to pieces the incense altars that were high above them; he also smashed the Asherim and the carved images and the cast images to pieces, and ground them to dust and scattered it on the graves of those who had sacrificed to them. 5 Then Josiah burned the bones of the [pagan] priests on their altars and purged and cleansed Judah and Jerusalem. 6 In the cities of Manasseh, Ephraim, Simeon, and as far as Naphtali, in their surrounding ruins, 7 he tore down the altars and beat and crushed the Asherim and the carved images into powder, and cut to pieces all the incense altars throughout the land of Israel. Then he returned to Jerusalem. Josiah Repairs the Temple 8 In the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign, when he had purged the land and the [LORD ’s] house, he sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah, and Maaseiah the governor of the city, and Joah the son of Joahaz the recorder (secretary), to repair the house of the LORD his God.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Like most Americans today, the young people in these three groups did not expect to remain abstinent until marriage. At the same time, Carpenter found that a substantial minority of teens, which once would have included Christina, had gone resolutely the other way, becoming more committed to and more vocal about remaining chaste until their wedding night. For them, too, virginity was a “gift” to be shared with one true partner, but it was also something else: a way to honor God. Waiting for the Prince An attractive couple stepped out of a low-slung sports car at the entrance of the East Ridge Country Club in Shreveport, Louisiana. He dark-haired, in a tuxedo; she in what appeared to be a wedding dress: strapless, with a sparkling white bodice and yards of floor-length tulle. At second glance, though, I saw that something did not quite fit: there was a touch of gray at the man’s temples. The woman was not actually a woman at all: she was a fourteen-year-old girl. These were not newlyweds; they were father and daughter, here for the seventh annual, tristate, Ark-La-Tex Purity Ball. Inside, other couples, similarly dressed, milled around a table laden with candy: pink and orange jelly beans and gum balls. Most of them were white, though there was a smattering of African Americans and a few Latinos. One group of daughters and dads (or other male “mentors,” who were equally welcome) stood near curtains covered in twinkle lights. Some had already taken their seats at round tables decorated with candles and silk flowers. A few posed for commemorative photos of the evening, which, according to its online invitation, was “designed to equip and encourage young women seventh through twelfth grade to stay pure until marriage.” For one hundred dollars a couple (plus fifty dollars each for any additional daughters), it continued, “this event allows fathers an opportunity to pledge themselves to love and protect their daughters. It also helps young women begin to realize the truth: that they are infinitely valuable princesses who are ‘worth waiting for’” (emphasis in original).

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  I have had a lot of conversations about this over the years with my nieces and my friends’ daughters, and a lot of times I would give anything for the earth to swallow me up so I don’t have to talk to them about orgasms. But I make myself do it. With one friend’s teenage daughter I said, “I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. I want you to think about these questions. Do you know where your clitoris is? Have you masturbated? Have you had an orgasm? With yourself? With him? Are you comfortable telling him what you like sexually?” A lot of adult women aren’t comfortable with that. If what you’re trying to do is express intimacy and mutual pleasure, I’m not sure that rushing to intercourse without understanding that pool of experience is going to get you there. So why are you doing it? I’m not saying it’s wrong from a moral perspective, but from the perspective of understanding yourself and your sexuality and exploring, building agency and strength. Ask yourself those questions. It’s so important for girls. What do you think this generation is doing right? What gives you hope for change? I had this conversation with a girl and she said that all the women in her family were super strong. Then she told me this litany of non-reciprocal experiences and I said, “Why did that happen?” And she told me, “Well, I guess girls are taught to be so meek and deferential.” I said, “Wait a second, you just told me how strong you are.” She said, “I didn’t know that ‘strong woman’ applied to sex.” But then she said, “I’m not doing [other girls] any favors by pretending these things are okay. I’m going to start going into my encounters demanding reciprocity and respect. Otherwise these guys are going to think this is okay, and they’re going to keep doing this with somebody else too.” Appendix B: Girls & Sex by the numbersCOMPILED BY PEGGY ORENSTEINThe average teenager is exposed to nearly 14,000 references to sex each year on television.1 Ninety-one percent of comedies and eighty-seven percent of dramas contain sexual content.2 Ninety-two percent of the top songs on the Billboard charts are about sex.3 Sixty-five percent of girls say selfies boost their confidence; more than half say pictures of them posted by others, however, make them feel bad about their bodies.4 Ninety percent of college men and one-third of women viewed porn during the last year.5 One in three girls aged fifteen to seventeen say they have performed oral sex on a partner to avoid having intercourse.6 More than one-third of teenagers included oral sex in their definition of ”abstinence.”7 The average American first has intercourse at seventeen; by nineteen, three quarters of teens have had sex.8

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

  The comparative indifference and partial aversion of the Christians to the affairs of the state, to civil legislation and administration exposed them to the frequent reproach and contempt of the heathens. Their want of patriotism was partly the result of their superior devotion to the church as their country, partly of their situation in a hostile world. It must not be attributed to an "indolent or criminal disregard for the public welfare" (as Gibbon intimates), but chiefly to their just abhorrence of the innumerable idolatrous rites connected with the public and private life of the heathens. While they refused to incur the guilt of idolatry, they fervently and regularly prayed for the emperor and the state, their enemies and persecutors.620 They were the most peaceful subjects, and during this long period of almost constant provocation, abuse, and persecutions, they never took part in those frequent insurrections and rebellions which weakened and undermined the empire. They renovated society from within, by revealing in their lives as well as in their doctrine a higher order of private and public virtue, and thus proved themselves patriots in the best sense of the word.

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  Still not yet referenced by name but differentiated based on phenotypic characteristics, skin tone and bodily features, Theresa and Lorraine are reduced to a fixation on their bodies and physical attributes that, problematically, does not extend beyond these aesthetic features; yet, on the other hand, they also embody dimension and characteristics that resist their conflation into absolute or singular categories that would relegate them and lesbians, as well as same-gender loving women generally, to undifferentiated types. They are imbued with a desirability and such qualities as that of being aesthetically pleasing-"pretty"-in ways that disrupt stereotypes and false, illusory conflations of lesbians and same-gender loving women as outside the beauty status quo: as ugly and sexually diverse because of their undesirability which, in turn, links with an inability to attract men. Just as Naylor demonstrates the heterogeneity that exists among black women within a specific communal locale, as evidenced by her dramatization of the lives of seven women, so, too, does she rescue black lesbians and same-gender loving women from a homogeneity that would otherwise render them and their experiences monolithic. While both of them love women sexually and emotionally, they differ on both experiential and ideological levels. Lorraine's first lover was a woman while she was in high school, and since then she never had a male lover or sexual encounters with men. Because she possesses knowledge of and conviction about her sexual character and intimate desires for women, when her father found a letter from her high school lover, Lorraine refused to lie about its fundamental meanings. As a result of embracing her sexuality and sexual attraction to women, she is kicked out-in an excommunication from her family-and not even allowed to take anything beyond the clothes on her back. Even in her conviction, she has a complex relationship to the designation "lesbian" and what it entails; her very existence, as well as what she embodies, challenges the hegemonic domains of heterosexuality, yet she also does not necessarily embrace, at least not comfortably, a subject position that renders her an outsider in ways that exclude her from community or reduce her to something that, in the words of Miss Eva, "'tain't natural." I've accepted it all my life, and it's nothing I'm ashamed of. I lost a father because I refused to be ashamed of it-but it doesn't make me any different from anyone else in the world. [...] There are two things that have been a constant in my life since I was sixteen years old-beige bras and oatmeal. The day before I first fell in love with a woman, I got up, had oatmeal for breakfast, put on a beige bra, and went to school. The day after I fell in love with that woman, I got up, had oatmeal for breakfast, and put on a beige bra. I was no different the day before or after that happened. (165)

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  A counterstance, coupled with a politics of recognition, occurs, however, in Michelle Obama's official White House portrait. In her official portrait, First Lady Obama dons a black sleeveless dress (baring/bearing arms literally and figuratively), and in the backdrop is a picture of Thomas Jefferson, former U.S. president, writer of the Declaration of Independence, and slaveowner (who fathered children by Sally Hemings, the enslaved half sister of his deceased wife). Michelle Obama's posture, attire, and agency in engaging on her own terms, evidenced in the picture-read within the larger historical context of Jefferson, whom she renders as backdrop as she is foregrounded, centralized and occupying the forefront-represent an interesting counterrepresentation that, whether calculated or inadvertent, achieves a number of results. It not only subverts a precarious historical past that would otherwise render black women's bodies the literal property and object of others' ownership, pleasure, and even disposal (whether physical, sexual, relating to labor, or otherwise). It also reconstitutes the terms of black womanhood, foregrounding it and embodied agency and subjectivity, while rejecting white male hegemonic or patriarchal control, as the Jefferson symbol comes to represent. For, it "executes a self-conscious taunting that reaches across the span of history to repudiate the violence and brutality suffered by so many enslaved women. Michelle [Obama] stands boldly in a White House where she is mistress, not slave. Her body is for her," as political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry cogently posits."4 And, moreover, it serves, she further asserts, as "an act of resistance" for her, as a black woman, to "demand that her body belong to herself for her pleasure, her adornment, even her vanity, because in the United States, black women's bodies have often been valued only to the extent that they produce wealth and pleasure for others."' The photograph is, thus, iconographic and political in that it opposes U.S. historical and contemporaneous proclivities to designate black women's bodies and pleasures within the realm of disbelonging and, thus, at the ownership, voyeurism, and service of others. She dictates its terms and, concomitantly, "normalizes" black womanhood in a postmodern sense, yet also transgresses totalizing constructions and paradigms in ways that offer possibilities and potentialities, inherently empowering, where black womanhood, racialized gender representation, and sexuality are concerned. Her gesture, and this very spirit, parallels that of this book-a nexus of race, gender, representation, and transgression in relation to black women and their bodies that demonstrates the transhistorical reach and temporal ubiquity of these racial/ sexual/gendered dynamics. This book, like First Lady Michelle Obama's official White House portrait, is a deliberate effort to subvert, reconstitute, and disrupt so that stereotypes or restrictions do not dictate black women's comportment, govern the politics of our intimacies and passion-private or public-or reduce black expression to perversity or aberration but, rather, place it within a continuum constitutive and reflective of the existential human (sexual included) condition.

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  [It is in] this spirit of self-naming, an ethnic/sexual pride, [that] the term "same-gender-loving" (SGL) was introduced to fortify the lives and illuminate the voices of [sexual minorities of color]; to provide a powerful identi[t]y not marginalized by "racism" in the gay community or "homophobic" attitudes in society. [...] It is the intention of the [same gender loving] movement to break this cycle." Black sexual minorities' engagement of same-gender loving has myriad sociocultural and political implications, especially since it acknowledges both sameness and difference.19 Moreover, it resists the essentialism, in terms of race and sexuality, that black nationalist and gay and lesbian discourses, as well as queer theory, largely occlude. The revolutionary possibilities of same-gender loving lie in its ability to draw critical and necessary attention to racialized same-sex acts and illuminate the realities of black sexuality, rather than problematically, and at times erroneously, reduce some individuals to confining sexual labels and identifiers. Even the term "homosexual" itself emerged, as Michel Foucault avers, as a clinical description for a type of individual rather than a sexual activity.20 Same-gender loving, unlike most sexual categories, resists and avoids the all-too-pervasive tendency to define and/or demarcate individuals on the basis of sexual orientation or reduce black sexual minorities merely and inevitably to a sexuality. Same-gender loving expands the ways we conceptualize black sexual desire, eroticism, and loving; and it resists and destabilizes the politics of silence surrounding sexuality, especially black female sexuality, that has long persisted. Forcing us to engage sexuality and gender discourses seen primarily as disclosures in the black community and society at large, it enables us to discuss with depth and accuracy the particularities of black sexual lives, intimacies, and desires without being stymied by sexual labels, silences, or boundaries.21

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  Lorraine is wholeheartedly accepting of her sexuality, yet she rejects, as well as excoriates, a relegation to a politics of difference based on her sexual preference and desires. Her essence is intrinsically what it is-constant and stable prior to and subsequent to her acting upon her sexual desires for women-and, as such, no word, especially the designation "lesbian," reflects or defines what constitutes her or her (sexual) existence. Thus, even as she embraces her sexual diversity/identity in the face of her expulsion from her childhood home, she also argues that her very sexuality, in and of itself, is by no means an axis around which a politics of difference operates. Theresa, unlike her lover Lorraine, has a sexual history characterized by a complexity of diverse sexual experiences with both women and men, complicating efforts to situate or categorize her within a particular type of sexual designation. And, much like Lorraine, she is unapologetic for her sexual history or preferences: "There's nothing disgusting about [sex with men]," as she tells Lorraine. "You've never been with a man, but I've been with quite a few-some better than others. There were a couple who I still hope to this day will die a slow, painful death, but then there were some who were good to me-in and out of bed" (138). Theresa complicates the rigidity surrounding sexuality, especially what constitutes lesbian identity, much like that of Renay in Loving Her who refuses to allow reductive sexual terminology to serve as a reflection of her sexual preferences and sexuality. Theresa, however, embraces the designation "lesbian," even as her experiences exceed myopic categorizations; moreover, recognizing the limitations of labels that do not aptly reflect but rather obfuscate more than they represent her (sexuality), Theresa also refers to herself and Lorraine in a language that is politically incorrect and sexually derogatory. She, on the one hand, uses the very labels to which society at large would, because of their sexualities, reduce them; but, she also uses that particular rhetoric in a way that is somewhat empowering, demonstrating that no words, even those, can define or encompass the complexity of her essence.

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  Theresa and Lorraine "come to see themselves as lesbians in quite different ways. [.. .I Both women prefer women to men, but they differ dramatically about what that choice means. Theresa insists that being a lesbian means that you are different by nature and thus outside of society, which punishes you so intensely, while Lorraine detests the word lesbian, insisting that she is not different from other people."15 Even while the two women differ ideologically, as well as have their own idiosyncrasies and sexual experiences, their dialogue serves a consequential role in that it is not merely discourse but, rather, is emblematic of the agency these women possess individually in terms of their autonomy, self-definition, and interiority. Delineating the correlation between agency in the narrative sense, which ultimately becomes emblematic of it at large, literary scholar Marilyn Farwell postulates, "Agency in the narrative is a function of women coming together on a narratological level as protagonists of their own story and as narrators of their own inner thoughts. The otherwise confusing set of narrators" puts "in motion a number of separate narratives, a narrative of facts in each woman's life and an inner, psychological narrative explaining her motives and justifying her actions."16 Its tautological nature notwithstanding, Farwell, like many feminist scholars, illuminates the correlation between narrating one's story and agency. Her assertions, coupled with the experiences of Theresa and Lorraine, illustrate the ways in which the two women, in their very agency, are empowered but also serve as agents or conduits by which female bonding occurs on an individual and larger collective level: they, in what she considers an alterative approach to reading "the two," "are not primarily victims or outsiders; instead, they form the metaphoric center of the female bonding that becomes a powerful narrative agent by the end of the text."" The accuracy or validity of her assessment is contingent, however, on what constitutes bonding and also how these dynamics are enacted. Theresa and Lorraine's presence, as well as their status as same-gender loving women, does become the center of attention and discourse within larger communal realms, as evidenced in the Brewster Place Block Association meeting.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  That summer, Maria flew home to Iowa and my mother went to Europe for two months. She left me twenty-five dollars a week to live on and the key to her apartment. She’d estimated that the allowance was large enough to feed me and small enough to force me into getting a summer job. I did work for a while loading trucks all night. To get the job I had to tell the boss I’d be staying on in the autumn. I’d dropped out of school, I said, and wasn’t seeking just summer employment. But once I started working, the other men drew me aside, one by one, to tell me that I must go back to school. “Don’t get stuck here,” they said. “It’s shit. It’s a dead end.” In the sweaty Chicago night we’d squat bare-chested inside the holds of semis, stacking cartons. Our sweating hands and arms would leave phantom brown prints on the tan cardboard boxes. My partner, a beer-bellied man whose five-o’clock shadow had deepened to midnight by dawn, never spoke to me; I could imagine marrying him, living in a trailer with him, and cooking him meatloaf. On the third night we worked together he finally opened up. He told me that when he was a teenager his father, a young doctor, had died suddenly of a heart attack. No insurance. My partner had been the oldest boy and had gone to work to support his mother and to send the three younger kids through college. “But I got stuck. Now they’re all in professions with nice homes in the suburbs and they’re ashamed of me, don’t like me coming around. So I’m stuck in this shit job.” We talked about books. He liked Stefan Zweig and Nelson Algren. And he liked Beethoven, especially the symphonies. When he talked about books and music, his flat Midwestern voice (he pronounced milk as “melk” and wash as “warsh”) warmed up, almost as though through the smoked window of his face I could see a young man approach, smile, then go away. Two nights later he stopped talking, and when he had to say something he mumbled. Once again every noun was double-decked by “fuckin’ ” or “mother-fuckin’.” I’d return to my mother’s skyscraper apartment, my face fierce in its warpaint of dirt, my T-shirt clinging to my wet body. The city at last was cool and the streets had run dry of traffic. I’d bow my head under the shower for twenty minutes, scarcely moving, then stand nude in the window and watch the city below slowly constructing itself like coral under incoming tides of light. My father had told me his father had become a professor so he wouldn’t have to work the fields of his parents’ Texas farm. Now I understood my grandfather perfectly. I felt pride in my strength and shame over my position just as the other men did.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘I don’t care what anyone says. Experience of the world is the best thing. It may not be the main authority but, in relationships, it is a good teacher. I know all about unhappiness in marriage. Goodness me. Oh yes. I was twelve years old when I first got a husband. I’ve had five altogether, thanks be to God. Five of them trooping up to the church door. That is a lot of men. By and large they were gentlemen, or so I was led to believe. Yet I was told quite recently - I forget by whom - that our Saviour attended only one wedding. It was in the town of Cana. So, the argument goes, I should only ever have been married once. And then there was the time when Jesus rebuked the Samaritan woman. They were standing beside a well, weren’t they? “You have had five husbands,” He said. “And the man you are living with is not your husband.” He was God and man, so I suppose He knew what He was talking about. I don’t understand what His point was, but I am sure He had one. Why was the fifth man not her husband? It doesn’t make any sense. How many husbands had she actually had? How many husbands was she allowed? In all my life I never heard there was a limit. Have you? ‘There will be ever so many experts telling us one thing and another. But I know this much. God told us to go forth and multiply. Am I right? I can understand that part of the Bible, at any rate. And wasn’t it God who commanded my husband to “leave father and mother” and belong to me alone? But He never mentioned a number. It could be two. It could be eight. Who knows? There’s nothing wrong with it, anyway. ‘What about that Solomon? He was a clever man. Didn’t he have more than one wife? I wish to God I had his luck. If I had half as many husbands as he had wives, I would be laughing. Think of it. I could be God’s gift to men. And what about all those wedding nights? I bet that he did you-know-what as hard as a hammer with a nail. I bet he gave them a right pounding.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Lori and Brian and I would use the rocks to decorate the graves of our pets that had died or of the dead animals we found and decided should get a proper burial. I also held rock sales. I didn’t have that many customers, because I charged hundreds of dollars for a piece of flint. In fact, the only person who ever bought one of my rocks was Dad. He came out behind the house one day with a pocketful of change and was startled when he saw the price tags I’d taped to each rock. “Honey, your inventory might move a little faster if you dropped your prices,” he said. I explained that all my rocks were incredibly valuable and I’d rather keep them than sell them for less than they were worth. Dad gave me his crooked smile. “Sounds like you’ve thought this through pretty well,” he said. He told me he had his heart set on buying a particular piece of rose quartz but didn’t have the six hundred dollars I was charging, so I cut the price to five hundred and let him have it on credit. Brian and I loved to go to the dump. We looked for treasures among the discarded stoves and refrigerators, the broken furniture and stacks of bald tires. We chased after the desert rats that lived in the wrecked cars, or caught tadpoles and frogs in the scum-topped pond. Buzzards circled overhead, and the air was filled with dragonflies the size of small birds. There were no trees to speak of in Battle Mountain, but one corner of the dump had huge piles of railroad ties and rotting lumber that were great for climbing and carving your initials on. We called it the Woods. Toxic and hazardous wastes were stored in another corner of the dump, where you could find old batteries, oil drums, paint cans, and bottles with skulls and crossbones. Brian and I decided some of this stuff would make for a neat scientific experiment, so we filled up a couple of boxes with different bottles and jars and took them to an abandoned shed we named our laboratory. At first we mixed things together, hoping they would explode, but nothing happened, so I decided we should conduct an experiment to see if any of the stuff was flammable. The next day after school we came back to the laboratory with a box of Dad’s matches. We unscrewed the lids of some of the jars, and I dropped in matches, but still nothing happened. So we mixed up a batch of what Brian called nuclear fuel, pouring different liquids into a can. When I tossed in the match, a cone of flame shot up with a whoosh like a jet afterburner. Brian and I were knocked to our feet. When we stood up, one of the walls was on fire.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  There were once at Paris in an inn certain very considerable Italian merchants, who were come thither, according to their usance, some on one occasion and some on another, and having one evening among others supped all together merrily, they fell to devising of divers matters, and passing from one discourse to another, they came at last to speak of their wives, whom they had left at home, and one said jestingly, 'I know not how mine doth; but this I know well, that, whenas there cometh to my hand here any lass that pleaseth me, I leave on one side the love I bear my wife and take of the other such pleasure as I may.' 'And I,' quoth another, 'do likewise, for that if I believe that my wife pusheth her fortunes [in my absence,] she doth it, and if I believe it not, still she doth it; wherefore tit for tat be it; an ass still getteth as good as he giveth.'[132] A third, following on, came well nigh to the same conclusion, and in brief all seemed agreed upon this point, that the wives they left behind had no mind to lose time in their husbands' absence. One only, who hight Bernabo Lomellini of Genoa, maintained the contrary, avouching that he, by special grace of God, had a lady to wife who was belike the most accomplished woman of all Italy in all those qualities which a lady, nay, even (in great part) in those which a knight or an esquire, should have; for that she was fair of favour and yet in her first youth and adroit and robust of her person; nor was there aught that pertaineth unto a woman, such as works of broidery in silk and the like, but she did it better than any other of her sex. Moreover, said he, there was no sewer, or in other words, no serving-man, alive who served better or more deftly at a nobleman's table than did she, for that she was very well bred and exceeding wise and discreet. He after went on to extol her as knowing better how to ride a horse and fly a hawk, to read and write and cast a reckoning than if she were a merchant; and thence, after many other commendations, coming to that whereof it had been discoursed among them, he avouched with an oath that there could be found no honester nor chaster woman than she; wherefore he firmly believed that, should he abide half a score years, or even always, from home, she would never incline to the least levity with another man. Among the merchants who discoursed thus was a young man called Ambrogiuolo of Piacenza, who fell to making the greatest mock in the world of this last commendation bestowed by Bernabo upon his wife and asked him scoffingly if the emperor had granted him that privilege over and above all other men.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Quoth the physician, 'I see you know me not yet; maybe you judge of me by my gloves and long gown. If you knew what I did aforetimes at Bologna anights, when I went a-wenching whiles with my comrades, you would marvel. Cock's faith, there was such and such a night when, one of them refusing to come with us, (more by token that she was a scurvy little baggage, no higher than my fist,) I dealt her, to begin with, good store of cuffs, then, taking her up bodily, I dare say I carried her a crossbowshot and wrought so that needs must she come with us. Another time I remember me that, without any other in my company than a serving-man of mine, I passed yonder alongside the Cemetery of the Minor Friars, a little after the Ave Maria, albeit there had been a woman buried there that very day, and felt no whit of fear; wherefore misdoubt you not of this, for I am but too stout of heart and lusty. Moreover, I tell you that, to do you credit at my coming thither, I will don my gown of scarlet, wherein I was admitted doctor, and we shall see if the company rejoice not at my sight and an I be not made captain out of hand. You shall e'en see how the thing will go, once I am there, since, without having yet set eyes on me, this countess hath fallen so enamoured of me that she is minded to make me a Knight of the Bath. It may be knighthood will not sit so ill on me nor shall I be at a loss to carry it off with worship! Marry, only leave me do.' 'You say very well,' answered Buffalmacco; 'but look you leave us not in the lurch and not come or not be found at the trysting-place, whenas we shall send for you; and this I say for that the weather is cold and you gentlemen doctors are very careful of yourselves thereanent.' 'God forbid!' cried Master Simone. 'I am none of your chilly ones. I reck not of the cold; seldom or never, whenas I rise of a night for my bodily occasions, as a man will bytimes, do I put me on more than my fur gown over my doublet. Wherefore I will certainly be there.'