Thursday, January 3, 2013: 4:30 PM
Balcony K (New Orleans Marriott)
My paper examines how specific spaces – such as sleeping car trains, theaters, speakeasies and rent parties – facilitated African American women’s same-sex behaviors and relationships in the early-twentieth century. I look at both women performers such as the classic blues women as well as everyday, anonymous women who are discussed in the black press and the Committee of Fourteen’s vice reports. These accounts described house parties and speakeasies where black women danced with each other in sensual fashions and sometimes even boldly told the male reporters who had intruded into their counterpublics that they were “bulldaggers.” As lesbian identity was becoming more visible in the 1920s, pathologizing narratives of “lesbian love murders,” in which women “crazed with gin and a wild and unnatural infatuation for another woman” killed their lovers at women-only house parties began to appear in black newspapers.[1] Women performers such as Bessie Smith felt free to take part in same-sex behavior within the enclosed spaces of train cars and backstage at the theaters in which they performed, where the only other people who could observe them were their fellow entertainers who did not intrude on their transgressive behavior. When the classic blues women toured, Jim Crow segregation of public transportation and accommodations created situations and environments that brought women closer together and may have assisted in the creation of intra-race same-sex relationships. My paper shows that liminal spaces that blurred the boundaries of public and private often afforded black women in the 1920s the safety to express sexual desires that were becoming more visible in American culture, yet were still generally viewed as deviant.
[1] “Woman Rivals for Affection of Another Woman Battles With Knives, and One Has Head Almost Severed From Body,” New York Age, November 27, 1926, p. 1.
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