Sissy Insurgencies - A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness

Marlon B. Ross explores the figure of the sissy as central to how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated black masculinity from the 1880s to the present.

List of contents

Preamble. Sissies Everywhere  ix
1. Can the Sissy Be Insurgent?  1
2. Sissy Housekeeping: Cleanliness, Gender Dissonance, and the Spoils of Political Patronage at Washington's Tuskegee  51
3. Un/fit Manliness: Evading Masculine Brutality in James Weldon Johnson's Sissy Narratives  111
4. Baldwin's Sissy Heroics  165
5. Sissy but Not Gay: Anatomy of the Post-Civil Rights Straight Black Sissy  233
6. Gay but Not Sissy: Race and the Queering of the Professional Athlete  283
Postscript. Whatever Happened or Will Happen to the Sissy-Boy?  343
Notes  349
Bibliography  403
Index  433

About the author

Marlon B. Ross is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era and The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry.

Product details

• Authors: Marlon B Ross, Marlon B. Ross
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.03.2022
• EAN: 9781478015215
• ISBN: 978-1-4780-1521-5
• No. of pages: 456
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories