A Book Club Discussion with Marlon B. Ross: Sissy Insurgencies
Please join Africana Studies for the Black Studies Book Club meeting, featuring Marlon B. Ross in discussion of their book Sissy Insurgencies, on Friday, April 4 at 11:30 am at Tulane University. This is part of an ongoing series sponsored by Africana Studies, which features scholars whose recent publications have shifted the conversation in our field. Lunch will be provided.
This event is by registration only, and space is limited. Please register by following the link below if you plan on attending. Thank you!
https://www.eventcreate.com/e/marlonross
ABOUT SISSY INSURGENCIES
In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.
