Lifting the veil: African American images and the European American gaze: Commentary on Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins
Document Type
Article
Date of Original Version
1-1-2008
Abstract
Patricia Hill Collins presents and discusses gender and gender role norms, behaviors, and ideologies among African Americans in an interdisciplinary diagnostic endeavor that calls attention to health, economic, behavioral, and psychosocial patterns related to social injustice and inequality. Collins presents several popular culture, mass media, and social science literature topics that call for a progressive Black sexual politics necessary for African American empowerment. A most crucial and apparent point of Collins's discussion is that improvement in the lives of African Americans requires inspection and analysis of gender and sexuality related intragroup variation and diversity. I situate this discussion primarily within a post-civil rights ideological revolution related to the European American "gaze," multiculturalism, and European American emotional ambivalence toward the Black body. It is proposed that Collins's analysis of the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality among African Americans occurs within an American context that reciprocally impacts African American intragroup dynamics. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Publication Title, e.g., Journal
Studies in Gender and Sexuality
Volume
9
Issue
1
Citation/Publisher Attribution
Harris, Shanette M.. "Lifting the veil: African American images and the European American gaze: Commentary on Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins." Studies in Gender and Sexuality 9, 1 (2008): 32-51. doi: 10.1080/15240650701759409.