Rigorous Loving: Black Women, Black Feminism, and Friendship, 1970-1996

Abstract

"Rigorous Loving: Black Women, Black Feminism, and Friendship, 1970-1996" is an interdisciplinary project that explores the multifaceted and mostly overlooked significance of Black women’s friendships to Black women’s cultural productions within the late 20th century United States. Applying methods from Black women’s history, Black feminist literary studies, transnational women of color feminist studies, and more, I unearth and analyze theories of friendship evident in the archival material, published interviews, and literary work of prominent activists, writers, and poets such as Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, and Lucille Clifton. I return to these notable Black women political and literary figures to uplift what, I argue, is a neglected aspect (and influence on) their work: friendships. Friendships were significant to these writers’ lives and their cultural productions in a multitude of ways. First, my dissertation, reveals how friendships were vital to the existence and survival of many of their cultural productions. Second, through examining friendship beyond romanticized, heteronormative, and de-politicized framings, I reveal how these Black women writers theorized friendship (including the care and the conflict) as essential to their Black feminist praxis and as a site of political possibility that defied the normative expectations of friendship and Black womanhood within the Anglo-American patriarchal family. My dissertation centers four different cultural forms: retreats, letters, anthologies, and poetry. Each chapter is organized around one cultural production through which I investigate how friendships were manifested, deepened, or tested. Ultimately, through this research, I propose that friendship appeared in at least three ways across these women’s work: (1) as a site of political theorizing, organizing, and knowledge production; (2) as a site of creative possibility and epistemological transgressions; and (3) as a space of refuge and survival. By “space of refuge,” I mean a spatial imaginary that is quite literally a “retreat,” outside of the domain of normative visions of cis-heterosexual womanhood, especially for Black women, Black feminists, and Black working-class lesbian feminists in a world that perpetually threatened their existence.