Abstract
Through an examination of the microhistories of three select communities (African American women, twentieth-century gay and lesbian activists in the U.S., and the presumed audience that heard 1 Timothy), the article interrogates the hyper-normative standards or “outside gaze” that marginalized communities often internalize in their quests for respectability or acceptance from more dominant social powers. The article argues that such standards (whether in the form of middle-class decorum, cisgendered heteronormativity, or ancient Rome’s notions of piety) must be challenged by counternarratives because such standards are discursive frames and restrictive binaries rooted in histories of power and domination. Such frames police thought, presuppose a deficit of one kind or another in the marginalized communities, and inevitably lead such marginalized groups down a path of psychic scarring and self-loathing.
Keywords
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel, Morrison interrogates the “gaze that condemned” (2017, xi) Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist, a little Black girl. Having been hated by members of her family and community, Pecola internalizes that hatred. She feels ugly because that is the way others see her. Worse than that, she suffers the delusion that the granting of blue eyes would render her beautiful both in the eyes of others and in her own eyes. With that move, to paraphrase Morrison, Pecola takes a step “over into madness” (2017, 206). Thus, the famed late novelist wrote her first novel to interrogate “the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze” (2017, xi). The novel is a story about racial contempt. It is a story about racial self-loathing. It is a story about psychic scarring. It is a story that interrogates that outside gaze.
In what I purport to be an examination of microhistories (or neglected stories [Walton, Brooks, and DeCorse 2008, 3-12]), I have selected Morrison’s character and some of Morrison’s words because I think they are useful in interrogating the outside gazes with which three marginalized and often-neglected communities have had to contend and with which two such communities—in the iterations in which they appear today—still must do so. These communities are: 1) African American women; 2) gay and lesbian activists in the U.S.; and 3) the community behind 1 Timothy. Each community, in its own distinctive quest for respectability, is a part of a larger aggregate that I designate as Pecola’s People. They have often sought acceptance according to an outside, hyper-normative standard that is already coded for their exclusion and psychic wounding.
Two disclaimers should be stated before I proceed. First, I recognize that the labels for all three of the aforementioned collectives are shorthand expressions and not monolithic wholes. A lesson learned from Audre Lorde is the danger of excessive aggregation or, in her own words, “false and treacherous connections” or the “pretense to a homogeneity of experience.” (1984: 115-16). So, as I am able, I will disaggregate the collectives, especially when doing so will show the damaging dynamism of the outside gaze’s restrictive binaries. As the article will show, moreover, members of some groups have faced interlocking forms of oppression and they have spent “time on two crosses” or more (see Rustin, 2015).
Second, as noted in the introductory essay to this volume, I also recognize that the term respectability politics as deployed by Evelyn Higginbotham and others is not stable. Rather, the term must be historicized to see the variations it has assumed by the various scholars deploying the term. Still, I argue that each instantiation of the idea of respectability politics examined here presupposes the presence of an outside gaze. I also would argue that when Morrison wrote about the outside gaze, she herself appears to have been familiar with a version of a politics of respectability, at least with reference to language, as is clear from her “Nobel Lecture in Literature” address. Her words, which feature her characteristic focus on the power of words—especially hurtful language that cloaks itself in respectability—are worth quoting in an extended fashion: “Oppressive language does more than represent violence, it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge, it limits knowledge…. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language—all are typical of the policing languages of mastery and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas” (2019: 104-5).
Those two disclaimers stated, I will now offer extended micro-historical reflections on how the politics of respectability has worked in the three aforementioned communities. Then, I will offer some closing reflections that are not lodged at Pecola’s people, but against the damaging discourses and systems that could cause any group of Pecola’s people, to paraphrase Morrison again, “to step over into madness” (2017: 206).
Three Marginalized Communities Contending with an Outside Gaze
Given the plasticity of a term such as “a politics of respectability,” how have marginalized communities been affected by an outside gaze? How has a respectability politics served as the scaffolding for the construction of self-loathing and psychic scarring? Marginalized communities—from African American women, gay and lesbian activists, to the implied community behind what is known as 1 Timothy—have often donned cloaks of respectability in order ostensibly to fit in and be accepted in the estimation of the status quo. The apparent logic is that those who do not assimilate find themselves debased, deemed unworthy, and denigrated to the outskirts of polite society, and those who do assimilate are accepted. As we shall see, though, to varying degrees, parts of some of the communities examined below have resisted the stories that have repeatedly constrained and policed their lives and such persons have arrived at the conclusion that the posturing to be accepted by those who represent a hyper-normative standard either does not really work or it does not treat the real problem, namely, the structures that decree the hyper-normative standards (or what Audre Lorde would call the “mythical norm,” 1984: 116) as ideal in the first place.
The Case of African American Women
Black women did not embrace a politics of respectability exclusively in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the following microhistory will reveal, the politics of respectability continued well into the mid and late twentieth-century and remains a subject of debate in the third millennium. At the turn of the twentieth century, Black women—especially working-class Black church women—deemed a politics of respectability necessary as an intra-race solder, an extra-race shield, and an inter-racial strategy for political action. According to Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson and Brian Ward (1999), a politics of respectability was a solder for black women who collectively faced disfiguring images even if the various disaggregated groups of Black women belonged to different class levels within the Black community. According to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a politics of respectability was also a shield from “sexual insult and assault” (1993: 194). Through a “culture of dissemblance,” Darlene Clark Hine’s term for black women’s cultivation of desexualization or of silence about sexual hurt, many Black women tried to avoid further assault and hurt by holding the hurt inside a politics of silence (Hine 1989). As Hine notes, “in the face of the pervasive stereotypes and negative estimations of the sexuality of Black women, it was imperative that they [Black women] collectively create alternative self-images and shield from scrutiny these private, empowering definitions of self” (1989: 916). Higginbotham builds on Hine’s term to show how Black women tried to protect themselves through a “self-imposed secrecy and invisibility” (1993: 194). Furthermore, as Higginbotham has also noted, a politics of respectability was also a strategic “bridge discourse” between white women and Black women: “a discursive common ground in … [respectability politics’] concern for sexual purity, child-rearing, habits of cleanliness and order, and overall self-improvement” (1993: 198).
At times, though, as demonstrated in the lives and words of Black working-class blues women in the 1920s and 1930s, some Black women expressed a direct form of resistance to a politics of respectability. Advocating what Angela Y. Davis would call early Black proto-feminism (1998), Black blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, and Mamie Smith defied notions of domesticity, challenged the paired stereotypes of the asexual Black woman on the one hand and the oversexed or sexually aggressive Black woman on the other, and—at times—challenged the gender identity politics of their era. In her song and dance performances, for example, Gladys Bentley repeatedly attired herself in top hat, a white tuxedo suit, and a tie (Wilson 2010: 177). According to Angela Davis, the release of “Ma” Rainey’s song “Prove It on Me Blues” (1928) also included a picture of “the blues woman sporting a man’s hat, jacket, and tie” (1998: 39). The protagonist of the song’s story itself, moreover, admits she goes out with women but dares anyone to prove she’s ever been caught in a lesbian tryst. Thus, the transgressive practices of these blues women complicate any facile orthodoxy about decorum or gender proprieties even if the goal of such proprieties historically was to avoid the extra-communal caricatures of Black women either as asexual or hypersexual. These Black blues women railed against the outside gaze.
The Case of Gay and Lesbian Activism in the U.S.
Despite Arthur Schlesinger’s view that the U.S. has always been a “nation of joiners” (Schlesinger 1944), a politically organized gay community did not exist until the twentieth century. Apart from the short-lived Society of Human Rights formed by Henry Gerber in Chicago in 1924, the homophile movement (as it was once called) did not come into prominence in the U.S. until the 1950s (see Katz 1978; Vaid 1995). As my third microhistory will argue, three early organizations paved the way for such prominence: the first Mattachine Society from the years 1950-1953 (sometimes known as the Mattachine Foundation); the later Mattachine Society (1953-57), with one or more of its chapters continuing until 1967; and the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), which was found in 1955. All three lie at the root of much—though certainly not all—current gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights activism and thus were at the fount of successive marches on Washington, the deletion of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders in 1973, and key federal court decisions, including the landmark Supreme Court 2015 Obergefell vs. Hodges decision banning the denial of the right to marry to same-sex couples.
I offered the aforementioned exception clause (“though certainly not all”) because of the danger of histories of assimilation. Organizers of the group GALA (Gay Latino Alliance, 1975-1983), for example, were not influenced at all by the national work of the Mattachine and DOB organizers, but largely by the national and international migrations of people who felt themselves to be “sexiles” or in this instance Latinx persons looking for a group and place to which they could belong as sexual beings (see Ramírez 2003). Furthermore, histories must always be contested on the basis of the knowledge regimes that serve as the scaffolding for the construction of those histories. So, as Marlon M. Bailey and L. H. Stallings (2015: 197) have stated, “African Americans may have assimilated into such histories, but when resistance to a universal experience of sexuality has been waged, black people relied on the culture, language, and representations produced in their own communities to correct the gaps and errors produced by a history of sexuality.”
While some historians would mark the first Mattachine Society as radical and the latter as advocating a politics of respectability, Martin Meeker argues that the Society in both periods mixed radical approaches with respectability politics (Meeker 2011: 79-89). So, while the earlier form of the society began under the Communist activist Henry (“Harry”) Hay, Jr. and envisioned solidarity, education, and political action as its three major goals, the early Society’s secrecy and anonymity of leadership played well into the dominant culture’s view that homosexuals should remain silent. In contrast, the second manifestation of the Society refused to use pseudonyms on their publications and thus defied invisibility politics. They also established a collaborative network for distributing pertinent literature (such as James Baldwin’s 1956 novel, Giovanni’s Room). Still, according to Meeker, both groups advocated the presentation of “a respectable image in hopes of gaining legitimacy for their cause” (2011: 89), with the second group often working behind the scenes with scientists and researchers who would help to educate the larger society’s limited view about intimacy, sexuality, and gender. Both adopted respectability politics because they knew that the FBI and the select U.S. political leaders wanted to malign the organization and discredit its members as sexual deviants (Meeker 2011: 113-16).
Organized by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon and six other women as the first lesbian organization in the U.S., the DOB was initially formed to provide social support and later to provide educational resources on the history and rights of lesbians. In its Articles of Incorporation, it welcomed all women, “regardless of race, color, or creed” (Gallo 2006, xxii). Two of the founders of the organization were women of color: a Chicana and a Filipina. Unknown to most who would become fans of A Raisin in the Sun (1959), its Black playwright, Lorraine Hansberry, was a member of the DOB. Under a pseudonym, she also published short stories in Ladder, a DOB publication, and in One, a Mattachine Society publication (see Perry 2018: 80-83). By 1963, moreover, the national President of DOB was an African American woman (Cleo Glen Bonner). Like the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis developed chapters throughout the country. Yet, like the Mattachine Society, it also accommodated the dominant society’s norms about dress codes at its meetings. Many did so, though, because they feared losing child custody or they feared the threat of workplace discrimination.
Still, both the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis appealed to U.S. creedal scripts (that is, its language about citizenship rights) and to the direct protest movements of the Civil Rights organizations of the time in their own struggle. For example, army veteran and scientist Frank Kameny, a member of the Mattachine Society and one who had been instrumental in the founding of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO), organized members of ECHO in one of several “cleaned-scrubbed demonstrations” (as Kameny himself described them, see Duberman 2019: 358), in the nation’s capital, including in front of the White House on April 17, 1965. While the protesters in front of the White House or at the marches in front of several government buildings demanded equality in hiring in the federal government, the repeal of sodomy laws, and the removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder, the tone of the marches was reminiscent of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Thus, according to Nadine Smith, “The strict code of dress and conduct was designed to present a non-threatening image to a country whose only concept of gays was as warped, depraved, and sinister people to be reviled or pitied” (Smith 2000: 439).
The rebellions that came in the wake of a June 28, 1969 early morning police raid on the Stonewall Inn (a gay, lesbian, and transgender bar in Greenwich Village) would soon follow, but not before the homophile community widened its ranks, educated its base, sharpened its tone, leveraged key religious and legal allies, and took direct action with the backing of regional and semi-national groups. The ranks were widened as homophile groups embraced their own bar subculture (Meeker 2011: 82). Multiple publications educated the homophile movement on its history and its rights. The movement gained key religious allies such as Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (White 2015). In the fight against discrimination, the movement also gained the ACLU as an ally to challenge wrongful convictions or the lack of due process in courts across the country. A growing militancy also denounced self-hatred, declared “Gay is Good,” and challenged the medical model that treated same-gender attraction like a disease as opposed to a social identity. Most importantly, the movement picketed, protested, published documents to change the sentiments of the wider public, and promoted public rallies to bring its causes and concerns out in the open.
Thus, with Stonewall in 1969 and the groups that came out of its wake, such as the GLF (Gay Liberation Front, an organization fighting oppression on multiple fronts), the GAA (Gay Activists Alliance, a single issue, rights-based group), and STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, found by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera), the politics of respectability was abandoned (or so it seemed), but not the “patriotic dissent.”
So, when retrenchment came with Anita Bryant’s Save the Children Campaign and a repeal of the Dade Country ban on anti-gay discrimination (1977) and when retrenchment also came with Proposition 6 (aka the Briggs’ initiative against gay and lesbian teachers in California in 1978), gay and lesbian activists responded with the first national march for queer rights in 1979. Furthermore, political dissent would continue beyond the reporting of the first AIDS cases in the 1980s. as in the protest demonstrations against the government’s inaction in response to the AIDS crisis by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Yet, even the founding of the watchdog group GLAAD (Gays and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation) in 1985 would be marked by a politics of respectability as GLAAD used media activism to mainstream the successor-iterations of the homophile movement into entrepreneurial, middle-class respectability. According to Heather Murray, with“[t]he trauma and dislocations of A.I.D.S. in the 1980s … [caused] … some gay activists felt the need to return to a strategy of respectability and increased attention to reformist rather than radical activism” (Murray 2010: x). Similarly, even the seeming openness of businesses and companies to sponsor Pride Parades or to be inclusive in hiring LGBTQ employees in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was often followed by those companies’ selection of a group of LGBTQ representatives who fit what is deemed as “respectable” cisgender images.
Thus, the words of Harry Hay, Jr. are worth considering as a critique of a politics of respectability. Speaking about the post-1953 Mattachine Society, he noted that they “were concerned with being seen as respectable—rather than self-respecting. They wanted to be dignified by professional ‘authorities’ and prestigious people, rather than by the more compelling dignity of group worth” (see Vaid 1995: 54). He himself had grown weary of the outside gaze.
The Case of the Community behind 1 Timothy
In offering a microhistory about the community behind 1 Timothy, I must make some disclaimers. Here, I presuppose that 1Timothy was written to a delegate, but that the delegate receives the instructions to help a larger audience such as those who would aspire to be a bishop or a deacon within what the writer calls the “household of God” (3:1-13, 15). Furthermore, the writer’s reference to a large group lies behind such expressions as “so that all may see your progress” (4:15) and “for in doing so you will save both yourself and your hearers” (4:16). Note as well the third person imperatives that refer to members of the church/assembly (5:9, 16[2], 17; 6:1, 2[2x]. The second person plural at the end of the letter (6:20), which is a feature of 2 Timothy (4:22) and Titus (cf. 3:15), also suggests a larger group with which the letter’s recipient must work (see also Towner 2006: 435; Bassler 1996: 122).
For the third microhistory, I do not pretend to offer an unassailable truth about a text that is the subject of great debate. Whether this text belongs to vintage jazz Paul or jazz fusion Paul is not my interest here. Whether this text is an intensification of a Paul that is arguably already patriarchal or a domestication of an erstwhile ostensibly egalitarian Paul is as well not the task that drives my interest. Some Pauline interpreters who accept 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36 as wholly Pauline would argue that Paul—even if he had an egalitarian ethos as noted in Galatians 3:28—was still largely patriarchal. Paul’s appeal to the patriarchal texts in Genesis 2 within his discussion of head veils also strikes some interpreters as anti-egalitarian (cf. 1 Cor 11). Thus, when some scholars notice the reference to the silencing of women in 1 Timothy 2:11, with its equally patriarchal attempts to legitimate the silence with appeals to Genesis 2 and 3, these scholars argue that the position of 1 Timothy is simply an intensification of an erstwhile already patriarchal Paul, whether Paul or one of his followers actually authored 1 Timothy and the other Pastorals. Other scholars argue, however, that the position of all the Pastorals appears to be a domestication of an arguably egalitarian Paul. That is, within undisputed Paul, Paul does not place limitations on women and their roles in the churches. Whether this text represents one side of a debate and the Acts of Paul and Thecla represents another is someone else’s call to make (see Krause 2004: 35; Solevåg 2013: 90). Finally, whether it is better to speak about this text as a collection of three works known as the Pastorals or simply to allow each letter to stand on its own is not germane to the scope of my interest.
Rather, I engage in a more modest undertaking. I suggest that behind the writer’s regulations is a concern about the outside gaze. Behind the patriarchal instructions about the dress and deportment of women (1 Tim 2:9-12) and behind the writer’s appeals to Genesis as a justification for such instructions (1Tim 2: 13-15) is a concern for what others outside of the writer’s community might think. To see the evidence of a concern about the outside gaze, though, a few words are in order about the letter’s overall interest in instructions. That every chapter of 1 Timothy deploys the diction of teaching suggests that the overall interest of the letter is one about the delegate’s role as a teacher or instructor. A chart (Chart 1) follows to show the frequency with which the writer sprinkles “teaching” diction.
If one adds to this matrix of teaching diction a list of “instructions” diction (based on the Greek
As a part of the aforementioned instructions, moreover, the writer begins by making statements on respectable behavior during worship (2:1-15) and in the households of leaders (3:1-13) who ultimately would lead members of the household of God (3:15; cf. 3:4-5). Thus, the “respectable” (
Next, as the writer continues the aforementioned instruction set, the writer repeatedly uses the Greek demonstrative
Thus, if one follows the matrix of teaching and instructions that provides the rhetorical scaffolding for the entire letter, the evidence that points to this outside gaze becomes clear. For example, in the writer’s request for prayers, the prayers are to be prayed for all people, with kings and other persons of preeminence explicitly listed (2:1-2). The writer sees such offering of prayers as necessary so that the audience can live a peaceful and quiet life with dignity or respect (
That the writer makes appeals to godliness or piety may also be an indicator of a concern for the outside gaze. As Christopher Hoklotubbe has argued, the writer’s use of the Greek word
Finally, 1 Timothy also includes an explicit appeal to outsiders. In 1 Timothy 3:7, where the writer speaks about a bishop or overseer as being above reproach or defamation (
It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that all outsiders or all persons outside of Christianity felt the way that some of its well-known social critics felt toward it, as told in the examples above. It is yet the case that most would have looked contemptuously toward Christianity based solely on the nature of the death of one of its important leaders. So, does the writer demand the writer’s community to adopt the well-known social virtues of the larger Greek and Roman societies as a form of shame-control, even though the values are from the outsiders? Is it the case that the women of the writer’s addressed community are being asked to accept domestication because the writer is concerned about shame-control? Is this a writer who has not yet grown weary of an outside gaze?
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, each community for which I have provided a microhistory must make its own decisions about a politics of respectability. Those decisions are often exceedingly difficult when one disaggregates a collective. That is, as we have learned from intersectionality theory (see Nash 2019), social identity is not determined solely by a single subject formation variable such as race, class, or gender, all of which are themselves socially constructed categories. Considerations of a person’s social identity in terms of only one of these analytical factors, then, entails the homogenization of social identity as if a person’s humanity were limited to only one so-called essentialist subject formation. Such considerations also lock social identity into simplistic dichotomies (Black and white; male and female; etc.) that deny both variation within an aggregate human grouping and obscure the power differentials that exist within a human grouping because within a system of domination and subordination the aggregate social grouping includes some persons whose other traits/features may be more valued than the traits/features of yet other persons belonging to the same social group.
Single analytical categorization, even if designed to redress the bias of research that fails to incorporate a select subordinate grouping, moreover, operates from an “additive linear” model as if the inclusion of a new subject overcomes the power dynamics that may yet inhere both for the traditionally “well-developed bodies of research” or for the new subject considered (McCall 2005: 1787). Furthermore, theorists of intersectionality recognize the interlocking nature of oppression. A person like the civil rights activist and later Episcopalian priest Pauli Murray faced multiple, interlocking forms of oppression. Murray is known in later years for her role in providing a legal basis behind the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end so-called “separate but equal” practices of discrimination and in providing a legal precedent for the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Reed v. Reed decision that extended the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to women. Yet, she was oppressed for being a woman (for which she was denied entrance into Columbia College in 1926) and oppressed for being black (for which she was denied entrance into the University of North Carolina in 1938). As many would learn years after her death, moreover, for the whole of her life she quietly dealt with what she herself calls her “queerness” and “betweenness” and what a recent biographer has called Murray’s “transgender identity” (Rosenberg 2017: 1). Thus, in an interlocking fashion, Murray spent time on “two crosses” or more.
What each marginalized group—in its various disaggregated forms—will need to consider, though, is how a politics of respectability, particularly a thinly layered one, often makes the marginalized group the problem and often leaves unchallenged systems that will continue to exclude those who seek acceptance into a larger group with hyper-normative standards. Why must the standard be the bluest eyes—seen in a Mary Jane candy wrapper (Morrison 2017: 50) or attributed to portraits of Jesus, the Galilean (Bailey 1998)? Why must white middle-class decorum or civility be the standard? Why must cisgendered, heteronormativity be the standard? Why must Rome’s notions of piety be the standards? To accept any of these standards is to accept the compounded messages, images, and iterations—the discursive framings—that have made these values seem unassailably natural, normal, and transcendental, though all of them are rooted in histories of power and domination. To do so is to accept as well the authoritarian force of those who assign definitions of normal and deviant and thus to concede to an “ideology of normalcy” (Betcher 2004, 82). Why should any of Pecola’s people internalize self-hatred, bleach out the loveliness of their true selves, and look at themselves as seen through the outside gaze, as if they have a “deficit” (Yancy 2017: 169)? Should not Pecola’s people—those who live to tell about their lived experience anyway—instead offer counternarratives to the discourses that create the standards of the outside gaze? Interrogating the outside gaze will be a complex task, but is not that to be preferred rather than to allow one other Pecola to chase an Imitation of Life fantasy and thus step over into madness? Have not we all grown weary of the outside gaze?