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Tryin' to Scrub that "Death Pussy"1 Clean Again: The Pleasures of Domesticating HIV/AIDS in Pearl Cleage's Fiction
- African American Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 50, Number 2, Summer 2017
- pp. 153-168
- 10.1353/afa.2017.0019
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Examining Pearl Cleage's What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997), I read through pleasure and politics to explore how HIV/AIDS enters into the lives of black heterosexual women in narrative discourse. Threading disability studies and black "quare" theory, I investigate the pleasures of domesticating and converting the "threatening" poz character—integrating a perceived threat back into the social order as a mouthpiece for heterosexual, able-bodied normality. Because this domestication is not narratively casual or politically neutral, I highlight the investments, benefits, pleasures, and dangers of these narratives and discuss how they impact our understandings of blackness and disability.