Black Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies

PART FOUR

PART FOUR Negotiating Systemic and Personal Stresses Part IV considers how members of the Black community make sense of and negotiate varying degrees of stress. Many of the groups depicted are sexual minorities, some are impoverished, and others are Blacks involved in marginalized occupations . All have experienced trauma that can directly or indirectly be associated with sexualities and to which current societal structures have been unable to concertedly respond. In addition to vividly describing experiences, the authors provide critical contexts such that readers can grasp the compounded nature of attempts to cope with stresses from a disenfranchised frame of reference. Although three of the chapters focus on stressful encounters, the final piece illustrates how such experiences can be overcome for personal empowerment. “Blacks and Racial Appraisals: Gender, Race, and Intraracial Rape,” by C. Shawn McGuffey, examines both the mainstream trauma literature to explain differences between White and Black rape survivors as well as Black feminist literature that favors a structural framework for understanding survivor accounts. McGuffey’s results are based on in-depth interviews with thirty-four Black women and men who are survivors of intraracial rape. His special focus is how an understanding of race informed victims’ accounts of their rape and how ideas about both Black culture and social structure are employed in their rape narratives. McGuffey shows that each of the rape victims viewed themselves as structurally at the bottom of a hierarchy of power: for some because they were Black, for others because they were both women and Black, and for others because they were gay and Black. These social structural understandings of one’s position relative to more power- 270 PART FOUR ful groups were important for the victims, providing a rationale for why they were powerless and had been raped in the first place, and also why others would not take their side in confronting or prosecuting the rapist. This emphasis on structural inequality was consistent with writings by Black feminist writers such as Hill Collins, Crenshaw, Davis, and others, who emphasize a hierarchy of power as central to sexual violence. However, McGuffey shows us that the victim’s narratives also drew upon another important idea in explaining their victimization, namely Black culture. Combining personal testimony with convincing analyses, McGuffey demonstrates that people who suffer intraracial rape feel victimized in three senses: the original physical and emotional trauma; as victims of a social structure or hierarchy that labels them as unworthy and therefore as open to victimization and/or as lacking the standing to complain; and as culturally disempowered, unable to respond with outrage because their condition is defined as un-Black, or because complaining itself is seen as treacherous to the Black community or a slur upon Black manhood . Just as earlier chapters talked about sexualities being silenced, and experiences and memories being erased, here McGuffey shows that sexual victimization entails silencing and repression that operate both through victims’ understanding of racial and gender hierarchy and through victims’ understandings about dominant Black cultural beliefs about sexuality. Results demonstrate how the survivors elicit cultural and structural interpretations of trauma. This dual interlocking process is referred to as a “racial appraisal” or a form of social comparison. The author suggests that such appraisals reflect a specific way of understanding how such Black rape survivors use race—alongside gender, sexuality, and social class—to construct their interpretations. According to Robert Peterson in “When Secrets Hurt: HIV Disclosure and the Stress Paradigm,” research suggests that stress concepts can be uniquely beneficial to understanding how persons experience HIV. After an HIV-positive diagnosis, individuals may face stressors, such as experiences and perceptions of homophobia, marginalization of drug users, discrimination, and general stigma, that contribute to overall levels of stress. Peterson examines the influence of stigma and reviews studies concerning stress patterns to better understand the functions of disclosure as a stressor in general and in the Black community in particular. He attempts to explain how disclosure is used as a research variable NEGOTIATING SYSTEMIC AND PERSONAL STRESSES 271 across the stress paradigm as a stressor, as a coping process or mechanism, and as an outcome. In “Black Female Sex Workers: Racial Identity, Black Feminist Consciousness, and Acculturated Stress,” Stephanie L. Tatum provides a portrait of Black female sex workers’ acculturated stress from Black feminist and social psychological frameworks . The intent is to raise awareness about Black female sex workers to eliminate...