Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (review)

The thesis of Jenkins's book is derived through a sequential process. It is that a shroud of secrecy and repression has historically surrounded black intimacy and sexuality. The shroud has been dictated, in great measure, by the black middle and upper classes' adoption of a Victorian propriety toward intimacy and sexuality, propelled by the desire of these black elites to debunk the dominant group's stereotypes of blacks as savage, crude, and uncivil. In turn, black sexuality has been encompassed in a term that Jenkins coins, the "salvific wish," which she defines as "a black, largely, female, and generally middle class desire—a longing to protect or save black women, and black communities more generally, from narratives of sexual and familial pathology, through the embrace of conventional bourgeois propriety in the arenas of sexuality and domesticity" (14). The salvific wish has been an attempt to create a safe space for black intimacy, rather than embrace the vulnerabilities accompanying an unbridled sexuality.

As her thesis unfolds, however, Jenkins provides a not so subtle critiquing of the salvific wish as being unrealistic, since, in her view, sexuality can never be made safe emotionally, psychologically, or socially, for "to enter the realm of the sexual, the erotic, is to take a risk—even for those already-at-risk black bodies that have the most to gain from trying" (183).

In advancing the notion that blacks should embrace intimacy and sexuality in their fullness, Jenkins allows for homosexuality to be included, for, after all, in her view, homosexuality has historically been aligned with sexual aberration, making it a part of the same victimage of the dominant group's stereotyping as historical views of black savagery, crudeness, and uncivility. In short, it all was labeled as aberrant (my term).

Jenkins's thesis is finally rendered complete by her clear noting of the irony that surrounds the black salvific wish, and that is that not only does it entail a repression of the fullness of black intimacy and sexuality, but it also allows the adoption of the dominant group's Victorian propriety, allowing the dominant group to exercise yet another means of control over black lives and sensibilities. Jenkins portrays the black elites, especially women, as those who sacrifice full intimacy and sexuality on the altar of seeking to maintain a respectable image in the eyes of the dominant group, while, most sadly of all, failing to realize that in so doing, they are still unliberated in not being able to plot their own course of identity, one that would allow them to unapologetically inhabit a liberated self, with comfort. And yet, Jenkins complicates her sequential thesis by explaining that the purpose of Private Lives, Proper Relations is to not only call attention to the regulating of black intimacy and sexuality, but to call attention to, and to problematize, "how intimate behavior has always been part of how black people situate themselves as political subjects" (29). Jenkins argues that in this way, white power can be viewed productively (for whites) in allowing blacks to participate in their own victimization in socially significant ways. So, Jenkins would argue for elite black women's need to realize that they, like the dominant group, are guardians of black sexual oppression. However, black elites are shown as being uncritical guardians of their own oppression, when, in fact, they have the social leverage to do otherwise.

And yet, the salvific wish does not represent the entire black race, according to Jenkins, so, in reading her, the reader has to make a necessary shift to a dynamic frame of thinking, leaving behind the linear one, as Jenkins juxtaposes the salvific wish of black elites with the external stereotypes of the black proletariats, many of whom have Southern rural roots. In terms of intimacy and sexuality, black commoners are viewed as having less restrictive and less proprietary sexual engagement practices, positing themselves as easy prey to the dominant stereotype of blacks as savage, crude, and uncivil. Not surprising for a scholar...