I love that you all are talking about Her
One of the things I really like about the book is that it gives a broad spectrum of Black women's sexualities in an earlier Detroit.
A lot of the texts from the 1990s stigmatize bisexual characters for not being 100% gay/lesbian.
Her is really showing a range of black female sexuality, and Charlotte is a character who challenges any sort of "good=lesbian, bad=bisexual/straigth". She's not leaving King at the end of the novel to "become a real lesbian." She's a complicated woman with a complicated life, and she's holding on to all the parts of her.
I love Lizzie and Laphonya, and their complicated histories. And Laphonya all butched up for Girls Night In, singing down and dirty blues.
I love how on Girls Night In, all kindsa women get out and have themselves a good time.
Ricky/Wintergreen with her shadows and her ruined feet.
The irony of Charlotte and Ricky being right across the street from one another.
On the other side, of course, there's Monkey Dee, a bisexual-but-mostly-gay pimp who has a deep hatred for women. I don't really know what to do with him, but let Muhanji paint her whole picture, without it necessarily fitting anything I want it to do.
One of the things I really like about the book is that it gives a broad spectrum of Black women's sexualities in an earlier Detroit.
A lot of the texts from the 1990s stigmatize bisexual characters for not being 100% gay/lesbian.
Her is really showing a range of black female sexuality, and Charlotte is a character who challenges any sort of "good=lesbian, bad=bisexual/straigth". She's not leaving King at the end of the novel to "become a real lesbian." She's a complicated woman with a complicated life, and she's holding on to all the parts of her.
I love Lizzie and Laphonya, and their complicated histories. And Laphonya all butched up for Girls Night In, singing down and dirty blues.
I love how on Girls Night In, all kindsa women get out and have themselves a good time.
Ricky/Wintergreen with her shadows and her ruined feet.
The irony of Charlotte and Ricky being right across the street from one another.
On the other side, of course, there's Monkey Dee, a bisexual-but-mostly-gay pimp who has a deep hatred for women. I don't really know what to do with him, but let Muhanji paint her whole picture, without it necessarily fitting anything I want it to do.
2 comments:
Where you able to find more copies of Her??
The paragraphs at the top of pages 170 and 174, on the loss of black women's sexuality and the problematic history of black women respectively, tell pretty directly what a lot of this class is about. The suggestion that 'what was natural' became lost and looking, as you wrote, at the Lizzie & Laphonya relationship and then the compromises and adaptations people make to 'survive' was intense. But my favorite line is when King Solomon talks to his wife Miss Charlotte about her relationship with Rickie and says "If I catch ya with a man, I'll kill ya!" That scene really showed the love he had and the way he could accept and live with a reality that would always keep him on the outside. Really, all the main characters where amazingly complex, except for Monkey Dee who seemed a caricature but still he was interesting.
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