A Queer Enough Love: Gwendolyn Brooks's "Women, Yes"

Abstract

This article locates what I call a "queer enough" orientation to and love of ordinary life in two of Gwendolyn Brooks's early works, Annie Allen (1949) and Maud Martha (1953), which have yet to be examined as a pair. Far from queering Brooks's two alliteratively-named Black women characters (Annie Allen and Maud Martha), or re-describing them by way of an existing understanding of the "queer" as broadly marginal, excessive, and opposed to normal life, I read for what we have not thought to recognize as queer at all in their domestic, unheroic, and at times impoverished lives. Brooks's characters, I argue, are not queer in the possessive sense of bearing a non-normative erotic and/or sexual identity, and they are not, on this same basis, straight. A nuanced account of Brooks's ordinary heroines, I argue, demands not only that we further stretch the boundaries of inclusion for the queer, but also that we question our investments in a queerness rendered legible by sexual alterity as much as by resistance to the normative.