Black Intimacies: A Gender Perspective on Families and Relationships ‐ by Shirley A. Hill

Abstract

Intimacies: A Gender Perspective on Families and Relationships. Shirley. Hill. New York: AltaMira Press 2005. 246 pp. ISBN 0-7591-0152-3$24.95 (paper). In Intimacies: A Gender Perspective on Families And Relationships, Shirley A. Hill applies a gender lens to the multiple systems of oppression which impact the lives of African Americans. Specifically, she investigates how gender is understood, defined, practiced, and perpetuated by people and how it affects their everyday experiences. Using a postmodern analysis, she considers the static social construction of identity, womanhood, and cultural norms and considers how these shape the intimate lives of people. Hill challenges the idea of a historically and contemporarily universal concept of intimate and familial experiences for African Americans. Hill offers a nuanced description of the struggle for civil rights in the mid-20th century. During this time, Americans struggled together for civil rights, despite differing interests that represented the heterogeneity of class, gender, and skin tone within this population. However, the success of the Civil Rights Movement upset unity and exacerbated the diversity that had historically characterized families and communities. Race, she insists, is no longer a unifying factor for African Americans. Intraracial postmodern diversities around race, social class, age, political allegiance, and gender more aptly characterize the experiences of people in the United States historically and in the present. The interaction of these multiple identities and interests presently contests the saliency of using the term Black as a universal category of analysis for understanding issues of family and intimacy within the group. Hill argues that neither cultural nor structural paradigms can adequately explain past and current high rates of separation, divorce, and singlemother households. Rather, these phenomena are best understood by simultaneously considering the role of human agency, ethos, structural opportunity, and constraints. Following Emancipation, women resisted hegemonic ideas of gender practices and family formation. Slavery and discrimination created structured obstacles to socioeconomic success for African Americans. Yet, it simultaneously demystified hegemonic gender and marriage ideals (i.e., a crucial link between marriage, sexuality, and childbirth) and prioritized the work roles of women. Consequently, women had the autonomy to decide on varying family formations. Yet and still, Hill suggests that racial oppression did not create a monolithic family form. Middle-class African American women, for example, set the trend for combining employment and married family life in die decades following Emancipation. However, poor and working-class women chose female-centered family structures because their partners were unable to provide them with economic security. …