In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.

Marlon B. Ross is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era and The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry.

Preamble. Sissies Everywhere  ix
1. Can the Sissy Be Insurgent?  1
2. Sissy Housekeeping: Cleanliness, Gender Dissonance, and the Spoils of Political Patronage at Washington's Tuskegee  51
3. Un/fit Manliness: Evading Masculine Brutality in James Weldon Johnson's Sissy Narratives  111
4. Baldwin's Sissy Heroics  165
5. Sissy but Not Gay: Anatomy of the Post-Civil Rights Straight Black Sissy  233
6. Gay but Not Sissy: Race and the Queering of the Professional Athlete  283
Postscript. Whatever Happened or Will Happen to the Sissy-Boy?  343
Notes  349
Bibliography  403
Index  433