Sissy Insurgencies

In <i>Sissy Insurgencies</i> 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.