Pleasure in the news : African American readership and sexuality in the Black press /

Pleasure in the news : African American readership and sexuality in the Black press /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Gallon, Kim T., author.
Imprint:	Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2020]
Description:	x, 200 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.
Language:	English
Series:	The new Black studies series New Black studies series.
Subject:	African American newspapers -- History -- 20th century. Sex -- Press coverage -- United States -- History -- 20th century. Sex role -- Press coverage -- United States -- History -- 20th century. Press and politics -- United States -- History -- 20th century. African American newspapers. Press and politics. United States. History.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12413557

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780252043222 0252043227 9780252085093 0252085094 9780252052101
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	"Throughout the twentieth century, the black press (alongside the black church) served as one of the most venerable black institutions. As such a respected site, the black press certainly wielded important influence on the way African Americans viewed sexuality and shaped sexual identities. What happens, then, when we take the sexy, unsavory side of the black newspaper business and look at sensational and tabloid journalism as valuable and worthy source material for understanding the black press and its influence? Kim T. Gallon explores that very question by using sensational news coverage as well as readers's letters to the editor to historicize black sexuality. In doing so, Gallon constructs a history of African American sexuality and modernity predicated on the relationship between the black press and its readers between 1925 and 1950--the vibrant interwar era of jazz journalism, the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New Negro Movement. Gallon demonstrates that sexual discourse in black newspapers highlighted intraracial class and gender tensions that reshaped African Americans' struggles for racial progress and uplift in the early twentieth century. The black press, in this context, served as a public sphere for modern conceptions and discussions about sexuality. Coverage of bathing beauty pageants, divorce trials and sex scandals, interracial romance and male homosexuality coexisted with ideas and representations dedicated to transforming the African American public image into one that could help African American leaders make the case for full citizenship. The simultaneity of sexual images with racial uplift in the black press demonstrated that modern African Americans possessed the capacity to be at once respectable and sexual. To this end, the early twentieth-century black press functioned as more than a simple advocate for social change relative to racial progress. Rather, it embodied core tenets of American modernity and provided a space for African Americans to work out modern class and gender tensions through sexuality"--
Other form:	Online version: Gallon, Kim T., Pleasure in the news Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2020. 9780252052101

Description
Summary:	Critics often chastised the twentieth-century black press for focusing on sex and scandal rather than African American achievements. In Pleasure in the News , Kim Gallon takes an opposing stance--arguing that African American newspapers fostered black sexual expression, agency, and identity. <p>Gallon discusses how journalists and editors created black sexual publics that offered everyday African Americans opportunities to discuss sexual topics that exposed class and gender tensions. While black churches and black schools often encouraged sexual restraint, the black press printed stories that complicated notions about respectability. Sensational coverage also expanded African American women's sexual consciousness and demonstrated the tenuous position of female impersonators, black gay men, and black lesbians in early twentieth African American urban communities.</p> <p>Informative and empowering, Pleasure in the News redefines the significance of the black press in African American history and advancement while shedding light on the important cultural and social role that sexuality played in the power of the black press.</p>
Physical Description:	x, 200 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.
Bibliography:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:	9780252043222 0252043227 9780252085093 0252085094 9780252052101