Respectability politics extends beyond Black women to nationalism and bodily self-control
Evidence
For a discussion of respectability as an oppositional discourse for the purpose of black nationalist resistance in the late 1960s, see E. Frances White, “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African-American Nationalism,” Journal of Women’s History, 2 (Spring 1990): 76. Although not focusing on African Americans, a growing body of literature discusses respectability from the perspectives of gender, sexuality, and nationalism. For a gender analysis of “respectability” as orderliness and bodily self-control, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 136-138; also see the connection between respectability and nationalism (European, especially German) in George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985), 4-5, 9-10; see also Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations, 37 (Winter 1992): 11-17.
— Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 1548
Categorization
DEFINE: Shows the coined concept’s scholarly genealogy and how later theorists broadened it to gender, sexuality, and nationalism.
XREF: Connects to Mosse’s Nationalism and Sexuality and Chakrabarty’s postcolonial critique of historical narratives about non-modern peoples. — connects to: The politics of respectability required blacks to police their own behavior against racist stereotype — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 900; Respectability politics created status hierarchies inside the black working class — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 930; The respectability campaign rhetorically elevated working-class domestic servants as race exemplars — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 997 (+6 more)