Withstanding the Weather: Black Women Rethinking Dispassionate Objectivity

Christine “Xine” Yao (UBC) “In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone,” says Audre Lorde on the need for black self-love. Taking Lorde’s stone with Sharpe’s weather, I read Black women’s texts... [ view full abstract ]

Christine “Xine” Yao (UBC)

 “In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone,” says Audre Lorde on the need for black self-love. Taking Lorde’s stone with Sharpe’s weather, I read Black women’s texts for how unfeeling defies stereotypes of affective excess and emotional labor bound to white feelings. Attending to what Rusert calls “fugitive science,” I trace Black women’s affective strategies in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroyand writings by the first Black women doctors Rebecca Lee Crumpler and Rebecca J Cole through dispassionate scientific objectivity. By foregrounding Black feminist thought I intervene in the anti-social turn and affect theory. 

Black women novelists played with the sentimental marriage plot: duCille argues they redefined themselves through “passionlessness.” I rethink “passionlessness” in relation to “dispassionate” objectivity.  According to da Silva, “affectability” is constructed as the property of non-white others in science; I suggest that reclaiming unfeeling demonstrates political and affective disaffection. In this regard, Crumpler’s medical text and Lee’s thesis adapt scientific objectivity to create their own authority. Finally, I read Iola Leroy for “withstanding the weather” in science and romance: Iola refuses to love white Dr. Gresham and chooses Dr. Latimer, demonstrating that strategic unfeeling toward whiteness can make transformative Black love possible.