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Overview
A New York Times Notable Book
Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects: his mother, a self-described "Negress," who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author's own social and intellectual formation.
Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.
Synopsis
A New York Times Notable Book
Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects: his mother, a self-described "Negress," who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author's own social and intellectual formation.
Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.
Salon - Courtney Weaver
Hilton Als, a staff writer for The New Yorker, bills his fascinating-and maddening new book as part memoir, part psychological study, and part sociopolitical manifesto. It's surely all three, an attempt by a gay black man to view the multiple roles society gives black women through the prism of his own experience.
Als' interest in the experience of black women, perhaps the most marginalized group in society, goes beyond identification. The Women is not only a study of what he calls "the Negress" but also of women's relationships to each other-as well as the identity of the gay male. In exploration of these ideas, Als examines three significant "Negresses": his first mentor and lover, Owen Dodson; his mother; and the queen of all "fag hags," Dorothy Dean.
"Negress" is a harsh word, Als writes, and it's clear his meaning is ironic. But the usage is deliberate, underlining the stereotypes of black womanhood, including the "good neighbor" and the martyred wife/girlfriend/mother. Being a Negress also entails a particular brand of humor: "Well, at least we won't have to look at those two ugly feet anymore," Als' sister cracked, when their mother's leg was amputated. Their mother laughed.
Als uses The Negress as a springboard to explore other, more complex ideas. The fact that Als describes himself as a Negress indicates he feels a stranger affiliation with women than he does with a race. His examination of the "fag hag" as personified by Dorothy Dean-a New York writer, pundit, and all-around bad girl in the '60s and '70s-is fascinating. "The 'fag hag's' marriage to her constant gay male companion is a marriage sanctified not by physical love but by Humor and Verbal Punishment," Als writes. It is a relationship marked by anxiety: the gay man's jealousy of the woman's power to attract men, and the woman's fear that she will lose her friend to sexual desire. It's here that the book transcends the narrow focus on the Negress-that Dean was black seems almost inconsequential.
The Women is frustrating, incisive and thoroughly entertaining. You may not agree with Als' theories: his assertion that jealousy between women precludes any chance of real friendship is particularly galling. But his voice is so honest, articulate, and intelligent that it's worth putting up with a bit of presumptuousness.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Inventive and daring...a fascinating sensibility."—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times"The Women is a book to read several times, noting how its application grows broader and broader upon consideration. Like all truly original writing, it comes to no conclusions, imposes no creed and sets the reader free to ponder. Writing of people who limited themselves and died of it, Mr. Als has overcome limits...On the strength of his vision, he has managed to enter those 'expansive interior places' his mentor avoided. One hopes that he will just keep going."—Andrea Lee, The New York Times Book Review
Courtney Weaver
Hilton Als, a staff writer for The New Yorker, bills his fascinating-and maddening new book as part memoir, part psychological study, and part sociopolitical manifesto. It's surely all three, an attempt by a gay black man to view the multiple roles society gives black women through the prism of his own experience.
Als' interest in the experience of black women, perhaps the most marginalized group in society, goes beyond identification. The Women is not only a study of what he calls "the Negress" but also of women's relationships to each other-as well as the identity of the gay male. In exploration of these ideas, Als examines three significant "Negresses": his first mentor and lover, Owen Dodson; his mother; and the queen of all "fag hags," Dorothy Dean.
"Negress" is a harsh word, Als writes, and it's clear his meaning is ironic. But the usage is deliberate, underlining the stereotypes of black womanhood, including the "good neighbor" and the martyred wife/girlfriend/mother. Being a Negress also entails a particular brand of humor: "Well, at least we won't have to look at those two ugly feet anymore," Als' sister cracked, when their mother's leg was amputated. Their mother laughed.
Als uses The Negress as a springboard to explore other, more complex ideas. The fact that Als describes himself as a Negress indicates he feels a stranger affiliation with women than he does with a race. His examination of the "fag hag" as personified by Dorothy Dean-a New York writer, pundit, and all-around bad girl in the '60s and '70s-is fascinating. "The 'fag hag's' marriage to her constant gay male companion is a marriage sanctified not by physical love but by Humor and Verbal Punishment," Als writes. It is a relationship marked by anxiety: the gay man's jealousy of the woman's power to attract men, and the woman's fear that she will lose her friend to sexual desire. It's here that the book transcends the narrow focus on the Negress-that Dean was black seems almost inconsequential.
The Women is frustrating, incisive and thoroughly entertaining. You may not agree with Als' theories: his assertion that jealousy between women precludes any chance of real friendship is particularly galling. But his voice is so honest, articulate, and intelligent that it's worth putting up with a bit of presumptuousness.
— Salon
Publishers Weekly
"I knew I was a Negress... [when] I saw myself in my mother's eyes; the reflection showed a teenage girl, insecure, frightened and vengeful." Thus does Als, a black man, introduce the story of his mother's life and his intense identification with it, which, he feels, affected the direction of his sexuality. It is the first of three powerful essays on race and sexual identity in the black community. The other two essays explore the life of a legendary black "fag hag" and the culture of what Als dubs the gay "nigerati." Als, a staff writer for the New Yorker, does a highwire act, perched between an anguished portrait of his mother and himself and a dispassionate examination of a segment of black urban culture whose males feel they have two role models "bad niggers" or victimized mothers. Both postures often coalesce in an ambivalent mix of pride and humiliation. Although he deals with familiar themes of black attitudes toward color, white values and perceptions, his vision is both original and wrenching. Altogether, this is a provocative, engrossing vision of both homosexuality and black culture.Library Journal
Als's first book reads not unlike an extended essay in The New Yorker, where he works as a staff writer (he also edited the catalog for the controversial 1994-95 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art"). The predominant motif of this autobiographical tract is what Als calls the Negress. As a gay African American man, an "auntie man" (a term his West Indian mother uses), Als both identifies and competes with his mother, sister, and other representations of matriarchal society. His intriguing memoir is deeply felt and beautifully written with provocative digressions, such as a tirade on the questionable treatment of Malcolm X's mother in the Autobiography of Malcolm X and a mini biography of Dorothy Dean (an important figure in New York gay society). Recommended for gay studies and African American studies collections. Janice E. Braun, Mills Coll., Oakland, Cal.Sarah Schulman
The Women is a collection of three essays. Quite different in voice and style, they resonate in a discomforting way as the author challenges and rechallenges his own position of simultaneous privilege and marginalization...The soul of the book is Al's self-identification as a Negress, a kind of black woman who refuses to be contained. And yet he is not a woman. This tension, between feeling and being, is the soul of Als's creative process. He exposes it with great courage and giving, even when it becomes infuriating...
— The Advocate
Kirkus Reviews
Examining the images of "the Negress" and the "good Negro" as they have shaped the lives of several remarkable men and women, including Fulbright scholar and "fag hag" Dorothy Dean, poet Owen Dodson, and the author himself, this extended essay combines riveting subject matter with an original critical approach.
According to New Yorker staff writer Als, the image of the Negress, of a woman of color living out a clichéd life of poverty, self-abnegation, and Christian forbearance, has been a deforming and resilient presence in the American imagination for a long time. She is a familiar figure in popular culture. On a personal level, Als explores the history of (and his identification with) the Negress he knew most intimately, his mother, who donned a cap of smiling servitude when she emigrated to this country from Barbados and whose "long, slow, public death was an advertisement for the life she had lived." Dorothy Dean, on the other hand, was a brilliant and difficult woman who graduated from Radcliffe in the 1950s, at a time when black women still had few choices. Dean attempted to subvert the image of the self-sacrificing Negress, but could never entirely escape it. Greatly gifted but filled with doubt, she came to New York, sampled and abandoned a series of professions, and surrounded herself with upper-class white gay men, fortifying her self-hatred with relationships based on sarcasm and gossip. Als also writes about the sexual relationship he had from ages 15 to 19 with the poet Owen Dodson, who was older than his mother "but just as committed to the experience of pain." Dodson sacrificed his wit on the page for the acceptable oppressed voice of the New (andpublishable) Negro and drank himself into a self- destructive old age.
What makes this debut book so compelling is the author's ability to combine extreme honesty with sharp critical discourse, his willingness to explore the shadows of complex lives, including his own, that challenge clichés about race and gender without ever sacrificing intellectual rigor.