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The myth of the "angry Black woman" has been built over generations through clever rhetoric and oppressive social policy. Here, Rousseau explores the continued impact of labeling and stereotyping on the development of policies that lead to the construction of national, racial, and gender identities for Black women.
Black Woman s Burden will likely inform future reproductive rights research in considering the relevance of social rhetoric, and political and economic climates in the examination of women s experiences. It is that rare book that marries political economy with the reproductive rights of an oppressed class. Once more we see in her brilliant work that the personal experiences have political and historical antecedents. Despite the fact that black women are the most dedicated, educated, and stable members of the black community, they remain the most devalued and stigmatized group among the panorama of sub-groups in the United States.
This book explores how a predatory political and economic system operates to deprive her of control over her body, a condition that has existed since her introduction to the new world. This book is worth our reading and, more importantly, needs our action to redress these acts of oppression that remain a fundamental part of her life. In Black Woman s Burden, Professor Rousseau deploys a cogent historical materialist analysis to Black women s sexual and reproductive histories.
Centrally, her point of departure is political economic, articulating Black women s historical relations with the capitalist state. Herein is rooted, she argues, the regulation of Black women s reproduction and resistance to such regulation. Rousseau makes quite a compelling case. Or enter your phone number, customer service of fado Password must be at least 6 characters , is not allowed longer than 30 characters, including numbers and letters.
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Other Sellers. The paucity of sexuality data gathered in the present investigation raises several methodological questions, such as: are the minimal narratives that we were able to draw from respondents a product of the challenges of collecting data on the topic of sexuality in older age? And, if so, what were the challenges?
Black Woman's Burden examines the historical endeavors to regulate Black female sexuality and reproduction in the United States through methods of. In Black Woman's Burden: Commodifying Black Reproduction, author Nicole Rousseau argues that black women occupy a unique space in the.
What could be the best approach to a topic that is so profoundly intimate, and how might researchers overcome the aforementioned obstacles? In the present section, we have succinctly discussed these topics and have attempted to provide potential solutions so that interested researchers will be equipped to avoid running into the same challenges.
First, it must be kept in mind that, in general, many ethnic minority groups do not trust researchers. Recently, Katz [ 56 ] stated that the fallout from the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee included a longstanding national belief that African Americans would refuse to become research study participants. Also, the concept of having multiple partners sponsor a proposed research project could yield success. Without having these strategies in place, it is hard for researchers to create a situation in which African American women would feel comfortable discussing intimate sexual issues. Also, maybe the measures and the procedures that we used such as a short, structured interview protocol administered with a few other assessment tools usually in a public place, with limited time available might have been a deterrent to sexual disclosure in our study.
On the other hand, our research assistants interacted with our respondents with a research agenda, having to collect data for a university-sponsored project that was not previously known to the participants, nor sponsored by an African American organization or an African American health provider. In research on the sexuality of African American women, Rose approached her interviewees as an open process centering on their sexual experiences and reflections, as well as their perceptions of societal issues relating to race and gender.
She made sure not to use a fixed list of questions, choosing instead a conversational style, and asked research participants the reasons why they agreed to participate in sexuality-focused research.
This last question, although ideal, is not easily applicable to small sex studies conducted by RAs such as our investigation, in which finding willing participants was a hard task. In the case of our RAs, asking willing respondents to articulate their reasons for wanting to participate in the study could have provoked the undesirable response of withdrawing from the research project, thus it was not mentioned.
Moreover, our interview protocol did not have a developmental structure. Interestingly, her respondents often offered stories covering the aforementioned topics well before she mentioned them. When comparing her research approach to ours, in addition to the series of limitations already discussed, we faced additional constraints that precluded us from adopting a comprehensive model of interviewing.
Therefore, another strategy to be implemented in future research is to offer the opportunity for African American older women to eventually locate their stories in published manuscripts. This could be very rewarding, as respondents would likely feel honored and proud of their research participation. They could show to their loved ones that they using a safe pseudonym contributed to important research. In the case of our study, we did provide a certificate of completion of the research to each respondent, but did not have in place a mechanism for creating pseudonyms, nor did we tell participants that they could have seen their revelations in press of course, with the latter being carefully disguised to protect their anonymity.
Indeed, cohort differences could make it even harder to engage our target population in sexuality-focused disclosure. Concerning methodological challenges related to sexuality research on older women in particular, themes of silence and invisibility have tended to dominate sexuality in later life [ 58 ].
We as researchers must engage in debates around methodological issues of researching sexuality in older age.
For example, in a qualitative study of women over the age of 70, Jones [ 59 ] found that many participants were concerned about the potential for misunderstanding and miscommunication regarding sex and sexuality. Successful research approaches to address this issue included to establish a shared meaning at the beginning of the research encounter between researchers and participants and to use common colloquial language familiar to the respondents.
Also, according to Jones, individual and telephone interviewing were preferred over group interviews due to the perceived sensitive nature of the questions asked during the interviews.
Some respondents favored the idea of focus groups as a way to empower participants to discuss sexuality and aging through support and encouragement. Moreover, participants felt that knowledge of the questions prior to data collection would be helpful and empowering. In future studies, researchers should consider whether individual versus group or telephone interviews, as well as focus groups, would be the best way to collect data for their sexuality-focused research projects. Perhaps, when conducting research involving sensitive topics targeting older African American women as well as older women of other ethnic backgrounds , survey research in which anonymity of the respondents is maintained or assured could significantly improve the response rate and content.
Respondents might be more open to expressing their opinion regarding these sensitive topics when completing surveys than in face-to-face or even in telephone interviews. Another one of our potential methodological challenges was that maybe older African American women prefer disclosing sexual topics to professionals who are not young RAs.
The desire to have more mature professionals who specialize in the gerontology and the health field conduct the interviews rather than students may have held back the participants in our study from providing intimate details on their sexuality. In this regard, Hahn [ 60 ] discussed full disclosure from the participants of a study of year-old women who lived alone in their own residences.
Thus, their research participants may have revealed details about their sexuality based on the belief that the study was conducted by experts in the field of sexuality research. On the other end, in our study, the RAs were typically in their early 20s and had a limited amount of training in sexuality. Moreover, ethnicity is a known potential confounding variable in the interview process, with respondents giving socially desirable answers to interviewers of other races, except when the interviewers occupy a higher status role [ 61 ].
Could educational status have played a similar role in our study, if research participants had the perception that the interviewees were of a different socio-economic status and thus felt intimidated? This latter point conflicts with the prior discussion on expertise and maturity, but it is nonetheless a factor to consider.
These issues, in addition to the methodological concerns discussed earlier in this section, might have played a significant role in our study. In sum, based on our experience, employing young RAs who a have an often-higher financial status than the older African American women interviewed, b are using a short, structured interview protocol without follow-up options for each question, c have limited time to complete the sexuality-focused interview, and d administer the research assessment materials including the interview typically in public places such as libraries, is not the best way to induce sexual disclosure in African American older women.
Moreover, enslaved women were painted as overtly sexual and amoral animals, with natural inclinations for domestic and field labor, which reified the abusive system. It is possible that this history contributed to why the older African American women in the present study were very reserved about sharing information concerning their sexuality.
Likely due also to some of the methodological challenges discussed above, our respondents provided brief, yet revealing answers to sexuality questions in one-on-one interviews with RAs of the same gender and race yet much younger in age than the respondents. Four major themes that emerged from the content analysis were identified and discussed; nobody reported having any sexual problem.
Employing her theory of historical womanism, Rousseau argues black women have served a vital role as producers and reproducers of the labor force. Black men and women, access to African-American intellectual and political traditions, feminist and otherwise, remained elusive. On occasion, they attempted unionization Terborg-Penn The disappearance of well-paid manufacturing jobs for Black working-class men suggests that young African-American women view the dual-income, working- class family as a hoped-for, albeit difficult-to-achieve, option. David Fort Godshalk. In: Katz R, Warren R, editors.
Nevertheless, would older African American women be likely to seek professional help if they perceived that their sexual functioning was impaired? To answer this question, we must consider that, although some older adults continue to be sexually active well into later life, health care professionals seldom address sexual functioning with older patients who, in turn, rarely raise sexual concerns with a health care provider. People 45 and older report that books — not health professionals — are their primary source of sex information and, as already noted, older women are particularly reluctant to seek treatment for physical conditions that are impacting their sexuality adversely [ 45 ].
The cause could be any of the above-mentioned factors, including a sense of privacy especially valued within the African American community, wherein secrecy has historically been a necessary requirement for survival. Social variables such as a widespread propensity to equate aging with senility and poor health, as well as an age-related decline in both beauty and a positive sense of self, could further complicate this picture.
These ageist attitudes are likely to apply to older African American women as well. In future research, it would be very interesting to identify the creative ways through which some older African American women are able to counter the multiple negative pressures that are typically inscribed on their sexuality, and how they manage to nonetheless feel empowered in their sexual expression. Perhaps, although still unbeknown to researchers such as ourselves, many older African American women have found innovative ways to integrate their sexual desire with sexual activity within their lives, as sexual pleasure is a main component of integral sexual health [ 63 ].
These women would provide powerful role models for future generations of African American women. Thus, the content of this article is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
The first author thanks the students in her gerontology class for collecting the data. The second author co-designed the study with the first author and wrote parts of the manuscript. The third and fourth authors updated the literature review, conducted the content analyses, and contributed to the writing of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. All authors declare that written informed consent was obtained from the research participants for publication of this empirical research. This confirms either that this study is not against the public interest, or that the release of information is allowed by legislation.
National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Br J Med Med Res. Author manuscript; available in PMC Jan Bruzzone , 3 and Cristine E.