| Sumario: | This article draws attention to Ann Allen Shockley's Loving Her (1974/1997), the first known novel to highlight an interracial lesbian relationship, featuring Renay (Davis) Lee, a working-class black pianist, and her lover Terry Bluvard, an upper-class white writer. While previous critics have rightly understood Shockley's novel as revolutionary in its critique of the patriarchal family as imagined by some strands of black nationalism, I argue that the book offers a relationship that is still blemished by uneven power based on class. While the novel does put forward a subtle class critique, its most intimate relationship, that between Terry and Renay, displaces class difference onto the site of racial difference and/or replaces it with romantic love. When read symptomatically, love in the novel is more, though, than an imaginary solution to class difference; it adumbrates a lack, a need to further theorize the relationship between love and power. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
|
|---|