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Abstract
The dissertation deals with how the work of Bessie Smith, Mae West, and Nella Larsen negotiated with and represented the ways codes of race, class, and sexual orientation contributed to constructions of women's sexuality and normative heterosexuality in the 1920s to early 1930s. To do this, I drew from a variety of primary and secondary sources. The primary sources I examined were the artistic work of West, Smith, and Larsen--West's plays, novel, and films; Smith's song writing and musical performances; and Larsen's novels and short stories. The secondary sources I drew on range from the theoretical writings of such thinkers as Meaghan Morris, Anne Freadman, and Stuart Hall, to the social/historical analyses of sexual historians whose work has been informed by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci. My methodology fell in line with these latter scholars in that my approach concerned investigating not just the material itself, but also drew conclusions from that material that concerned the ways discourses of sexuality undergo various kinds of transformations. I used the image of the "discourse pirate" (from Morris) to investigate such transformations and to help explain the techniques West, Smith, and Larsen practiced to contend with the often oppressive constructions of their sexualities. The "discourse pirate" allowed for an analysis of these artists' work as not necessarily oppositional or "feminist" in the strict sense of the term (that is, work informed by a specific feminist political project), but as material that contested or negotiated with configurations of white working-class, African American working- and middle-class women's sexuality. The trajectory of each chapter included a historical/contextual sketch of each woman's historical context followed by an analysis of their work and how it reflected the positioning of each artist within her own particular milieu. Such a methodology permitted connections between each performer to be drawn out, an opportunity to speculate on how marginal people intersect with power itself in all its realms, and a documentation of the ways individuals contended with and contested often brutal ideologies concerning women's sexuality during this period.