Abstract:

This article locates what I call a "queer enough" orientation to and love of ordinary life in two of Gwendolyn Brooks's early works, Annie Allen (1949) and Maud Martha (1953), which have yet to be examined as a pair. Far from queering Brooks's two alliteratively-named Black women characters (Annie Allen and Maud Martha), or re-describing them by way of an existing understanding of the "queer" as broadly marginal, excessive, and opposed to normal life, I read for what we have not thought to recognize as queer at all in their domestic, unheroic, and at times impoverished lives. Brooks's characters, I argue, are not queer in the possessive sense of bearing a non-normative erotic and/or sexual identity, and they are not, on this same basis, straight. A nuanced account of Brooks's ordinary heroines, I argue, demands not only that we further stretch the boundaries of inclusion for the queer, but also that we question our investments in a queerness rendered legible by sexual alterity as much as by resistance to the normative.

摘要：

这篇文章在格温多琳·布鲁克斯的两部早期作品安妮·艾伦(1949) 和莫德·玛莎( Maud Martha ) 中找到了我所说的对普通生活的“足够酷”的取向和热爱（1953），尚未作为一对进行检查。远非酷儿布鲁克斯的两个以头韵命名的黑人女性角色（安妮艾伦和莫德玛莎），或者通过现有的将“酷儿”理解为广泛边缘、过度和与正常生活相对立的方式来重新描述它们，我阅读了在他们的家庭、非英雄、有时甚至贫困的生活中，我们根本没有意识到他们是奇怪的。我认为，布鲁克斯的角色在拥有非规范的色情和/或性身份的占有意识上并不奇怪，而且在同样的基础上，他们也不是异性恋。我认为，对布鲁克斯的普通女主人公的细致描述不仅要求我们进一步扩大对酷儿的包容范围，